The Biggest Laugh Ever (Part 2)

So, now I’ve watched the film again, and did I laugh at the same spot as before? Actually, I did. Not as heavily as before, because I knew the gag, and knew it was coming, but at the moment it dropped I was as unprepared as before, and still had a good explosive laugh at it coming, and the sheer straightfacedness with which it was presented. It was one of only two points in the film that made me seriously laugh out loud.

And the name of this film? I told you you wouldn’t get it. It was A Very Brady Sequel.

To set out the background, The Brady Bunch was a very successful American sitcom, running from 1969 to 1974, which was not, to the best of my knowledge, shown in Britain. The set-up was that widower architect Mike Brady, bringing up three sons alone, married Carol (marital status left undefined because the Networks wouldn’t accept a female divorcee) who had three daughters. It was an old-fashioned domestic comedy series which was never a big hit at the time but has turned into a cultural institution in syndication.

In 1995, The Brady Bunch Movie appeared, one of a number of Sixties Sitcom revivals as films, and about the only one with any critical standing. Gary Cole (just before appearing as Sheriff Lucas Buck in American Gothic) starred as Mike Brady, with Shelley Long, ex-of Cheers, as Carol Brady. The film set itself up cleverly by portraying the entire Brady clan as still living in the Seventies whilst the world outside was taking place in the Nineties, and made its comedy out of the clash between the two cultures.

The film was big enough to spawn a nearly-as-successful sequel, which is what Mark and I watched that August Bank Holiday evening.

The peg behind this one is that it had never been made clear whether the former Carol Martin had been widowed or divorced. Now, with her Anniversary with Mike coming up, Carol gets a shock when a man turns up claiming to be her first husband, Roy Martin. The audience are in on the fact that he’s an imposter from the outset: he was actually Roy Martin’s assistant, who left Roy to die at sea after Roy sent Carol an important archeological find, a statue of a horse. ‘Roy’ plans to get his hands on it and sell it to Dr Whitehead, an antiques collector in Hawaii, for $20 million dollars.

So the main part of the film is the clash between ‘Roy’s underhandedness and crookedness and the Bradys’ naive decency. There’s a sub-plot about eldest boy and girl, Greg and Marcia, falling in love, and another about middle girl Jan’s jealousy of her elder sister, which leads her to make up a boyfriend called George Glass.

It’s all quite clever in a superficial way. I don’t have the original to compare with, but the gag is built upon the Bradys all being of their forgotten time. Everybody plays their roles with straight faces without once so much as hinting they’re in on the gag, which is the only way this can work, but that does make large parts of the film very one-note, and given that the note is that of a very bland sitcom, the joke wears thin quickly. Some scenes are just embarrassing, where your suspension of disbelief is put to impossible tests, and the odd dirty line, that is dirty only to the minds of contemporary audiences, tends to fall flat.

Mark and I would have been taking the piss out of this right royally.

But I did laugh out loud twice tonight. Once, and the biggest laugh for me, was when Mike Brady goes to the Police, and the Detective he speaks to is a cameo by Richard Belzer, playing our dear old John Munch from Homicide: Life on the Street.

But that wasn’t the big laugh. Let me set it up. We’re in the closing stages now. ‘Roy’ has stolen the horse statue, dragging Carol along as a hostage, and has got all the way to Dr Whitehead’s estate (John Hillerman, essentially playing Higgins from Magnum PI). But Whitehead won’t buy the statue now he’s heard from Carol what Trevor did to get it, cutting the little ship’s fuel-line, causing it to presumably sink. Whitehead’s son was on that boat, as it’s mate: Whitehead will never see his boy again, his boy Gilligan.

It was like a ton of bricks. The two of us howled, barely hearing Carol bemoan that she’ll never see her husband, the Professor, either. Yes, thanks to Trevor, the Minnow was lost.

I don’t know who came up with that idea but they were a freaking genius to do so. The gag is that Carol’s husband never came back because he was the Professor in Gilligan’s Island, a 1964-67 American sitcom that did get shown over here and that I used to love as a kid, but the idea of linking the two was just so left-field that the two of us were laughing at it for several minutes, and probably completely missed the bit where Carol, in her typically sunny way, speculated that maybe the Minnow crashed into some desert island and everybody survived, an idea that Whitehead dismissed as ridiculous, which is what a lot of people said about Gilligan’s Island, my parents probably included.

Of course, the whole idea was only made possible because Sherwood Schwartz, creator of The Brady Bunch, had also created Gilligan’s Island before it.

And yes, the way it’s dropped in, out of the blue, by Whitehead mentioning Gilligan, had me laughing again tonight. Not so hard, not so long, but just as unexpectedly.

The film did try to duplicate the effect at the very end, incidentally. Mike and Carol renew their vows, and she tosses her bouquet in the traditional manner. However, it goes over the heads of housekeeper Alice and her three daughters and is picked up by a blonde is harem pants, red top and blonde hair piled up above her head, that everyone old enough to recognise Gilligan will instantly recognise as Jeannie, a cameo by Barbara Eden, from I Dream of Jeannie (1965 -70). She’s looking for her husband… Mike Brady.

Whatever the flaws or failings of A Very Brady Sequel, may be, most of them deriving from the original I have to say, that one moment is genius of the highest water and I salute the film for it, from both 2000 and 2018.

