Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

 I recall 2017 being such a good year. It was "Twin Peaks - The Return", I was so excited about it. And Naomi Watts was in it. She was also in a forgotten Netflix series, in just one season, of "Gypsy". This was a series about an affluent married couple with a gender-confused child, themselves struggling to communicate their own marital issues which are gradually under attack by personal struggle. That personal struggle is further emphasized in the episode, "The Commune", where Watts' Jean, a psychiatrist, has adopted a false identity to communicate with folks associated with her patients. It is easy to see how that idea would be questionable ethically. Especially when you are attracted to the lover of a patient named Sam (Glusman), so infatuated and increasingly captivated by Sidney (Sophie Cookson) you await her text back to you obsessively and can hardly concentrate on anything else. Jean's husband, Michael (Crudup), in this episode, suspects so...

  Not very long, but so much fucking fun just the same. Humans are dead. We annihilated ourselves. We are indeed a bunch of morons responsible for our own demise. I'm not the least bit surprised. These three robots above are on a tour and viewers are allowed to see the rubble left behind, the skeletal remains inside and outside decaying cars with broken windows, dilapidated diners left behind with cob-webbed, rotted hamburgers on plates plopped down on dusty tables with a customer with a trucker cap dropped dead right on a stool at the counter, a gym with a still-bouncy basketball left behind as a curiosity, and a missile particularly rested in place as a reminder of weaponry we once prepared to use as a destructive force. The robots, though, swear up a storm, excitedly peruse the landscape of mankind's demise, contact a {talking, intellectual] cat that survived (with plenty of its species), and the remnants of an X Box sort of suggested as their "ancestor". The quips...

  Serling introducing "The Fugitive" I started with "The Gift" because I thought it was not too too bad even though Sterling lays in the Messianic Alien message a bit thick, as a visitor from another planet arrives with a gift and befriends a nine year old boy named Pedro but encounters terrified people who shoot at him without wondering whether or not he's a threat. This message comes complete with a conversation about Jesus being crucified and finishes with a cure for cancer in a book that's burned by an obtuse blabbermouth bartender, as the police are egged on by superstitious locals in an impoverished Mexican town bordering Texas to kill the alien (whose wounds are tended to by a local physician who considers the alien possibly harmless and a curiosity due to his recovery and response during the removal of bullets). I've seen a ton of Sokolov lately during some Twilight Zone revisits, including "The Mirror" and "Dust". Whether he...

  The first season alternates the Victoria and Burke Devlin storylines, this episode focusing once again    on the mystery of Elizabeth Stoddard’s hiring of her. An ongoing plot also concerns the potential nuptials of Joe and Carolyn, but it is obvious that this will simply not happen. Reason being is Carolyn just doesn’t love Joe even though she says so in this episode when he visits Collinwood with news of a promotion (a promotion most certainly requested by boss Liz). There are a couple of long smooches between Joe and Carolyn, and their happiness is short-lived when he mentioned the big-M word. Carolyn talks about breaking free from the shadow of the Collinwood mansion but can she really leave? When Carolyn tells Joe she loves him, does she mean it? Joe comes across as a really likable fellow, but he’s extremely gullible. It’s so obvious Carolyn is not interested in a long-term romantic relationship. Anyway, we get another verbal confrontation between Victoria and Eli...

  The juicy melodrama between Burke Devlin, Roger Collins, and Sam Evans becomes white-hot in this episode of Dark Shadows as their story-line takes center stage. A “trial” is mentioned when Maggie talks pleasantly with Burke as he orders coffee and donuts in the Collins Port diner. Roger has a rather heated (to put it mildly) conversation with artist Sam over what they are to do about Burke. Their conversation really shows that Burke’s reemergence in Collins Port has shaken them to the core. Whatever was the cause of the trial, and how it concerns these three, something exists that troubles Roger and Sam. Roger, a bundle of nerves, and Sam, a slobbering drunk who often waxes poetic (the poetic is often about his woes in life), really have a hard time being even in the same room with each other, so their discussion doesn’t exactly part on good terms. Sam seems willing to face Devlin, tired of the anguish that the incident, yet not fully described, has grieved him into alcoholism, w...

 I forgot that Sam was played by someone else. This guy was a bit more theatrical than the Sam Evans we later received. The Widow's Hill suicide story. The Josette story told by Sam overlooking that cliff into the waves crashing rocks and the whispering winds often kicking up what could be a dreary storm. And he tells Vicky to leave. Maggie, with blond hair, at the diner told Vicky to leave. At one point, Caroline told Vicky to leave. Burke warned Vicky. Roger learns of Burke's presence in Collinsport and "cross examines" Vicky. Little brat David comes down the stairs to tell Vicky he hates her, even bashing Vicky's suitcase with his fists. Lots of exterior shots early in the show's history, too, such as Vicky arriving at Collinwood, walking to Widow's Hill, moving across the grounds. Where I'm at now, Elizabeth has finally admitted to the death of her husband to Vicky, as Jason McGuire blackmails her for marriage to keep that secret silent. In the ear...

