#there’s one woman character with dialogue and that’s not until s4. and she’s an old woman. and she’s still played by Harlan Guthrie

[potato-lord-but-not]

are there any women in malevolent at all. ive been trying to listen to it but im a lesbian and getting a little bored of just these two guys

Oh bestie 😬😬

[macgyvertape]

Castlevania kinda had a pacing problem

spoilers for all of Netflix’s Castlevania. I haven’t seen much analysis for the show on tumblr, im honestly curious if discussions I had with irl friends mirror what fandom talks about

tldr: Castlevania seems inconsistently paced from season to season, and within season as well, leads to a lot of characters motivations feeling unclear so characters repeatedly explain why they are doing something while they’re doing it

overview of the seasons:

S1 I know somewhat of a test for Netflix but it has good main trio character establishment and sets the scale of the conflict

s2: pretty complete emotional arc for most characters and resolves the plot of killing Dracula while setting up additional characters to continue the story. Isaac, Hector, Carmilla all established with the audience as characters whose story would continue

honestly I would bet this is the most popular season

S3: s2 did a bit of worldbuilding, but this season really fleshed out the world with both a wide range of locations and exploring the question of “what now, Dracula is dead but vampires and night creatures remain”.

There were basically 4 plot threads: 1) Sypha/Trevor investigating the cult & Saint Germain; 2) Hector & Carmilla (also introducing Lenore, Striga, Morana); 3) Isaac’s journey of revenge & self discovery; 4) Alucard sits around the castle and is betrayed.

overall characters roughly feel like they are in the same place if not worse. A big criticism I saw at the time, which hold up after rewatching this before s4 is nothing felt resolved for the main characters

I would say this season is where the pacing issues start to become apparent, juggling 4 plot threads that lack a central theme or even mutual character connection. If there was a central theme it would be “humans are awful to each other”. The Judge doing Hot Fuzz style murders, The Wizard in the tower, Sumi & Taka

S4: it starts with the same 4 plot threads, though upfront it is made clear that the plot theme is “people are trying to resurrect Dracula”, and the progression of the plot works to resolve unrelated plot threads until the main trio reunites for the boss fights. To me and my friends watching it was obvious that the show would reunite the main trio, the question was how and how far into the run time.

Season 4 is why I’m writing this essay, for the past 2 days I’ve been like, yeah that character sure explained their motives repeatedly maybe with some philosophical discussion, but it’s just such a weird place considering where they were in s3

Alucard’s arc:

Where he was left in season 3, it was after killing people he had trusted in self defense and impaling their corpses. It was clearly meant to parallel Dracula’s dislike of humanity. However overall his character lacked a proactive motivating force.

Honestly the most interesting thing I found in s3 was Alucard clearly misses Sypha and Trevor, however they don’t miss him or refer to him

One reason Sumi & Taka betray Alucard is for the secrets and power of Castlevania. After inviting the village including St Germain who Alucard was warned of into the Castle, Alucard makes 0 effort to secure anything, not even his personal childhood room. Guess he really learned nothing

Discussing St Germain, I think it’s funny that they had a several minute flashback sequence for his lost girlfriend (who doesn’t have a name or a voice actor), to remind the viewer of who he is, and to justify how he’s suddenly back and down for murder.

In s4 there is the call to help the village, and the walk back to the castle is a montage of Alucard opening up to Greta and becoming friendly literally overnight. He laughs off the impaling, and basically all of the darker things he went through in season 3, which has me asking what was the point of his season 3 arc then? 

Honestly writing this I realize the biggest parallel he has with Dracula is the call to action from a bold woman with a dramatic entrance speech which then leads to a romance

Isaac’s arc:

in s3, with all the other themes of “humanity sucks” I was always unsure if the townspeople were meant to appear irrational while attacking a larger force instead of letting him pass through an leave, or him not caring about how he’s provoking them is meant to show his insanity

ive seen the discussion elsewhere, curious about the Discourse here

is s4 Isaac has the whole monologue about how he now has agency but him gaining that agency was his s3 arc. In s4 he’s already at the point of accepting it. By the end of s4 he’s one of those who comes the furthest from his first character appearance to his last.

s4e5 where of Isaac attacking Carmilla in Isaac’s 2nd appearance had him resolving like 4 plot threads at once (Carmilla, Striga& Morana, Hector, and Isaac himself).

but i do wonder if Trevor, Sypha, or Alucard even know any of these people exist. I think not

I was honestly confused if I missed a scene from his dialogue about building something and what is inherent nature, to “My plan has evolved, my plan is now conquest” because he only conquests the one castle and the rest is left unclear

Upon rewatch the connection there is “killing [the wizard] felt just ... I liked that feeling”, so the show says that Isaac in the end attacked Carmilla for the sake of justice and not revenge.

Isaac in his last conversation expresses the theme of s4 “build something new on these old bones, where people can live for the future”

however, his arc honestly feel scenes were cut, and then dialogue was written around it. He’s the only living character who doesn’t show up in the epilogue and the sentient night creature “what if I could empty hell” dialogue was some of the most interesting worldbuilding. Night creatures with sentience and possibility of regaining memories!!!!

The Council of Sisters & Hector’s arc:

oh I’ve already seen s4 discourse about Lenore/Hector while searching for character analysis, a chunk of it seems to be rationalizing the absolute difference between how s3 ended with these characters and s4. It was extremely confusing for me and my friends; wondering if 1) was Hector showing more emotional intelligence than before and putting on a facade to cover up hatred? Nope 2) did more time pass than 6 weeks for there to be some kind stockholm syndrome? No, Hector seems fine to let Lenore kill herself

The slave control ring: played up in the climax of s3 and easily solved s4. s3 Lenore says if he tries to harm them, flee, or take it off it would cause crippling pain, in s4 Hector just easily cuts off his own finger.

for a control ring that they take time to show a version being on the Rebus, it doesn’t do much controlling of Hector

also guess the definition of “do harm” just refers to direct action

Lenore in s4: has no purpose in conquest, has that useless remarked on by multiple characters, is imprisoned, then kills herself after a genre aware philosophical discussion. This essay is long enough, but what the fuck happened to this character who ended s3 clearly physically and sexually abusive? Seriously this was one of the biggest writing changes to the point where she was treating Hector as an equal. Compare her last words in s3 “shh the real people [vampires] are talking”. The change in the relationship is actually something I would have taken being shown, or atleast told of what exactly caused this change other than the vague “you adopted him”

Striga&Morana get the best arc of the Council. 3 scenes: the tent argument, Daybreak armor fight & argument resolution, declaration of feelings and turning away. You could argue Castlevania is plot to be connective tissue between fight scenes, but for all the dialogue about human resistance in different seasons it was nice to see it. Overall the scenes were short but had a lot of showing what their relationship is not just telling,

unlike Carmilla. For as much hyping up as they did with her, and as much power as she had, she only appeared in 2 episodes and no other group except Isaac knew about her military conquest.

the map scene where she states her motive for conquest of wanting to take things from old men is the key example of how characterization became tell not show. How interesting was that monologue compared to the past seasons flashback to her murmuring the old vampire lord, or all her repeated insults of men/man-children that shows how she judges people??

That monologue had to carry the weight of justifying the Sisterhood bonds falling apart as well as why her motivation changed from building a human pen from Styria to Braila to world conquest. I think it did so poorly

Sypha & Trevor

really Sypha & Trevor have the main plot in the show. I checked and post season 1 the only episode they don’t appear in is s4e6, which is entirely devoted to the Isaac, Hector, and Council of Sisterhood arc. Their partnership and adventures are the main plot of the show.

Its easy to see what Trevor’s arc was over the show: coming to peace with the deaths of his family, taking up the mantle of being a Belmont, and starting a new family with Sypha.

With Sypha I actually had to scroll through tv tropes for what is her character arc, and I guess hers is disillusionment from adventure and life outside the speakers? My friends joke that Sypha’s magic is what the plot demands to look cool in a fight, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Tangent: the ending of their arc was easy to guess: as soon as Trevor went to fight the final boss alone I literally said “oh i bet Sypha’s pregnant, Trevor’s doing a heroic sacrifice, theyll use the unexplained magical dagger mcguffin, and 60/40 odds that he goes through an infinite corridor to outright come back vs just the implication he might come back”

I guess my final thought of the show, was overall the SUPER Final Boss got my by surprise. It was a good twist I enjoyed. Not that Death appeared, I had guessed that from the heavy foreshadowing, but I was surprised by who it was, because I had thought I thought the characters involved feeling shoehorned into the plot was just more bad writing. The Alchemist who put St Germain on the path or murder for no discernible motive for helping? Sure gotta move the plot along. New Dracula court member Varney who has a whole introduction with almost every character he meets and banter about his smell? Sure thats basically how all characters talk with a snarky and acerbic voice.

[novadreii]

my thoughts on castlevania s4 SPOILERS obviously

wow, i was actually impressed with hector for once. he collected the last wit about him to turn his situation around and take his balls out of lenore’s hands back into his pants. i thought he would go sicko mode on her and feared it getting a little revenge misogynistic, but i was pleasantly surprised at how civilized it was between them up until the end.

lenore was a little useless, wasn’t she? i half expected her to go, “you know what? fuck diplomacy” and just go mach 1 on everyone. eh.

isaac, oh. isaac. my favorite secondary character. wanders the desert conquesting, killing and raising the dead which made him realize things. he realized so much he marched right into carmilla’s castle while her beserker and army were away and owned her ass. good for him.

carmilla. oh, carmilla. tied with isaac for my favorite. so determined and single-minded that she sent away all her forces while she schemed in her fortress. she depended too hard on her partners doing all the work for her, and as a result she wasn’t much of a thinker, just a bloody, murdery doer. for example, she didn’t think that there were other formidable forces in the world that may want to impede her whole world domination plan? did she forget about isaac, out in the world rogue forgemastering? that was a threat she should have checked on before going global. she got too greedy, too quickly, and she paid the ultimate price for it. she went out like a fucking boss though, and i was pleased with her arc overall. as far as villains go, her raison d’etre was relatable and hard to argue with. 

the dialogue style is both one of my favorite parts of the show but also at times a pain point for me. when it’s good, it’s relaxed, comfortable and realistic and the characters play off each other really well with it (like quipping back and forth during battle which i normally hate but works well here). when it’s bad, it’s a little cringe. some dialogue scenes went on wayyyyy too long while the characters repeated things they’d literally just said verbatim, which is awkward af in screenwriting. i.e. Isaac telling Hector twice in the space of 30 seconds “Dracula earned his rest.” which is odd because impactful phrases like this usually are not repeated so as not to, yknow, dilute their impact. Also Carmilla waxing spiteful about “evil old men” and repeating some variation of the phrase 15 times in one scene. lastly, the liberal sprinkling of the word “fuck” in every other line is also like, mostly welcome but once or twice just sounded silly given the context of the scene. i’m nitpicking, here.

saint-germain. Idk much about his woman, but she definitely seemed worth slaughtering a village and raising dracula from the dead for. violent and hot as fuck, she never uttered a single word which i want to think is indicative of something but what? did we ever figure out why she kept eluding him via dimension-jumping? imagine she was trying to get away from him all this time lol. yikes.

the smartest people in this whole show are the vampire lesbians who peace tf out immediately when they see their castle is under siege and figure out carmilla is dead. LOL at them assuming useless lenore is dead too (bc, she’s useless) and just leaving her there. they packed their shit up, moved out west, presumably to build a lover’s stronghold where they could just be in vampire love forever. GOOD FOR THEM.

trevor: continued to drunkenly yell Fuck while being masterfully proficient immediately at any weapon he picks up, though eventually always ending up using his fists like the brawler he is.

sypha: if she met the avatar, she'd be like “lmao, you can ‘bend’ the elements, huh? i can use them in ways that would make your skin crawl and your head explode to even think about. sit the fuck down.”

alucard: adorable himbo with a heart of gold, needs a tough as nails gf to jerk him out of his moods and organize his kitchen for him. another round of good for him. i was a little scared they would kill off his gf but that would have been unimaginably cruel considering what he went through in s3. alucard had imo the best/most stylish fight sequences of the season. and they know what we’re about, since he was shirtless or at least in a very deep V cut most of the time. thank you.

i had 2 major predictions for this season going into it: trevor would die (permanently), and sypha would have a kid/get pregnant. i was 75% on the money.

i liked the ending message of why humans win these wars against vampires despite being slow meatbags compared to them. the vampires’ fatal flaw is resistance to change, provoked by their immortality, arrogance, and insatiable desire for power in order to provide themselves long term stability in the world. whereas humanity’s best trait is the polar opposite: adaptability. throughout history, the ability to adapt has been proven to be the determining factor in a species’ survival. vampires, for all their god-like strengths, prove to be no exception to this rule. alucard, with his human heart, is the only one with vampire blood who has proven he can make major changes and overcome personal prejudices to live a better life.

And my final thoughts on the ending are: everyone major got a satisfying end to their arc. BUT. it was just too happy. either trevor should have stayed dead, OR dracula and lisa should have gone back to hell. but not both. having everyone come back to life and go on to skip in fields just seems contrary to the tone and messaging of the whole show, which is pretty high up on the edginess scale.

i love a bittersweet ending in general, so i’m biased. imo, the joy of a mostly good ending is rendered all that much sweeter by reflecting on what was lost to obtain it. imagine:

alternate ending 1: trevor comes back, the gang lives happily ever after at Belmont Village or wtvr they name it, BUT. we see alucard lost in thought thinking about his parents, how he saw a flash of their souls during the penultimate battle. there’s regret there, the regret of shit left unsaid and shitty family dynamics unsolved. we cut immediately back to hell, with lisa and dracula embracing, maybe whispering a few lines of doomed lovers dialogue and something about their son. they’re in hell, but ultimately, they’re together. cut back to alucard, yanked out of his sad thoughts by his pretty gf who won’t let him get too deep in the weeds. shot pans out of them together with the gang. the end.

alternate ending 2: trevor is DEAD dead. sypha stays with alucard and the gang at belmont farms and raises her kid. maybe we get a 2 year timeskip and we see the little shit have some of his dad in him/her. sypha is sad about trevor but doesn’t mope about it. she runs that town like it’s a business. alucard is the best uncle to that kid & the orphans they could ask for. everyone gets trained in ass-kicking next door at the belmont hold. lisa and dracula are miraculously alive through whatever convoluted bs makes it work, and contemplate one day moving back to see their son. dracula has a moment to realize that his family is mostly human, and what he loves in them he can learn to tolerate from all of humanity.

don’t those feel happy but just. TINGED. with just enough sadness to be more memorable? idk i may just be a masochist.

i haven’t mentioned the technical aspects such as animation and direction because they were amazing. really, really incredible animation that is going to be hard to follow up (and netflix is going to make copycats of this formula, you bet your ass they will). where cgi was used, it was excellent and barely detectable, really well integrated with 2d. so engaging to watch.

overall: 9/10

[papermoonloveslucy]

VACATION TIME

April 29, 1949

“Vacation Time” (aka “Trailer Vacation to Goosegrease Lake”) is episode #41 of the radio series MY FAVORITE HUSBAND broadcast on April 29, 1949 on the CBS radio network.

Synopsis ~ It's vacation time, and Liz and George have decidedly different plans. He wants to go camping with a trailer he borrowed from a friend, while she's set on a glamorous vacation at Moosehead Lodge.

This episode later partly inspired the premise of “Liz Learns To Swim” aired on June 11, 1950. 

“My Favorite Husband” was based on the novels Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, the Record of a Happy Marriage (1940) and Outside Eden (1945) by Isabel Scott Rorick, which had previously been adapted into the film Are Husbands Necessary? (1942). “My Favorite Husband” was first broadcast as a one-time special on July 5, 1948. Lucille Ball and Lee Bowman played the characters of Liz and George Cugat, and a positive response to this broadcast convinced CBS to launch “My Favorite Husband” as a series. Bowman was not available Richard Denning was cast as George. On January 7, 1949, confusion with bandleader Xavier Cugat prompted a name change to Cooper. On this same episode Jell-O became its sponsor. A total of 124 episodes of the program aired from July 23, 1948 through March 31, 1951. After about ten episodes had been written, writers Fox and Davenport departed and three new writers took over – Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and head writer/producer Jess Oppenheimer. In March 1949 Gale Gordon took over the existing role of George’s boss, Rudolph Atterbury, and Bea Benaderet was added as his wife, Iris. CBS brought “My Favorite Husband” to television in 1953, starring Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson as Liz and George Cooper. The television version ran two-and-a-half seasons, from September 1953 through December 1955, running concurrently with “I Love Lucy.” It was produced live at CBS Television City for most of its run, until switching to film for a truncated third season filmed (ironically) at Desilu and recasting Liz Cooper with Vanessa Brown.

MAIN CAST

Lucille Ball (Liz Cooper) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. With Richard Denning, she starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” which eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon.

Richard Denning (George Cooper) was born Louis Albert Heindrich Denninger Jr., in Poughkeepsie, New York. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to Los Angeles. Plans called for him to take over his father’s garment manufacturing business, but he developed an interest in acting. Denning enlisted in the US Navy during World War II. He is best known for his  roles in various science fiction and horror films of the 1950s. Although he teamed with Lucille Ball on radio in “My Favorite Husband,” the two never acted together on screen. While “I Love Lucy” was on the air, he was seen on another CBS TV series, “Mr. & Mrs. North.” From 1968 to 1980 he played the Governor on “Hawaii 5-0″, his final role. He died in 1998 at age 84.

Bea Benadaret (Iris Atterbury) and Gale Gordon (Rudolph Atterbury) do not appear in this episode. 

Ruth Perrott (Katie, the Maid) was also later seen on “I Love Lucy.” She first played Mrs. Pomerantz (above right), a member of the surprise investigating committee for the Society Matrons League in “Pioneer Women” (ILL S1;E25), as one of the member of the Wednesday Afternoon Fine Arts League in “Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress” (ILL S3;E3), and also played a nurse when “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” (ILL S2;E16). She died in 1996 at the age of 96.

