The Scare Salon

It’s time to delve back into Night Gallery, and since we already covered the pilot episode as well as the (very short) first season, we’re now going to get into the second season. Because season two contains 22 episodes (as opposed to only six in the first season), I’m planning to tackle this project in six-episode chunks, just like I do with Thriller. So without further ado, here are breakdowns of the first half-dozen episodes of Night Gallery‘s second season, which ran from 1971 to 1972.

Episode 1
“The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes”

Written for the screen by Rod Serling and directed by John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, 1979’s Dracula, WarGames, Short Circuit), this first story is actually a pretty good one, and features prolific character actor Clint Howard (brother of Ron) as a pre-teen. I’ll also note that the source story on which the teleplay was based was written by Margaret St. Clair, who also wrote an outstanding tale called “The Estuary” in one of my favorite horror fiction anthologies ever, 1968’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories That Scared Even Me, a book I talked about at length here (and which will come up again before the end of this post).

Anyway, at the beginning of the story, a stereotypically douchebaggy TV producer is approached by his underlings, who tell him they have a fantastic act for the coveted Wednesday night time slot. Said act consists of a nerdy, ten-year-old kid named Herbie who sits in a chair and talks enthusiastically about all the things he learned that day from all his reading.

The producer is apoplectic, thinking nobody in their right mind is going to watch a geeky kid rambling about bullshit on network TV, but then, in the middle of the kid’s wholesome litany of interesting facts, Herbie suddenly pauses, and proceeds to tell the live audience that a young girl who has been missing for several days in the mountains will be found alive, albeit with a broken leg. He then goes on to predict that there will be a severe earthquake early the following morning, which will cause a great deal of damage as well as some fatalities.

The producer doesn’t believe any of this nonsense, of course, and tells the kid and his grandfather/minder to get the hell out of his studio and never come back. He even orders the tapes of the show erased. But naturally, the producer quickly changes his tune when the next day comes, and both of Herbie’s predictions come true, exactly as he described.

The tale then jumps ahead a year, and Herbie has become a massive celebrity, as fully one hundred percent of his predictions absolutely come to pass. Parapsychologists want to study his amazing gift, and he’s inundated with letters from all over the world, from people who desperately want his help. Through it all, Herbie remains as cheerful, humble, and eager to please as ever.

But one day, just moments before he’s due to go on, he suddenly seems very troubled, and tells his grandfather that he needs to go home. He insists that he’s not sick, but he just doesn’t think he can do the predicting thing today. His grandfather goes to bat for him and scoops the kid up to get him out of there, but the producer, after blowing his stack and screaming at the kid at first, eventually calms down and is able to wheedle Herbie into doing the show as usual.

Herbie is clearly reluctant, but stoically does his duty. Initially, though, he doesn’t make any predictions at all; for most of the show, he just sits there talking about some neat stuff he learned from one of his books. The producer is losing his shit behind the camera, but then, finally, Herbie does his telltale pause, the one that presages him laying down some knowledge.

He then starts to make what seems like a very strange prediction, basically telling the television audience that tomorrow is going to be the start of a whole new world, where everyone will get along, and there will be no more war or prejudice. He also makes subtle allusions to the Garden of Eden, implying that whatever is going to happen tomorrow is going to be amazing, a new beginning for the human race. Uh oh.

After he signs off, everyone is sort of confused about Herbie’s odd pronouncements, but people seem pretty jazzed about them too, because it all sounded pretty awesome and Herbie has always been right about his predictions before. But because this is a horror story, you just know that there’s more to it than what he said, and indeed, there is. Later on, he tells his grandfather and the parapsychologist who befriended him that what he actually saw in his “vision” was that the sun was going to suddenly go nova tomorrow, wiping out every living thing on Earth in the blink of an eye.

Because he was persuaded to go ahead and do his usual show after the producer told him how much everyone depended on him, he decided to tell everyone that things were going to change for the better tomorrow, because he didn’t want anyone to worry or panic, and he knew it was going to happen so fast that no one would really be aware of what was going on. He just wanted everyone to go out happy, expecting something great.

So, a pretty bleak ending overall, but a damn good story regardless, and Clint Howard was terrific as the self-possessed and compassionate little boy who was able to do the human race a solid by chilling everyone out even though he knew for sure that the world was going to end. Whatta guy.

“Miss Lovecraft Sent Me”

Not so much a story as a somewhat silly, trifling vignette that’s only a few minutes long, this one has a babysitter (Sue Lyon, of Lolita fame) arriving at what is clearly a haunted castle, where the door is answered by a full-on Halloween vampire (Joseph Campanella), complete with cape, blue skin, fangs, and cheesy Eastern European accent. Unfazed, the babysitter makes small talk with the Count about the “kid” she’ll be babysitting. You never see him/her/it, but it’s implied by sound effects that it’s some kind of monster, and that the babysitter has been lured here so the monster can eat her. She twigs onto what’s going on, though, and hightails it out of there before she becomes a snack, while the Count comes cluelessly back into the living room, wondering where she went. Kind of dumb, but sort of funny, this was one of those segments that was clearly wedged in to fill up time between the longer, more substantial stories.

“The Hand of Borgus Weems”

Another decent longer yarn, this one was based on a short story by George Langelaan and directed by John M. Lucas. In it, a man named Peter (George Maharis) seems to be having some trouble controlling one of his hands (and possibly also one of his feet), because while driving down a crowded avenue, he straight up attempts to purposely run down a pedestrian, even though his facial expressions clearly suggest that he’s horrified by his own actions. The pedestrian isn’t hurt, and though Peter crashes his car into a pole, he’s mostly okay too, at least physically.

In the next scene, we see Peter at the office of Dr. Ravdon (played by Ray Milland). The desperate man is begging the doc to cut his right hand off, but naturally, the doctor balks at this, because there isn’t anything wrong with Peter’s hand. Peter tries to explain that his right hand has a mind of its own and will murder someone if it isn’t stopped, but Dr. Ravdon simply attempts to refer Peter to a psychiatrist. At this point, though, Peter grabs a heavy marble bust and smashes his hand all up, injuring it so badly that the doctor now has no choice but to amputate.

While he’s recovering, Peter tells Dr. Ravdon the whole sad story, and we then enter an extended flashback. It seems that Peter first noticed his hand doing its own thing when he went into a building for a meeting, and his hand deliberately pushed the wrong buzzer, even though Peter could see that it was the wrong one. He went to the “wrong” apartment anyway, though, and there ended up meeting a hot blonde named Susan, who he became engaged to only three days after they met (!!!). Gotta say, that’s some powerful meet-cute.