 When I was watching Episode 262 and Mitchell Ryan had been replaced, I admittedly opined how disappointed I was. I had some time to kill on Saturday afternoon with a rather thunderstormy atmosphere outside, so I thought I'd go back to the Dark Shadows era so often (perhaps rightfully so) forgotten about, that whole period of the show before Barnabas was freed from his tomb to roam (and bite necks). Before Jason McGuire and Willie Loomis, Barnabas and Dr. Julia Hoffman, there was Victoria Winters arriving on a train from New York, hoping to learn more about her past by arriving at Collinsport, Maine, answering and accepting a letter of employment to teach Roger's son. Burke Devlin was the chief villain arriving on that same train to get him some good ole revenge. Roger and Sam Evans have some history to address that concerned Burke Devlin. So funny watching the Barnabas era right now and how Roger and Sam aren't even remotely attached in anything story-wise. But at this tim...

 For my actual  Review It does seem like I watched an X Files episode where "corrupted biological genes passed down from one family member to another" just recently. I could be getting all my science fiction shows mixed up. This is definitely a story line I have seen used in science fiction and horror television before. A woman detective in Aubrey, Missouri, is seemingly attacking women much like her father (she doesn't realize that a victim from 1942 who survived a serial killer gave birth to her and gave her for adoption because she was the spawn of the monster who attacked her) did 50 years prior. She dug up a profiler who was buried in a field and later pops open with a crowbar floorboards with another profiler buried under the floor, seemingly lured there after experiencing the events through her father's memories, introduced to her through visions. Woodward makes your skin crawl. At least he was sickly, deprived of much movement, hooked to an oxygen machine, wit...

  This didn't quite work for me. Scully is really passionate about figuring out who (or what) was responsible for the physical and sexual attack on a nurse (Rothery) at a convalescent home. It seems some elderly patients at the facility/hospital have improved out of deteriorating dementia and are alert, high functioning, and of sound mind. One has returned to his heights of artistic credibility, another (with a supposed deteriorating hip) can move faster than an orderly trying to stop him from going out a window and onto the rooftop, a third who can move her wheelchair like an athlete as she sees the ghosts of former patients seemingly unable to leave and just as miserable as they were in life. Mulder is more skeptical of the nurse's "invisible entity rape story" while Scully believes she was legit harmed by something malicious in the hospital. An orderly from Malaysia grows mushrooms in the basement and smashes them with other herbs into powder to make the patients ...

 Mark Rolston (often a heavy in various genre stuff; quite dependable for a good snarl and look of disgust or intimidating stare) as a the leader of the Odin Order operating the Church of the Red Museum, is basically anti-beef who believe enlightened spirits inhabit the bodies of others--Mulder mentions, "walk-ins". I just watched an older episode of Unsolved Mysteries involving this belief by folks claiming to have experienced this--and have congregated together in rural Wisconsin. In a small town teenagers are being drugged, with magic marker print of "He is One" or "She is One" found on their backs as they walk about without clothes in a state of duress. Later Mulder and Scully find out that these kids (who were showing behavioral changes altering their personalities for the worst) were being "inoculated" by the town doc with Alien DNA (the same kind in the Erlenmeyer Flask). Of course, this biological substance of peculiar origin was only fou...

  For more analysis look  Here I have always felt "Firewalker" is one of those episodes easy to forget because it just feels very similar to a "The Thing" retread. It does the "Uh-oh, Scully's in danger again" at the end. This does serve as a "get Scully back out into the field" follow up to her near-death experience and "return from abduction" in "Duane Barry" / "Ascension" / "One Breath" (a detour of "3" is sort of sandwiched in there, providing Mulder a retreat to LA and finding himself up against vampires). Mulder looks through the notes of Whitford's genius Trepkos about finding silicon life (close to carbon, but Scully refutes this as possible, considering that as "science fiction" drummed up by a "delusional mind"), later learning that the spores were released from a type of obsidian rock and ingested after their release by the party that accompanied Trepkos to t...

  This is an episode where Skinner points at a No Smoking sign to the Cigarette-Smoking Man while in his office. I always crack up at that. That and Mulder giving it right back to Skinner over "denying everything, never answering questions, concealing the truth", knowing "Cancer Man" is responsible for Scully's "poisoned body, compromised immune system, some inhuman biological DNA found". And with X telling Mulder he was once where Mulder had been at the present moment, searching for evidence, for truth, always short of retrieving it, "unable to do what needs to be done". "One Breath", God what an episode. Mulder's unable to help his beloved friend. She's dying and he is running around trying to find some sort of solution that seems unavailable. He's just a mess. Mulder is even called Fox a lot. By Dana's sister and mother, but there is no funny stuff. This is dead serious. How often my mind screamed at Mulder to pul...

