Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Nightmare Cafe, which ran on NBC from January to April of 1992. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!
This week, Fay’s sister comes to visit!
Episode 1.3 “Fay & Ivy”
(Dir by Christopher Leitch, originally aired on March 13th, 1992)
The third episode of Nightmare Café opens with a young woman named Ivy (played by Molly Parker) coming to the big city with her boyfriend, Jesse (Peter Outerbridge). Ivy is totally excited to be in the big city because she thinks that she’s going to finally track down her older sister. Ivy’s sister left home ten years ago and Ivy isn’t even sure what she looks like. However, for ten years straight, Ivy’s sister sent her letters about how great life in the city was. The last of her sister’s letters invited Ivy to come out to the city herself.
Jesse is a bit less excited about the prospect of finding Ivy’s sister. In fact, Jesse is a bit of a controlling jerk who “accidentally” drops one of the letters while he and Ivy are getting off the train. Jesse is coming to the big city so that he can find new ways to make money, like robbing a convenience store while the clueless Ivy waits outside.
As for the dropped letter, it’s picked up by Robert Englund’s Blackie, who reads the letter, has a good laugh, and then speaks straight to the audience. Blackie informs us that Ivy’s sister is Fay and that Fay probably doesn’t even remember inviting Ivy to come see her.
As Blackie puts it: “I wonder if she remembers issuing this invitation. She’d just as soon forget. You suppose the café will let her forget? I don’t.”
And, sure enough, Ivy and Jesse eventually end up in the Nightmare Café. were Fay is the waitress and Frank is the cook. Fay, who earlier was saying that she felt like there was still some things in her former life that she needed to take care of, is shocked to see Ivy. For her part, Ivy doesn’t recognize Fay. And, for Jesse’s part, he gets upset when Fay starts asking Ivy too many questions about her life back home. Jesse grabs Ivy and the two of them leave the café.
Frank leaves the café to search for Ivy and Jesse, saying that he’s getting bored with being stuck in the building. (In a mildly amusing subplot, the café actually gets offended by Frank’s comments and requires Frank to apologize before he’s allowed to later reenter the building.) Ivy and Jesse, meanwhile, end up in a tattoo parlor where Jesse gets a tattoo from none other than Blackie himself. (Robert Englund appears to be having a ball playing a tattoo artist.)
As for Fay, she uses the cafe’s phone to call her mother. When Fay identifies herself, her mother (Penny Fuller) refuses to believe that Fay is calling. Fay, realizing that her mother has never forgiven her for leaving home, tells her mom that Ivy is in the city and that she’s in trouble. Fay then has what appears to be a café-inspired hallucination in which she finds herself talking to her mother face-to-face and the two of them discuss their strained relationship. It’s a touching scene, well-played by Penny Fuller and Lindsay Frost.
In the end, everyone ends up back at the café. Jesse returns to the café to try to rob it and he drags Ivy (who now knows that Fay is her sister) with her. Frank returns to the café with Ivy’s mother, who says that she came to the city after having a weird dream in which Fay called her to tell her that Ivy was in trouble. Finally, Blackie shows up so that he can zap Jesse into the back of a police car.
With Jesse gone, Fay, Ivy, and their mother have a cup of coffee. While declining to mention that she’s actually dead, Fay does say that it’s a bit too late for her to fix her relationship with her mother. But there’s still time for her mom and Ivy to talk and get to know each other. Ivy and her mom, for their part, both think that Fay left home and disappeared because she works for the federal government.
This was kind of a sad episode, really. Fay wants to heal her relationship with both her mother and her sister but, in the end, she’s forced to accept that she’s dead and they’re not. Fay and Frank can help people live better lives but their own lives are pretty much over and they’re going to spend an eternity in the Nightmare Café.
I liked this episode, which was considerably more straight-forward in its storytelling approach than the previous two. What it lack in surreal imagery, it made up for in genuine emotion.
Next week, the café helps a dying detective sold one last murder!
Through the Shattered Lens 