Founding Fathers. We pick up with our teams just where we left off, right after last week’s episode, and the other teams are quite disappointed that Air Force comes in rather than the Fogal Family. Still, just as Air Force arrives, everyone has to take off, headed back to France, so they have to be a bit happy that they had no chance for even a moment’s rest (or so it seemed).
July 2006 Archives
Treasure Hunters Recap: Normandy, France
Treasure Hunters · Season 1 · Episode 7 · Aired July 31, 2006
The Twilight Zone Recap: The Bard
The Twilight Zone · Season 4 · Episode 18 · Aired May 23, 1963
Julius Moomer (Jack Weston, also in the excellent The Monsters are Due on Maple Street from Season 1) is in a bind. He is a writer, but he can’t write. Sure, he can grind out zombie stories with the best of them, but they aren’t very good. So he uses some black magic to conjure up William Shakespeare to help him out, and what do you know? It works.
A bit strange, really, as it’s tough to imagine Shakespeare translating well to any 20th century medium, even after being edited by Moomer. But it’s fiction. In the end, of course, it doesn’t work out because Moomer wants all the glory for himself and Shakespeare doesn’t think that is right. It’s not that he does, mind you, he just doesn’t like what Moomer is doing to his works of art. So he leaves.
Keep your eyes open for small roles from Burt Reynolds, John McGiver (Sounds and Silences from Season 5) and Howard McNear (Floyd the Barber, also in Hocus-Pocus and Frisby from Season 3).
The Twilight Zone Recap: No Time Like the Past
The Twilight Zone · Season 4 · Episode 10 · Aired March 7, 1963
Paul Driscoll has invented a time machine and convinced himself he can rid the world of the things that make it such a horrible place. He visits Hiroshima, then Berlin, then the Lusitania, but he cannot change the events of any of them. Finally he decides to settle down in a small town in Indana where he will be away from everything.
The only problem is that the very next day is the day that the president comes to visit and gets shot, and he will die a few months later from an infection he picked up when shot. Then he finds out a fire will break out and school children will die, but if he saves them he will change the world. He tries to not give in, but he eventually tries to help, and in so doing actually sets in motion the events that start the fire and does the damage. Perhaps time is not so fragile as we would believe. But that does not mean we can handle the events of time.
Paul returns to his time, convinced that we are not meant to live outside our own time, and convinced to try and make it better through his knowledge that he has gained. This would have been an excellent episode if he had returned to find that some small thing he did rippled through the years to upset his world even though the larger events didn’t do anything. That would have made it excellent. As it is, it was just good.
The Twilight Zone Recap: Come Wander with Me
The Twilight Zone · Season 5 · Episode 34 · Aired May 22, 1964
This episode is another that perhaps isn’t told as well as it could be, but isn’t bad once you get to the end. We see a young singer, Floyd Burney, who is looking for his next song, when he wanders into a shop run by an older gentleman. Apparently Floyd was told that this is where he can find inspiration, and here he has come looking for it. Unfortunately for Floyd, the other man doesn’t seem to anxious to help him. But after picking up a guitar and leaving some money to pay for it, Floyd takes off, for he has heard some notes that he thinks might just do the trick. What he fails to notice is the gravestone that he passes that has his name on it.
The Twilight Zone Recap: Shadow Play
The Twilight Zone · Season 2 · Episode 26 · Aired May 5, 1961
In this odd telling, a condemned man is apparently dreaming, but he knows he is dreaming. The odd part is that he realizes that he is dreaming about his own execution. He feels he is dreaming, and waking up night after night, but cannot realize why he keeps waking up and cannot escape. The reason, of course, is that he is about to be judged guilty of his crimes, which is when he will actually be sentenced to death. Perhaps an interesting tale, but the way it is told makes it a bit difficult to follow.
Close to Home Recap: Baseball Murder
Close to Home · Season 1 · Episode 10 · Aired December 16, 2005
When one young teenager feels that he loses a playoff game for his team,. he takes a baseball bat to the head of another young teenager on the other team, who he felt won the game for his team. It just so happens that they are - or at least were - friends, which makes the killing all the stranger.
While most of the prosecuting team wants to forge ahead with full charges as an adult, Annabeth wants to get to the bottom of things and figure out why a generally good kid would suddenly go berserk and lose it in such a manner, killing someone who formerly was such a good friend. Of course, he didn’t mean to kill him, he just wanted to vent his rage. It doesn’t help that the boy’s parents want to pass it off as a phase the kid is going through.