Bixby and Oakland on the Twilight Zone  I was looking at my Favorites list (I'll scrutinize that damn thing to death now, always seeing some episodes too far down or perhaps too far up) and "The Thirty-Fathom Grave rests at #30. The Silence Shadow Play The Thirty-Fathom Grave Third from the Sun Passage on the Lady Anne The New Exhibit Little Girl Lost You'd think this would perhaps be a bit higher but this show has so many damn good episodes. In the fourth season, a few episodes really stand out, I think, and "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" is one of them for me. I remember going through the fourth season a few years ago. Yes, TZ is simply at its best in the 30 minute format. I guess I don't mind the "padding" in "The Thirty-Fathom Grave", the technical submarine jargon, the military order and how officers follow their commander in Simon Oakland. Kellin as the haunted Bell being "drawn" to where he escaped 20 years prior in WWII by ...

 This episode, while addressing Maggie's "demise", as Victoria and Elizabeth learn the news, the other big story arc involving Liz and Jason's upcoming nuptials gets some rub by the Dark Shadows writing team. Vicky also tells Caroline about Maggie's "death", while dealing with her loss and considering accepting Liz's request to be there for her when the marriage occurs, a witness of the "event". But a very important change in the show is the recasting of Burke Devlin. I'm a Mitch Ryan fan, so when he was fired from the role, from the show, it was such a disappointment. It does make me want to return to The Beginning when Ryan was such an integral part of the show. Sadly, his alcoholism left those in charge no alternative. But by this point, Burke as the villain was no more. Anthony George has a soft face, a friendlier tone of voice, looking like some prime time television doctor of the 60s. I noticed that Vicky is very much an adult wom...

 Sam FINALLY finds Maggie exactly where ghost girl, Sarah, told him, on the beach, collapsed and unable to speak. Oh, Barnabas reaches her, alright, but just as he is about to take her back to the Old House, Sam arrives to crash his plans. Maggie is returned to a bed to sleep as Dr. Woodard, Sam, and Joe dote on her. But Maggie's mental state has regressed to when she was a child, not even recognizing her boyfriend, Joe, and obviously forgetting Barnabas (conveniently). Maggie is but a little girl, wondering when Sam would be taking her to the fair. Yep, that is quite a turn. Dr. Woodard considers this a "safety measure" the brain triggers in order to keep the person in trauma "protected". Woodard brings up Maggie going to a hospital under the care of Dr. Julia Hoffman--in my opinion, we are approaching Dark Shadows as it really starts to get damn good--while telling everyone else besides Sam and Joe (and Hoffman, over her care) she is dead. Woodard surmises tha...

  With this sort of/kind of being "Oscar season", I have been planning to revisit "Chinatown" (1974). It is a big film. A film that I so often see touted with great acclaim. "The Two Jakes" (1990), on the other hand, not so much. So, for some reason, I was very interested in watching this "sequel" to the much revered "Chinatown". It was on some premium channel called HDNet, not exactly a name of any significance, though, plenty of high quality titles (and some rather obscure, not as well known, films, too) are on it. Now, "The Two Jakes" is not a film that ever flew up on my radar like some bird out of the sky swooping down. It was directed and stars Nicholson, and it was set during 1948 LA. It looks very much like 1948 LA with art design, costume design, and (my favorite part) the vehicles driven often, particularly Nicholson's private dick, Jake Gittes. It was based on a screenplay from reliable Robert Towne, who was hop...

 I think as the pandemic raged last year, the lives and activities of celebrities in Hollywood didn't matter quite so much. When your grandparents and relatives, your friends and loved ones, are dying alone in a hospital hooked to a ventilator, Gad Gadot singing something from Lennon means very little. But, admittedly, I looked over Turner Classic Movies and I can already tell I'll probably get the fever. I was watching "Rear Window" (1954) and researched just a bit on whether or not it received any Academy Award nominations. It did. No surprise, though, it didn't win any. As great a film as "Rear Window" is (this is my third favorite Hitchcock film after "Rebecca" and "Psycho"), for whatever reason the Academy just would not give him the Oscar. This film, I laughed at myself as I was so engaged and captivated by the film my eyes were glued to the screen while stuffing my face with a meal. It was the scene, of course, where Grace Kell...

 I finally did it. I look at the list and obviously debated a lot about preferential order. This is clearly not written in stone. I could watch a few of these episodes and move them up and down the list. For instance, I look at "The Shelter" and could easily see it move up my current list. So with any favorite's list, it is subject to change. But as of now, this list feels as right as it can considering the great depth and quality of an entire series with a whole bunch of episodes that differ in opinion according to each TZ fan. One episode I left off is "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge".  The episodes in red are my "top tier". The episodes I consider the cream of the crop (5 to 4.5 stars). The episodes in blue are my "middle tier". The episodes I consider quite good. These are episodes I really like to watch during the day of marathons in the past. You have the prime time iconic episodes and those in blue are what I think make for good "...