Bob LeMond (Announcer) also served as the announcer for the pilot episode of “I Love Lucy”. When the long-lost pilot was finally discovered in 1990, a few moments of the opening narration were damaged and lost, so LeMond – fifty years later – recreated the narration for the CBS special and subsequent DVD release.

GUEST CAST

Frank Nelson (Policeman) was born on May 6, 1911 (three months before Lucille Ball) in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He started working as a radio announcer at the age of 15. He later appeared on such popular radio shows as “The Great Gildersleeve,” “Burns and Allen,” and “Fibber McGee & Molly”. This is one of his 11 performances on “My Favorite Husband.”  On “I Love Lucy” he holds the distinction of being the only actor to play two recurring roles: Freddie Fillmore and Ralph Ramsey, as well as six one-off characters, including the frazzled train conductor in “The Great Train Robbery” (ILL S5;E5), a character he repeated on “The Lucy Show.”  Aside from Lucille Ball, Nelson is perhaps most associated with Jack Benny and was a fifteen-year regular on his radio and television programs.  

Wally Maher (Joe Risley) was born on August 4, 1908 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was known for Mystery Street (1950), The Reformer and the Redhead (1950) and Hollywood Hotel (1937). He was heard with Lucille Ball in the Lux Radio Theatre version of “The Dark Corner” (1947), taking the role originated on film by William Bendix. He died on December 27, 1951.

Milton Stark (Filling Station Attendant) was a theatre actor and director, who also appeared on radio and television, although usually in supporting roles.  He also worked as a dialogue coach and acting teacher. At UCLA a scholarship was established in his name. He lived to the age of 103. 

EPISODE

ANNOUNCER: “As we look in on the Coopers, it is a cold rainy afternoon, but Liz is in her bedroom standing in front of the mirror wearing a back-less, strapless sun dress.” 

Liz calls Katie in to show off her sun dress, but Katie is disapproving that is so revealing.  Liz has shopped for summer vacation clothes.  Liz’s bathing suit cost’s forty dollars. 

KATIE: “That’s a lot of money for two doilies and a diaper.” 

Liz says that husbands only approve of scanty swimsuits when they are on any woman but their wives. 

LIZ: “I want to look good for George. He’s going to see a lot of me this summer.” KATIE: “He’s not the only one!”  

The topic of revealing bathing suits was later also mined for comedy on “I Love Lucy.”  In “Off To Florida” (ILL S6;E6) Ricky thinks Lucy’s new skimpy new swimsuit is for Little Ricky!  Lucy also buys a swimsuit that Ricky feels is too skimpy when shopping for their California trip in “Getting Ready” (ILL S4;E11)

Liz says they are going to Moosehead Lodge on Lake Okeechobee. Liz calls it a real swanky place.  Katie reminds Liz that George prefers more rugged vacations.  Liz says she will suggest it to George at dinner. 

Lake Okeechobee is a real place, located in central Florida, although it is far more conducive to George’s type of vacation than Liz’s, highlighting nature through fishing and nature.  

Although there are places called Moosehead Lodge in America, it unlikely that a moose would be associated with central Florida and that it would be an upscale resort of the type Liz is describing. 

At the bank, George talks to his co-worker Joe about scheduling vacations.  Joe says that his ideal vacation is in a trailer.  If George likes the idea, he will lend the Coopers his trailer.  George will suggest it to Liz at dinner. 

After dinner, both Liz and George get cozy with the idea of easing the other into going on their dream destination.  Liz ‘just happened’ to hear about a place that she vaguely remembers. 

LIZ: “I did hear of some place called Moosehead Lodge. It’s probably situated in groves of stately pines, on the shores of an emerald green lake, its rustic beauty enhanced by lawns and flower beds. Each luxurious room is furnished with clean, comfortable box spring beds, modern bathroom and shower. Ten dollars a day, American plan. Oh, George, let’s go there. We can relax and enjoy a continual round of  glorious entertainment, sports, good food, and true fellowship, see your travel agent for details.”

George realizes that Liz has been plotting a vacation.  George says he has a better idea - two weeks in a trailer.  Liz is less than keen. George says that they can borrow Joe Risley’s trailer!

LIZ: “Keen with mud on it.”

Liz is worried that nobody will see her new vacation wardrobe if they are cooped up in a trailer.  They are at an impasse.  Liz suggests they go on separate vacations.  When George reluctantly agrees, she breaks down in tears.  

Liz moans to Katie that she already misses George, and the vacation doesn’t begin for two months.  George phones from work to talk to Liz.  George offers a compromise.  They will take a trial weekend trip in the trailer, and if she doesn’t like it, he will go to Moosehead Lodge!

Vacationing in a trailer was explored by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in their 1953 comedy MGM’s The Long Long Trailer.  The film mines a lot of physical comedy from the trailer’s unwieldy movement and how Lucy’s character Tacy Bolton copes with it. 

ANNOUNCER: “George is just driving up with the trailer hooked up to the back of the car.”

Liz remarks how small the trailer is.  

GEORGE: “Keep an open mind.” LIZ: “I’ll have to close it or it won’t fit in that trailer.” 

They tour the inside, which is smaller than Liz thought.  Just then, a knock at the trailer door and there’s a policeman (Frank Nelson) issuing them a parking ticket! Forty bucks for parking illegally!

The next morning George and Liz get an early start on their trial trailer trip.  Liz has brought along a little light reading for the trip: “Inside Moosehead Lodge” by Liz Gunther. 

Motoring along the highway, George is enjoying the drive. 

LIZ: “Travel is great. I wouldn’t go anywhere without it.”

George says it is so smooth, you wouldn’t even know the trailer is back there.  Liz notices that it isn’t!  George forgot to hook it on!   Finally, they are off (again) to Goosegrease Lake. Liz reads one of those sequential signs along the roadside: “If Your Whiskers...  Won’t Behave... Take a Tip Use....”  Liz goes silent. 

GEORGE: “Use what?”  LIZ: “The last sign’s torn down. Now we’ll never know.” 

Almost everyone in the audience knew it was Burma-Shave.  From 1926 until 1963 the ‘brushless’ shaving cream company dotted the American highways with small red signs, each containing a line of a short rhyme that the driver could read without slowing down as they drove by.  At one time, there were over 600 different rhymes on signs!  

The idea was given a nod on a 1955 “I Love Lucy” episode “First Stop” (ILL S4;E14) with the roadside signs for Aunt Polly’s Pecan Pralines. 

LUCY: Fifty miles to Aunt Sally’s Pecan Pralines. later... LUCY: 300 yards to Aunt Sally’s! ETHEL: 200 yards! FRED: 100 yards! RICKY: Just around the bend! LUCY: You have just passed Aunt Sally’s. 

Liz is quite sure that George’s shortcut has gotten them lost. They stop to ask directions from a laid back filling station attendant (Milton Stark) who tells them they don’t want to go to Goosegrease Lake.  He suggests they go to the hot springs, instead. 

Oops! Milton Stark has trouble pronouncing ‘Goosegrease’ and  the audience is aware of his flub. When he asks Lucille Ball “What ya gonna do there?” She deliberately says “We’re gonna goose a grease”, instead of “grease a goose”, which causes more giggles from the cast and gales of laughter from the audience. 

FILLING STATION ATTENDANT: “You can’t get there from here!”

Next morning Liz wakes up and looks around.  She sees beautiful green grass and a little flag with the number 18 on it!  A golf ball comes crashing through the window. The policeman from who ticketed them earlier knocks on the trailer door. They have illegally camped out on the 18th green of the municipal golf course - only two miles from home!  Liz said they didn’t know where they were going. 

POLICEMAN: “Do you know where you’re going now?” LIZ: “Yes!  To Moosehead Lodge!” POLICEMAN: “No, to the city jail! Come on!”

End of Episode

[ebaeschnbliah]

CHANGING  OF  THE  GUARD

________________________________________________________________

A metaphorical reading of Sherlock BBC, The Sign of Three (and beyond)

The beginning of Sherlock BBC, The Sign of Three, really leaves no doubt what the theme of its story is about. When the eye of the camera zooms slowly in on Speedy’s and the famous black door with the number 221 in Baker Street, it seems to take it’s path right through a literal wood of pointy, black spears. Fences built of iron spears that guard the place..

It starts with a row of spears in the forground. When those get blurry, even more spears from midfield move into focus. Finally the camera reveals spears also in the background. That makes three levels of spears, one might say.

Three levels of spears stand like guardians in front of 221b Baker Street. Could those three levels symbolize the three stabbing victims of The Sign of Three? After all, each one of the three characters is depicted as guard, as protector ... and each one of them gets stabbed. 

TBC below the cut ...

Stephen Bainbridge 

He is a Private in the Household Guard of the Queen. The Grenadier Guards is an infantry regiment of the British Army. The current regiment is known as the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards … ’Every foot soldier bears the mark’  (Soo Lin, TBB). How surprising is it that the ‘East’ zooms in on Bainbridge before he gets stabbed by Jonathan Small? 

Also … the gesture of the woman is interesting. Two Vs make a W (or a M … depends on the turning). It also lets me think of Culverton Smith’s W-gesture in TLD, in the short clip with the man disguised as cock (x).

Modern Grenadier Guardsmen wear a cap badge of a "grenade fired proper" with seventeen flames (x). Foot soldiers linked to exploding grenades … what a lovely coincidence, especially regarding the ‘passions’ grenade from TFP. :)

When the changing of the guards takes place, Bainbridge is already wounded and slowly dying. He got stabbed before the changing.

The name Stephen is of Greek origin and means ‘crown’ and ‘that which surrounds’. Saint Stephen was stoned to death and is regarded as the very first Christian martyr. 

Another little detail caught my attention as well. Just a word used twice to describe a person. 

SHERLOCK: “Elite Guard.” JOHN: Forty enlisted men and officers. SHERLOCK: Why this particular Grenadier? Curious.

And in TRF Sherlock sais:

SHERLOCK: This little boy; this particular little boy ... who reads all of those spy books. What would he do? JOHN: He’d leave a sign?

Max Bruhl left a sign. Stephen Bainbridge wrote a note. Not much of a difference, I think.

Guardsmen   Max and Claudette

 James Sholto

He is a retired Major of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers and Captain John Watson’s old commanding officer. A decorated war hero but not to everyone. Something went wrong when he led a team of new recruits into battle. ‘They all died’ (just like AGRA). Major Sholto, badly wounded, was the only survivor. Press and families gave him hell. Deaththreats and hate almost turned him into a recluse, into a most unsociable man, who spends his retirement way out in the middle of nowhere.

I’m quite sure this has been mentioned before, the 5th Northumberland Regiment on Foot (’foot soldiers’ too) still uses their ancient badge … St George killing the dragon (x)   Every quiver of his beating heart

‘He destroyed us all’  …  somehow these words sound very similar to the one Sherlock uses in TFP, in a situation where he considers himself to be a soldier: ‘Five minutes. It took her just five minutes to do all of this to us. Well, not on my watch.’ 

As mentioned above, Mary’s dialogue in TST matches the description about the incident with Sholto’s recruits almost identically …  ‘something went wrong’/’but it went wrong’ … ‘I was the only one who made it our’/’they all died; he was the only survivor’. And Mary considered AGRA to be her family ... ‘we were family’. 

Major John Sholto is an original character from ACDs novel The Sign of Four. His sons are called Thaddeus and Bartholomew. The renaming of the Major’s first name - from John to James - must have been a deliberate choice. A choice which is reflected in the skip code of TEH ‘John or James Watson … saint or sinner ... James or John’, as well as in John Watson’s middle name … Hamish (Scottish for James).

Major Sholto’s room number is ‘two oh seven’. This reminds me of the ‘double oh seven’ codeword for the ‘flight of the dead’ in ASIB. Two and double …. both means 2. Sure, the number on the door reads 207 but then, it happens several times in this story, that things told and things shown are sometimes not quite the same or vis versa. 

When the wedding guests leave the church and the reception takes place, Sholto is already wounded and slowly dying. He has been stabbed before.

Sherlock investigates the cases of both guardians

Bainbridge’s note reaches him sometime during the wedding preparations. John and Sherlock arrive just in time to save Private Bainbridge’s life. The case though remains unsolved.

Without knowing it at the time, Sherlock investigates Sholto’s case during John’s stag night. They call the investigation of the ghost-man the ‘Mayfly Man’ case. It remains also unsolved.

Sherlock includes both unsolved cases into his best man speech at John’s wedding and here at last, all the puzzle pieces fall into place and Sherlock is able to solve both cases, which are closely related. As a consequence Major Sholto’s life can be saved as well. 

The person responsible for the attempts to kill Private Bainbridge and Major Sholto is:

Jonathan Small

‘Brilliant, ruthless, almost certainly a monomaniac - though, in fairness, his photographs are actually quite good’ … that’s how Sherlock describes the killer. Small’s motive is revenge. He is convinced that Major Sholto is responsible for the death of Small’s brother Peter, who had been among the killed recruits. It seems that Private Bainbridge merely had the misfortune and got randomly chosen for the rehearsal of Sholto’s murder. But ... why this particular 'foot soldier’? (I’ll come back to that question later)

Jonathan Small grins like Jim Moriarty and wears a checkered shirt like John. He is a brilliant, ruthless monomaniac and obviously also a womaniizer who has no problems to woo half a dozen women, almost at the same time, into telling him well-kept secrets. Basically … a perfect blend of Jim Moriarty and traditional John ‘three continents’ Watson. 

Like Major Sholto, Jonathan Small too is an original character from ACDs novel The Sign of Four. His name has not been changed. Only together with his female and not-canon counterpart Janine, Mary’s bridesmaid, who seems to be a lovely blend of Irene and Jim, the name chosen for the antagonist of this episode, appears to gain a special significance. 

Janine - deiminutive of Jeanne, female form of John … ‘little Johnny’

Jonathan - diminutives are Jon, Jonni ... though not related to ‘John’ regarding the meaning of the name, it can still be heard as … ‘little Jonny’  (’You can talk, Johnny-boy. Go ahead.‘ Jim, TGG)

None other than ‘little Jo(h)nny’ (the H makes the difference) is responsible for the almost murder of Private Bainbridge and Major Sholto, the first two stabbing victims of this episode. 

‘Little Johnny’ also happens to be another word for penis … the ‘meat dagger’.

Who’s the third ‘victim’ then?

Mary Elizabeth Morstan

She is a character full of surprises who starts as a simple nurse who marries John Watson in TSOT. Among Sherlock’s deduction-word-cloud in TEH the term ‘guardian’ can be found and only one episode after the ‘wedding’, Sherlock outs her as facade … his very own facade, because the Empty Houses in Leinster Gardens, on whose front walls Mary’s face is projected, are Sherlock’s property. 

Mary Elizabeth Morstan isn’t her real name either. It’s the name of a stillborn child from a gravestone in Chiswick Cementry. This connects her character to the other stillborn child of this story ... Rachel Wilson, the pink lady’s daughter from ASIP. The initials A.G.R.A. stand for Mary’s true name, she tells later … but soon this turns out to be incorrect as well. A.G.R.A. was a group of four undercover agents who worked for the British Government. Prior to her ‘retirement’ Mary had been a member of that group. Sherlock describes her as ‘super-agent with a terrifying skill set’. Based on the current status, her two first names are Rosamund Mary … the family name is still unknown (if there even is one). 

Why should Mary be the third stabbing victim?

Readers of my theories will probably know that I’m playing for a long time now with a mind palace scenario which stretches from the beginning, most likely in PILOT (or even before) to the end of S4 (x). Back then I wondered ...

Is it really so farfetched to consider the possibility that Sherlock tries to deduce and solve the mysteries and problems of his own live - and his falling in love with John - at first in his mind? Before he comes out?

Over decades - since ACD - the story of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson has been told by the famous 'unreliable narrator’. Could it be that this time - with Sherlock BBC - the world will get the true story? Finally told by Sherlock himself? By looking right into his heart and mind and soul? By showing how his brilliant mind works? How his heart and soul expand and grow?

Would TPTB do such a thing? Stay in Sherlock’s mind over the span of multiple episodes? Follow his train of thought … show his evolution … in such a way? I don’t know. But it sounds thrilling to me. (Nov 2016)

Based on those early ideas I gradually came to the conclusion that Sherlock BBC tells the story of how Sherlock Holmes deduced his own persona. He does this the same way he investigates his criminal cases … by setting up scenarios in his mind and repeating those until he has found the correct solution (The Stage is set). Investigating his own case - the pink one - in such a way, would mean that all the characters which appear on Sherlock’s ‘mind stage’ represent different aspects of himself. Some of them may be based on real life persons, most of them are probably entirely created by Sherlock’s imagination. I like to compaire this process to a ‘mind journey’ or to a long (dramatic) dialogue, Sherlock holds with himself. This propably doesn’t happen during a dream or in a state of coma, as I thought back in 2016. A lot of time and thinking has gone by since then. Nowadays I presume that a conscious thinking process would fit better with the literal character Sherlock Holmes, whose deductions are always built on facts, science, reason and logic. It would be rather OOC that a man like Holmes would base an important, life changing decision on anything else than his razor sharp mind. Anyway, it’s just one of many theories.

Mary now … ever since I noticed the lot of similarities this character shares with Sherlock (x) my view on her started to change considerably. To me she isn’t the woman anymore who comes between Sherlock and John but instead the facade Sherlock Holmes created and married to his traditional, eternal friendship with John Watson for the sole purpose, to hide his romantic feelings and his sexual desire for the friend behind this protective wall. Mary is Sherlock’s facade, his guardian, his firewall … because:

John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever – and I will never let that happen. Please … understand. There is nothing in this world that I would not do to stop that happening.

In my opinion, these are Sherlock’s own words and they express his fear of what might happen to the uinque friendship he shares with John, if the friend ever discovers the true nature of his feelings for him. Sherlock would do anything to stop that happening, even if this means that he has to incarcerate his emotions inside a high-security facility, behind elephant glass and chain his sexuality with iron bonds to a wall in a padded cell, like a hound from hell.  