American Gothic: e22 – Requiem

This one I was reluctant to start watching, because it was the last one and not the end. I didn’t want to get to that point, which I remembered breathlessly, where the plug is pulled, the bathwater drains away and there is just a blank where season 2 should have been. But I had forgotten just how dark this last episode was.

Watching it put me in mind of the end of Blake’s 7, where a poor series 4, made under duress and boy did it show, ended up with the Seven, including Blake and, off-screen, Jenna, killed to destroy any risk of there being a series 5. It was wrong then, it’s wrong today. I am, in one sense, old-fashioned, due to my age. I grew up in an era where Good prevailed, and to see Evil prevail is, in certain circumstances, deeply wrong to me.

Had American Gothic lived as it deserved to, had seven seasons, until Caleb grew into manhood and came into his own, I think ultimately he would have rejected what Lucas Buck stood for. In this last episode, with Lucas apparently dead as of last week, Caleb embraced the power that flowed into him with all the lack of sophistication of a ten year old boy, and the only thing that stopped him was the resurrection of Lucas Buck.

There was a funeral, with only four attendees: Caleb, Gail, Selena and Ben. Five, of you count the gravedigger who showed no respect to the deceased. But then Caleb, left alone (but for the eavesdropping Selena) to say his final words, not only openly acknowledged Buck as his father but spat upon his grave.

There’s a horribly disturbing scene right off, in broad daylight, as Ben takes Caleb back to the boarding house. Caleb wants to see Ben’s gun but he refuses. He startles Ben by pulling out of the glove compartment Lucas’s gun, the one Ben didn’t know about. He sticks it in Ben’s chest, grinning, going on about how Ben was never praised by Lucas because he never showed his potential. His gun’s against Ben’s heart, he pulls the trigger, but it’s not loaded. It’s all a game: I was just funning with you.

Then he moves into Lucas’s house, against Merly’s wishes. Caleb is on the point of taking the name Buck, and doesn’t want her and her white dress around him any more. Once there, he finds Selena, at her most seductive, interested in Caleb’s potential.

At the hospital, Billy Peale has ordered post mortem blood tests on Lucas, concerned about why he ‘died’. We know he’s not dead, just buried alive, a point reiterated this week. Merlyn’s conducting a conversation with him in which he’s almost but not quite asking for help: because if he dies and his powers go irrevocably to Caleb, there’ll be no saving the boy.

But hospital boss Dr Narone, whose three year old granddaughter Ashley is with him today, is concerned about this. They’re expensive, the hospital can’t afford them, bring the results to me immediately (without looking at them yourself). And Ben, in the midst of a horde of townsfolk, demanding that they still get everything they had under Sheriff Buck’s ‘deals’ (whilst no doubt glad they no longer have to uphold their end of the bargain, not like all the dead ones), gets a prompt from a solid-looking Merlyn.

So Bill(y) and Ben go down to the cemetery at night and dig up a less-than-graciously-grateful Lucas Buck and sneak him into the hospital via the back door, so no-one else will know. Lucas is, however, weak.

And Selena’s told Caleb that Gail is pregnant by Sheriff Buck. It’s his insurance policy, an heir and a spare (how Windsorian) in case Caleb escapes him. But Caleb’s not having that: there can only be one Buck in every generation. He gets Selena to lure his cousin to the house where he makes it very plain that she’s not leaving there pregnant. Or alive, if need be.

Lucas, as soon as he learns this, skates over there, but not in time to prevent Gail from falling down the stairs: miscarriage, fracture concussion, possible spleen damage. Gail is out of it. And Selena, for playing her part in this, is definitively rejected by Lucas.

Who’s paid an unexpected visit to Dr Narone. Narone had taken advantage, tired of all the years of covering up the suspicious deaths that surround Lucas Buck. Something to temporarily stop his heat and burial alive. Lucas will be merciful: if Narone hangs himself with little Ashley’s skipping rope, Lucas will spare little Ashley. We know it’s coming but that doesn’t shake the horror when the little girl approaches Doctor Billy and Doctor Rita to tell them, in puzzlement, that ‘Granpa’s sleeping on the ceiling’.

Now it’s down to Lucas vs Caleb over who wields the power. Caleb uses a letter-opener to stab Lucas in the stomach, but it’s not him, it’s Merly, seeming to be him for a distraction. Lucas grabs Caleb from behind, but it’s too late, the only way to save him is to kill him. Lucas is going to throw him off the landing. Merlyn is frantic, thiswasn’t their deal, but Lucas Buck is a lying, cheating bastard. I won’t let you kill him, she yells. I know you won’t, Lucas says, having manipulated Merlyn into a sacrifice that benefits him. When he throws Caleb down, she is there: there is a blinding flash and she’s gone, never to return.

Caleb’s back to normal, good-little-kid normal. Buck tells him Merlyn’s inside him now: they’ll get by without her.

And it’s all over, it really is all over.

Creator Shaun Cassidy wrote the final episode. You can see in it all manner of layers and pointers for how it might have gone in season 2, in which it was planned for Dr Matt – who gets a namecheck – to return. But American Gothic was killed by its network, mistreated, neglected, denied a proper shot at an audience that I can’t believe it wouldn’t have grabbed if they’d had the proper chance at it.

