Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, Monsters makes even less sense than usual.

Episode 3.17 “Leavings”

(Dir by John Tillinger, originally aired on January 20th, 19991)

Two cops (played by Tony Shalhoub and John Christopher Jones) are concerned about something that they’ve noticed on the streets.  Homeless people who are missing limbs are showing up.  The cops know that the homeless people had all their limbs just a few days ago but now, they’re gone.  There’s no sign of surgery or any sort of trauma.  The limbs are just disappearing apparently.  Meanwhile, there’s some new homeless guy wandering around who appears to be made out of limbs that don’t really seem to go together.

They go to their boss (Clifton James) with this concerns.  Their boss tells them not to worry about it.  However, the cops continue to worry about it.  This leads to their boss revealing the truth of what’s happening.  It turns out that their boss has been stealing body parts and building new people for years.  He’s trying to create a policeman who will be loyal and who won’t ask questions.  (We only see one of these constructed cops in the show.  He wears a jacket that identifies him as being Officer S. Partz.)  The boss then kills the two cops because they’ve seen too much.

This was a weird episode.  How exactly did their boss learn how to remove body parts without leaving any sort of obvious signs of trauma?  How did he learn how to bring his constructed people to life?  How did …. well, it just doesn’t make any sense.  It’s true that a 30-minuet anthology show doesn’t necessarily have to make perfect sense but this episode really does stretch things a bit too far.  The three actors all give good performances but, otherwise, this episode just falls a bit flat.