The ‘meat dagger’ incident

Sherlock tells the wedding guests - Major Sholto sits among them - about the unsolved Bainbridge case and asks if any of them has got a theory how that guard might have been stabbed. What kind of murderer can walk through walls, which weapon can vanish? Molly’s fiancé Tom (both characters are mirrors for John and Sherlock) assumes it could be a case of ‘attempted suicice by meat dagger’ ... something that would have been self administered. 

A lot has been written since then about the ‘meat dagger’ as a metaphor for 'penis’ …. for ‘little Johnny’.  :)

Sherlock sees only one feature of interest in the whole case … while he tried to solve the mystery, the eternal friend saved the life of the guard. And just the same happens a little while later with Major Sholto, the other guardian. It turns out that both men - both guardians - have been stabbed by the same killer … Jonathan Small … little Jonny, the meat dagger ....

There’s only one other character in this episode who has been stabbed unknowingly as well. That’s Mary. And in her case it’s indeed … ‘stabbed by meat dagger’ because Sherlock deduces her pregnancy by the end of the episode. Or expressed in computer language:  the firewall has been penetrated by the virus.

The ‘father’ might be John or David, Mary’s ex. It doesn’t matter if one views the story metaphorically where all characters represent aspects of Sherlock himself. Going by his looks, David is clearly a mirror for John, while his history regarding the constant online observation of Mary, connects him to Mycroft, the brain. David seems to be a ‘blended’ mirror like Jonathan Small (John/Jim) or Janine (Irene/Jim). A mirror who represents the ongoing interest of the brain in the feelings hidden behind the facade. 

When Sherlock marries John and Mary, he puts a guardian in front of his true feelings for the friend. He tries to ‘downgrade’ those feelings. And yet, Sherlock allows three ‘social ancounters a year’ but ‘always in John’s - the traditional friendship’s presence’. That sounds very much like the ‘calculated risk’ Mycroft takes with Eurus. Both ‘brothers’ seem to be ‘love-addicts’ in need of a fix, once in a while … when the burden of ‘holding oneself to a higher standard’, of ‘keeping oneself right’ gets too heavy … or too boring. In that case it could propably happen that one takes the frustration out on the wall … then the wall has it coming …  :)

The moment of revelation

When Sherlock is blinded by the flashlight of ‘little Jo(h)nni’s’ camera, he suddenly realizes that the cases of Bainbridge and Sholto are connected. That the stabber has to be the same person. It’s the moment when the first domino piece falls and knocks over the next, and the next, and the next …. leading to a chain reaction of revelations at the end of which Sherlock knows without any doubt that his new facade had been penetrated again … this time though by a ‘kill shot’. He’d been hit by AMO (the perfect ammonition), fired by the crack shot that is his eternal friend. The seed of love has been laid without Sherlock noticing the ‘chink in his armour’ through which Cupid’s arrow hit home. Now love has taken root behind his facade and is growing. 

The name chosen for that love is Rosamund - Rose of the world, as the dialogue in TST confirms. There’s a real rose of that name - Rosa Mundi - an old rose depicted in a work of Sandro Botticelli “Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child”. This rose is also known by the synonym ‘rosa versicolor’ - which means ‘rose of many or changing colours ... iridiscent’.

The word iridescence is derived in part from the Greek word ἶρις îris , meaning rainbow, It is the phenomenon of certain surfaces that appear to gradually change color as the angle of view or the angle of illumination changes. (X)

Sherlock - the ‘virgin’ he is called in ASIB by Jim and Irene - announces the pregnancy of Mary (I still wonder if this means that he is the 'Gabriel’ of A.G.R.A. - the angel who announces virgin Mary’s pregnancy). And during the stag night, John is labeled with ‘Madonna’. Another name for Virgin Mary. This turns the eternal friend also into the ‘virgin’, just like Sherlock and Mary. Another ‘sign of three’ one could say. 

Three virgins - three novices - who will now start a new journey on a way they have never travelled before. Sherlock will finally encounter romantic love and accept it ‘it is what it is’, the facade will ‘get retired in a pretty permanent sort of way’ as the brain blatantly puts it in TST and the traditional ‘eternal’ friendship will have to change into a romantic-sexuell relationship. A morphing together of friendship and sex - John and James - would be a quite logical consequence, I guess.

In TST the little baby is christened with the name Rosamund, a name that can be traced back to ‘rainbow’ … Rosie for short.  And rosy=pink!

‘Oh, what a night! ... I was never gonna be the same … I felt a rush like a rollin' ball of thunder spinnin' my head around n' takin' my body under’ 

No wonder this song has been chosen by the creators to accompany this scene. Overwhelmed by emotions - surprise, confusion, amazement, shock, joy, panic, uncertainty, concern, fear - Sherlock isn’t able anymore to carry on with this ‘wedding’ .... with this renewed ‘changing of the guard’. He walks away alone into the night. The case is solved. Sherlock is aware of what happened. Now he has to deal with the consequences. Should he really replace his guardian again or should he finally stop pretending, stop lying, drop the facade and confess his deepest secret?

Because if you tell them and they decide they’d rather not know, you can’t take it back. You can’t unsay it. Once you’ve opened your heart, you can’t close it again.

This confrontation, Sherlock fights with himself, becomes the centrepiece of the following episode (HLV) where Sherlock is completely torn into. One half of his being, still protected by the facade, is at war with the ... ‘other one’, the slowly increasing emotional side of him. But somewhere deep inside his mind he probably knows already that this is a war ‘he must lose’. And so Sherlock has to go deeper ...

TAB doesn’t only take Sherlock back to his literal roots. In this episode Sherlock investigates again two of the main threads of the story and ties them together through the ‘bride’ … FALL and HOUND. Mary, the facade, feels already ‘left behind’ and John, who represents Sherlock’s now fully acknowledged, tender feelings, directed at his friend ... ‘does grow up so fast’. The episode ends with Sherlock, who throws himself into a torrent of water=emotions and follows Jim Moriarty, Mr Sex, down the Reichenbach Fall … right into the emotional rollercoaster that is Series Four. 

Like the investigation in TAB, this series runs backwards as well. TST repeats the events of S2 and S3 while TLD zooms in on S1. I persume this happens because Sherlock applies an ability he describes to Dr. Watson as ... ‘reasoning backwards’:

“In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the every-day affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically…Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.”  (ACD  A Study in Scarlet, Conclusion) 

There’s one important change though, which will alter everything. Sherlock now adds baby Rosie, the pink seed of love, the AMO-factor, to his equation. As a consequence his mask, his facade - that what ‘thatched’ and guarded him - crumbles and falls. And Sherlock accepts the change … It is what it is. 

Then, in TFP, the third episode of S4, Sherlock puts the results of his deductions under the sharp lens of his emotional core, for the ultimate experiment … the final distillation … to produce at last a clear solution. Still missing is the chemical reaction that should follow the application of that solution, one might say. :)

Back to the three ‘guardians’

My husband is three people

During the wedding preparations, John tries to interst Sherlock for this curious case. John says the sentence ‘my husband is three people’ twice, interupted only by this short dialogue:

SHERLOCK: Major James Sholto. Who he? MARY: Oh, John’s old commanding officer. 

Taking John’s words ‘my husband is three people’ literally, then he is talking about his own husband … which will soon be Mary. Husband, not wife, because Mary represents an aspect of Sherlock, his facade, his cover ... his ‘thatch’. As mentioned above, when Sherlock marries John to Mary, he puts a guardian in front of his true feelings for the friend … one could also say …. he places a commander at their/his side. And this is exactly what Mary does in later episodes. She decides who mowes the lawn, chooses the name of the baby and that it is her to take John home and not vis versa. 

Husbands can be equated with facades, with commanders, with guards. All of them serve as protectors and defenders of Sherlock’s true feelings for the friend. 

Who could have been the first ‘husband’ … the first facade, the first guardian?

Neither of us were the first

This is what Mary tells Sherlock, while John welcomes his ‘privious’ commander. Is she really talking about sexuell experiences of her brand-new husband with another man, just to taunt Sherlock? Viewing the Mary-character as an aspect of Sherlock himself and not as a real wife that comes between two men, I heavily doubt this. Applying a metaphorical reading to the story, wouldn’t it be much more likely that this conversation is about their - Mary’s and Sholto’s - assigned profession. Neither of us were the first … guardian.

Mary is the husband to be, the most recently chosen facade, John’s new commanding officer, an undercover agent of the government.

Major James Sholto is John’s old commanding officer, Sherlock’s previous facade, which turned out to be not strong enough. 

The only other guard in this story is Stephen Bainbridge, Private in the Household Guard of the Queen. The foot soldier named after Saint Stephen, the first martyrer. 

And isn’t there somthing strikingly similar regarding those three guards as well as a noticeable increase in drama and strength, which so often happens when sequences are repeated on Sherlock’s mind stage?

Private Bainbridge guards the Queens Palace. The ‘East’ zoomes in on him, then he get’s stabbed by ‘little Jonny’ - the meat dagger - without noticing it. A changing of the guard takes place. Bainbridge almost dies beneath a shower of water.

Major Sholto guards the Queens country. He fights on a battlefield in the East beneath a burning hot sun. Something goes wrong and all the recruits under his command die. Badly wounded himself, Sholto has to leave the service and change into retirement. He gets stabbed by ‘little Jonny’ - the meat dagger - and almost dies.

Mary secretly works for Mycroft, the government, the ‘queen’ -  as an undercover ‘super-agent with a terrifying skill set’. Her last operation took place in the East. Something went wrong and a lot of people died. It first looked as if Mary had been the only surviver (like Sholto). She marries ‘Johnny-boy’ Watson, gets stabbed by his meat dagger, becomes pregnant and …. dies not long after ‘PINK-RAINBOW-ROSIES’ birth.

The Sign of Three is about the ‘changing of the guard’. It takes place inside Sherlock’s head. But the marriage of John and Mary, that Sherlock arranges so heartbreakingly beautiful (and so strikingly yellow), turns out to be utterly pointless. Because the bride, the husband, the new commander, the facade is already pregnant ... had been stabbed before the wedding ... before the changing of the guard. 

The Yellow Face connection

This isn’t new. It has been discussed before in this interesting meta  About Yellow Face  by @darlingtonsubstitution  (sadly the part below the cut is gone) from 2017. As mentioned in the comments there, the creators of Sherlock BBC once refered to their favourite ACD stories. Yellow Face was among them but ... they wouldn’t be able to adapt it, because of the sensitive content, they said. This isn’t quite true though, it seems. On the contrary, the colour yellow features most prominently in Sherlock BBC … and not just the colour itself. 

It starts with Sherlock’s and John’s first date at Angelo’s. The whole scene is drenched in yellow. PILOT even more than ASIP.

A secret code of ancient cyphers, sprayed in yellow paint, leads to the Yellow Dragon Circus. 

Golden cats and big ‘yellow’ felines - lions - roam the story. 

Yellow is the colour of the smiley face on the wall of the 221b living room. 

There’s an assassin who carries a yellow ladder and a yellow tool case with a gun in it. 

A bright yellow mask has been placed inside a box, alongside a train, a phone, nicotin patches and a note. 

The main colour of the wedding ... bright yellow. It’s the wedding that leads Sherlock to the revelation ... to his love deduction. 

A canary trainer, a trainer of yellow birds, turns out to be the killer. 

Norbury, the case of the Yellow Face from canon, plays a vital role in TST 

The finish of a race is marked with a bright yellow band that floats slowly to the ground while a ‘confessing’ serial killer, who is a mirror for John, passes as winner, signaling a W with his fingers, while the fingers from the ‘East’,, next to Private Bainbridge, signal a double V.

Yellow is the colour of the sun, of fire, flames and explosions.

Yellowbeard ….

But one of the most important links to Yellow Face is the following one:

JOHN: Mary, I may not be a very good man, but I think I’m a bit better than you give me credit for, most of the time. (Sherlock BBC, TST) 'I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.'  (Grant Munro, The Adventure of the Yellow Face)

This piece of dialogue connects John to Grant Munro, the husband of Effie, the woman who hides her secret child from a previous marriage behind a yellow mask. She doesn’t do it out of some dark or sinister motive as Sherlock Holmes is convinced at first. Her former marriage had been legal and she'd loved her late husband dearly. Lucy, her little girl, can truly be called a child of love. But Effie fears to reveal Lucy, because the girl is ‘different' and the mother is anxious to lose the man she loves now, because of this. She is torn into between the love for her child and the love for her husband.

She (Effie) drew a large silver locket from her bosom. 'You have never seen this open.'

'I understood that it did not open.'

She touched a spring, and the front hinged back. There was a portrait within of a man, strikingly handsome and intelligent, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent.  (ACD, The Yellow Face)

ACDs Yellow Face is a case without crime, without any devious betrayal. Instead, it’s about love and the fear to lose  love, because at that time in ACDs story, it’s about a love not accepted by many. 

'That is John Hebron, of Atlanta,' said the Lady (Effie), 'and a nobler man never walked the earth. I cut myself off from my race in order to wed him; but never once while he lived did I for one instant regret it. It was our misfortune that our only child took after his people rather than mine.   (ACD, The Yellow Face)

In ACDs Yellow Face, the ‘first husband’ is of ‘African descent’ … just like Private Bainbridge, who is the ‘first guardian’ - the first of the three ‘identical husbands’ - in Sherlock BBC, The Sign of Three. He is the one who represents Sherlock’s earliest facade … the guardian of the Queen’s Palace.

Just like @darlingtonsubstitution presumed more than two years ago, I’m now more convinced than ever, that Moffat and Gatiss did adapt ACDs Yellow Face and they not only included it in Sherlock BBC, they made it into the main theme of their story (beside ‘hound’, ‘fall’ and ‘scarlet/pink’). In their version though, the focus shifts from ‘unacceptable’ skin-colour to ‘unacceptable’ sexuality. 

Sherlock BBCs baby ... Rosie ... Sherlock’s baby ... represents love. And this love is pink and has been given a name that can be traced back to ‘Rainbow’. The Sign of Three tells the story of the ‘changing of the guards’ and how Sherlock finally discovers the AMO-factor that will alter his life completely.

When I discoverd Sherlock BBC for the first time (back in 2011) I was thrilled by that fascinating crime drama and its two charismatic leads. Now, after 13 episodes, it has grown into so much more than just an excellent crime drama among others. The way I read it, Sherlock BBC is a wonderful and stunning story about equality. Inside Sherlock’s mind, the great detective doesn’t only solve the greatest secret of his life. No, the actors Sherlock chooses to represent the different aspects of his persona, are as diverse as the colours of the rainbow. They are old and young, male and female, beautiful and ugly, strong and weak, rich and poor. Neither gender, sexuality nor the shade of skin colour or from which corner on this planet someone comes, is of any importance. Anyone can be a part of this Sherlock Holmes. That’s what makes this adaptation so absolutely unique to me. Sherlock himself becomes the rainbow of his own story. 

Thanks for reading to anyone who is still there. :))))  I leave you to your own deductions. And thanks @callie-ariane​ for your invaluable scripts.

December, 2019

________________________________________________________________

Episode spanning metaphorical reading of Sherlock BBC: 

From PILOT to TGG  ….      About the meaning of S1 

From ASIB to TEH  ….  The big question - what is the meaning of Reichenbach

[lbibliophile-mcu]

Tony Stark Bingo 2020 Masterpost - 3096

The @tonystarkbingo is complete! Thank you to the mods and other participants for making it so much fun.

With the new system of adopting less popular prompts, I have a blackout!

This round saw a lot more art fills than previously:

10 moodboard/gifset/graphic

6 fanfic (325-1200 words)

5 fanart (4 DUM-E’s Drawings and one actual sketch-set) 

5 drabble/ficlet (3 with moodboard)

2 poem

1 craft

Fill links and details under the cut

Duckling Therapy II

S1 – stay still Link/s: AO3 Tumblr  Fill type: drabble (100 words) Characters: Tony Stark & Bucky Barnes Tags: ducklings! Summary: This was not how Tony expected to finally catch up to Barnes. 

Conduction

T1 – fireplace Link/s: AO3 Fill type: fanfic (970 words) Characters: Tony Stark & Bucky Barnes Tags: Touch-starved, Bucky Barnes needs a hug Summary: Conduction n, the transfer of heat energy via contact. It is a small thing that makes him notice. A simple clap on the shoulder, emphasis for whatever point he is making. But when he moves to take his hand away, Bucky follows, just for a moment, prolonging the contact.

Situational Analysis

A1 – kidnapped Link/s: AO3  Fill type: fanfic (1200 words) Characters: Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes Tags: Tony Stark has terrible coping mechanisms, sleep deprivation, headaches, kidnapping? Summary: As awareness gradually seeps back in, the first thing Tony notices is the headache. Not that this is exactly an uncommon state of affairs; but depending on the reason for the headache, his day will have drastically different outcomes. Aka, is he waking up to a mild annoyance, or a rather unpleasant morning, or an increasingly miserable however long until he manages to get himself back home?  

Employee of the Year

K1 – Obadiah Stane/Iron Monger Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: gifset Characters: Pepper Potts Tags: Pepper Potts appreciation, down to murder for her boss Summary: “I do anything and everything Mr Stark requires. Including, occasionally, taking out the trash.” She was expecting the scheduling, and the fetching and carrying, and even escorting out his overnight ‘guests’. She was not prepared for literally replacing her boss’ heart, hacking into their own company, or killing the CEO gone rouge. But she is Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts; whatever Tony Stark needs, she will make it happen.

Moodboard for Status Report

S2 – major injuries Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: moodboard Characters: Tony Stark, JARVIS Tags: Heavy angst, Major character death, AVALON protocol, self-sacrifice Summary: Iron Man is a superhero, but Tony Stark is only human. And sometimes, what is asked of a superhero is more than a human can give. So Tony makes contingency plans. He makes the AVALON protocol. He makes sure that Iron Man is able to help the Avengers even when human Tony Stark… can’t. 

One

T2 – time travel (to the future) Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: moodboard and ficlet (170 words) Characters: Tony Stark & Morgan Stark Tags: Major character death, angst, time travel Summary: Time travel is real, and Tony has to make a choice: to ignore this chance to restore the Dusted, or to risk all he has gained since. Strange had told him that there is only one future in which they succeed; he needs to know if this is that one. But… he has a time machine.  