But where Midnight Caller had been Saturday night dross, American Gothic gave Gary Cole a role in which he could dominate every scene he was in, and he took that chance with a vengeance, and these past 22 Thursdays, reacquainting myself with him and it has been time well-spent.

I have another series in mind for the Thursday morning slot, but what it is you’ll have to wait and see, in case I change my mind at the last minute. Thank you for visiting Trinity with me. It’s a nice town. If you do as you’re told…

American Gothic: e21 – The Buck Stops Here

And now we’re right on the brink.

This was an ideal set-up for a season finale, stirring things about to the greatest extent, resetting conditions that had been disturbed over previous weeks and introducing the greatest of new factors: Sheriff Lucas Buck is dead. Or is he?

In many ways, the penultimate episode was confused and muddy, with no clear storyline. Billy Peale and Selena Combs break into Buck’s house searching for medical files on Doris Lydon, believed to have been stolen by the Sheriff. Doris has been in a coma for two years, following some mysterious deal between Lucas and her husband, Yancey, the Hospital pharmacist.

Instead of searching for the files, Billy and Selena have sex in Buck’s bed. She talks of wanting Lucas dead, but when he comes home unexpectedly, they skedaddle out, though the Sheriff well knows what’s gone on. He interrupts Selena’s class the next day, making some pointed comments, but he also introduces Caleb to the eye in the pyramid symbol on the dollar bill, linking it to Caleb’s surname, Temple, and Lucas’s: the Buck stops here, and in every generation one rises who wields the power.

Weird stuff is going on. Caleb gets obsessed with cutting out the eye in the pyramid from dollar bills, arranging them into the third eye symbol. Gail, pregnant with Lucas’ baby, starts eating raw, uncooked beef and drinking it’s blood. Yancey blames Buck for cheating him: he gave a Judge who had upset Lucas a placebo (of which he impliedly died) in exchange for Doris’s life, but was lead to believe she would be restored, not comatose.

With the muddy waves stirring, and Merly getting ever more concerned about Caleb, someone attacks the Sheriff with a trochea, a medical implement constructed to split skulls. Billy’s there, but didn’t do it, though he’s thrown in jail at first (we all know it’s Yancey). Buck has been stabbed through the ‘third eye’, the pineal gland, the source of his power.

And he dies, just after whispering something to Caleb that we don’t get to hear.

There’s a funeral, a procession of people passing the coffin, several of them figures from earlier episodes. Reaction to his death is, to say the least, mixed. Gail admits to loving Buck. She also shoots Selena down, telling her she’s deader than Lucas.

But the worst is Caleb. He just smiles, like Gary Cole.

So it rushes towards a conclusion. Yancey is going to put Doris out of her hopeless condition but she dies first. Merly brings her back long enough to say farewell. Then Caleb enters, to punish him. Yancey winds up with his mouth and throat choked with pills: only an emergency tracheotomy by Billy saves his life. Caleb has come into his powers, it would seem.

He walks into the church, lays a dollar on the coffin lid, says, “The Buck Starts Here.”

And inside the coffin, Lucas Buck’s eyes open…

Next week is the finale, about which I remember certain things. Especially the closing scene. Hang on tight.

American Gothic e20: Strangler

This episode is the last of the lost, the four episodes unaired in America on American Gothic‘s original run, though shown on Channel 4. It’s almost the last of the few memories of that initial viewing in the mid-Nineties, and it is, for the most part, what I remembered it to be, something awkward and contrived. Given that it features the infamous Boston Strangler, the real Boston Strangler, raised from the dead, I can understand why it would have been kept from the airwaves, though the episode also contained a major development that would have governed everything else to follow.

Basically: Merly is trying to get Caleb to forgive his father, but he can only say the words, not mean them. Their little meeting in the graveyard is interrupted by Lucas Buck, who wants rid of Merly once and for all. When he tries to seize her, she uses her powers to blast him back a dozen feet. So, after she and Caleb have gone, Lucas summons up a figure from the dead to do the job for him: Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler.

Gareth Williams, playing DeSalvo, does a massive job, aided by the fact that Gary Cole is absent for over half the episode, leaving the show to concentrate on the Strangler. He plays DeSalvo as a quiet, content man, secure in himself, self-aware, popular and empathetic, but nevertheless struck with an insane compulsion, of which he is, if anything, proud. Never at any time does he try to justify or explain himself.

Now Lucas is off to a Convention, leaving Ben Healy in charge. DeSalvo is only supposed to murder Merly – and when the dead kill the dead, they go into oblivion – but his obsession is too powerful. He attacks and kills the pretty, short-skirted nurse Sara (Amy Parrish), he attacks Gail Emory after seeing her briefly in a short skirt but is prevented by her resistance and Ben’s arrival, and he kills another nurse in the hospital itself.

In the meantime, posing as a refrigerator repairman, he befriends Caleb, nudging him towards calling on his sister.

With Lucas out of town, and Deputy Floyd imploring him to just wrap it all up until Buck gets back, Ben starts hesitant, but gradually grows in authority and intelligence, to the point that, by episode’s end, he has a hard-working, thrumming Sheriff’s office, operating thoroughly. The man has authority and respect. Naturally, Lucas shuts it all down: back to normal.

