Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!
This week, Lloyd returns!
Episode 1.9 “Root of all Evil”
(Dir by Allan King, originally aired on November 28th, 1987)
Remember Lloyd (Barclay Hope)?
Lloyd is Micki’s fiancé, an attorney who obviously has a lot of money. Way back when this series began, Micki promised Lloyd that it would only take her a week or two to deal with her late uncle’s estate. That was all we heard about Lloyd for the next few episodes and I have to admit that I had assumed that the show had forgotten about him.
Well, it turns out that I was wrong. In this episode, Lloyd calls up Micki at the antique shop and basically accuses her of trying to get out of marrying him. Micki, who obviously cannot begin to explain what she’s been doing at the antique shop, tells Lloyd that her uncle’s estate is really complex. Lloyd wants Micki to come back home. Micki, herself, says that she wants to go back home. Ryan, however, tells Micki that they have an obligation to get all of the cursed antiques.
(One of the best things about the first season so far has been the contrast between Ryan’s enthusiasm for dealing with the supernatural and Micki’s more cautious approach towards their mission. Wisely, the show doesn’t take sides. Ryan often acts without thinking while Micki often spends a lot of time trying to rationalize each of the curses. Both approaches have their strengths and their flaws.)
Lloyd eventually shows up at the antique shop and Micki finally tells him what’s going on. She even shows him the vault, which includes the psycho doll from the show’s pilot. (The doll gives Micki and Lloyd a rather nasty look.) Lloyd is still not convinced and, at first, Micki takes some comfort in the fact that he’s not a Ryan-style believer. She considers marrying Lloyd and returning to a life of pretending that the supernatural doesn’t exist.
While Micki is dealing with all of that, Ryan and Jack are dealing with a homicidal gardener named Adrian (played by future Veronica Mars co-star, Enrico Colantoni) who has a cursed mulcher. When he stuffs a person into a mulcher, the body is transformed into however much money the person was worth, both financially and morally. Jack and Ryan go undercover as gardeners and, as you can probably guess, Adrian is eventually fed into the mulcher. The mulcher doesn’t feel that Adrian is worth even a dollar, which means that it just grinds his body up and blood goes flying everywhere. This is definitely one of the more gory episode of the show so far.
As for Lloyd, even after he sees proof that magic is real and that the antiques actually are cursed, he still says that Micki should abandon the store and marry him. Micki realizes that Lloyd doesn’t care about anyone but himself and she dumps him. (If she had fed him to the mulcher, she could have at least gotten some money out of the deal.) The episode ends with Ryan welcoming Micki back to the antique shop and Micki realizing that she’s home. Awwwwww!
I liked this episode, mostly because it tied up a loose end from the pilot, suggesting that the show’s writers actually were paying attention to what they were doing and also showing that Friday the 13th was more than just a show about the supernatural. It was also a show about the bonds of family and friendship. Robey finally got to do something more than look scared and ask Jack what to do. And, it must be said, the mulcher was an enjoyably grisly creation. Still, I do have to wonder …. who buys a mulcher from an antique store?
Through the Shattered Lens 