Iron Man is Red

 A2 – cliche Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanart [DUM-E’s Drawings] Characters: Tony Stark, DUM-E, U Tags: DUM-E’s Drawings, Valentines day, Roses are red Summary: Valentine’s Day again, and DUM-E talks U into helping with TON-E’s card.

Go the Fuck to Medical

R2 – day-in-the-life Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: poem (200 words) Characters: Phil Coulson & Avengers Team Tags: Hiding medical issues, Language (as per title), Avengers family,  Phil Coulson has the patience of a saint - and this is his breaking point  Summary: Phil Coulson likes the Avengers, likes working with them. But when it comes to convincing them to seek necessary medical attention... the next person to complain is getting dragged there by their ear!

What Matters

K2 – image [comics old!Tony] Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: moodboard/graphic Characters: Tony Stark & Morgan Stark Tags: Tony’s masks Summary: Tony has played many roles in his life, each famous in their way. But he is never more proud of a title he’s earned than when Morgan calls him “Daddy”.

Love is Comfortable

S3 – limping Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: moodboard Characters: Pepper Potts / Natasha Romanoff Tags: Fluffy socks Summary: As a woman, being beautiful is painful. So when they're together, they prefer to be comfortable.

Just Apply STE-V

T3 – matchmaker Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanfic (425 words) Characters: Tony Stark/Steve Rogers, DUM-E Tags: Mutual pining, developing relationship, DUM-E ships it Summary: When TON-E is sad, DUM-E finds ways to cheer him up. When TON-E is pining, DUM-E finds him STE-V. (Steve would rather prefer to have been consulted on this before being ‘delivered’.)

On Being Tony Stark’s Friend

A3 – free Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: drabble (100 words) Characters: Tony Stark & James Rhodes Tags: non-codependent friendship Summary: To be Tony’s friend, Rhodey had to learn to step back. They must complement each other, not complete. 

Trauma Bingo (the Avengers need ALL the therapy)

R3 – shared trauma Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanfic (1180 words) Characters: Bucky Barnes & Avengers Team Tags: Angst and humour, PTSD (many traumatic topics mentioned briefly - see fic tags) Summary: SHIELD remembers that trauma therapy exists, and their sights are set on the Avengers. Aka. How many issues can you fit in one team, and can you also get them all in the same person. Succeeding at trauma bingo is not actually winning…

DUM-E Draws a Bath

K3 – miscommunication Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanart [DUM-E’s Drawings] Characters: Tony Stark & DUM-E Tags: DUM-E’s Drawings, literal interpretation, DUM-E is a disaster bot Summary: DUM-E tries to be helpful, but interpreting English is hard.

Gift of the Universe

S4 – resurrection Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: moodboard and ficlet (150 words) Characters: Tony Stark & infinity stones Tags: Sentient infinity stones, resurrection Summary: Tony Stark. We see you, we know you. Everything comes with a price, but you – our champion – have paid enough. Accept our gift, and wake!

Brooklyn Boy

T4 – Writing format: non-prose Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: poem (350 words) Characters: Tony Stark / Steve Rogers Tags: Filk, Pining, Happy ending Summary: It’s just not fair that Steve is so perfect... How could Tony not love him?

Cleaning up the Evidence

R4 – writing format: dialogue only Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: moodboard and drabble (100 words) Characters: Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers Tags: De-aging, Parent Tony Stark, Bubble-bath Summary: Tony discovers the unexpected pitfalls of an artistic toddler

TON-E and PET-R; or I-N Man and SPID-R Man

S5 – Peter Parker / Spiderman Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanart [DUM-E’s Drawings] Characters: Tony Stark & Peter Parker, DUM-E Tags: DUM-E’s Drawings, puns Summary: DUM-E meets PET-R, TON-E’s new young friend, and has fun with their superhero names. He also discovers how to improvise a ruler.

With me or Against me

T5 – angst Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: moodboard Characters: Tony Stark &Steve Rogers Tags: Betrayal, Sokovia Accords Summary: He and Steve have always had their disagreements, but he’d thought that being Avengers together meant something. Apparently not.  

Storyboard for Define Winning

A5 – Writing format: missing scene/epilogue/coda Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: graphic/storyboard Characters: Stephen Strange Tags: Time stone / Eye of Agamotto, Mapping the future, Infinity War Summary: When fighting against impossible odds, you need to know exactly what you are trying to achieve; what is the one battle you cannot lose. Sometimes, success all comes down to asking the right question.

Surprise Superpowers: the Good, the Bad and the Awkward

R5 – supersoldier serum Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanfic (1020 words) Characters: Tony Stark Tags: Extremis!Tony Stark Summary: When Tony injected himself with a modified Extremis, it was supposed to keep him alive long enough for the arc reactor to be removed, then quietly fade away. It was not supposed to be this strong. It was not supposed to stick around. And it was not supposed to combine with Dr Cho's Cradle and the suit implants to create some really weird side-effects. Tony's not sure what to think about these new superpowers, so he decides to write it all out.

Learning Curve

K5 – image [DUM-E] Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanfic (325 words) Characters: Tony Stark & DUM-E Tags: MIT era, DUM-E is born, DUM-E is a disaster bot Summary: Tony never intended to create an AI as uniquely special as DUM-E, but he recognises it instantly when he does.  

DUM-E’s Revenge

Adopted (January) – Sunset Bain Link/s: AO3 Tumblr Fill type: fanart [DUM-E’s Drawings] Characters: DUM-E, Sunset Bain (past Tony Stark/Sunset Bain) Tags: DUM-E’s Drawings, Vicarious revenge Summary: DUM-E really doesn’t like people who hurt his TON-E.

Copybot

Adopted (March) – facial-hair bros Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: craft Characters: DUM-E Tags: Dum-e is a disaster bot, Tony’s goatee Summary: DUM-E likes TON-E’s goatee, and U is an enabler.

DUM-E plays dress-ups

Adopted (June) – KINK: role-playing Link/s: Tumblr Fill type: fanart Characters: DUM-E Tags: Dum-e is a disaster bot, dress-ups Summary: The Avengers are some of DUM-E’s favourite people, so he tries to copy them. With varying degrees of success.

[leiascully]

Fic:  Between A Rock And A Hard Place (Part 5/5)

Timeline: Season 10 (replaces My Struggle in the All The Choices We’ve Made ‘verse - Visitor + Resident + etc.) Rating: PG Characters:  Mulder, Scully, Tad O’Malley, Sveta (established MSR) Content warning:  canon-typical body horror (mentions of abduction, forced pregnancy, etc.) A/N: ��I’m collecting all the related stories that go with Visitor/Resident under the title “All The Choices We’ve Made”, because it felt right at the time.  This story is an alternate My Struggle that reflects M&S’ growth/change in the ATCWM ‘verse. I’m weaving canon dialogue into the stories in an attempt to keep the reframing plausibly in line with canon.  

Part One  |  Part Two  |  Part Three  |  Part Four  |   AO3

It's not a surprise the next day when they emerge from the Hoover Building, where they've been supervising the setup of all of the new computers, to see Tad O'Malley's gleaming black limo.  The door opens.  They get in.  

"Glad we caught you, agents," O'Malley says with a grin.  

"We're not hard to track down," Mulder says.  

"It's the chip in my neck," Scully says dryly, and Mulder isn't sure he's ever heard her joke about it before.  But maybe she's spitting into the wind too, reminded of how whoever is behind all this has tampered with her at a molecular level.  He admits it is easy to direct (or misdirect) that frustration at Tad O'Malley.  

"Hi," Sveta says, waving at them from across the car.  O'Malley hasn't brought out the champagne this time, but she's clutching a bottle of Perrier.  

Mulder leans back against the leather seat.  The car certainly is plush.  The perks of selling out, he imagines.  

"I didn't think you'd come, Agent Scully," O'Malley says.  "After all, your work is so important.  So I took the liberty of coming to you."  He opens a small fridge concealed under the seat.  "Perrier?"

"Thank you," Scully says, accepting a bottle.  "What are you doing here, Mr. O'Malley?"

"Exposing a global conspiracy that's crushing the soul of America," O'Malley declares.  "Agent Mulder knows what I'm talking about."

"You're ready to make a move?" Mulder asks.

"The Truth Squad with Tad O'Malley with a world exclusive," O'Malley tells him.  "The story to end all stories."  

"Why don't you give us a preview?" Scully says, settling into her seat.  

O'Malley leaned forward.  "We begin with a war.  The Civil War.  The United States splits in two.  A new government forms.  They mint their own currency.  They make their own laws."

"They perpetuate the enslavement and genocide of millions of people," Scully murmurs.  

"That enslavement creates the haves and the have-nots.  And the halves begin to believe, to truly believe, that they are above the law.  That they can meddle with the fates and lives of people they start to consider subhuman: black, white, Native American, and everyone else.  An experimental program to create a better person through a variety of methods, including surgical intervention and selective breeding."

Sveta shivers.  Scully looks at her compassionately.  She reaches for Sveta's hand.  

O'Malley doesn't seem to notice their discomfort.  "The shadow government continues to exist after the war.  The genetic engineering of a superior human continues in the shadows of the shadow.  And they have other secrets."

"It all sounds like a ghost story," Scully says in that even voice that immediately sends Mulder into full alert.  "Designed to scare children."

"Children should be afraid," O'Malley tells her.  

"Everyone should," Mulder says, and he sees the shiver in her eyelid that means she's trying not to roll her eyes at him.  "It's a conspiracy bigger and more secret than the Manhattan Project, with tentacles reaching back into the very roots of America."

"The metaphor is mixed," Scully says.

"All the more apt," Mulder tells her.  "The Civil War set the stage and World War I gave us access to new technologies, but it wasn't until victories in Europe and Japan that the drama really ratcheted up for the rest of the world."

"Political and economic conditions became perfect for execution of the larger plan," O'Malley declared.  "The success of the program in the former Confederate states had spread to the re-United States.  Agents of the conspiracy, swearing their allegiance to President Grant, had infiltrated the highest levels of government.  World War I and World War II had weakened the European powers that might have held the US in check.  As it was, they were delighted to accept the offer of help from the United States, and if it came with a price, they were happy to pay it.  Their scientists began working with our scientists.  The project stretched those insidious tentacles to grasp the entire globe."

Mulder grins.  This is his wheelhouse.  Even as much as he's been jerked around and lost his faith, it's still exhilarating to put together the pieces of the puzzle he worked at for half his life.  "Paper Clip.  Experiments in the aftermath of the atomic bombings.  The crash at Roswell leading to cannibalized alien technology and cannibalized alien corpses, all resources that furthered the project."

O'Malley breaks in.  "The bomb was the latest threat of extinction, but not the first.  The energy of the explosions acted as transducers, creating wormholes that drew in alien ships just like the one that crashed at Roswell, ships that ran using electro-gravitic propulsion.  Sacrificing those alien lives with their extraterrestrial biology and their advanced technology delayed our self-immolation on the altar of democracy."

"World leaders signed secret memos directing scientific stuff of alien technology and biochemistry," Mulder puts in.  "All in the name of furthering the project, creating a new species that could survive alien invasion or whatever else might wipe us out.  Classified studies were done at military installations, extracting alien tissue.  S4, Groom Lake, Wright Patterson, and Dulce: all part of a network of black sites where tests were conducted using advanced alien technology recovered from the ships."  He glances at Sveta.  She has one hand over her mouth.  "Tests including human hybridization through gene editing and forced implantation of the resulting embryos in unsuspecting human subjects."  He swallows and tries not to look at Scully, but can't help meeting her eyes.  "Embryos with extraterrestrial DNA."  

Sveta gasps.  "Why do such a thing and lie about it?  Our own government?"

"Aliens aside," Scully says, "the American government has conducted experiments on unsuspecting populations as a matter of policy.  The Tuskegee Syphilis Study lasted for years beyond the point where they could have cured the patients.  The scientists in charge chose not to inform their subjects because they were African-American.  They let them die horrible, preventable deaths, claiming it was all in the name of science.  Genetic material was extracted from a sample of a tumor taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks and used without her consent or her family's.  Other people have been sterilized against their will, or stolen from their families.  I doubt we'll ever understand the full extent of the violence done to the indigenous peoples of the Americas."  She exhales loudly.  "While I cannot substantiate all of Agent Mulder's claims, I have found evidence of anomalous genetic material being implanted or otherwise introduced into the DNA of numerous subjects, including myself.  And you."

"What are they trying to do?" Sveta asks.

"That's the missing piece," Mulder tells her.  "We've learned so much, but some part of this eludes us."

"But it's not hard to imagine," O'Malley breaks in.  "A government hiding, no, hoarding alien technology for seventy years, at the potential expense of all human life and the future of the planet.  A government inside the government, secretly preparing for more than a hundred years for the long-awaited event."

"The takeover of America," Mulder says, feeling sick to his stomach.

"And then the world itself," O'Malley says with an almost religious fervor.  "By any means necessary, however violent or cruel.  Severe drought brought on by weather wars conducted secretly using aerial contaminants distributed via chemtrails and high-altitude electromagnetic waves.  Perpetual war waged overseas, a drain on our resources and our energy engineered by politicians to create problem-reaction-solution scenarios to distract, enrage, and enslave American citizens at home with tools like the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, and pure old-fashioned jingoism, abridging the Constitution and its promised freedoms in the name of national security.  Every dissident, every minority: a terrorist in situ.  Vietnam, but this time they're doing it right."

"Militarize the police forces," Mulder says slowly.  "Martial law.  FEMA building prison camps.  Mercenaries fighting under our flag, but not under our orders."

"The corporate takeover of food and agriculture," O'Malley says smugly.  "It's already begun.  Monsanto.  Dicamba.  They've got pharmaceuticals and healthcare in their pocket too.  An insurrection of men and women with clandestine agendas to dull, sicken, terrify, and control a populace already consumed by consumerism."

Mulder leans over to Scully.  "I didn't really like Wall-E," he whispers.  She shakes her head at him.

"A government that taps your phone, collects your data, and monitors your whereabouts with impunity," O'Malley says with a flourish.  "A government preparing to use that data against you when it strikes and the final takeover begins."

Mulder nods slowly.  There is a seed of truth in O'Malley's conspiracy-addled rant.  He's been seeking it long enough to know it when he sees it.  The nation is poised on a precipice.  All the rest of it is lies, smoke and mirrors, a way to turn the paranoid and the credulous into easy money.  But somewhere, under eighty mattress-thick layers of right-wing garbage, is a pea-sized truth, and he's the princess shifting uncomfortably.  

"The takeover of America?" Scully asks.

O'Malley leans forward.  "By a well-oiled and well-armed multinational group of elites that will cull, kill, and subjugate."

"Happening as we sit here in this car," Scully says.

"It's happening all around us," O'Malley tells her.

"It's been happening for years," Mulder murmurs.  "The other shoe waiting to drop."

"It'll probably start on a Friday," O'Malley says.  "The banks will announce a security action necessitating that their computers go offline all weekend."

"Digital money will disappear," he says.

Sveta looks startled.  "They can just steal your money?"  Scully squeezes her hand.

"While the banks are vulnerable,  they'll detonate strategic electromagnetic pulse bombs to knock out major grids.  Traffic lights, security systems, everything: gone.  Hospitals will be on backup generators indefinitely.  It will seem like an attack on America by terrorists or Russia."

"Or a simulated alien invasion featuring alien replica vehicles already in use," Mulder murmurs.  

"An alien invasion of the U.S.?" Scully says.

"The Russians tried it in '47," Mulder reminds her.  "Or they took credit for it, anyway."

"They'll take more than credit this time," O'Malley says.  "This goes worldwide.  Everything that has happened for the past seventy years has been engineered by this global conspiracy, these shadow players.  The structures they've built are designed to crumble, tearing America apart at the seams.  They'll build a new world on the ruins of our current one.  It will happen soon, and it will happen fast."  

Scully shakes her head.  "You can't say these things," she tells O'Malley.

"I'm gonna say them tomorrow," O'Malley says with an almost religious fervor in his voice.  

Scully frowns.  "It's fearmongering, isolationist techno-paranoia so bogus and dangerous and stupid that it borders on treason.  Saying these things would be incredibly irresponsible."  

"I hate to say this, Scully, but if this is true, it would be irresponsible not to say it," Mulder says reluctantly.  

"If it's the truth," Sveta says, "you have to say it."  

"It's not the truth," Scully says.

O'Malley grins that smarmy grin.  "Agent Scully, with all due respect, I don't think you know what the truth is."

"The only thing I don't know is where you're taking us," Scully says, ice in her voice.  "Except on a wild goose chase."

"It's lunchtime," O'Malley says.  "I thought you might want something to eat."  

It's clear from the look Scully gives him that there is a long, long list of people she would rather have lunch with before she deigned to have lunch with Tad O'Malley.  In fact, it might be approaching seven billion people long.  

"I think what Agent Scully is trying to convey is that we've got to decline your invitation," Mulder says.

"You believe me," O'Malley says to Mulder with certainty.

Mulder looks at Scully.  She looks back at him, her eyes tight just at the corners.  "I might have, back in the day.  My doctor says paranoia is bad for me."  

O'Malley sits back, disappointed.  Scully's shoulders loosen.  She glances at him and there's something between approval and gratitude in her eyes.  He smiles at her.  

There's a pinging noise.  Scully checks her email on her phone.  Her brow creases.  She scrolls through something, then flicks back to the top and reads through it again.  "This is strange."

"What?"  Mulder leans over.  

"Sveta, the lab retested your samples.  A new tech was running the machines, and a number of test results were compromised.  In fact, they retested your samples twice to be sure.  Your DNA shows no anomalies."  Scully looks up.  "Whatever's been done to you, it had nothing to do with this project."

"Nothing?" Sveta and O'Malley ask at the same time.

"That can't be right," O'Malley says.  "Retest her."  

"I don't want to be tested again," Sveta says.  

"You're my evidence," O'Malley tells her angrily.  "You have to."

"She doesn't have to do anything," Scully tells him.  "She's under our protection now."