But that’s merely a stinger. The climax comes at the boarding house. DeSalvo has dropped all pretences: unless Caleb calls Merly, DeSalvo will use his knife. Merly comes, ready to defend her brother and, when her powers prove ineffectual against the Strangler, ready to forfeit her soul for him. DeSalvo has his hands round her throat, Caleb is trying to drag him off, she’s fading out, and then comes the moment that changes everything.Caleb screams ‘Noooo!!!!’, and his powers hurl DeSalvo across the room, against the wall, and burn him up from the inside, leaving only smoke-shadows against the wallpaper.

Merly has only sadness. Caleb has saved her soul, but at the cost of using powers that will destroy his soul. She touches Caleb’s face. They can now touch one another. She says “Goodbye.”

Effective as it is in that game-changing ending, and in showing Ben as both competent and a viable point of opposition to Lucas Buck, twenty years later ‘Strangler’ still feels like an awkward contrivance. The Boston Strangler is the Boston Strangler: Boston, Massachusetts, up North, Yankee country. He has nothing to do with Trinity, South Carolina. By dragging in a real-life, and extremely notorious figure, reality in Trinity is warped out of shape. It feels more like an episode done because someone wanted an episode starring Albert DeSalvo than anything organically part of American Gothic‘s true arc. For all that he’s actually a ghost here, the Boston Strangler is too real for everybody else beside him, and it ultimately damages the episode.

But it sets up the final two episodes, as we shall see.

American Gothic e19: Triangle

Imagine this in your womb…

There’s not much time left and with so few steps remaining, American Gothic comes up with the closest to a dud episode yet, primarily composed to two opposing but related strands, one of which not even having any kind of recognisable conclusion, even temporarily.

The episode title applies to both halves of the story, but in different ways, and both halves involve a triangle of two men and a woman, the shared point and fulcrum being Sheriff Lucas Buck.

On one side, the woman is Gail Emory. Gail’s quitting, puling out, leaving Trinity and taking Caleb with her. It’s been too much for her, she’s in over her head, she’s spitting defiance but she’s definitely surrendering and running away. Until the stomach cramps hit her, because she’s pregnant. With Lucas Buck’s child, another son.

Lucas is laying up insurance. Caleb’s his, but could go either way, but Luke Jr is his entirely, a little monster, pre-formed and grimacing and pointing to Gail on the ultrasound. She’s freaking out, she’s trying to abort via an overdose of vodka, she’s going to throw herself off the roof of a building, except that Caleb’s desperate pleas hold her back. She goes to church, and Merlyn appears to her, sympathising, but in the end offering no practical solution except hope and faith: look at Caleb.

And that’s all we get, a status quo of stored-up trouble, weighted in Sheriff Buck’s favour, a theme to be explored in, yes, you guessed it, season 2.

The other woman is Selena Combs, making Billy Peale the third apex. This is the more conventional triangle. Selena is slipping more and more out of Lucas’s grasp, and that’s not something he’s prepared to allow. Billy won’t play ball, under no circumstances. But his job in Trinity is done, there’s an epidemic in Uganda, and he wants Selena to come with him: Paris, Rome, Africa, where they need good teachers. But she stands him up at the airport.

Billy gets good and drunk but he comes back to her. She’s sliding towards him, they make love, but out of the blue, or rather the black, Selena’s hit with a raging fever that’s going to burn her out, kill her. Billy recognises magic, tries to beat Lucas into relinquishing his hold, but the Sheriff will only do it if Billy recognises his authority. Kiss my ring, says Buck, proffering a signet ring, though we all know that it’s asking for the good old osculam infamous, which Billy promptly and defiantly concretises with a retorted “Kiss my ass!”

The spell is lifted. Selena recovers. Billy thinks it’s love. Selena knows it is. And she knows who she really has to thank.

Neither half of the story is really satisfactory. A rare miss. And I have no great recollections of the following episode either, the last ‘lost’ episode. A week.

American Gothic e18: Echo of your Last Goodbye

I remembered this one. In fact, I remembered it so much, I’ve been waiting all season for it to come up, wondering how I would react this time, knowing what was coming. And also twenty years on in the development of CGI to put on screen what is impossible to film in real life.

Because it starts with Ben Healy coming towards the end of a date with Cindy, who’s answered his personal ad. She’s a cheerful, nice-looking woman, not a knock-out, the kind of woman a Ben Healy can relax with, feeling it believable that she could enjoy his time. She’s chirpy, enthusiastic, fun. She even insists on coming with him on a call-out to a dilapidated old house in Goat-town, where an unholy stink’s been reported. Heck, it near doubles Ben up, it’s that rank, but Cindy doesn’t seem the least affected.

There’s a light on in a window at the back. Ben climbs up to look in. What he sees is what he’s seen before: Lucas Buck breaking Merlyn Temple’s neck.

Cindy’s not quite so chirpy now. She’s not Cindy after all, she’s Merlyn. She takes hold of her own head, twists it until the neck breaks. Her head becomes Merlyn’s. And it flops forty-five degrees and falls on her shoulder.

Last time round, they had to claw me back down from the ceiling. This time, I was a bit more conscious of the SFX, and it wasn’t the shock it had been so long ago.