Anyway, not long after that, his hand started paging through a phone directory of its own accord and pointing to the phone number of a man named Brock Ramsey. It then dialed the number without Peter’s permission, and wrote the named “Borgus Weems” on a piece of paper. Peter, whose brain is also, it’s implied, being subtly manipulated by the hand, tells the guy on the other end of the line that it’s Borgus Weems calling, at which point the guy wigs out and hangs up.

Meanwhile, Peter purchases a gun and his hand attempts to kill his girlfriend Susan, but doesn’t succeed. He also tries to run over a guy in the street, which was the scene we saw at the beginning. And then Brock Ramsey, the guy on the phone, shows up at Peter’s place, saying he knew a guy named Borgus Weems who had lived in this very apartment several years before. Peter’s hand tries to shank this dude too, but Peter is able to override it. It’s suggested that it was at this point that Peter consulted the doctor about having his wayward hand chopped off so it wouldn’t do any more attempted murdering.

Even though Dr. Ravdon still thinks Peter is delusional, something about the story kinda sticks in his craw, so he asks a police officer to look into the matter. The cop happened to have worked on a case several years prior in which a man named Borgus Weems had his hand lopped off, and then was pushed to his death from the window of his high-rise apartment…the very same apartment that Peter moved into not long before.

The cop also informs Peter and the doctor that Brock Ramsey and his then-girlfriend Susan (yep, the same one), who was also Weems’s niece, were suspected to be the ones who’d killed him, but a lawyer was able to get them off. This lawyer, in fact, was the same guy who Peter had attempted to run over in the street.

At the very end of the story, Borgus Weems’s hand ghost appears to transfer to Dr. Ravdon, who will presumably now have to amputate his own hand, after which I guess the cycle will continue until somebody finally offs the people responsible for Weems’s untimely death.

Stories of possessed hands are something of a small subgenre of their own (see The Hands of Orlac, for example, or the Thriller episode called “The Terror in Teakwood,” both of which I’ve discussed at length on this very site), but this was a compelling tale nonetheless, and kept me entertained and guessing throughout its entire runtime.

“Phantom of What Opera?”

Another throwaway vignette that’s only a couple minutes long, this one features an unrecognizable Leslie Nielsen as the iconic Phantom, and Mary Ann Beck as his hapless victim. As in the original story, the Phantom carries a struggling woman down to his underground lair and proceeds to play his pipe organ while telling her never to remove his mask or she’ll be sorry. But of course she does, and Leslie Nielsen looks all kinds of fucked up under there. But then, in a ridiculous turnabout, the woman’s face and the front part of her hair are torn off in the struggle, after which it’s revealed that she looks as fugly as the Phantom does. They then embrace, having finally found each other’s soul mates, I guess? Because everyone knows that super fugly dudes are always attracted to women who are fugly in the exact same way that they are.

This was another kinda why-bother segment; I love Leslie Nielsen, but the story just seemed pointless, a bad one-note joke. If it was that important to fill up an exact time slot, why not add a couple more minutes to the longer stories to flesh them out a little, rather than putting these kind of dumb little asides in here? I guess it doesn’t bother me that much, but I’m not a big fan of the more humorous segments (other than the great one with John Astin and Phyllis Diller), so I just wish there had been more focus on beefing up the serious stories instead of featuring these silly little comic relief interstitials. Anyway.

Episode 2
“Death in the Family”

Episode 2 followed the same format as the first one, with two long segments broken up by two really short, insubstantial ones, though the two shorter ones here weren’t quite as lame.

I was actually really excited to rewatch this episode and this first segment in particular, because “A Death in the Family” by Miriam Allen deFord is a fantastic short story, another tale that I’ve read numerous times because of its inclusion in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories That Scared Even Me anthology. I have to say, though, that while this segment is good, a LOT of details are altered from the source story, a fact that disappointed me quite a bit. I wish the adaptation had been more faithful, in other words, because I’m not sure the changes worked all that well, and in fact I might even argue that it’s not really an adaptation at all, since it’s not really the same story.

E.G. Marshall plays an undertaker named Mr. Soames (the protagonist was named Jared Sloane in the original story). At the beginning, a couple of guys bring a new stiff to the funeral home; the dead dude lived in an old folks’ home for the last three decades of his life, had no family, and was being buried at the expense of the state. Soames is appalled that no one cares about this man, and goes on at great length about how no one should just be ignored and forgotten about like this guy, especially in death. The meat wagon dudes are all MEH, but Soames decides he’s going to do the dead man up right, and celebrate him as a person.

Meanwhile, a young criminal who’s been shot breaks into the funeral home shortly afterward, looking for a place to hide out from the cops. He hears someone singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and soon discovers that Soames has not only done an impeccable job of fixing up the dead guy, putting him in a swanky suit and everything, but he’s also sat the corpse upright in a chair and is in the middle of having a little farewell party for the man, who he calls his father. Which is kind of sweet, I suppose, but also weird as fuck.

The criminal kid thinks so too, but he’s bleeding badly and doesn’t have the energy to get too upset about it. Soames is very kind to him, telling him that he’s very young and deserves compassion, not punishment. Soames explains that he was brought up in an orphanage, and it taught him that everyone’s life had value, and that everyone deserved kindness and understanding.

As the tale goes on, the criminal (whose name is Doran and who’s played by Desi Arnaz Jr.) discovers that Soames has a whole “family” of preserved corpses in the joint, all seated around a table as though they’re having a big shindig. Not long afterward, the police bust in and see the whole morbid tableau, which also now includes Doran, who was evidently added to the family after he died of his wounds. The cops then shoot Soames, who becomes the last member of his dead family, a fitting ending.

As I mentioned, this was a pretty damn good episode, but it’s not all that much like the short story it was supposedly based on. In the original tale, the reader knows from the beginning that the undertaker has a whole corpse family in the basement of the funeral home, as the first part of the tale describes his cozy daily routine, and then goes into how he started obtaining the bodies for his little “project.” The whole plot point about the undertaker being exceptionally compassionate toward the dead wasn’t really addressed; it was clearly stated that Jared Sloane constructed his ersatz family because he was an orphan and was horribly lonely. He did love his deceased “relatives” very much, however, and interacted with them as if they were adored, living members of a “real” family.