"We'll see about that," O'Malley says.  He presses a button.  The driver pulls over.  He opens the door.  "Goodbye, agents.  Goodbye, Sveta."

"What will you do?" Sveta asks him as she climbs out of the car.  

"I'll do what I do," O'Malley says.  "I'll tell the truth."

The car door slams shut.

Truth Squad with Tad O'Malley the next day is a runaway hit: high ratings, viral content, memes, gifs, and a media uproar.  "I promised you the truth today, but that truth has come under assault," O'Malley says, looking into the camera, and they roll footage of Sveta confessing to reporters, accusing him of telling lies.

"I am so sorry if I misled anyone," she says tearfully, wringing her hands in front of her.

"They get her?" Mulder asks.

"She should be safe," Scully tells him.  "They'll work on relocating her."

"Material witness?" Mulder asks.  "That's a bit of a stretch."

"It won't be by the time all of this is over," Scully says grimly.  "I went to the hospital to collect the samples and had our labs run them again."

"And?" Mulder says.

"Sveta and I share a lot," Scully says.  "Including anomalous genetic material."

"O'Malley must be furious," Mulder says, propping his hands on his hips as he thinks.

"Rumor is they're going to pull the plug," Scully says.  "No more truth, no more Squad."

"To his followers, that'll feel like a sign," Mulder says.  "A shot fired across their bows."

Scully shrugs.  "Damned if you do, damned if you don't.  Either we embolden a liar, or we enrage his base."    

"Politics have never been our strong suit," Mulder says.  "You know, there's something called the Venus Syndrome."

"The plant, the planet, or something else I'm afraid to ask about?" Scully asks.

"The planet," Mulder says.  "It's a runaway global warming scenario that leads us to the brink of the Sixth Extinction.  Those with the means will prepare to move off the planet into space, which will have already been weaponized against the poor, huddled masses of humanity that haven't been exterminated by the über-violent fascist elites.  If you believe in that kind of thing."

"Honestly, these days it sounds almost plausible," Scully tells him, leaning on one of the desks.  Whoever has funded the untimely revival of the X-Files has been generous: they have two normal desks and four standing desks scattered around the office.  It's much too flexible a workspace for two people.  

Their phones go off almost in unison.  They both reach for them.

"Skinner," Scully says.

"Skinner," Mulder confirms.  He reads the message:  Situation critical.  Need to see you both ASAP.  

They look at each other.  

"Scully, are you ready for this?" Mulder asks.

"I don't know there's a choice," she says, but she sounds fierce and proud.

There are wheels turning somewhere.  He can almost hear the gears of the world grinding.  They won't get caught in the teeth this time, won't get torn apart.  Whoever is behind everything they've been through will be exposed, finally and totally, brought to light.  They'll have to open the wound to clean it out, but that's all right.  They've finally learned how to heal.  He opens the door for her and they stride toward the elevator together.

[gottaenjoythelittlethingzz]

@mastery-in-procrastination, who is busy doing some awesome things for the community, was kind enough to send me this ask: “How long have you been working on "The Reaper's Only Daughter"?” Tumblr ate the ask, but I was able to save my answer! I may have gone a little over broad in my explanation. Thanks for the question, now sit back and experience the journey. 

Ah yes. My origin story. I remember it like it was yesterday. Allow me to take you back, to before the beginning...

2018! For me it was the year of television (as ‘17 had been the year of the movie). I vividly remember searching for shows on IMDB to compile a sort of list in January. Some well-known, some old hat, but two in particular stuck out to me. Two my mother specifically enjoyed and had for many years. Sons of Anarchy and Shameless. I was finally at the age to where I could start enjoying these shows and so they were added to my list to be watched later. I remember reading the description of SOA and looking through pictures of tough guys on motorcycles. I knew I had to watch it!

Fast forward to May 15th. I was nearing the end of my high school/senior year. I believe I had taken all of my finals at this time and just had a few meaningless things left to turn in for one or two classes. I had just finished The Punisher (thank the godz) and was ready to start the next series. It was again between SOA and Shameless and I have never made a better or more damaging decision in my entire life than when I hit play on the pilot episode of SOA at 7 am as I was getting ready for school that Tuesday morning. Mind you, my school was a dead zone as far as internet goes, but the media godz were shinning down on me that week. I chased the signal every single day.

For the next 6 days, it was all I thought about, all I watched, all I wanted to talk about! I watched 92 episodes, roughly 70 hours of content in 6 days. Though my mother has seen it many times (as it is also her favorite series with her favorite actor(s) in it) I retold her the stories (nearly every episode, or several at a time) as I watched them. She was the first person to see me “live react” to a show in text or otherwise. She enjoyed it because she hasn’t had anyone to talk to about the show in what is now nearly 5 years and she liked hearing my takes on things. 

I stopped talking to friends, I stopped eating (not really so extreme, but I mean...), and on the last 3 nights I hardly slept. I watched it absolutely everywhere! That Friday I skipped school. I reasoned I wasn’t doing work anyway and it wasn’t going to hold me back. If my memory serves me correctly, I watched the finale of S3 through S4 and maybe a little more on either side (but for certain these 14 episodes, technically my favorite in the series) in one straight sitting. In truth, nothing was going to be able to hold me back from this show. I was hard pressed to leave my room, much less my house which made work Saturday difficult. I told my coworkers I was watching it as I jumped up and down waiting to go home (business was slow you see) and I actually left early. I have a bad habit of watching things while driving (don’t do it kids! Listen to your mother!) and actually watched an episode on the way home. 

I ended up pulling an all-nighter on Saturday trying to finish it as I had more plans Sunday. Well, it didn’t work. I fell asleep around 4 am with 4 or 5 episodes to go. I watched a few episodes to and from where I was going in the car, but on Sunday night May 20th, 2018, I watched the final two episodes of the series back to back and a weight had been lifted off my shoulders (it also left a hole in my heart, quite literally). I was no longer susceptible to spoilers and I knew the “secret”. What’s more, I completely, 100% agreed with the creator’s decision as to how and when he ended the show. 

SOA was the first show that ever captivated my attention in such a way. I was never bored, not for a minute. I wouldn’t call many of the episodes fillers even now that I’ve watched each a couple of times (too many to count, for research purposes, I assure you.) And it is one of the most consistent as far as new ideas and character development/design I have ever seen. What's more is I absolutely adore the main cast and characters alike. It honestly took over my life and has changed it for the better. So much so, that it was still all I thought about for several weeks after I finished it. To the point where I had to watch it again top to bottom, though it took me about 2 weeks while sleeping that time. I’ve never watched a show like that, before or since, no matter how much I like a series.

Alas, life goes on, there were more shows to watch, and for the next month or so I turned to watching Shameless (another story entirely) and, though I didn’t want to, I stopped thinking about SOA for a time. That was, until I started thinking about moving to college. My mother had an SOA poster that use to be in her office that she gave to me to put in my apartment. I wake up every morning to see it hanging over my bed and I am reminded that I should be writing TROD. I went down to my college apartment about a week before term started. It was the first time I was technically on my own, though I have roommates, and you will never guess what I did during that week. Go ahead, guess. I did 2 things, actually.

I rewatched SOA, though this time I stopped on series 5 (and if you’ve seen it you may know why) and I “broke down” and created a Writeblr. I’ve always loved to write and actually was in the process of shelving what was originally meant to be my first novel length WIP (on the grounds that it did not have a plot to hold the characters together) that now hasn’t been updated in 6+ months. During this third rewatch an idea came to me. “What would it be like to be in this world?” More specifically, “What would it be like to be a woman in this world”?

This was apparently the right question to ask. The rest is history, swirling into a big black and crow feathered blur. I spent a few months creating Schuyler. I slowly stopped talking about the shelved WIP online and started answering questions for her instead. I figured if I was going to shelve 1 project I had better have another to replace it with, and so TROD was born! I nearly immediately had a character personality and a title when I started. The name Schuyler and her family lineage to link her to the canon story took more time. But while I was thinking of all the technical stuff I was also imagining all the fun scenes that would take place in this imaginary novel I was picturing.

I spent so much time thinking about it, specifically the first chapter which you have seen is now available to read on this blog, that the first time I sat down to write I wrote out 5,000 words flat. Many remained in what is currently “the final draft”. This had never happened to me before and I was inspired! I have been working on it ever since. As far as physically writing for it I have only been writing TROD for about 4 months. But in actuality, TROD has been a project a long time in the making. Nearly 9 months of thought and devotion to a Fandom nearly gone, but I’m here now to carry the torch!

9 months in and I have 6 moodboards, a chapter, and far too many tag games/posts to count. I have roughly 30k words written (continuously, obsessively tweaking the first 3 chapters) and another 2k or so of notes (outlines, dialogue lines, and ideas for scenes). This is actually the first story where I’m consulting a sort of outline (my own that I’m always adding to, but also the canon story) and it’s been my best writing experience to date!

This project is going to be long. Longer than anything I’ve ever dreamed of taking on before. I still have much to explore, plot kinks to work through, and many months, if not years, of work to go. But w/o SOA I would have never become so involved in media (as now I want to make it my career), met some of my favorite actors, created my Writeblr or been inspired to continue writing, and I certainly never would have entered into this inclusive community or met so many awesome writers!

*Whew. That was a lot. But SOA and my WIP TROD means a lot to me as you can see. Thanks so much for the ask. Feel free to stop by anytime! 

I’m also going to tag @themildestofwriters as I know you may be thinking about diving into this series yourself and I want to both warn you and wish you well if you choose to do so!

And @aspire2bu, as I believe I saw you post recently about how you first got into K-pop in the first place and I found it interesting. Hopefully you’ll find this interesting too!

[calliecat93]

Callie Reviews: TMNT 2012 Season One (Part One)

Ever since 1984, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise has gone form a cult-status indie comic to a massive mass market. There have been various comics, movies, video games, merchandise, and of course cartoons. And it’s easy to see why. TMNT’s concept, a group of mutated teen turtles fighting evil in New York, is both incredibly bizarre and incredibly appealing to a mass audience. You have action, science fiction, martial arts, and of course plenty of mutant ideas to make toys out of. The fact that this Fall will be releasing the fourth animated TMNT series and that a new movie series is in production shows that even over 30 years later, this is a franchise that is far from losing it’s power.

As a kid, I of course knew that Turtles as a thing and I even watch parts of 2k3. But I was never really a fan until the day I stumbled upon the 2012 show. I fell in love with it and, since it started when I was just starting this blog, it was a huge focus for me for several years. I have since moved on and while I’m going to check out the 2018 show, I don’t think I’m going to be as crazy as I was with this show (but never say never). Back in 2012, I was someone who... lets say ignored the flaws and defended the show far too passive aggressively to the point that looking at my older stuff makes me want to blow up by blog. 

Nowadays, while some of my opinions hold true (like the ‘Donnie is a stalker’ accusations are still bullshit), I am more willing to admit the shows problems, especially now that I can take the show in fully. I also like to believe that I’ve become a better reviewer since I was 19 years old, plus it had been far too long since I went back over the show form the very beginning. So does the show still hold up? Will 25 year old Callie feel differently than 19 year old Callie did? Well we’re about to find out. This is the TMNT 2012 Season One Review!

The Premiere (Episodes 1-2)

Our story begins with a training sequence that introduces us to the titular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo. Along with some minor character establishment, like Mikey being the funny one and Raph the violent one, the biggest thing here is one of the shows strengths: the choreography. It’s best exhibited in Leo and Raph’s duel. The movements are very fluid and well-paced. It’s fast, but not too fast, it’s enough to move things along but still let you take in all the impacts. It’s very well done. Raph ends up winning and we are introduce to the boys mentor and father, Master Splinter. Aka, the best written character int he show, but we’ll get to that later.

After the opening theme, we cut to the boys 15th Mutation Day where we get our backstory. Borrowing from the 80′s show origin, Splinter was once a young man named Hamato Yoshi. He had just bought four pet turtles when he stumbled across a shady dealing. Being a ninja master, he was able to fight back, but he ended up getting splattered with a strange green substance. This turned him into a rat, as one brushed his ankle while the baby Turtles become anthropomorphic. Yoshi, taking on the name Splinter, fled to the sewers and raised the four turtles as his own as well as taught them ninjutsu. It’s a simple, but still solid telling of the origin that pays tribute to previous origins, leaves some mystery about the substance and who was dealing it, and is told with use of comic-style panels reminiscent of the original comics.

The Turtles, having lived in the sewers since their mutation, are hoping to convince Splinter to let them finally go to the surface. After some begging, Splinter reluctantly agrees. We then cut to Leo watching a Star Trek: The Animated Series parody where we learn of his desire to become a great hero and leader. This is interesting for several reasons. One, it establishes that Leo isn’t the leader of the group yet, a departure form normal as he’s normally put into that role automatically. And second, ti does a great job at character establishment. In previous versions, Leo is often seen as the boring, overly leader type. Not a bad character mind you, but he lacks the quirkiness that the tough Raph, genius Donnie, and wild child Mikey present. Here? Leo is shown to be an idealistic, naive, but good-intention kid who aspires to be a great hero like he sees on TV as well as give shim some dorky characteristics, like quoting cheesy one-liners to sound more heroic. It helps make him more relateable, funny, and sets up a character arc for when he does inevitably become the leader. Very well done.

The boys finally go to the surface, and are in awe of what they see. They even discover their trademark favorite food, pizza. Given that they only ever ate worms and algae until this point, it makes their love of it all the more understandable. But not all goes well as they soon witness a group of business men kidnapping a red-haired teenager and her father. They attempt to help, but end up only beating each other up and the bad guys get away with their captives. Mikey ends up beating up one and discovers... a brain with tentacles... yipe... he tries to tell the other three, but they don’t believe him. A common trend in the show.

Upon returning home, the boys try to blame each other for the failure before Splinter accepts it for not giving them proper training as a team. While he considers keeping them down below for another year, Donnie convinces him to let them go help the girl due to seeing how terrified she was and how they failed to help her... and because of the crush he developed in a record five seconds. Splinter agrees, but first assigns Leo as the official leader, much to the ire of Raph. They’re eventually able to find the kidnappers vehicle and wreck it, capturing the driver named Snake and they discover a vat of a glowing green substance. A vat that they recognize as the same one that caused their original mutation.

Snake, after Raph threatens to mutate him, leads the boys to the facility where the captives are... and uses the boys bickering as a chance to escape. Leo uses this to trick the crook into thinking that they’re going to plow his van into the place as he conducts a plan to sneak in. All while Roah is an asshole who refuses to listen and outright undermines Leo’s orders. Yeah, Raph is a real jerk during this season. FYI. When Leo shows hesitance about his plan, Splinter tells him of his final confrontation against his rival Oroku Saki, aka The Shredder. It ended in his wife being killed, his house burning down, and his infant daughter nowhere to be found. Well, that won’t be important in any way, shape, or form later! The point being that he lost everything, but gained the boys, easing Leo’s worries about how much is riding on the plan.

So yeah the boys crash the van, Snake gets mutated, the boys break in, fight some guards, and Mikey proves that he isn’t crazy about the aliens.. and then trips an alarm. Smooth Mikey, smooth. They find the captives, that being this version of April O’Neil and her scientist father. Now in most versions, April is an adult woman. Here? She is aged down and is around sixteen years old. We’ll talk more about that later. The bad guys, aka The Kraang, take the captives away and as the boys give chase,t hey are confronted by the mutant Snake... who is a weed monster. Hey, that’s breaking supervillain rules writers! If you have an evil sounding name, that’s what you turn into! Donnie is sent to rescue the O’Neil’s as the other three face Snakeweed... Mikey’s idea, not mine.

The boys eventually defeat Snake via Leo’s direction and mass electrocution while Donnie is able to rescue April, but her father is taken away. April plans to find him however, no matter what it takes with the boys promising to help in whatever way they can. Once home, Leo finds out the complex reasoning for why he was named the leader over everyone else... because he asked. Ming-boggling, right? Well there is actually another reason, but we’ll talk about this in S4. The boys also made the news as their shruriken got found, but come on, what could one tiny news story do that would be bad? Well... being seen by your master’s worst enemy and re-igniting his lust for vengeance might count! Woopsie!

Overall, a solid two parter. It establishes the characters well, has fun fight scenes, the animation is a little dated now but still pretty good, the dialogue is funny, and it does a good job setting up future plotlines while fulfilling it’s own plot. It started 2k12 off on the right foot and was still enjoyable over five years since it’s initial premiere.

The Beginning (Episodes 3-8)

The episodes following the premiere create a steady flow of creating the status quo. You have episodes like Turtle Temper, Metalhead, and Monkey Brains (kinda) that have the boys dealing with the Kraang’s Plan of the Week as they continue their mutagen experiments. It helps with character development and some minor plot progression, such as Raph learning how dangerous his anger can be and Donnie learning to rely on his instincts rather than on his mind 100% of the time. Some are going to want me to comment on the shipping stuff, But I’m gonna save that for later. The biggest issue with these episodes, aside from Monkey Brains, is the Kraang. They are not interesting as villains at all. As great a VA as Nolan North is, the Kraang’s way of talking just gets... annoying. It doesn't help that the threat ultimately becomes either an accidental mutant or Donnie’s robot... well okay a Kraang possessed the later, but it shows that those are more interesting villains than the Kraang themselves and they exist mroe to just have an excuse for a plot. It’s really irking after awhile.

As far as plot goes, it’s mostly your usual ‘Monster of the Week’ stuff. But it has some small things that have a larger impact later. For one, in Monkey Brains, April begins to tap into what looks like some strong emphatic abilities. More on this next season. But due to this, Splinter decides to take April on as a student and train her to be a kunoichi (a female ninja). This will be the largest part of her character for the remainder of the series. April herself... is not utilized as well as she could have been in these early episodes. She’s described as the boys guide to the outside world, and she does serve that in some respects. For example, introducing Mikey to social media in New Friend, Old Enemy to let him make friends without exposing his mutant identity. And in Never Say Xever she takes them to a blind man’s shop so that they can actually experience life topside for once. The issue is we never see April establish bonds with the boys or Splinter after her introduction. In New Friend, Old Enemy she just acts like she’s been friends with the guys for awhile and after showing Mikey the net, doesn’t appear or is even mentioned in the episode again. She disappears after her importance in Metalhead as well, but she is given mroe to work with there at least. I glossed over this when I was watching the show and April does get mroe time with the guys, her relationship with Splinter being one of my favorites. Still, they didn’t do a lot with having April become part of the group or really act on her role as their ‘guide’ and I feel they just wanted to ignore it to get to the other stuff. Which is just a bummer.