This episode was one of four not shown in America on the original broadcast of American Gothic, perhaps because of the visceral impact of that moment. It was another nail in the coffin of the series, because ‘Echo of your Last Goodbye’ (the title of which only became explicable in the closing seconds as Ben and Merlyn’s ghost dance to a torch song on the jukebox) was another aspect of the changing tide as the series moved towards the end of season 1.

Merlyn’s there to haunt Ben, she appears in every woman he sees, she drives him towards discovery, not least of the fact that he has a backbone after all. Ben saw Lucas Buck snap Merlyn’s neck. Lucas is open with him about it, so long, that is, that Ben doesn’t tell anyone else: a mercy killing, he describes it. But that’s not the only death he’s responsible for.

Merlyn’s goading drives Ben back to the broken-down house, against Buck’s orders. His frustrated digging into its background, without an idea of what he’s supposed to look for, draws in Gail Emory, who’s still screwing Lucas Buck (Paige Turco, in a scene that doesn’t work simply because it turns the stomach too much, records her thoughts on relationships and not trusting Lucas Buck whilst stripping down to bra and panties and getting into bed with Lucas Buck).

It’s she who uncovers the fact that the house used to belong to Judith Temple, Caleb’s mother. In a sense, Ben fulfils part of his mission from Merlyn, to save Gail from ending up like her Aunt Judith: Gail works out what we have long known, that Lucas raped Judith, fathered Caleb on her, killed her afterwards, which he openly admits. If that doesn’t end the ‘relationship’…

And Ben comes to know it too. The house is a house of ghosts, most of them children. Judith Temple ran a children’s refuge, where kids in trouble could go: without her, without refuge… Maybe some or even all of them might have lived.

Ironically, it’s a refuge still. Tina, an aggressive, thieving, bullying girl who’s picking on Boone, lives there after being abandoned six months ago by her alcoholic mother. Egged on by Lucas, Caleb gets revenge on her for Boone, callously tricking her into getting her hand jammed into a soda machine and breaking her hand. Ben finds her, saves the day, wins her trust. Caleb’s remorseful, despite Buck’s scorn that remorse is for babies, but she can’t trust him yet.

Ben can do nothing about Judith Temple: that trail has been cold too long. The episode mildly fudges whether he can do anything about Merlyn, but he makes it plain to Lucas that he will no longer look the other way. For once, the Sheriff’s threats seem to contain an element of bluster.

There’s a tide of change. There’s Billy Peale. There’s the slow will-she-won’t-she question, teased again in this episode, of whether Selena Combs will turn against Lucas. Gail Emory’s separated herself. And now Ben Healy is moving into the opposition column. What a fascinating second season, with Dr Matt due to return, this would all make…

American Gothic: e17 – Learning to Crawl

Don’t worry, he won’t shoot

At this point in the series, and this remove in time, it’s impossible to know what was being produced to complete an order doomed to a premature end, and what is being made in furtherance of an overarching story, to be developed to an even deeper extent in season 2.

‘Learning to Crawl’ is an episode that looks, feels and plays as part of an overall scheme that is not prepared to end in five weeks time. It’s an episode that starts to change the terms of the series, and an episode that takes advantage of the removal of Dr Matt – who was directly involved in standing between Lucas Buck and Caleb – to tip the balance towards the former. It’s an episode about corruption.

It begins with Caleb, helping clean up the Sheriff’s station, accidentally electrocuting himself. He has an out-of-body experience, watching himself in the hospital, and meets Merly, there to welcome him. But Lucas Buck is also there, driving a wedge between Caleb and his sister by telling the boy what Merlyn hasn’t: that he has a choice, to stay or go back. It’s in his hands. Merly is driven to want Caleb to die aged ten because she’s afraid to let him live to make wrong choices. I mean, Buck as good as says that being like him is a bad choice, but what other choice would a ten year old boy make? Caleb takes Buck’s hand, and lives.

The rest of the episode is a chilling, slow expansion on that choice.

Without Dr Matt, without Billy Peale having quite settled in to his role as new protagonist for the Sheriff, and having made a conscious rejection of Merly, Caleb goes off on a fishing jaunt with Lucas, to the nearby ghost town of Simpsonsville. En route, the Sheriff can’t resist pulling over Selena Combs’ bright yellow sports car to fuck with her, leading her to think Billy Peale is standing her up for their symphony concert date that night to join the fishing party.

However, and this is an unfortunate contrivance that has to be ignored in the face of the quality of its development, the cabin Lucas and Caleb are heading towards is being used by a little family trio of kidnappers, who are holding a Cigarette company CEO as hostage. There’s the wild, stupid ex-con Cody, his wife, the even more vicious Jeri, and his somewhat ineffectual younger brother Ted (guest star Ted Raimi, son of Sam and future recurring character in Xena, Warrior Princess), who we later learn is shagging Jeri.

Whilst Cody and Jeri wait in vain for the pick-up of the extra ransom the idiot Cody is demanding, our CEO behaves with considerable stupidity. Used to obedience from all around him, he tries to control something he can’t control, won’t listen when Ted warns he’ll shoot him if he keeps running away, and gets shot in the back. The brief role put me in no sympathy with the ‘innocent’ victim who thought he was a Master of the Universe, even tied up, blindfolded at gunpoint.