Also left out of the Night Gallery adaptation was the entire inciting incident of the original story, which was a pair of kidnappers leaving the dead body of a ten-year-old girl they’d murdered on the doorstep of the funeral home. Jared was thus torn between adding the little girl to his corpsy crew—because she had been exactly what he had been looking for to complete his family—or doing the right thing and calling the police.

I guess I get why the murderers and the dead little girl from the original tale were changed to an older delinquent in the TV adaptation; murdered kids were a pretty hard sell on network television back then, after all. But the changes made were overall so significant that I feel as though the whole thrust of the original story was lost. So like I said, this was good, but not really the adaptation I hoped for.

“The Merciful”

Another very short vignette with that switcheroo, “gotcha” energy, this one was essentially a twist on Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” In it, you’re led to believe that an old man (King Donovan) is being walled up alive by his wife (Imogen Coca) because he’s terminally ill, and apparently this is a better way to go?

But then, the doorbell rings upstairs, and the old guy gets out of his chair and ascends a previously unseen staircase to answer it, revealing that the guy isn’t emtombed alive at all; the wife has actually bricked herself up, presumably because she’s the one who’s terminally ill and wants this to be the way she goes out.

Amusing, but again, not all that substantive, and sort of a waste of time.

“Class of 1999”

Based on another teleplay by Rod Serling and directed by Jeannot Szwarc (Jaws 2, Somewhere in Time, Supergirl), this segment features the always-welcome presence of Vincent Price, who is awesome in everything. As suggested by the title, it’s science fiction, but takes place entirely in one lecture hall.

Vincent Price is the instructor, and the situation is evidently these college students’ final, oral exam. So Vincent begins firing questions at each one of the students; as he calls on each of them, they stand up and give rote answers, except for one guy named Johnson who is only able to spit back three answers of the four Vincent wanted, and gets excoriated.

At first, the questions are science-based and relatively normal, but Vincent then moves into another portion of the test, in which the queries become much more uncomfortable. For example, Vincent asks a white student named Clinton to describe a black student named Barnes, and Clinton says that Barnes might be expected to be “pushy” or “aggressive,” or possibly “inferior.” Then Clinton wants to slap Barnes, so Vincent tells him to do it, then Barnes gets his chance to retaliate.

Vincent also tackles class struggles and envy of beauty by facilitating a confrontation between two women, one of whom is working class and somewhat dowdy and is named Peterson, and the other of whom is slim, beautiful, and wealthy, and is named Fields.

Things go on like this for a bit, and you’re kinda wondering what exactly is going on, what kind of “class” this is. Things begin to escalate perilously when another white guy, Elkins, targets an Asian guy named Chang in the back of the class, calling him an “enemy” and saying he’d like to kill him. Vincent encourages this, even giving Elkins a pistol, but in the end, Elkins can’t bring himself to do it, realizing that Chang is maybe not his enemy after all. He deliberately aims for the wall behind Chang before pulling the trigger.

This pisses Vincent off no end, and then he tells his assistant to essentially shut everyone down so he can figure out why he’s encountering “resistance.” The assistant twists a knob, and all the “students” freeze in place, revealing that they’re actually realistic cyborgs who Vincent is “training” to be hostile toward other races and classes the way humans are. It’s also implied that conformity to the program is of utmost importance; anyone with ideas different than what’s been taught is considered a traitor. As such, because Elkins couldn’t shoot Chang like he was asked to, another white guy (the one named Johnson who had messed up the earlier science question) redeems himself by shooting Elkins for being a subversive.

It turns out that the human race has been severely depleted through wars and environmental disasters, and these robots are being primed as human replacements, but in order to be accurate representations of us, they have to be programmed to be hostile and bigoted toward others not like them. “We shall repay our debt to men by emulating him. We shall act as men, react as men. We shall be men,” Vincent says. Vincent is also a cyborg, of course, and during his commencement speech, he relates that the primary mission of the university is to teach the robots to be just but ruthless, to rid themselves of “misplaced compassion,” and never to tolerate an “inferior.” Yikes.

Rod Serling wrote a lot of stories about prejudice, but I think this might be his best one; it’s not quite as overt or heavy-handed as he would usually go, and seeing bigotry being taught by rote right alongside hard sciences is pretty chilling and quite a clever conceit. Vincent Price is great as the dispassionate instructor, and although the whole thing takes place in one location, its implications are much wider than its intimate setting would suggest. Sadly, its message has not dated at all in the more than fifty years since it first aired.

“Satisfaction Guaranteed”

When this episode of Night Gallery first aired on network TV, this final segment was actually one called “Witches’ Feast,” but for whatever reason, every time it played in reruns, and subsequently when the series was released on DVD, the segment was replaced with “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” which had originally aired as the third segment of episode 22, the final episode of season two.

Anyway, this is another short vignette, this one starring ubiquitous character actor Victor Buono as a wealthy man seeking to hire someone from an agency, presumably as a secretary. The woman running the agency, Mrs. Mount (Cathleen Cordell), takes great pride in the excellence of her candidates, boasting that she has never had a single complaint in all her twenty-five years of business.

The man is skeptical, but hopeful that the agency will be able to meet his needs. One by one, Mrs. Mount calls in the various possibilities, all of whom are lovely young women with sterling qualifications, but the man is clearly not impressed with any of them, and as each one is summarily rejected, Mrs. Mount is becoming more and more distraught.

Because this is Night Gallery, you’re fairly sure that the man is hiring a woman for something other than secretarial work, but for a few minutes, you’re not sure what exactly that is. After all the top candidates have been dismissed, a tall, awkward, meaty, and kinda slovenly woman rolls in and starts filing some papers in the office. The man’s eyes light up at the sight of her, and he offers Mrs. Mount an enormous sum for this woman’s services.

Mrs. Mount is confused, telling him that this woman is pretty useless; she can’t type, she can’t take shorthand, her penmanship is atrocious, and the coffee she makes is undrinkable. Why she’s allowed to work at this agency at all, given her dire limitations and the unblemished reputation of the agency itself, is never explained. Maybe she’s someone’s niece or something.

But it turns out all that doesn’t matter, because after the man hands over his check, he proceeds to put on a bib and pull out some cutlery. Yep, he’s going to eat this large woman right in Mrs. Mount’s office, bold as you please. Damn, the rich really ARE different from the rest of us, aren’t they? He just assumed everyone would be okay with a little light cannibalism; he did pay for his “meal,” after all.