So you’re probably wondering about Shredder stuff, right? Well thankfully the Foot Episodes are also the most plot relevant episodes. It starts with New Friend, Old Enemy where Shredder arrives in New York and assigns one of his lieutenants, a famous martial artist named Chris Bradford, to find out about Splinter. The Foot end up encountering the Turtles, with Bradford later using this to manipulate Mikey after accidentally becoming online friends with him. He captures him and use shim as bait to lure out the other three and then follow them to where Splinter is hiding. It fails with the boys using their knowledge of the sewers to literally wash Bradford and his partner, Xever, away. Along with the dangers of meeting people you don’t really know on social media, the episode presents a very unique lesson. In a fight for your life, screw fairness, You fight by any means necessary to stay alive, including fighting dirty. Most shows emphasize on being fair, but this one actually acknowledges that if your life is on the line, you do what it takes to get out alive. It’s a unique message for a kids show and one that I really appreciate.

Next is Never Say Xever where Xever gets to lead the charge. After the boys track down the two and get beat up, Xever receives inlet from the Purple Dragons, who int his version are pretty much a trio of teen thugs. The Turtles fought them off earlier at the shop April took them to, with Leo sparing the leader as an act of mercy. Something that Raph takes umbridge with... as he does with most anything that Leo does in the first half of the series. It’s no surprise that Leo and Raph butt heads, as they do in most series, and it follows their respective arcs. Leo having to deal with being leader as well as realizing that it’s much more pressuring and unforgiving than he thought, while Raph act son his jealousy that Leo got the position even though he’s the better fighter and therefore questioning Leo’s orders or outright just being an asshole for no good reason. But after the shop owner is kidnapped to lure the Turtles out, Leo’s act of mercy ends up saving them as the lead Dragon repays the favor by throwing him back his discarded sword. Which Leo uses to break a water tower to wash the bad guys away again. Angered, The Shredder decides to handle the Turtles himself.

The episodes do a good job in establishing a solid status quo. Bad guy does a thing, one character has their B-Plot to deal with, there’s a clash, the plots intertwine, bad guy gets defeated, and the lesson of the day is learned. A simple routine, but it works here. Plus we get plenty of character establishment and moments which makes you care about them. For example even though Raph is a massive jerk, the end of New Friend, Old Enemy has his comfort Mikey after the deceit and have him see that he’s a good kid who simply got duped as anyone else would. With this being after Raph mocked him wanting to make friends throughout the episode, it helped show that he does have a caring side. Leo frequently has issues with being a leader, such as dealing with Raph and moments like in ITHNiBS where the guys outright refuse to listen to him when he tries to remind them that they’re grounded. Even Splinter has a lot of moments, being a stern but fair parental figure and wise mentor, but is also snarky as Hell. We also see hints to how much the past has affected him, like after April agrees to undergo kunoichi training and leaves the dojo, there’s just a brief moment where he looks down with a forlorn expression. As though wishing that he was telling this to his own MIA daughter. It’s so subtle, but it speaks volumes about his emotional state. 

The characters are ultimately what makes these episodes works and what I would say is the strongest part of the series. You are likely going to relate to or like someone from this show and their progression. But now that we have a fully formed status quo, it’s time to shake it up a little bit and have the Turtles experience their first hard dose of reality.

The Escalation (Epsidoes 9-13)

Episode 9 begins as a typical ‘Mutant of the Week’ plot with the guys trying to catch a pigeon mutant that was after April. But when they do, they discover that he was simply trying to deliver a message... from her father. The message warns her to get out of the city due to a mutagen bomb, but she refuses to leave without him. As such,t he Turtles... somehow... find where Mr. O’Neil is and try to save him. While they get him out of the cell and get the location of the bomb, Mr. O’Neil sacrifices himself when the Kraang outnumber them so that the boys can protect April. All while poor April can only watch, helpless to do anything. Ouch...

The Turtles can only go to where the bomb is to disarm it, but things get further complicated when Bradford and Xever attack, wanting payback from before. Fortunately Donnie disarms the bomb and the four corner the two, but Bradford refuse sot go down quietly and stabs the bomb, but all it does is mutate himself and Xever. But ti also washes them away.... again. I should also point out that this point,t he Turtles have gotten incredibly over-confident since they’ve beaten every bad guy so far, feeling unstoppable. So then... Shredder arrives. Yep. And he kicks their shells HARD. Liek he holds no punches, he easily over-powers all four of them and almost stabs Leo int he head. The only reason that they escape is Shredder getting distracted by his now mutated lieutenants. But the boys retreat, badly beaten up and completely demoralized.

The next episode focuses on the fallout. The four are mostly feeling better, but their fears are being escalated by, of all people, Splinter. This is due to the boys nearly getting killed by his long-time rival re-igniting his own trauma and having nightmares over losing them, causing him to again keep them in the sewers and be far more harsh with his training. The only one doing moderately well is April, who gets intel about the Foot planning to destroy the sewers. The Turtles try to stop it, but get pounded by Bradford, who is now a giant dog mutant named Dogpound. This forces April to get the inlet herself, but she gets caught an captured by the Foot. This further brings Leo down, but to his surprise Raph actually encourages him to pull himself together and lead the team. The Turtles manage to both save April and stop the Foot from destroying the sewers with Splinter apologizing for allowing his fears to affect both himself and his sons. Overall, a solid pair of episodes that bring the boys down a bit, finally has all the plots meet somewhere, and deliver a strong message about not letting fear control you or the others around you.

After a filler episode where the only importance is Shredder forcibly recruiting Stockman to his forces, we get some more Kraang stuff with Episode 12. Where we actually show them being dangerous. Shocker, right?! It also introduces us to long-time supporting character within the franchise  Leatherhead. Here he is an alligator mutant who the Kraang experimented on and it causes him to have violent fits of rage if he so much as hears the word ‘Kraang’. The Turtles end up saving him when the Kraang try to re-capture him, but find his angry bursts, well... dangerous. But Mikey is able to befriend him and it becomes more clear that LH is actually a rather intelligent, good-hearted mutant who has been put through Hell. He gets run off by Splinter though when one of his trauma-induced bursts causes him to attack the boys, forcing the rat master to intervene. Mikey, and by proxy the other three, give chase to an old subway car where LH reveals how the Kraang took him to their home, Dimension X, and experimented on him. He escaped and also took their Power Cell, cutting them off form Dimension X, in hopes of saving humanity from them. The Kraang want it back and act like a zombie swarm as they break through the car. LH fights them off, leaving the Power Cell in the Turtles care.

While Episode 11 sucks (to put it simply Leo and Raph are overbearing assholes while Donnie and Mikey are just made to be as weak as possible), the other three do a good job at making the villains more solid threats. Shredder was built up as intimidating and powerful, and boy did he deliver. The Turtles face their first major loss and have to deal with the fallout, Leo especially dealing with his first real failure as a leader. Even the Kraang come off as a scarier hivemind and we get mroe stuff on them, like Dimension X and their plans to mutate the Earth. Add that with a strong supporting character like Leatherhead, who is understandably traumatized but is an intelligent being who is trying to prevent others form suffering like him. and it helps make some strong episodes.

The first half of the season concludes with the 13th episodes... that aired as the 14th for some reason. But I’m going in order of my DVD’s and this was after Episode 12, so it’s what I’m going with. It both concludes a lot and opens up a lot for the future. The episode I am talking about is, of course New Girl in Town.

TBC in Part Two....

[papermoonloveslucy]

LIZ LEARNS TO SWIM

June 11, 1950

“Liz Learns To Swim” is episode #92 of the radio series MY FAVORITE HUSBAND broadcast on June 11, 1950 on the CBS Radio Network. 

Synopsis ~ George makes a bargain with Liz: If she'll learn to swim, they can go to the beach with the Atterburys for their vacation.

“My Favorite Husband” was based on the novels Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, the Record of a Happy Marriage (1940) and Outside Eden (1945) by Isabel Scott Rorick, which had previously been adapted into the film Are Husbands Necessary? (1942). “My Favorite Husband” was first broadcast as a one-time special on July 5, 1948. Lucille Ball and Lee Bowman played the characters of Liz and George Cugat, and a positive response to this broadcast convinced CBS to launch “My Favorite Husband” as a series. Bowman was not available Richard Denning was cast as George. On January 7, 1949, confusion with bandleader Xavier Cugat prompted a name change to Cooper. On this same episode Jell-O became its sponsor. A total of 124 episodes of the program aired from July 23, 1948 through March 31, 1951. After about ten episodes had been written, writers Fox and Davenport departed and three new writers took over – Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and head writer/producer Jess Oppenheimer. In March 1949 Gale Gordon took over the existing role of George's boss, Rudolph Atterbury, and Bea Benaderet was added as his wife, Iris. CBS brought “My Favorite Husband” to television in 1953, starring Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson as Liz and George Cooper.  The television version ran two-and-a-half seasons, from September 1953 through December 1955, running concurrently with “I Love Lucy.” It was produced live at CBS Television City for most of its run, until switching to film for a truncated third season filmed (ironically) at Desilu and recasting Liz Cooper with Vanessa Brown.

REGULAR CAST

Lucille Ball (Liz Cooper) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. With Richard Denning, she starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” which eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon.

Richard Denning (George Cooper) was born as Louis Albert Heindrich Denninger Jr., in Poughkeepsie, New York. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to Los Angeles. Plans called for him to take over his father's garment manufacturing business, but he developed an interest in acting. Denning enlisted in the US Navy during World War II. He is best known for his  roles in various science fiction and horror films of the 1950s. Although he teamed with Lucille Ball on radio in “My Favorite Husband,” the two never acted together on screen. While “I Love Lucy” was on the air, he was seen on another CBS TV series, “Mr. & Mrs. North.”  From 1968 to 1980 he played the Governor on “Hawaii 5-0″, his final role. He died in 1998 at age 84.

Bea Benadaret (Iris Atterbury) was considered the front-runner to be cast as Ethel Mertz but when “I Love Lucy” was ready to start production she was already playing a similar role on TV’s “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” so Vivian Vance was cast instead. On “I Love Lucy” she was cast as Lucy Ricardo’s spinster neighbor, Miss Lewis, in “Lucy Plays Cupid” (ILL S1;E15) in early 1952. Later, she was a success in her own show, "Petticoat Junction” as Shady Rest Hotel proprietress Kate Bradley. She starred in the series until her death in 1968. Gale Gordon (Rudy Atterbury) had worked with Lucille Ball on “The Wonder Show” on radio in 1938. One of the front-runners to play Fred Mertz on “I Love Lucy,” he eventually played Alvin Littlefield, owner of the Tropicana, during two episodes in 1952. After playing a Judge in an episode of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” in 1958, he would re-team with Lucy for all of her subsequent series’: as Theodore J. Mooney in ”The Lucy Show”; as Harrison Otis Carter in “Here’s Lucy”; and as Curtis McGibbon on "Life with Lucy.” Gordon died in 1995 at the age of 89.

Ruth Perrott (Katie, the Maid) was also later seen on “I Love Lucy.” She first played Mrs. Pomerantz (above right), a member of the surprise investigating committee for the Society Matrons League in “Pioneer Women” (ILL S1;E25), as one of the member of the Wednesday Afternoon Fine Arts League in “Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress” (ILL S3;E3), and also played a nurse when “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” (ILL S2;E16). She died in 1996 at the age of 96.

Bob LeMond (Announcer) also served as the announcer for the pilot episode of “I Love Lucy”. When the long-lost pilot was finally discovered in 1990, a few moments of the opening narration were damaged and lost, so LeMond – fifty years later – recreated the narration for the CBS special and subsequent DVD release.

Gale Gordon (Rudolph Atterbury) is not in this episode, but is mentioned by Iris. 

GUEST CAST

Hans Conried (Benjamin Wood, Liz’s Swim Instructor) first co-starred with Lucille Ball in The Big Street (1942). He then appeared on “I Love Lucy” as used furniture man Dan Jenkins in “Redecorating” (ILL S2;E8) and later that same season as Percy Livermore in “Lucy Hires an English Tutor” (ILL S2;E13) – both in 1952. The following year he began an association with Disney by voicing Captain Hook in Peter Pan. On “The Lucy Show” he played Professor Gitterman in “Lucy’s Barbershop Quartet” (TLS S1;E19) and in “Lucy Plays Cleopatra” (TLS S2;E1). He was probably best known as Uncle Tonoose on “Make Room for Daddy” starring Danny Thomas, which was filmed on the Desilu lot. He joined Thomas on a season 6 episode of “Here’s Lucy” in 1973. He died in 1982 at age 64.

This begins Conried’s history of playing Lucy’s instructors. Percy Livermore taught her grammar; Professor Gitterman taught her singing and acting. 

Herb Vigran (Filling Station Attendant) made his "I Love Lucy” debut as Jule, Ricky’s music agent, in “The Saxophone” (ILL S2;E2) in 1952 and immediately returned in “The Anniversary Present” (ILL S2;E3) to play the same character. He will also play Mrs. Trumbull’s nephew Joe, the washing machine repairman, in “Never Do Business With Friends” (ILL S2;E31) and Al Sparks, the publicist who turns Lucy and Ethel into Martians, in “Lucy is Envious” (ILL S3;E23). Vigran also played the man who sold Lucy and Desi The Long, Long Trailer (1953) and returned to work for Lucy in six episodes of "The Lucy Show” between 1963 and 1966. He died in 1986.

EPISODE TRIVIA

The day before this episode aired, Lucy and Desi were in New York City on their ‘vaudeville tour’ designed to try-out material for “I Love Lucy” and prove to the networks that they had good chemistry together. There they appeared on “The United Cerebral Palsy Telethon” hosted by Milton Berle and aired on NBC. 

The script for “Liz Learns To Swim” was basically a remake of “Vacation Time” (aka “A Trailer Vacation To Goosegrease Lake” broadcast on April 29, 1949.  

Unlike many episodes of “My Favorite Husband,” “Liz Learns To Swim” has no corollary on “I Love Lucy,” although certain situations and dialogue will be familiar to viewers. 

EPISODE

ANNOUNCER: “As we look in on the Coopers tonight, summertime is fast approaching and Liz has roused her self from spring fever long enough to go on a shopping spree for some beach clothes.”

As the episode begins, Liz is showing Katie the Maid what she has bought for her summer vacation, including a skimpy swimsuit.  

LIZ: “I want to look good for George. He’s going to see a lot of me this summer.” KATIE: “He’s not the only one!”  

In “Off To Florida” (ILL S6;E6) Ricky thinks Lucy’s new skimpy new swimsuit is for Little Ricky!

RICKY: “Hey, look, Ricky!  Mommy bought you a bathing suit.” LUCY: “That's mine!” RICKY: “Yours?!” LUCY: “Relax. It stretches when it's on.” RICKY: “See that it does!”

Lucy also buys a swimsuit that Ricky feels is too skimpy when shopping for their California trip in “Getting Ready” (ILL S4;E11). 

In looking over their daily mail, we learn that the Cooper’s live at 321 Bundy Drive. Liz gets something from Weeping Willow Ranch, where they spent last year’s summer vacation. It is not a place Liz is anxious to revisit.

LIZ: “One week there and you understand why the willows are weeping.” 

In “Vacation Time” from 1949 (the episode upon which this one is based) the resort was named Goosegrease Lake.

Lucy Carmichael visits a dude ranch called Tumbleweed Inn during a 1966 episode of “The Lucy Show.”

Liz wants to go to the beach with the Atterbury’s while George insists on going to the dude ranch. George agrees to go to the beach if Liz will first learn to swim. 

Adventure-Loving Lucy Ricardo swam in the chilly Med before pedaling to Nice in “Lucy’s Bicycle Trip” (ILL S5;E24). Fred calls her “the poor man’s Florence Chadwick” an American swimmer known for long-distance, open water swimming and the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions, setting a record each time.  

Liz’s neighbor, Mr. Wood (Hans Conried), teaches her how to swim - without ever leaving the living room!  George is doubtful Liz can learn swimming without getting wet, so they agree to a test at the Country Club pool the next day. That night, Liz ‘swims in her sleep’ - nearly drowning!  

At the pool next day, Iris (Bea Benadaret) brings Liz some water wings to wear under her swimsuit and fool George. To inflate them, Iris drags Liz to a Filling Station to use their air pump. But the water wings burst, just like Iris’s plan. Iris thinks of a loophole: Liz never promised George she wouldn’t use help - so Iris darts home for one of Rudolph’s life jackets.   

Life jackets and Lucy Carter’s inability to swim were integral to “Lucy Rides The Rapids” (HL S2;E4), filmed on location on the Colorado River. 

Liz puts on the life jacket and dives into the pool. George agrees to take her to the beach - even though Liz failed to inflate Rudolph’s life jacket. She swam without help!  As soon as she realizes it, however....HELP!!!

HELP!!!  Lucy pretends not to be able to swim so that Ricky can pretend to save her, all to get the attention of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in “The Hedda Hopper Story” (ILL S4;E21). 

Lucy and Anthony Newley tread water in the Thames River in “Lucy in London” (1966).

Lucy and Desi relaxing in their pool at home in the 1940s. 

[papermoonloveslucy]

BE YOUR HUSBAND’S BEST FRIEND

December 4, 1948

“Be Your Husband’s Best Friend” (aka “Be a Pal to Your Husband”) is episode #21 of the radio series MY FAVORITE HUSBAND broadcast on December 4, 1948.

Synopsis ~ Liz buys a book that says that the way to get along with your husband is to share all of his interests. With that in mind, she joins him in a poker game and tags along on a camping trip. 