Eventually Annabeth’s efforts pay off as she finds a trend where the coach encourages his team towards violence, with the former pitcher having refused to throw at the same boy just one game before, and quitting the team because of it. Several members of the team had no problems before joining the team but now have criminal records. In the end, the boy has to do time, but the coach gets what’s coming to him in the form of a charge of his own.
Dirty Jobs Recap: Fuel Tank Cleaner
Dirty Jobs · Season 2 · Episode 13 · Aired July 25, 2006
Candy Maker. Our first stop is Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where all sorts of sweet treats are made at Wertz Candy. First, some caramel corn, then some peanut butter balls and on and on it goes. What I don’t get was the corn syrup. We’ve all seen corn syrup in a bottle. Their corn syrup wasn’t, well, syrupy. It was more like a taffy substance. I’m sure it was good and all. I’m just not sure it was named appropriately.
Sean and Tally have even more hope that Zoe is alive as the Russian who confessed to her murder tells them that he only confessed so he could stay in a US prison, since it’s much nicer than a Russian prison. That is, until Park tells them that he was the one who took the money out of the offshore account. Sean tells Park that he isn’t giving him any money, so Park brings in some goons to beat him up.
Damien has indeed moved back in with his folks, and seems to have completely separated himself from Galina - no sign of her in this week’s show. Frankie, meanwhile, is trying to get her mom to move back home, but no dice there, so she simply walks out while Damien breaks curfew and takes off in his car to drive to pick up Frankie. I though they lived in Illinois somewhere, while Frankie was on Manhattan. Even in a fast car like that, that’s got to be a drive of several hours. What was he thinking?
As Peter prepares to unveil the company’s new bike, Sunny seems to be putting the moves on him since Nina can’t seem to make up her mind if she wants the family life or if she wants everything as she claims. At the end, she seems to want Cameron, since she didn’t go to the party for Peter, but she did go to see Cameron and ending up kissing him wildly in the parking lot (and who knows what else). Beth, meanwhile, had an odd discussion with Kimberly about being a single parent. Though she says she isn’t pregnant, I still suspect she is. Guess we’ll have to wait on that one too.
Meanwhile the preview seems to show that Zoe will return next week, but it might be just another teaser. I still think she is alive, as I have all along, and she just took off so she didn’t have to deal with Sean and all the money.
The Twilight Zone Recap: The Prime Mover
The Twilight Zone · Season 2 · Episode 21 · Aired March 24, 1961
A man in a diner is obsessed with gambling. He plays the one-armed bandit they have (which is perhaps a bit odd in itself), he flips a patron for his dinner (and loses), and after he loses, the man takes the quarter to the slot machine and wins the quarters from it. When the man finds his friend (Buddy Ebsen) has telekentic powers as they help save someone from a car crash, he figures it’s time to visit Las Vegas.
So they head to the tables and make the dice turn up the way they need to, they make the roulette wheel land just right, they hit everything like they want. The only problem is that the effort causes considerable headache from the effort, not to mention a lot of moral compromise, and so the next day when the man wants to challenge a big gambler in some dice rolling, his friend loses his power just when he needs it the most.
They head back to the diner and everything turns out at the end - but as with most things in this series, it turns out that the power wasn’t lost, just forgotten at an opportune moment.
The Twilight Zone Recap: The Purple Testament
The Twilight Zone · Season 1 · Episode 19 · Aired February 12, 1960
An army lieutenant can see death on the faces of his fellow soldiers before they actually die, something that causes him considerable distress. He expresses his concern to his commanding officer (Dick York, also in A Penny for Your Thoughts from Season 2), who doesn’t quite know whether to believe him or not.
He starts to believe when they go to a hospital and it happens again, then when he is told of his own impending doom just before they go into another battle, so he leaves his own possessions - some pictures and a wedding ring - behind, just in case. As it turns out, the soldier can predict the death of people, so it was a good idea.
The juicy twist comes at the end, where the soldier is shipped of for some rest, but before he goes he looks in the mirror and sees his own face, which naturally has “the look”, so he knows he won’t make it for the promised rest. The talk then is to be safe on the ride, and to avoid the land mines, so you know what’s in store, but it’s a good ending nonetheless.