Again, this one was kind of funny, but also just kind of there to fill time, and amounted to a long fat joke, really. I have to say it was better than the vampire babysitter one, though.

Episode 3
“Since Aunt Ada Came to Stay”

This segment, one of the most fun ones so far, was based on a short story by A.E. van Vogt, a prolific and extremely important science fiction writer whose style was a big influence on Philip K. Dick. This story isn’t really scifi, though; it’s an old-school witchcraft yarn, which is one of my favorite subgenres of horror.

So elderly Aunt Ada (Jeanette Nolan) has moved in with her ostensible niece Joanna Lowell (Michele Lee), and Joanna’s professor husband Craig (James Farentino). Fun fact: at the time this show aired, Michele Lee and James Farentino were married in real life. Anyway, the professor thinks Ada is a weirdo and doesn’t like having her around, but Joanna seems to have taken a shine to the cackling old bat and her endless supply of herbal teas.

It’s made pretty clear from the beginning of the story that Ada is a witch; she’s shown chanting spells and making very occulty movements with her witch stick in her bedroom. It’s also established that Ada is allergic to flowers, and that Professor Craig has an affectation of wearing a green carnation in his lapel whenever he goes to work. So you just know these two things are going to factor into the plot eventually.

It so happens that another professor at the college, Nick Porteus (Jonathan Harris, probably best known as Dr. Smith from Lost in Space), is interested in the occult, and wants to discuss Craig’s green carnation in regards to same, but Craig—who teaches logic and philosophy—doesn’t have time for all that supernatural hooey.

Despite his skepticism, he is starting to find Aunt Ada just a mite bit freaky, however. One day, she seems to disappear instantly from her chair in the yard, and when a confused Craig goes inside, Ada and his wife claim they’ve been in the kitchen sipping tea the whole time.

After waking up late one night and discovering Ada and Joanna having yet another litle tea party in the kitchen, Craig decides to get to the bottom of whatever this herbal beverage is, so he takes a sample to the science lab at the university, and the guy there tells him it’s seaweed, and in particular a type of seaweed known in folklore as witches’ weed.

Craig goes to Professor Proteus to ask him about the stuff, and Proteus clarifies that the weed is used by witches to facilitate their transfer into a new, younger body, so they can prolong their lives indefinitely. Proteus also tells Craig that fortuitously, the green carnation he always wears is pretty much the only thing that can combat this witchcraft. Not long after this, Aunt Ada does a spell that makes Proteus drop dead of a massive stroke.

Because of these events, as well as the revelation that Aunt Ada is not actually Joanna’s aunt at all but perhaps a witch who just took over that woman’s body, Craig becomes convinced that Ada is planning to transfer her consciousness into Joanna on the first full moon after the upcoming autumnal equinox. Craig tells Joanna what’s going on, but she thinks he’s nuts and jokes about calling the men with the butterfly nets. Craig is resolute, though, vowing to not let Joanna out of his sight until the fateful day for the tranference has passed.

This works for a while, but one evening, Craig is obliged to take over a class for another professor who has a family emergency. Joanna accompanies him and sits in the classroom, but Ada’s powers work even over distances, it seems, because she’s able to psychically compel Joanna to slip out of the class and return home so the soul takeover can occur.

Craig finally notices that his wife is gone, and races home to try to save her. When he gets there, Joanna appears unconscious, and Ada tells him it’s too late, even busting out a spell that makes a whole bunch of witch clones that overwhelm Joanna and keep Craig from getting to her.

But at the last moment, Proteus’s ghost appears (or maybe it’s just a visual representation of Craig’s memory) and reminds Craig about the whole green carnation deal, so the professor whips it out of his lapel and chucks it at the witch, causing her to vanish in a pillar of green fire, leaving nothing behind but the burn mark on the carpet about the size of a half dollar. That’s the nice thing about witch deaths; there’s never a mess to clean up.

At the very end, there’s a brief coda where it’s suggested that Joanna—who appears back to normal—may actually still be housing the witch after all, as she looks very troubled at the sight of the bunch of green carnations growing in the front of the house.

Like I said, this was a fun segment; it was over the top, particularly Ada’s witch character, but I really liked that about it, honestly. It also had some legitimately creepy shots, since Aunt Ada was nearly always filmed through a fisheye lens that made her look pretty unsettling from certain angles. I love classic witch stories anyway, so this one hit all the right notes for me.

“With Apologies to Mr. Hyde”

Another pointless, very brief stab at humor, this one starred Adam West as Dr. Jekyll, who quaffs a potion made by his hunchbacked assistant, turns into a vaguely Mr. Hyde-ish version of Adam West, then berates the assistant for putting too much vermouth in the brew. Har de har.

“The Flip-Side of Satan”

I have to say I wasn’t a huge fan of this one, which was directed by Jerrold Freedman and based on a short story by Hal Dresner. Arte Johnson (best known from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In) plays an obnoxious DJ named J.J. Wilson, though to be honest he refers to himself in the third person so often that I actually thought J.J. was a different character at first.

Anyway, the setup is that J.J. is a famous DJ from New York City whose career has been tanking for a while. His agent has booked him in a guest slot at a dinky, empty radio station out in the middle of nowhere, and J.J. is clearly not happy about it. The desolate nature of the place is bad enough, but J.J. also discovers that the station only broadcasts from midnight to six a.m., and J.J. can’t play the music he wants, but must stick to the playlist already made up for him by persons unknown.

This is essentially a bottle segment, taking place entirely in the radio station, and with J.J. being the only character. All the information is imparted through J.J.’s phone calls to various people. Through these phone calls, it comes to light that J.J. had been having an affair with his agent’s wife, and that she is now dead, apparently by suicide. According to some plot synopses I read, the implication was supposed to be that J.J. had actually killed her, but I didn’t really pick that up while I was watching the segment; I don’t know if that’s because I wasn’t paying close enough attention or if that angle wasn’t conveyed effectively.

So J.J. is getting more and more anxious as the night goes on, particularly because the numbered records he’s slated to play are all creepy horror-movie music. After he plays a couple of them, one of the records starts featuring Satanic chanting on there, talking about a sacrifice.

At first, J.J. thinks that the other DJs at this station are pranking him, but his terror amps up when he attempts to call the operator and is told the number has been disconnected, and then realizes that all the other DJs whose photos are framed on the wall only served at the station for a single day.