Note: This episode was aired before the characters names were changed from Cugat to Cooper. It was also before Jell-O came aboard to sponsor the show and before the regular cast featured Bea Benadaret and Gale Gordon as the Atterburys.

The script was also re-written as a 1950 episode of “My Favorite Husband” also titled “Be a Pal” and broadcast June 18, 1950. This was to account for the change in the characters surnames from Cugat to Cooper. 

This program was also the basis for the “I Love Lucy” episode "Be a Pal" (ILL S1;E2) filmed on September 21, 1951 and first aired on October 22, 1951.  The main difference is the radio versions do not include the famous Carmen Miranda lipsynch scene.  

This radio version also contains story elements in its second half that were later incorporated into “The Camping Trip” (ILL S2;E29). 

“My Favorite Husband” was based on the novels Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, the Record of a Happy Marriage (1940) and Outside Eden (1945) by Isabel Scott Rorick, which had previously been adapted into the film Are Husbands Necessary? (1942). “My Favorite Husband” was first broadcast as a one-time special on July 5, 1948. Lucille Ball and Lee Bowman played the characters of Liz and George Cugat, and a positive response to this broadcast convinced CBS to launch “My Favorite Husband” as a series. Bowman was not available Richard Denning was cast as George. On January 7, 1949, confusion with bandleader Xavier Cugat prompted a name change to Cooper. On this same episode Jell-O became its sponsor. A total of 124 episodes of the program aired from July 23, 1948 through March 31, 1951. After about ten episodes had been written, writers Fox and Davenport departed and three new writers took over – Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and head writer/producer Jess Oppenheimer. In March 1949 Gale Gordon took over the existing role of George’s boss, Rudolph Atterbury, and Bea Benaderet was added as his wife, Iris. CBS brought “My Favorite Husband” to television in 1953, starring Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson as Liz and George Cooper. The television version ran two-and-a-half seasons, from September 1953 through December 1955, running concurrently with “I Love Lucy.” It was produced live at CBS Television City for most of its run, until switching to film for a truncated third season filmed (ironically) at Desilu and recasting Liz Cooper with Vanessa Brown.

MAIN CAST

Lucille Ball (Liz Cugat) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. “My Favorite Husband” eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon.

Richard Denning (George Cugat) was born Louis Albert Heindrich Denninger Jr., in Poughkeepsie, New York. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to Los Angeles. Plans called for him to take over his father’s garment manufacturing business, but he developed an interest in acting. Denning enlisted in the US Navy during World War II. He is best known for his  roles in various science fiction and horror films of the 1950s. Although he teamed with Lucille Ball on radio in “My Favorite Husband,” the two never acted together on screen. While “I Love Lucy” was on the air, he was seen on another CBS TV series, “Mr. & Mrs. North.” From 1968 to 1980 he played the Governor on “Hawaii 5-0″, his final role. He died in 1998 at age 84.

Ruth Perrott (Katie, the Maid) was also later seen on “I Love Lucy.” She first played Mrs. Pomerantz, a member of the surprise investigating committee for the Society Matrons League in “Pioneer Women” (ILL S1;E25), as one of the member of the Wednesday Afternoon Fine Arts League in “Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress” (ILL S3;E3), and also played a nurse when “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” (ILL S2;E16). She died in 1996 at the age of 96.

In this episode we learn the names of all seven of Katie’s ex-husbands: Clarence, Peter, Harold, Oscar, Engelbert, and Yancy.

Bob LeMond (Announcer) also served as the announcer for the pilot episode of “I Love Lucy”. When the long-lost pilot was finally discovered in 1990, a few moments of the opening narration were damaged and lost, so LeMond – fifty years later – recreated the narration for the CBS special and subsequent DVD release.

GUEST CAST

Hans Conried (Professor Philpot Millmoss) first co-starred with Lucille Ball in The Big Street (1942). He then appeared on “I Love Lucy” as used furniture man Dan Jenkins in “Redecorating” (ILL S2;E8) and later that same season as Percy Livermore in “Lucy Hires an English Tutor” (ILL S2;E13) – both in 1952. The following year he began an association with Disney by voicing Captain Hook in Peter Pan. On “The Lucy Show” he played Professor Gitterman in “Lucy’s Barbershop Quartet” (TLS S1;E19) and in “Lucy Plays Cleopatra” (TLS S2;E1). He was probably best known as Uncle Tonoose on “Make Room for Daddy” starring Danny Thomas, which was filmed on the Desilu lot. He joined Thomas on a season 6 episode of “Here’s Lucy” in 1973. He died in 1982 at age 64.

Conried will recreate this role in 1950, when the script is rewritten for the Coopers as “Be A Pal.”  The only difference is that his first name is Philip, not Philpot.  On television, the author remains off screen throughout. 

Joseph Kearns (Joe, Poker Player) appeared on “I Love Lucy” as the psychiatrist in “The Kleptomaniac” (ILL S1;E27) and later played the theatre manager in “Lucy’s Night in Town” (ILL S6;E22). His most famous role was as Mr. Wilson on TV’s “Dennis the Menace” (1959). When he passed away during the show’s final season, Lucy regular Gale Gordon took over for him, playing his brother.

In future iterations of this script, this character’s dialogue is assumed by Mr. Atterbury (Gale Gordon) and on TV by Fred Mertz (William Frawley). 

John Hiestand (Cory Cartwright) served as the announcer for the radio show “Let George Do It” from 1946 to 1950. In 1955 he did an episode of “Our Miss Brooks” opposite Gale Gordon. Cory was a regular character who was eventually written out of the series when the Atterbury’s (Gale Gordon and Bea Bendaret) were introduced.

Jean Vander Pyl (Marge) is best known as the voice of Wilma Flintstone for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon “The Flintstones.” Coincidentally, Wilma’s best friend was voiced by Bea Benadaret, who will later play Iris Atterbury, Liz’s best friend on “My Favorite Husband.” On radio she was heard on such programs as “The Halls of Ivy” (1950–52) and on “Father Knows Best” before it moved to TV.  She died in 1999 at age 79.

THE EPISODE

ANNOUNCER: “Let’s look in on the Cugats and see what they’re doing. Oh, but hold your hats. Liz and George are having an argument about their plans for their evening. Liz wants to go to a symphony concert and George wants to have a poker game! (As a fight announcer) And in this corner  wearing a pink satin housecoat and weighing 120 pounds, ‘Battling Liz Cugat.’ And in this corner wearing a grey pinstripe suit and weighing 170 pounds is her husband ‘Gorgeous George’. Well, the first round ended in a draw and here comes the second round!”

‘Gorgeous George’ was the stage name of professional wrestler George Raymond Wagner (1915–63), so named because of his long, blonde hair. He was mentioned on “I Love Lucy” in “Pioneer Women” (ILL S1;E25) and “Ricky’s Movie Offer” (ILL S4;E6).

Liz and George lament that they argue so much since getting married. George wonders why men have to wear formal clothes to a concert.

LIZ: “Because when they fall asleep the stiff shirt keeps them from falling over.”

In “Lucy the Music Lover” (TLS S1;E8) it was Lucy Carmichael, not her tuxedo-clad date, that fell asleep during a classical music concert. At least she didn’t drop her opera glasses! 

Liz turns on the waterworks, but George still refuses to go to the concert. 

GEORGE: “And I hope Leopold falls flat on his Stokowski!” 

Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) was one of the leading conductors of the early and mid-20th century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra and his appearance in Disney’s Fantasia (1940) with that orchestra. 

Liz tells Katie the Maid she will be going to a woman’s club luncheon to hear a talk about marriage. Katie tells her that she has been married six times: Peter, Harold, Oscar, Engelbert, and Yancy, which she remembers because it spells out ‘P.H.O.E.Y’. She’s intentionally left off her first husband Clarence because it wouldn’t spell ‘phoey’!  

At their club luncheon, Liz and Marge (Jean Vander Pyl) listen to a guest speaker talk about “How To Be Happy, Though Married”. Professor Philpot Millmoss (Hans Conried) suggests the ladies be a pal to their husbands. Liz wonders why it has to be the woman who gives in - but Millmoss tells her to consult his new book on sale at the door for seventy nine cents.  

Note: In the 1950 revision, Marge was replaced with Iris (Bea Benadaret), but the author was still played by Hans Conried. In the television version, the author remains off screen and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) takes the Marge / Iris lines. 

Liz resolves to employ the “Be A Pal Treatment” with George and sits beside him to read the evening newspaper. Liz pretends to be interested in the sports section.

LIZ (reading): “Williams Bags Crown By TKO in eighth.″

Liz pronounces TKO phonetically as ‘Tuh-Ko” although George corrects her. The exchange was repeated verbatim between Lucy and Ricky in “The Camping Trip.”

LIZ (reading): “Midget Racing! They oughta be ashamed making those little men run around the track.”

George sarcastically calls Liz Ted Husing, and then Red Barbar.

Ted Husing (1901-62) was one of CBS Radio’s most popular sportscasters. By 1950 his salary was an astronomical million dollars!  Red Barber (1908-92) was a play-by-play announcer for major league baseball, then announcing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and holding down his own CBS TV sports show “Red Barber’s Club House.”

LIZ (reading): “They’re racing little girls! It says so right here,‘Yesterday at Tanforan a race was won by a three year-old maiden!’  She certainly was carrying a lot of money for a little girl. She had $2,000 in her purse.”

The line is virtually identical on television, except that Tanforan (a horse racetrack outside San Francisco) was changed to the more familiar Churchill Downs.

George / Ricky then refers to Liz / Lucy as Grantland Rice (1880–1954), a sportswriter known for his elegant prose, although the reference was removed for TV syndication when Rice died in 1954. It was restored for the DVD release. Clueless Liz / Lucy think he is a food!

Liz is determined to join in the poker game that evening, despite not knowing anything about the card game. Lucy also tried this tactic in the television version of “Be A Pal”.  The other poker players are Joe (Joseph Kearns) and Cory Cartwright (John Hiestand), George’s bachelor friend.

In the 1950 radio re-write, Joe was voiced by Hans Conried (doubling with Millmoss) and Gale Gordon as Mr. Atterbury, a role previously played in earlier episodes by Hans Conried. On television, the poker players were Fred Mertz (William Frawley), Hank (Richard Reeves, left) and Charlie (Tony Michaels, right). 

LIZ CUGAT / LIZ COOPER / LUCY RICARDO (looking over her cards): “There’s her sister! What do you have?”

JOE / MR. ATTERBURY / FRED: “I shouldn’t talk, but tell your two Andrews Sisters not to wait up for LaVerne!”

The Andrews Sisters were a close-harmony singing group most popular during World War II. In 1969 Lucy played LaVerne Andrews on an episode of “Here’s Lucy” that guest-starred Patty Andrews as herself. Lucie Arnaz took the role of the third Andrews sister, Maxene.

A few days later, George confides in Cory that Liz has been driving him crazy by sticking to his side like glue, trying to be interested in everything that he is. George decides to go away on a camping trip to get away from her for a while. Cory suggests that George take Liz with him and make the trip so rigorous that she will regret trying to ‘be a pal’. 

At the end of Act One, there is a public service announcement about NATO - the newly-formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 

Katie warns Liz about her husband’s plan, having overheard George and Cory talking.  Liz spills the beans to Cory and blackmails him to turn the tables on George at the campsite.  

Liz and George engage in a fishing contest, just like Lucy and Ricky in “The Camping Trip”.  When Liz pretends to know all about fishing, George calls her sarcastically dubs her Izaak Walton. 

Izaak Walton (1594-1683) was an English writer known for The Compleat Angler (1653), a famous prose and poetry celebration of fishing. His name was mentioned by Mr. Mooney before ‘fishing’ for Viv’s glasses in “The Loophole in the Lease” (TLS S2;E12) in 1963. 

Once George is out of sight, Cory arrives with some store-bought fish to fool George. 

LIZ: “Throw them to me, Cory. That way I can tell George I caught 'em.”

George and Liz decide to bet on who can hike back to the campsite fastest. Luckily, Liz has Cory waiting in a car to assure that she wins! 

Back at camp, Liz is patiently waiting for George, who trudges in weary and parched. Liz confesses that she got back so early she had time to wash her hair so there is no water. 

Next morning Liz and Cory conspire to make George think she’s an expert duck hunter and sharp-shooter!  Liz takes aim at the tree, and on cue Cory tosses a duck at her feet. 

GEORGE: “I don’t get it. Liz. First you catch a Lake Trout in a stream, now you shoot a duck marked Birds Eye Frozen Foods!”

In the early 1900s, Clarence Frank Birdseye II of Montclair, New Jersey, received patents for the development of improved methods to freeze fish for commercial production. In 1922, he formed a company, Birdseye Seafood, Inc., Birdseye created a new company, General Seafood Corporation, to promote this method. In 1929, Birdseye sold his company and patents for $22 million to General Foods Corporation which founded the Birds Eye Frozen Food Company.  Although primarily marketing frozen vegetables, they have occasionally sold other foods as well.  

A target practice ensues where a discretely hidden away Cory clangs an anvil every time Liz shoots at a distant horseshoe. A suspicious George gets wise to Cory and Liz’s scheme and trains his rifle on on the tree. A frightened Cory comes down but all ends happily. 

LIZ (to George): “Let’s not be pals or companions. Let’s not be even be friends anymore. Let’s just go back to being man and wife.”

In the bedtime tag, Liz tries to wake a sleeping George. She sees a note pinned to his chest that says:

DEAR PAL. YES, I AM ASLEEP. I TOOK A SLEEPING PILL TO MAKE SURE OF IT. GOOD NIGHT.

LIZ: “Aww...isn’t he cute? Goodnight, George.” 

[papermoonloveslucy]

LOVE AMONG THE TWO-BY-FOURS

S1;E3 ~ October 4, 1986

[Photo © Getty Images]

Directed by Mark Daniels ~ Written by Linda Morris and Vic Rauseo

Synopsis

Lucy's old flame Ben comes to town looking to enlist M&B Hardware as a supplier. Lucy and Ben rekindle their old romance, which causes Lucy to have to make a difficult decision about her future.

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Barker), Gale Gordon (Curtis McGibbon), Ann Dusenberry (Margo Barker McGibbon),  Larry Anderson (Ted McGibbon), Jenny Lewis (Becky McGibbon), Philip Amelio (Kevin McGibbon), Donovan Scott (Leonard Stoner)

[For biographies of the Regular Cast, see “One Good Grandparent Deserves Another” (S1;E1)]

Guest Cast

Peter Graves (Ben Marshall) is perhaps best remembered for playing Jim Phelps in the Desilu-produced spy drama “Mission: Impossible” from 1967 to 1973. His screen acting career began in 1951, the same year “I Love Lucy” premiered. Graves won an Emmy Award as the host and narrator of “Biography” (1987-2002). In 1980, he turned to comedy with the film Airplane! and its sequel. Graves died of a heart attack on March 14, 2010, just four days before his 84th birthday.

Although the final credits list the character's surname as Marshall, he is referred to throughout the episode as Ben Matthews. Ben is president of the Beechwood Construction Company. He is a widower who has three grandchildren and lives in Beverly Hills. 

Curtis Taylor (Joe) started acting on television in 1980. He played Arnie on five episodes of “Knotts Landing” in 1988. More recently, he appeared on a 2017 episode of “NCIS: Los Angeles.”  

Ed Bernard (Tony) was born on Independence Day in Philadelphia in 1939. He played Detective Styles on “Police Woman” (1974-78) and Principal Willis on “The White Shadow” (1978-80).  

Joe and Tony are construction workers for Beechwood Construction Company. Although given names in the final credits, only Tony's is used in the dialogue. The two characters are there to establish the tarp over the hole in the floor that Lucy and Peter Graves will sink into at the end of the show.

This was the sixth episode filmed but was the third aired. After John Ritter's appearance the previous week, Ball hoped to continue to woo viewers with the star-power of Peter Graves.  

The title of the episode is a variation of Robert Browning's 1855 poem, “Love Among the Ruins.” Browning's poem inspired or gave its title to many subsequent works, including a painting by Edward Burne-Jones (above), a 1975 TV movie with Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier, an episode of the TV series “Mad Men,” and an album and song by the band 10,000 Maniacs. The title of the poem is also made the title of a 1953 novella by British satirist Evelyn Waugh.

Lucillle Ball was featured on the cover of TV Guide the day this episode first aired. She shared the cover with Andy Griffith, who returned to series television with “Matlock.” Griffith's show fared much better than “Life With Lucy,” running nine seasons on NBC. Griffith had played Andy Johnson on an episode of “Here's Lucy” in 1973. “The Andy Griffith Show” was shot on the Desilu backlot.

This episode lost its time slot earning a 10.2 share behind “The Facts of Life” on NBC with a 15.2.

Although they are supposed to be playing characters of the same age, Lucille Ball was actually 15 years older than guest star Peter Graves.

This is the first of six “Life With Lucy” episodes directed by Marc Daniels, who directed the very first episode of “I Love Lucy” and 38 subsequent episodes. He is credited with suggesting to Desi Arnaz that Vivian Vance might be right for the role of Ethel Mertz. In a 1977 interview, Daniels noted that he left “I Love Lucy” to take another job that paid more. "Maybe it was a stupid thing to do but then we didn't know we were creating history. We were just doing a show." Daniels died at age 77, just three days before Lucille Ball, who also died at age 77 from a heart-related illness.  

This is the only time on the series that Lucille Ball wears a dress, rather than slacks, a housecoat or bathrobe.

At the start of the episode, Leonard is fooling around with a shower head display in the hardware store, pretending he is Scotty (James Doughan) on “Star Trek”: “Captain Kirk! Captain Kirk, it's Scotty here. Captain, the hardware ship Enterprise – it's losing power!”  “Star Trek” (1966-69) was a Desilu-produced show that owes its existence to Lucille Ball.  

Curtis: “I may become the bathroom king of Pasadena!”

We learn that Lucy Barker's maiden name is Everett. This is the first of her TV character that did not have the maiden name McGillicuddy. However, on “The Lucy Show” Lucy Carmichael first said she was originally Lucy Taylor. Later in the series she inexplicably claimed it was McGillicuddy.

