Janet Bailey | Through the Shattered Lens

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: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, a crib from the Titanic demands blood!

Episode 1.25 “What A Mother Wouldn’t Do”

(Dir by Neill Fearnley, originally aired July 18th, 1988)

After being told that her unborn child should be aborted because it’s just going to die anyway, Leslie Kent (Lynne Cormack) seeks peace inside an antique shop called Curious Goods. The shop’s owner, Lewis Vedredi (R.G. Armstrong), shows her an antique crib that he says was on the Titanic. Leslie is intrigued by the crib and, six months later, she is overjoyed when her friends reveal that they have purchased the crib for her as a gift. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a crib that was once used by a baby who probably drowned in icy water when the Titanic sank?

The crib does have a special power. It can cure sick babies! Of course, the cure only works if the crib’s owner first kills seven people in a body of water. After baby Allison is born, Leslie and her husband Martin (Michael Countryman) start killing random people in an effort to save their baby’s life.

It presents quite a moral quandary. If Micki and Ryan don’t retrieve the cursed crib, Leslie and Martin will continue to kill. However, if they do get the crib, Allison will die. Are they prepared to sacrifice an innocent baby just to get their hands on the crib? To its credit, Friday the 13th: The Series didn’t shy away from these questions. In this episode, the villains are not unsympathetic. Martin hates to kill but he’s trying to save his baby. As for Leslie, the episode’s title says it all. What wouldn’t a mother do to save the life of her baby? As disturbing as the murders may be, they’re nowhere near as frightening as the cold and clinical way that Leslie is ordered to get an abortion at the start of the episode.

In the end, both Martin and Leslie end up sacrificing themselves to save Allison’s life. But Allison disappears from her crib, leaving a terrified Micki to wonder if the evil within the crib has taken her. Fear not. As the final shot show, her babysitter Debbie (Robyn Stevan), grabbed the now healthy baby from the crib and then got on bus to start a new life. The baby looks up at her and smiles for the first time. Awwwww!

This was a good episode, with Micki and Ryan both coming to realize that the owners of the antiques are often as much victims as those they harm. Chris Wiggins dif good job of portraying Jack’s single-minded determination to find all of Lewis’s cursed antiques while Lynne Cormack and Michael Countryman were poignant as two villains for whom you couldn’t help but feel some sympathy.

Next week, season one comes to an end!

Welcome to 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 T. and T., a Canadian show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on Tubi!

This week, someone from the past shows up but it’s not Amy.

Episode 3.4 “Cry Wolf”

(Dir by Alan Simmonds, originally aired on January 26th, 1990)

While filming footage for what is sure to be a riveting cinematic essay on urban decay, high school student Martina (Joanne Vannicola) films a drug deal going to down in an abandoned warehouse. (The world of T and T was full of abandoned warehouses where people were either selling drugs or hiding stolen money.) Unfortunately, Martina runs out of film before actually capturing the drugs being exchanged. Everyone who sees the footage says that it doesn’t prove anything.

Martina decides to take justice into her own hands. I’m not really sure why. Martina’s obsession with tracking down the drug dealers and getting them arrested feels somewhat unhinged and it’s a bit disturbing to see coming from a teenager. I mean, Martina doesn’t know the drug dealers. She is apparently not a user of cocaine. She’s just decided that these people deserve to be taken down by her. One gets the feeling that Martina is going to grow up to be a member of the secret police.

Martina’s investigation leads her to a suburban couple who capture her and make plans to eventually kill her. Fortunately, Martina’s best friend is Joe Casper (Sean Roberge) and he is able to enlist his mentor, T.S. Turner, to save Martina’s life.

That’s right! Joe’s back. He was a semi-regular during the second season, appearing in the opening credits even though he rarely got to do anything on the show. Still, the return of Joe would, in theory, be the perfect opportunity for the show to explain what happened to Amy. Amy and Joe were close, after all. It seems like it would be natural for Joe and Turner to say something about missing Amy and perhaps provide us with a clue as to why Amy has been replaced by Terri.

However, that doesn’t happen. In fact, Turner acts as if he barely knows Joe, despite the fact that he practically adopted him during the second season. “Why are you kids always here?” he growls when he sees Joe and Martina in Decker’s gym. And seriously, why is everyone always in Decker’s gym? The place is a dump! And is there no one at the gym who could tell T.S. that the hot pink bodysuit that he wears while boxing looks kind of silly?

Anyway, T.S. goes down to the suburbs and saves Martina. As usual, it doesn’t take much effort because the drug dealers are all kind of wimpy whereas T.S. Turner is Mr. T. It was only as things ended that I realized that Terri didn’t even appear in this episode. With Amy gone and Terri not being all the important, T and T is feeling more and more like T.

This episode was pretty dumb but I did appreciate that the drug dealers were essentially just two suburbanites who had no idea what they were doing. That was a nice twist. But otherwise …. yeah, pretty dumb.