Shortly after he figures out that he’s the sacrifice, he touches some doohickey on the broadcasting equipment and gets electrocuted, after which his photo appears on the wall along with all the others.

This story was okay, though I think I would have liked it more if it was a bit more compelling. The premise was great, but J.J. was kind of an annoying character, and I just wanted him to hurry up and get sacrificed already. I also think too much time was allotted to him arriving at the station, putting on his special fringed vest, and puttering around looking at stuff. It was fairly clear from the get-go what was going to happen, so I think they should have gotten into the meat of the story more quickly, and maybe made J.J. a bit less grating.

Episode 4
“A Fear of Spiders”

Another decent segment, this one was written by Rod Serling and directed by the awesome John Astin (aka Gomez Addams).

In it, Patrick O’Neal plays a snotty, rage-filled gourmet food critic named Justus. Prior to the events of the story, Justus had apparently gone on a couple of dates with his upstairs neighbor Elizabeth, played by Kim Stanley. Elizabeth, who is painted as something of a lonely romantic, is now getting a mite needy, phoning Justus and knocking on his door at all hours hoping for some lovin’, which is driving Justus completely around the twist. He finally tells her outright that he is absolutely not interested in a relationship with her and that he doesn’t want to see her again. Elizabeth is taken aback by his cruelty, but Justus corrects her, saying he’s only “refreshingly blunt.” Regardless of what you call it, Elizabeth does finally seem to get the message, and scuttles back to her apartment with her tail between her legs, after telling Justus that she hopes one day he’ll need help and compassion from someone who loves him, but that no such person would be there to provide it.

Another thing about Justus is that he has severe arachnophobia, so it makes him a wee bit mental when he sees a fat little spider hanging out in his kitchen sink. He tries to wash the troublesome little critter down the drain, but the plucky little dude just keeps crawling back up to say howdy.

During this crisis, the landlord arrives to check out Justus’s faulty thermostat, and Justus complains about the spider infestation, but the landlord doesn’t even give one atom of a fuck, making it plain that he thinks Justus is an effete weenie who needs to do some actual physical work to make him more of a man, instead of all this prissy “writing” nonsense.

The sink spider is still in evidence, and an edgy Justus then hears an alarming sound coming from his bedroom. Upon opening the door, he sees an enormous arachnid on his bed, like the size of an ottoman, and he nopes the hell out of the apartment and runs up to Elizabeth’s door.

Contritely, he attempts to butter her up, apologizing for his earlier behavior. Elizabeth is wary, but she reluctantly lets him in for a drink. He’s clearly very rattled, and tells her of his overwhelming fear of spiders. He then relates to her that there’s a spider in his bedroom that’s the size of a dog, and that he can’t go back down there.

Elizabeth finds this all very amusing, and obviously thinks Justus has lost his marbles. Because of his previous cruelty to her, she sees an opportunity for payback, and basically informs Justus that he’s absolutely not staying with her, no matter how terrified he is.

Justus then begs her to at least come down to his apartment and check out the situation; he wants to prove to her that the gigantic spider is really there. She gently mocks him, but agrees, and they go downstairs together.

Once in Justus’s place, Elizabeth looks around, but doesn’t see any spiders, not even the little guy in the kitchen sink. She then opens the door to the bedroom and tells Justus that there isn’t any spider in there, humongous or otherwise. He doesn’t really believe her, but she holds out her hand to him, urging him to come in and see for himself.

As soon as Justus goes into the bedroom, though, Elizabeth slips out and slams the door behind him, locking it from the outside and laughing at Justus’s distress. She coos that she’ll come down and let him out in the morning. Before she leaves, Justus begins screaming that the spider is in there with him, but Elizabeth just does a metaphorical mic drop and sashays out of the apartment, leaving the screeching douche to deal with it alone.

It’s actually never made clear if the spiders, either the little one or the big one, are real, or simply a product of Justus’s troubled imagination. It’s possible that Elizabeth saw the big-ass spider in the bedroom and decided to let it attack him, but I’m leaning more towards the idea that the spider wasn’t real at all, and Elizabeth just thought it would be funny to fuck with Justus because he absolutely thought it was real. And to her credit, it was funny, because Justus was a tool and got what he deserved.

While I was watching this segment, I wondered if it was an influence on the Creepshow story “They’re Creeping Up On You,” the one about the rich asshole whose germ-proof apartment got overrun by cockroaches. The broad outlines of the story are similar, though to be fair Upson Pratt in the Creepshow segment was WAY more of a dick than Justus was. Not to diminish Justus’s shitheadery at all, but you know, it’s all on a spectrum.

I liked this segment a lot, and I especially enjoyed the character of Elizabeth, who came across as sort of a pitiful, unsympathetic figure at first, but became much more relatable once she turned the tables on Justus.

“Junior”

Another of the barely-there joke segments, this one features Wally Cox as a dad who is awakened in the middle of the night by his “child” calling to him for a drink of water. His wife, in bed next to him, tells him to deal with it because it’s his kid, and then we find out that the child in question is actually Frankenstein’s monster, lying in a crib in a nursery. The monster then pours the water on his face instead of drinking it, which obliged me to make the “drinking problem” joke from Airplane! The end.

“Marmalade Wine”

I have to admit I’m not really sure if I “got” this segment, which was weird as all get-out and seemed as though it was deliberately set up to look like a stage play, but ended up causing me some confusion because this factor didn’t really play into the story, making me wonder whether the set just looked cheap by accident instead of on purpose. It was based, incidentally, on a story by supernatural and children’s fiction author Joan Aiken.

Robert Morse (The Loved One) plays Roger Blacker, a guy wandering through a very fake-looking landscape of spindly trees during a very fake-looking thunderstorm. He’s wearing a camera around his neck and kinda stumbling around like a drunk, which again I thought was going to have something to do with the plot, but…nope, not really.

I guess he’s lost, but luckily for him, a man seems to magically appear up in the rafters, telling him he’ll help. The mysterious rafter man then appears to teleport down next to Roger, leading the befuddled man to his remote “house,” which is comprised of a bit of white decking in front of a completely black backdrop.

The savior introduces himself as Dr. Deeking (Rudy Vallée), and it’s established that he used to be quite a well-known surgeon for Hollywood starlets back in the day, but he’s now retired. He plies Roger with the titular marmalade wine, and Roger seemingly gets drunker and drunker, although he was acting kind of inebriated before, so it’s difficult to tell how much effect the wine is having.