Anyway, it’s completely thrown the weak-willed Ted so that when Lucas and Caleb arrive at the cottage, and are held at gunpoint, it’s easy for the former to face Ted down and take the gun off him. Cody and Jeri arrive to find the hostage situation reversed. They’re both stupid enough to believe that their having guns makes them in control of the situation, and they’re not. Lucas Buck is all set to manipulate all three players, playing them against each other, using the respective urges for money and love off, all for the purpose of providing an object lesson to Caleb. Caleb is shown how to control things, is lead towards the idea that love is meaningless, selflessness is stupid and control and its concomitant, selfishness, are the sole object worth attaining.

These lessons are given even sharper point by the arrival of Selena, thinking Billy’s there and intending to confront him. Though the point’s never made, the fact Lucas has effectively manipulated her to be present to provide an ineffectual counterpoint to his education of Caleb, added to Gary Cole’s continuingly awesome depiction of Buck as cool, detached and concentrated, suggests that the stumbling upon Ted and co might not not be the coincidence the show presents it as being, though the episode cannily doesn’t devote even a second to this possibility.

No, the lessons pile up for Caleb. Ted’s a broken reed, blaming CEO Ralston for his shooting: ‘look what you made me do’. Cody’s prepared to sell out his wife and brother for the money. Jeri is driven to kill him, believing Cody knows about the affair when he knew nothing at all (stupid to the last). Selena tries to keep Caleb on the straight and narrow, warning that Buck destroys peoples hopes, dreams and fears, that he’s trying to teach Caleb to hate people, though her hotheadness enables Buck to talk through her.

And even this last lesson has to be abandoned when a half-crazed, injured Jeri seizes her in daylight and puts a gun to her head.

By now, the dice have started to roll. First, Buck sends Caleb out top talk to Jeri, facing down her threats to shoot him, to plant in her head the notion that Cody knows. Then he begins to teach Caleb how to focus his thoughts, use the very same supernatural abilities Buck has, to force visions on Jeri that play on her paranpia and fear overnight.

It’s begun. And over the remaining five episodes, this strand will develop. May God have mercy on Caleb Temple’s soul.

American Gothic: e16 – Dr Death Takes a Holiday

As I remember it happening, though not the shape of it, this episode is Dr Matt Crower and Jake Weber’s swansong, as Billy Peale and John Mese are promoted into the cast as his direct replacement, for the last six episodes of the series.

At the time, having no knowledge of how the series was faring in America, and knowing only that it was consistently absorbing and effective, I thought it a daring, even progressive move: changing a central cast member in mid-season, showcasing a change of alignment, as Selena Combs begins a movement from Sheriff Buck’s camp into the opposition ranks.

Now, with much more information available as to the show’s history, I’m seeing this from the opposite side. We’re two-thirds of the way through a season which is failing commercially, with renewal an ever fainter prospect. Much as I like Jake Weber in this role, much as he stands out as the Yankee in the South (not that anyone except Buck seems to hold that against him), it’s clear that Weber was too laid-back, too quiet, too soft to be a real focus of opposition to our over-powerful villain.

So, ring the changes, bring in a more pro-actively strong protagonist, stir things up, create new interest. Billy Peale will do all of that, even as he comes over as a laid-back Southerner. Matt Crower is broken by Lucas Buck, he’s pushed aside, more than neutralised, finished. Apparently, if there had been a season 2, there were plans to bring him back, but in the context of this episode, I cannot see how, plausibly, he could have been re-inserted, except as an occasional, recurring character.

Weber’s send-off comes in an incredibly strong episode. It begins with him producing X-Ray pictures at the Sheriff’s office showing clearly Merlyn Temple’s broken neck, refuting the killed-with-a-shovel official cause of death. Buck decides to take steps against Dr Matt, once and for all, and, building upon last week’s fever-induced hallucinations, tries to get Judge Ketteridge to sign committal papers on him. The Judge, being a principled man, refuses to do so.

Buck, being an unprincipled man, save for the principle of what-I-wants-I-get, exploits the gambling habit of the Judge’s pretty young wife, Charlotte, in a tense poker scene that sees her wipe herself out: the Judge comes home to find her in the bath, her wrists slashed. Not dead, though: and in return for Lucas clearing things up in some unexplained manner, he signs.

(At the risk of being accused of hypocrisy, whilst I’ve several times railed at Deep Space Nine for the laziness of not showing things, I have no problems with what’s essentially the same issue here. Deep Space Nine is an SF series, taking place in a scientific, rational universe, that frequently glosses over questions central to a scientific, rational story. American Gothic is a supernatural oriented horror story in which rational explanations are antithetic to its tone, and where atmosphere and a sense of mystery are central to its main character. In addition, the element of the Judge and his wife, though given weight by the lengthy and horrifying Poker game scene, are a side-issue, which would become distractingly complex if it bogged itself down in such detail.)

Meanwhile, in the other half of the story, we see Dr Matt gradually descend. He begins heroically: an attractive, albeit seriously stressed-out woman (guest star Veronica Cartwright) pulls a gun on the Sheriff in the street and he grabs the gun, forcing it down. It’s an ironic foreshadowing, for the episode will end with Matt pointing the same gun at Buck, and a combination of Gail, Billy and Ben forcing it down.

The woman, ‘Mrs Smith’, Angela, is suffering from a golf-ball sized tumour, but what’s driving her is hatred of Lucas Buck. She accuses him of being pure, unadulterated evil, and that killing him would be an act of love, not evil. She berates Matt for not killing Buck, which makes him worse than the Sheriff. She says she should know: she is Lucas Buck’s mother.

But she’s not. When he finally comes to visit her at the Hospital, where Angela is in the room where Caleb’s mother threw herself through the window ten years ago, where Lucas materialises in his usual fashion, looking demonic in his duster coat and his buttoned-up shirt, we learn she’s an ex-lover, his first, aged 16, the older woman. She’s angry, hating him for leaving her, though it’s insinuated that this was forced on them by ‘the people’, because of the age discrepancy.

Buck soothes her, kisses her, makes nice with her… and somehow persuades her to throw herself through the window. Dr Matt sees her fall, finds her body, looks up to see Luca at the window.

It’s the final straw. All episode, he’s been refusing Angela’s impassioned pleas: to kill is evil. But he’s been reading one of Miss Holt’s books on demonology, and its dragged him down. Matt takes the gun, and gives Buck everything he wants.

There’s a moment, en route to the asylum, where Deputy Ben defies his orders. He pulls up in the woods, orders Matt out the car. Matt’s cynical, conjures up an old mage of ‘Law’ in the South, the prisoner shot and killed whilst trying to escape. But Ben will let him go, tells him to go back North. Matt refuses: he won’t run away again.

So there is no escaping his fate, a cell in the asylum. And Sheriff Lucas Buck, come to gloat, come to deliver the send-off. Matt knows he’s out of the battle now, but he warns Buck there will be others. There will still be an Opposition, and one day they will win.

Not in American Gothic though. Not in the time we have left. Maybe, in some mythical, fictional later season, season 5 maybe? The changes didn’t do enough good. There are six more episodes left. I hope they’re all as good as this one.

American Gothic: e15 – The Plague Sower

I’m sure they’re going to be friends

I wasn’t too sure about parts of this episode, in which Trinity was hit by a plague that had people bleeding from the eyes and ears. In execution, it was appropriately spooky, in logic – and the brevity of its ending – it was unsatisfying. But whilst I didn’t remember the story at all, I did remember its position as a swing episode. We’re two-thirds of the way through now, and change to the established position is about to happen.

That I’ll return to. But whilst I was less than convinced by some parts of the episode, its resolution opened up some intriguing doors of insight, and gave rise to at least one deeply intriguing thought.

But let’s look at the story. In outline, there’s not that much more to it than I’ve already said. The mysterious plague has already begun when Dr Matt and Deputy Ben drive out to an isolated farm in response to an emergency call. There’s an immediately truncated detail as Ben warns that the last time the wife made this kind of call, she’d ‘accidentally’ shot her first husband, but it’s a red herring because inside, she’s in bed, bleeding from eyes and ears, and he’s hanging from the door, dead, with a scrawled note taped to his stomach: Repent.

There’s an epidemic in town. To avoid panic, Matt supports Sheriff Buck’s lie that all is well. Blood supplies are disappearing fast. Billy Peale (guest star John Mese) arrives in town. He’s a photogenic, white t-shirt, blue jeans guy, laconic, unfazed, comes from Atlanta, talks like a Southerner, an epidemiologist from the Centre for Disease Control, and in his laid-back way he ain’t taking no shit from Sheriff Buck.

He’s also Dr Matt’s replacement, though we don’t get to that until next week. And he’s already attracted the attention of Selena, who’s shortened her hem-lines already, who’s showing signs of wanting to break free from Lucas, and that’s something there’ll be more of.

But in the meantime, Dr Matt has another encounter with a sick patient writing the word Repent, and the disease hits him, except that instead of the mere physical symptoms, Dr Matt goes bible-crazy, underlining verse after verse with yellow highlighter and leaving Billy Peale to lead the action against the plague.

Which we realise, to our shock, is being spread by Merlyn Temple.

First though, there are other factors. In one of the most dubious developments of the series, and in fulfillment of a cliche that I have loathed for a very long time, Gail gives way to her overwhelming lust and goes to get fucked by Sheriff Buck. I hate this stupid, lazy,  demeaning idea that every good woman (and not a few good men) will always succumb to the utterly evil, vile, repulsive, bad boy, over all their loathing. It’s cheap, it’s nasty and if you’re going to do it, you need to establish a basis for attraction a damn sight more carefully than American Gothic ever has (and no, having the bad boy leeringly tell the good woman that she wants him, he knows it, does not add up to the characterisation needed to sell this).

There will be consequences, and one of them is immediate: Gail falls ill with the plague.

So Buck goes out into a lonely place, in a cold, foggy night (we are in January 1996, thank you Billy Peale) to confront Merlyn Temple. And this is where it suddenly gets very interesting indeed. Because he accuses her of overstepping. And he tells her she should listen to him, that he can help her avoid the pitfalls. She won’t listen: he has fallen.

And suddenly, a  large implication opens up. We know Lucas Buck as a spoiler, a man of power, running his own virtual kingdom, giving people what they want and looking out for them, providing they conform to how he sees things and wants things to go. Did he start off seeking power with the intent of doing good? Was Lucas originally on the side of the angels only for Power to Corrupt, Absolutely? This is what he is warning Merlyn against, isn’t it?

She’s defensive against the very accusation, too defensive. But Merly has an advantage that Lucas Buck may not have had, that, ironically, springs from Lucas Buck, namely her young brother, Caleb.