So they have a discussion in which it becomes plain that Roger is not really a photographer, even though he brags to Deeking that his pictures have appeared in all the major magazines. I didn’t really get why Roger had been walking around with a camera that he obviously had no clue how to use, which was one of the confusing things about this segment. Like, what was Roger doing before he ended up at this dude’s house, and why did he lie about being a photographer? Anyway.

The drunker Roger gets, the more boasts he makes, at one point even telling Deeking that he can see the future. Deeking’s interest is piqued by this, and he asks Roger to predict the results of an upcoming horse race and election.

Roger is obviously getting very schnockered, but even in his boozy haze, he seems to remember that he had heard Dr. Deeking’s name before. He can’t remember the context of what he heard about him, though, and it’s really starting to get to him. Not long after this, however, he passes out.

When he wakes up, he’s in a bed in another spartan room, and the excited doctor is telling him that both of his predictions came true, and that the doctor won a bunch of money. At this stage, Roger confesses that he was bullshitting; he can’t really see the future at all. He just picked a horse and a candidate at random and he happened to get it right.

The doctor isn’t having it, though, and happily asks Roger to make even more predictions. Roger says he’s gotta scoot, and right around this time, he remembers the fact about Dr. Deeking that he couldn’t recall before. Turns out that there was some scandal years ago and the doctor had his license revoked.
Almost immediately after this, Deeking informs Roger cheerfully that he won’t be leaving ever, and that he’s taken the liberty of amputating Roger’s feet.

So, I have so many questions. Why did the sets look stylized, like those of a stage play, when that didn’t seem germane to the story? Who was Roger exactly, and why was he wandering around out here near the doctor’s house in the first place? Why did he make up these random lies about himself, to what purpose? And what about Dr. Deeking: did he deliberately target Roger because he somehow knew something about him, or was he just a psycho who abducted everyone who wandered past? Did he know that Roger would falsely claim to be psychic, and if so, how did he know that? Was Roger really psychic after all, which was the reason Deeking wanted to keep him around?

Although I really have no idea what was going on in this thing, it was still an enjoyable, if baffling, segment.

“The Academy”

This tale, again written by Rod Serling (from a story by David Ely) and directed by Jeff Corey, was a bit dull and anticlimactic, sadly, although all the acting was good.

Pat Boone (yes, THAT Pat Boone) plays an important muckety-muck named Mr. Holston whose wife has died and whose teenage son (who you never see) is a bit of a tearaway. Pat arrives at a strict military boarding school, with a view to seeing if his son will be accepted as a cadet there, since the boy badly needs some discipline.

The entirety of the segment is Mr. Holston being given a tour of the place, complete with cadets being yelled at by drill instructors as they march in formation. Mr. Holston notices, as he traverses the grounds and talks to some of the cadets, that there is a very wide range of ages among the students; in fact, some of the “cadets” are clearly in their thirties and forties.

It turns out that the big “secret” of the academy is that no one ever leaves there; one old cadet working the entrance gate proudly tells Mr. Holston that he arrived at the academy when he was fifteen…forty years ago. Honestly, I thought there was going to be something more sinister going on at this place than “drop your teenage boy off and they live here forever,” but no, that’s it. The students don’t appear to be tortured or mistreated in any way (other than their lives being really regimented, like in the military); they just can’t leave, and none of them seem to even want to.

At the end, the Director tells Mr. Holston that they’d be happy to accept his son, and Mr. Holston says he’ll drop the kid off tomorrow, thus ridding himself of the troublesome teen for the foreseeable future. Which doesn’t seem like all that terrifying of an outcome, really, though I guess it sucks that the son didn’t really get any say in the matter.

Like I said, this one was fine, but it went on a bit too long and wasn’t as chilling as it was probably intended to be. It would have been a lot cooler if Holston had found out that the directors of the academy were…I dunno, turning the cadets into dog chow or sacrificing them to demons or something, but as it was, the whole thing just felt a little underbaked.

Episode 5
“The Phantom Farmhouse”

This episode actually (and thankfully) dispensed with the shorter jokey segments and just focused on two longer ones, which was much appreciated, even though both installments were fairly peculiar, even by the normal standards of the show.

“The Phantom Farmhouse” was based on a classic 1923 story by Seabury Quinn and directed by Jeannot Szwarc, and reminded me, tonally and visually, of the somewhat dreamlike vampire film Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, which came out in 1971, the same year as this episode aired.

David McCallum plays Dr. Joel Winter, who works at a remote sanitarium out in the California countryside. At the beginning of the story, we seem to be in the middle of a group therapy session, where several patients are sitting on these strange, primary-colored platforms situated in a copse of trees. One of said patients is Gideon (played by David Carradine, looking super beardy like a lost member of the Bee Gees), who constantly plays his guitar and seems a wee bit hostile.

Through some baffling 1970s slang, we slowly discover that Gideon apparently has some “delusion” about a cottage in the woods where a family known as the Squires lives. One family member in particular, a beautiful young woman named Mildred (Linda Marsh), is evidently an object of adoration for all who see her, but the doctor insists that Mildred isn’t real, and simply a manifestation of Gideon’s drug-fuelled madness.

It turns out that another patient named May has turned up dead some short time before, completely torn to pieces in a nearby field. The doctor shows Gideon a note that was found on the grounds, which Gideon wrote earlier and gave to May, encouraging him to go and find the mysterious cottage in the woods.

Curious and perhaps supernaturally compelled, Dr. Winter heads out into the woods himself, and to his surprise, ends up finding the cottage after all. And sure enough, a gorgeous blonde in old-fashioned clothing comes out of the house and gives the doc a drink out of the well, which has amazingly delicious and clear water. Dr. Winter is immediately smitten, and Mildred—because that’s who this is—seems to return his feelings. There are also two other people in the house, presumably Mildred’s mother and father, and they also seem very friendly and welcoming, trying to coax Dr. Winter up onto the porch to stay for a spell, but then conceding that it would probably be better if he came back after dark, when they would have more time for company. Dr. Winter declines, but says he’ll be back soon.

Several things are creepy about this situation, however. Mildred has super red fingernails, for one thing, and her index finger is much longer than normal. Also, when Mildred is inside with her parents, Dr. Winter overhears her saying something along the lines of, “This one’s mine…do your own hunting.” Anyone else getting the feeling that Dr. Winter might be in a spot of trouble here?

Anyway, the doc goes back to the sanitarium and asks a couple shepherds/groundskeepers what the deal is with the cottage in the woods, but they look at him like he has three heads and tell him there hasn’t been a house there for ages because the whole shebang burned down back in the day. All that’s there now, they insist, is a chimney and three graves. Hmmmm.

Not long after this, one of the other patients, Betty (Trina Parks), basically tells Dr. Winter that the Squires are werewolves, but of course he doesn’t believe it, and not only because he’s a man of science, dammit, but also because he has begun to fall for Mildred, just like everyone else who meets her. Betty also tells him that Gideon has pentagrams in the palms of his hands.

A couple of sheep are subsequently found torn apart and the shepherds are terrified, trying to give Dr. Winter a silver crucifix to protect him before he goes into the woods, but the doc isn’t down with all this superstitious hogwash and heads out there to see Mildred anyway. When he gets to the cottage, though, Mildred tells him that because she loves him, she can’t see him anymore, though she won’t tell him why. He’s very distraught by this, but finally leaves.

Unfortunately, when he returns to the sanitarium, he discovers that Betty has also been found mangled and dead in the field. Gideon finally shows the doc the pentagrams, and basically implies that he made a deal with the Squires to send victims their way, and that anyone who sees the cottage (which isn’t really there) has been marked for death.

Finally starting to believe that maybe something supernatural is indeed going on, the doc heads back out to the cottage to ask Mildred what’s up. She seems to confirm the whole werewolf thing when her eyes go all black and red, and when she reiterates that he needs to get the hell outta there and forget about her. She finally tells him, sadly, that he should come back to the cottage before dawn the next day and read the prayer for the dead near the three graves on the property. The doc is all WHA? but through tears, he says he’ll do it.

On his way back to the sanitarium through the dark woods, he is set upon by two wolves who attempt to eat him, but then he’s seemingly rescued by a third, blonde wolf (who looks a lot more like a golden retriever, frankly). Shaken but okay, he returns to the facility, and then the next morning he comes back and reads the prayer like he said he would. There’s all kinda howling and growling and supernatural wind and what not while he’s reading it, and then he finally passes out. When he comes to, the cottage is gone, now just a burned ruin like everyone else said it was, and he’s left to confusedly wander around, yelling for Mildred. You’re led to believe that Mildred did actually fall in love with Dr. Winter, and had him send her family’s souls to Hell (?) to prevent them from killing him. So I guess they were kinda ghosts as well as werewolves.

This was an okay story; it’s kind of slowly paced and bizarre, what with all the 70s stuff intermingled with the gothic trappings of the original tale (which this adaptation follows pretty closely), but like I said, it somehow works, in an odd way.

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow”

This second segment was also quite weird, mainly because it was based on a short story that isn’t really conducive to a filmed adaptation, as most of it consists of a person’s inner thoughts.

It’s based on Conrad Aiken’s most famous tale, which was initially published in 1932 and has appeared in numerous American fiction anthologies in the years since. The story doesn’t really have a plot in the classic sense, and in order to capture the feel of the source work, the makers of the Night Gallery segment simply had Orson Welles do a voiceover, basically reading portions of the text while the events unfolded.

The story concerns a boy named Paul (Radames Pera) who becomes more and more fascinated with snow, leading to him becoming increasingly withdrawn from his friends and family. And I mean, that’s pretty much it; Orson Welles tells us that Paul’s obsession seemed to start with the approaching footsteps of the postman, which were more muffled than usual one day, leading Paul to assume that it had snowed in the night. When he looks out the window, however, there is no snow, but this doesn’t seem to faze him, as he keeps imagining beautiful snowy landscapes wherever he goes.

His teachers and his sorta clueless parents have no idea why Paul seems to have suddenly retreated into his own world, as he refuses to tell them anything about his inner thoughts. His parents eventually call a doctor, and after the three adults harangue the kid long enough, he finally tells them that he just likes thinking about snow, and then he breaks away from them and runs for his room, which is all full of swirling snow that he rapturously spins around in. Eventually, according to the voiceover, the snow whispers things to him and seems to overtake him before the screen goes black.

The short story is essentially an extended metaphor, though its specific meaning is open to interpretation. Some have seen it as a retreat from reality into fantasy, or a representation of mental illness, though I actually saw it as a boy’s morbid fascination with, and eventual acceptance of, his own death. I’d be interested to hear other people’s opinions about it, though.

As I said, this installment was very strange and quite unlike anything that had been done on Night Gallery before. I’m not sure this particular story was the best choice for an adaptation, since all of it takes place inside a boy’s mind, but I do have to admit there was something sort of eerie about it, and it’s always pleasant to listen to Orson Welles’s distinctive voice. I have a feeling most audiences would have just thought it was boring or pointless, though.

Episode 6
“A Question of Fear”

Easily one of the best, creepiest segments of the series, even if it’s also one of the simplest, “A Question of Fear” boasts an impressive performance from Leslie Nielsen, who has very little dialogue during the bulk of the story, but is able to perfectly convey the ordeal he’s experiencing.

Directed by Jack Laird and based on a story by Bryan Lewis, this installment begins at a gentleman’s club, where a man with completely white hair named Dr. Mazi (Fritz Weaver) is telling a group of three other men about a horrifying night he spent in a haunted house, which not only turned his hair white overnight but also caused him to have a nervous breakdown, necessitating a three-year stay in a sanitarium afterward.

Another of the men present, the eyepatched Colonel Denny Malloy (Leslie Nielsen), is absolutely not shy about blowing his own horn and regaling the other men with his own feats of badassery, basically calling Mazi a pussy for freaking out in a so-called haunted house. Slyly, Mazi tells Malloy to put his money where his mouth is, offering him ten large if he’ll stay overnight in the same house without dropping dead from fright. The scoffing, arrogant Malloy readily agrees.

Not long after, he arrives at the fateful mansion, and eerie shit begins to happen pretty much immediately: the front door slams by itself, footsteps and moaning can be heard echoing through the rooms, and at one point he even sees a glowing green head floating around in the hallway (that he shoots at to no effect). As I mentioned, this long sequence of Malloy moving through the house and encountering various spooky tableaus—blood dripping from seemingly nowhere, a dining table covered with rats, disembodied laughter and crying—is almost entirely without dialogue, as Malloy tries to maintain his tough-guy veneer. He seems to be operating under the assumption that it’s all fake, but we can see doubt beginning to creep into his expression as the paranormal manifestations ramp up.