I haven’t said this often enough, but Lucas Black’s performances as Caleb have been astoundingly good. There isn’t an ounce of artificiality in him, and Caleb’s solid core of good sense, his downhome benevolence, is central to every episode. Here, his solicitude for Dr Matt, his fear for his friend, and his righteous anger when he realises Merly is the plague sower, are at the bottom of her decision to reverse whatever she is doing, to draw back the plague. Merlyn Temple is struggling with her role. She has been sent her to punish the wicked and save the innocent, and she has these powers to assist her, but how, and when, and why to use her powers is proving difficult to understand. The age-old question, as once expressed in a 1970’s Justice Society of America story: what good are powers if you don’t use them? But what good are powers if you use them too much?

Thoughtful, profitable questions. Merly withdraws the plague, everybody recovers with miraculous speed, especially Dr Matt and Gail, and Billy Peale decides to stick around…

American Gothic e14: The Beast Within

Brothers

Firstly, we’re now back on track with the running order, as the fourteen episodes now completed by this review are the first fourteen episodes (I hope). It’s been tortuous, folks.

And I have to congratulate creator Shaun Cassidy, who wrote this episode, for turning round my early scepticism about the quality, and the point, of ‘The Beast Within’, and creating a story whose tension was steadily ratcheted up, and whose relevance came into ever sharper focus the longer it went on. And for giving me my best laugh of American Gothic to date.

The episode began and ended in dreams, Caleb”s dram, a recurring nightmare that occupied the complete open. Caleb walks down a corridor lined with cells, at the end of which a half-seen figure, almost naked, is praying. Another, even less well-seen figure (but we know it’s Sheriff Lucas Buck) gives him a razor blade, which the prisoner uses to slice open his stomach.

The stranger is guest star Jeff Perry, giving a magnificent performance as a soldier, released/escaped from the psych ward, who sets things in motion by stealing a cheap Korean watch from an appliance store. The robbery is interrupted by Sheriff Buck and Deputy Healey, who gets a tremendous shock to realise the robber is his brother Artie. In the confusion, Artie gets a bullet in the ribs, takes Buck hostage and heads for the hospital to have it removed. This means an emergency operation by Doctor Matt, with additional hostages in the form of Gail and Caleb, there out of concern for Caleb’s recurring dreams.

So far, so cheap filler set-up. It’s a cliche melodrama involving an outsider, with no point of contact to the overarching story. The melodrama is only enhanced when Artie reveals that, in addition to the bullet, he has something else in his belly: a bomb that will detonate at 11.00pm, or if he loses consciousness and his blood pressure drops below 45. And he’s got to get back to his ward by 11.00, because all his friends there are equally in pain, and he’s going to end it for everyone.

Or for Buck, Matt, Caleb and Gail if something isn’t sorted out.

It’s none of it organically arising out of Trinity, out of Sheriff Buck’s unhealthy hold over the town, out of the complex pattern of the principal characters. But slowly the tension starts to take hold, slowly what is happening starts to put out tendrils of story that attach themselves to the theme, slowly we start to be drawn into why this is happening. And, as the increasingly desperate Ben Healey says out loud for us, as he nervously rackets about, trying to cope with the unfamiliar weight of responsibility for managing this crisis and the rather more familiar weight if trying to save his brother, why is Lucas letting this happen?

Yeah, why is Lucas letting this happen? Two answers are under our noses. Ben has been bemoaning the way his son is still influenced by his stepfather (now equipped with prosthetic hand) and thinking Ben is garbage. And Lucas tells Artie that he knows about the long ago hunting trip, two Healey boys, Ben, Artie and their Dad, and how Ben shot a duck but, by accident, Artie shot their Dad, killed him straight out. And Caleb’s lost his father too, and is rejecting Buck’s offer to step in and replace him. Look, Caleb, what effect it has to have no father for you.

And in the end, Ben has to be the hero, and is the hero, though his instinct is to reject that role, both out of modesty at being in the spotlight, and an awareness on one level or another that this is all one of the Sheriff’s manipulations. Because, with Matt’s hand bust, time running out and Lucas busying himself with a pipe-wrench to get Caleb and Gail out of handcuffs, Ben has to operate on his own brother, cut him open, stick his hands outside and yank out… a packet of cigarettes!

With a wire sticking out.

Ben drops the bomb down the garbage chute into an old bomb shelter (in a South Carolina town? Huh?) and saves the day. It makes for a story, it’ll impress his son and it gets him dinner cooked by Rita, the not-unattractive red-headed nurse.

And Caleb gets a lesson too.

And who got Artie out of the psych ward, and gave him the razor to cut himself open with? These questions are not answered, but Caleb dreams again, marching down the corridor, the cells empty, including Artie’s. Out steps Lucas Buck, to be accused by Caleb of setting everything up, which we know he has. Buck doesn’t admit it, all he says is it’s Caleb’s dream. But he extends his hand, calling Caleb to him, sure and powerful in the knowledge that Caleb will.

Then Caleb has a gun in his hand and shoots Buck in the heart. Gary Cole manages a look of complete shock and pain tha’s far from what he has to do in his role as Buck, before collapsing. Caleb grins at the gun. Buck was right: it’s his dream!

What a brilliant ending!