At last, he arrives down in the basement, where a lot of the moaning and laughing seems to be the loudest. After taking a break for a smoke and a sip of coffee from his thermos, he also begins to hear a piano playing discordantly somewhere nearby.

Upon entering a back room, he sees a glowing green dude seated at a piano, who turns around and stretches his hands out toward Malloy; said hands then proceed to catch fire. This would seem to be the culmination of all the ghostly activity Malloy has been seeing up to this point, but then he notices a suspicious black power cord leading to the supposed “ghost.” Triumphantly, he cuts the power cord, causing the spirit and his flaming mitts to disappear.

So yeah, everything we’ve seen in the house up to this stage has been fake, just as Malloy surmised. And to be honest, it doesn’t really come as much of a surprise to the viewer, either, because the paranormal shit in this joint was way too over the top to not be fabricated. Malloy smugly tells Mazi—who he presumes is listening—that he’s gonna have to do better than that if he wants to scare him and says that he’s already looking forward to spending the ten grand he’s gonna win.

Malloy then takes his self-satisfied ass up to a bedroom, severing another power cord he finds beneath the bed. Astute viewers, however, will notice that Malloy seems to stumble a bit as he’s getting ready to turn in, almost as if he’s been drugged. Hmmmm. He shakes it off, though, and settles on top of the covers, but just then, metal restraint bars pop out the mattress and hold him in place, and a big ol’ semicircular blade appears out of the ceiling, “Pit and the Pendulum” style, and starts descending toward Malloy’s throat. It gets pretty close, and Malloy is maybe starting to think that this shit really isn’t funny anymore, yelling at the unseen Mazi that haha, joke’s over, but then the blade stops just an inch or so from beheading the overconfident Colonel. Malloy then sorta passes out, finally succumbing to the drugs we’re pretty sure he was administered at some unknown time earlier.

When he wakes up the next morning, both the blade and the restraints are completely gone as if they were never there, and Malloy smiles to himself, knowing that he’s won the bet. He goes downstairs, and weirdly, eggs are cooking on the stove, a hot pot of coffee is on the table, and two slices of toast pop out the toaster, even though there’s no one else around.

Just then, Malloy notices a TV mounted on the wall, with a video camera perched on top of it. The TV comes on, and there’s Mazi, with regular brownish hair instead of his previous white. Mazi says he can see and hear Malloy as well, because of the video camera.

So basically, Mazi tells Malloy that he’s been looking for him for a long time, because back during the war, Malloy captured Mazi’s father, who was a concert pianist, and burned his hands to useless stumps when the poor man wouldn’t give him the information he wanted (although it’s implied that the father didn’t know this information in the first place). So Mazi slowly integrated himself into Malloy’s circle and engineered the whole haunted house situation in order to take revenge on his dad’s behalf.

Malloy is still smug as fuck, though, reminding Mazi that the scheme didn’t work; Malloy uncovered the fakery and lived through the night, so he still won the bet. Not so fast, says Mazi, who then informs Malloy that he did indeed drug the Colonel’s coffee last night, and while Malloy was out, Mazi injected him with a serum of his own invention, which will essentially dissolve all of Malloy’s bones very slowly and turn him into an earthworm, even though all of his mental faculties will remain intact.

Malloy isn’t buying this shit for a second, though, thinking this is one last mindfuck. But Mazi insists that Malloy go back down to the cellar; there, he says, he will find what remains of Mazi’s colleague, who was also injected with the serum and is now basically a human slug. This ties in nicely with some weird shit Malloy saw earlier while he was exploring the house; he found what we now recognize as a wide slime trail going across the floor, though at the time neither he nor the audience knew what it was.

Malloy still thinks it’s all bullshit, but Mazi keeps telling him to go down to the cellar and have a look at what his ultimate fate is going to be, and though Malloy does go part of the way down there, he catches sight of the slime trail and hightails it back up to the kitchen in terror. He then screams that Mazi still lost the bet before shooting himself in the head, not wanting to give Mazi the satisfaction of seeing Malloy turn into an earthworm.

Mazi then leans back and smiles, saying to Malloy’s dead body, “No, you lose. There is nothing in the cellar.” Gotcha, bitch!

This was a great episode: creepy, fun, and well-acted, with a couple of good twists and turns. Even though by today’s standards it’s fairly predictable, I still had a ball with it, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call it one of the best segments of the entire series.

“The Devil is Not Mocked”

This one was much shorter and even more predictable, and honestly pretty cheesy, so I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. It was directed by Gene R. Kearney, and based on a short story by Manly Wade Wellman.

At the beginning, an old dude (Francis Lederer) is telling his grandson what he did in World War II, and then we jump back in time for a flashback. The Nazis are being their horrid Nazi selves in an area of the Balkans that they’ve taken over; they’re now camped out in front of a crumbling old castle, mocking the “stupid peasants” in the region.

The head of this contingent of assholes is General von Grunn (Helmut Dantine), and he believes that this castle is a secret base of the resistance. So imagine his surprise when the master of the castle (the old guy from the beginning) answers the door in all his formalwear splendor, opera cape and all, welcoming the Nazis with open arms.

The Nazis, apparently as idiotic as they are evil, go inside the castle and start searching for resistance members, all while the Master is calmly encouraging them to eat dinner from the delectable feast he laid out for them, and perhaps even avail themselves of some of the servant girls if they so desire. The entire time, wolves are howling obtrusively outside, so you can probably guess where all this is going.

The General reluctantly sits down to eat with the Master, and the Master all the while denies that there’s any resistance going on in the castle. The General gets crankier and crankier, threatening to put the Master up against the wall and so forth, but the Master retains his aplomb. The General tells the Master that he has a hundred men outside and he better act right or all of his resistance peeps are gonna get it, but then the General starts hearing screaming from outside, and looks out to see his men being attacked by the so-called “servants” from earlier.

So yeah, the upshot of it is that the Master is Count Dracula, and his resistance fighters are all vampires. They all proceed to eat the Nazis, and we return to the present-day Master, showing his grandson the medal he won in the war for his heroic deeds in service of his country. The end.

This one was kinda silly and you could see where it was going from a mile away, but it’s always satisfying to see Nazis get fucked up, so I’ll allow it. The first segment was miles better, though.

That will do it for the first six episodes of season two! Be sure to keep watching this space for whenever I get around to doing the next half-dozen, and until then, remember to keep it creepy, my friends.