Lucy calls Ben Matthews 'Goofy,' his high school nickname because he had an overbite and his ears drooped. This is a reference to the Disney animated dog Goofy, who shared these physical characteristics. Perhaps Ben had plastic surgery, because the description doesn’t match the handsome Peter Graves. 

Lucy: “I feel like a kid again!”

Lucy and Ben first met during a dance called the Big Apple. The dance dates back to the African American ritual dances of the mid-1800s. The name comes from its revival in the 1930s at The Big Apple Club in Columbia, South Carolina. In 1937 it became a national dance craze. It was mentioned in the films You Can't Take it With You (1938), Vivacious Lady (1938), and The Big Broadcast of 1938. The dance was first mentioned on “The Lucy Show” in “Lucy Becomes a  Reporter” (TLS S1;E17) in 1963 which dealt with Lucy Carmichael and Viv Bagley's high school days.  

Later in the episode, Lucy and Ben demonstrate the Big Apple. After their 'performance' (to one of Lucy's old records), Kevin mentions the dance craze of the 1980s, break dancing, while Margo and Ted demonstrate 'The Monkey' and 'The Swim', two dances that were popular with teens in the 1960s.  

Lucy and Ben dated for a year, until his family moved East.  

Lucy: (gazing at herself in a mirror) “I still have it!”

Lucy says Ben was her first kiss, which prompts Margo to remember that her first kiss with Randy Fargo, whose lips were all spongy; like two Twinkies.

When Becky is practicing kissing with a hand mirror, she says she looks “a little like Madonna, but a lot like a fish.”

Margo: (To Lucy) “Do you remember when I was 13, and all my girlfriends were going stead. Finally Randy Fargo asked me to go steady.  Do you remember what you told me?”

Lucy: “Yeah, I told you there was no future in the name Margo Fargo.”

Ben brings Lucy to a construction site for their date, packing a picnic with their favorite bubbly, chateau de Dr. Pepper. Ben brings along a mini-tape player to play their favorite song, “Too Marvelous for Words.” The song was written in 1937 by Johnny Mercer, with lyrics (that we don't hear) by Richard Whiting. Lucy and Ben dance among the two-by-fours, fulfilling the title!  

Lucy: (eating a chocolate chip cookie) “If this gets around my name'll be mud at the Happy Fig Health Food Store.”

In two episodes of “The Lucy Show” Lucy Carmichael dated Frank Winslow (Clint Walker) who owned a construction company and also took Lucy on a date to a construction site.  

In “Milton Berle Hides out at the Ricardos” (LDCH 1959), a construction site also figures into the comic finale.

Margo stays up and waits for Lucy to come home from her date just the same way Lucy Carmichael stayed up and waited for her daughter in the very first “The Lucy Show” “Lucy Waits Up for Chris” (TLS S1;E1).

This Day in Lucy History ~ October 4th

"The Business Manager" (ILL S4;E1) – October 4, 1954

"Lucy and Mannix Are Held Hostage" (HL S4;E4) – October 4, 1971

[papermoonloveslucy]

LUCY GIVES EDDIE ALBERT THE OLD SONG AND DANCE

S6;E6 ~ October 15, 1973

Directed by Coby Ruskin ~ Written by Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Davis

Synopsis

When producing a charity show, Lucy asks Eddie Albert to star in it.  At the same time, a woman meeting Lucy’s description has been stalking Albert.  

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Carter), Gale Gordon (Harrison Otis Carter)

Lucie Arnaz (Kim Carter) does not appear in this episode, nor does she receive credit in the opening titles. Despite her absence, the final credits do state “Lucie Arnaz Wardrobe by Alroe.”

Guest Cast

Eddie Albert (Himself) began his TV career years before electronic television was introduced to the public. In June of 1936 Eddie appeared in RCA’s first private live performance for their radio licensees in New York City, a very early experimental television system. He first worked with Lucille Ball in the 1950 movie The Fuller Brush Girl. Today he is perhaps best known for playing lawyer turned farmer Oliver Douglas on CBS’s “Green Acres” (1965-71). He was nominated for two Oscars as Supporting Actor, in 1954 for Roman Holiday and 1972 for The Heartbreak Kid. He died in 2005 at age 99.  

Mary Jane Croft (Mary Jane Lewis, left) played Betty Ramsey during season six of “I Love Lucy. ” She also played Cynthia Harcourt in “Lucy is Envious” (ILL S3;E23) and Evelyn Bigsby in “Return Home from Europe” (ILL S5;E26). She played Audrey Simmons on “The Lucy Show” but when Lucy Carmichael moved to California, she played Mary Jane Lewis, the actor’s married name and the same one she uses on all 31 of her episodes of “Here’s Lucy. Her final acting credit was playing Midge Bowser on “Lucy Calls the President” (1977). She died in 1999 at the age of 83. 

Vanda Barra (Vanda Barra, right) makes one of over two dozen appearances on “Here’s Lucy” as well as appearing in Ball’s two 1975 TV movies “Lucy Gets Lucky” and “Three for Two”. She was seen in half a dozen episodes of “The Lucy Show.” Barra was Lucille Ball’s cousin-in-law by marriage to Sid Gould.

Doris Singleton (Patty) created the role of Caroline Appleby on “I Love Lucy,” although she was known as Lillian Appleby in the first of her ten appearances. She made two appearances on “The Lucy Show.” This is the second of her four appearances on “Here’s Lucy.”  She was originally intended to be a series regular but was written out after the first episode.

The character’s name is not used in the dialogue but is listed in the final credits.

Jerry Hausner (Jimmy) was featured as Jerry, Ricky’s agent in the pilot and first three seasons of “I Love Lucy.”  He left the show after a disagreement with Desi Arnaz. He returned to work with Lucille Ball in “Lucy is a Soda Jerk” (TLS S1;E23), shortly after Desi Arnaz resigned as Executive Producer and President of Desilu.  This is is his only “Here’s Lucy” appearance and his last time on screen with Lucille Ball.  He was seen in three episodes of “Green Acres” with Eddie Albert.

“Green Acres” is mentioned in the dialogue of the episode. Eddie Albert’s co-star on “Green Acres,” Eva Gabor, guest-starred in two episodes of “Here’s Lucy.” Many other “Lucy” actors appeared in Hooterville.  Among them, Barbara Pepper (30 episodes), Eleanor Audley (19 episodes), Robert Foulk (16 episodes), Jonathan Hole (7 episodes), Shirley Mitchell (4 episodes), Parley Baer (4 episodes), Jerry Hausner (3 episodes), Jesse White (2 episodes), John J. Fox (2 episodes), Roy Roberts (2 episodes), Maurice Marsac, Lou Krugman, Bob Jellison, Norman Leavitt, Romo Vincent, Elvia Allman, Gail Bonney, Ray Kellogg, Irwin Charone, Bernie Kopell, Charles Lane, Alan Hale Jr., Robert Carson, Jerome Cowan, William Lanteau, Paul Bradley, Leoda Richards, Hans Moebus, and Rich Little.  

An office scene between Lucy and Harry was originally written for “Lucy, the Peacemaker” (S5;E3) but deleted for time.  It was re-staged for this episode.  

Lucille begins to wear longer wigs again after having worn shorter styles earlier in the season.

Lucy, Mary Jane, and Vanda are having a lunch meeting to plan their annual “Girl Friday Follies,” a show that raises money to send underprivileged kids to camp. Taking Lucy’s suggestion to find a “big name”, Mary Jane suggests Engelbert Humperdinck – the ‘biggest’ name she’s ever heard.  The English singing sensation was previously mentioned on “Lucy and Liberace” (S2;E16) and “Lucy and Ann-Margret” (S2;E20) where Lucy mispronounced his name as 'Pumpernickel’ and 'Dumperhink.’

Looking at his desk, littered with food items from the girls’ lunch, Harry laments that he “missed the Iowa State Picnic.”  The Iowa State Picnic is an annual event that started in 1900 and was held in Long Beach, California, which was nicknamed “Iowa by the Sea.” They were attended by Iowans who had transplanted to the area in order to share their common roots. With attendance dwindling, in 2014 the picnic moved from Long Beach to San Pedro where the USS Iowa is docked.   

To find a star, Lucy looks at Joyce Haber’s column in the newspaper. Joyce Haber was the gossip columnist of the Los Angeles Times. She made an appearance (above) as a member of the Hollywood Press when “Lucy Meets the Burtons” (S3;E1) in 1970.  

Haber’s column mentions that Frank Sinatra is coming out of retirement.  In 1970, the singer went into a self-imposed retirement that lasted until 1973 with the release of the album “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back.”  Sinatra was first mentioned on “I Love Lucy” in 1955 and his named has been dropped on both “The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy.” Sinatra inadvertently appeared on “I Love Lucy” when a clip of him in the film Guys and Dolls was inserted into the MGM Executives Show in “Lucy and the Dummy” (ILL S5;E3) when it was running short.  The clip has since been removed and has never been seen in the context of the episode after its initial broadcast.

Lucy says she saw Eddie Albert in The Music Man. In 1959, Albert replaced Robert Preston in the  Broadway production of The Music Man. Coincidentally, the show’s author Meredith Willson was from Iowa, where the musical is set, and attended the 1959 Iowa State Picnic to lead the Long Beach Band playing the show’s rousing anthem “76 Trombones.”

When a preoccupied Lucy is idle at her desk, she tells Harry she’s worried about Eddie Albert. Harry tells her to get busy and let Margo worry about Eddie Albert. Margo Albert was a Mexican-American actress born as María Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O'Donnell – so she simply went by the singular moniker Margo. Coincidentally, he was related by marriage to band leader Xavier Cugat, as niece of his first marriage to Carmen Castillo. Cugat was a mentor of Desi Arnaz’s and often mentioned as a rival of Ricky Ricardo. Margo appeared in a 1958 installment of “The Westinghouse-Desilu Playhouse” with Eddie Albert which was hosted by Desi Arnaz. The following year, she was seen in another installment with Arnaz as a co-star.  

Margo’s black and white photo is behind the sofa of Albert’s living room. Next to it is a photo of Albert’s son, Edward Laurence Heimberger (aka Eddie Albert Jr.), age 23.  In 1972, he was launched to fame from his portrayal of blind Don Baker in Butterflies are Free, for which he won a Golden Globe. He died of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2006, one year after his father’s passing.

When Lucy unexpectedly arrives on Eddie Albert’s doorstep he believes her to be his stalker, so Patty is sent to phone for the police. She rushes from the room saying “I feel like I’m on 'Mannix’!”  “Mannix” (1967-75) was a Desilu-produced TV show that was saved from cancellation after its first season by Lucille Ball. “Here’s Lucy” hosted a cross-over episode with “Mannix” in 1971 that also featured Mary Jane Croft and Gale Gordon. It, too, was written and directed by Ruskin, Davis, and Carroll.  

Trying to convince Eddie to change his conflict date and do the show, Lucy breaks into “There’s a Long, Long Trail” and then Albert joins in, harmonizing. At the end of the scene Harry, Mary Jane, and Vanda all join in.  The song was written by Stoddard King and Alonzo Elliott in 1913. In an episode of “The Lucy Show,” Lucy Carmichael and Viv sing the first two lines of the chorus in a failed attempt to entertain their kids after their TV set breaks down. The song’s title may have also influenced the title of the Lucille Ball / Desi Arnaz film The Long, Long Trailer (1953). 

“The Girl Friday Follies”

Mary Jane: “Nostalgia’s so old fashioned.”

The Girl Friday Follies opens with Mary Jane and Vanda taking their bows as the team of “Crime and Punishment”.  We never see what the act consists of, but it is likely not connected to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel of the same name.  

Eddie Albert: “To know Harry is to love him!” Lucy: “I don’t think we’re talking about the same Harry.”

For the finale, Lucy and Eddie Albert perform “Makin’ Whoopee” written by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson.  The song was first popularized by Eddie Cantor in the 1928 musical Whoopee!  For the first time since her skiing accident, Lucy dances on television.

In her DVD introduction of the episode, Shirley Mitchell calls the show “old home week.” 

Aside from Lucy’s reunion with Eddie Albert from The Fuller Brush Girl, she also shares the sound stage with three members of the cast of “I Love Lucy”… 

Shirley Mitchell (Carolyn Appleby)… 

Mary Jane Croft (Betty Ramsey)… 

and Jerry Hausner (Jerry the Agent).  

The episode is written by the “I Love Lucy” scribes Madelyn (Pugh) Davis and Bob Carroll Jr.

Lucy says she saw Eddie Albert’s house on a tour of the movie stars homes. Mary Jane asks Lucy if that was the tour where she sneaked into Rock Hudson’s backyard to steal an orange. This is a variation on when Lucy Ricardo took a tour of the movie stars homes and sneaked over Richard Widmark’s wall to steal a grapefruit in “The Tour” (ILL S4;E30). 

Rock Hudson played himself on an episode titled “In Palm Springs” (ILL S4;E26). Rock Hudson is mentioned again later, when Patty reveals that the same woman who has been stalking Eddie Albert has also been bothering Rock Hudson.

Vanda asks if it is the same tour where she saw Dean Martin in his bathrobe dumping empty bottles in the trash?  Although this even never happened on screen, Lucy Carmichael did date Dean Martin on “The Lucy Show.”  

Where the Floor Ends!  In the office, the camera pulls back for a wide shot that exposes where the wall-to-wall carpet ends and the cement stage floor begins. 

“Lucy Gives Eddie Albert the Old Song and Dance” rates 3 Paper Hearts out of 5

This episode is enjoyable for “I Love Lucy” (or Eddie Albert) fans. It is good to see so many folks from Lucille Ball’s past in one episode!    

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LUCY'S GREEN THUMB

Unaired Episode {originally scheduled for broadcast December 6, 1986}

[Photos © Getty Images]

Directed by Marc Daniels ~ Written by Mark Tuttle

Synopsis

Lucy's energy drink breakfast is so unpalatable that the entire family dump it into a potted plant. When they come home, the plant has tripled in size. Realizing that Lucy may have invented a new miracle fertilizer, the pressure is on for her to recreate the concoction. But when Lucy can't recall the recipe, Curtis's dreams of fame and fortune wilt.

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Barker), Gale Gordon (Curtis McGibbon), Ann Dusenberry (Margo Barker McGibbon),  Larry Anderson (Ted McGibbon), Jenny Lewis (Becky McGibbon), Philip Amelio (Kevin McGibbon), Donovan Scott (Leonard Stoner)

[For biographies of the Regular Cast, see “One Good Grandparent Deserves Another” (S1;E1)]

Guest Cast

Jerry Prell (Reporter) was seen on television in “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “The Young and the Restless.”  Off screen he was active with New England Academy of Theater and the Hartford Conservatory.

Doris Hess (Woman with a Sick Swedish Ivy) played Tina on three episodes of “Happy Days” and small roles on “Laverne and Shirley.” Hess was particularly busy in ADR (automated dialogue replacement).  

The woman's Swedish Ivy is named Helga.

Stuart Shostak (Stuart, Photographer) took a class taught by Lucille Ball in 1979 and subsequently went to work as her personal film archivist from 1981 until her death in 1989. This is his only screen acting credit. He also served as Assistant to the Producers and warm-up comedian for the series.

The reporter calls Stuart by his real first name.  

Melvin, Agnes, and Helga (Potted Plants)

Others at the press conference are played by uncredited background performers.

This episode was filmed ninth, but scheduled to be the eleventh one broadcast. It went before the cameras on October 21, 1986.

This is the only episode written by Mark Tuttle, who was also a writer on “Three's Company,” one of Lucille Ball's favorite shows. His career started in 1963 writing for “The Beverly Hillbillies.” He had worked with director Mark Daniels on two episodes of the TV series “Private Benjamin” (1981-82).  

On December 2, 1986, just two weeks after “Life Was Lucy” was canceled, Desi Arnaz Sr. died from lung cancer at the age of 69. His final screen appearance was on “The David Letterman Show” in 1983.  These two events devastated Lucille Ball and she became despondent.

Lucy: “I'm just a big flop.”

On December 6, 1986, “Life With Lucy” (and ABC's entire Saturday night line-up) was replaced by Christmas specials.

Curtis: “I'm just going to be a small businessman with a small store.”

In this episode,Curtis becomes obsessed with making money, just like his previous “Lucy” characters Alvin Littlefield (“I Love Lucy”), Mr. Mooney (“The Lucy Show”), and Harrison Carter (“Here's Lucy”, above).

The very first time Lucille Ball was seen on “Life With Lucy” she was carrying a potted plant (a schefflera). Lucy was afraid it had spider mites.

Lucy: (To Melvin) “The free ride is over!  You either get growin' or get goin'!”  

The living room now is home to two potted plants: Agnes (on the coffee table) and Melvin (on the table behind the sofa). Lucy begins the episode saying good morning to Agnes.  Hearing Lucy say “Agnes” reminds us of Mame, the 1974 film in which one of the major characters was named Agnes Gooch (Jane Connell).

Lucy: “My mind is a blank!” Curtis: “We know that!”

Unbeknownst to Lucy, the entire family dumps Lucy's healthy breakfast (a super-strength organic energy drink) into Melvin's pot rather than swallow it. When they come home, Melvin has tripled in size!

It is worth noting that a man named Melvin Frank directed Lucille Ball in the 1960 film The Facts of Life. [The plant behind Lucy is mere coincidence!] 

Margo: (about Melvin's growth spurt) What could have made it grow so fast?” Kevin: “I know. (pointing up) Aliens!”

This episode slightly resembles the 1960 film (and stage and screen musical) Little Shop of Horrors, in which a plant mysteriously grows to enormous size. The plant's origins are also attributed to aliens! In this case, instead of blood, its life-force is derived from Lucy's energy drink. The musical film was released on December 19, 1986, just two weeks after this episode was scheduled to air, but the stage musical had been playing off-Broadway since 1982 and would out-last “Life With Lucy” by a full year.  

Curtis comes up with the name Gigant-a-Grow for Lucy's miraculous growth potion.

Curtis: “From now on, when you hear the name McGibbon, you'll think fertilizer!”

Margo tells her mother that thanks to her discovery she'll be in the encyclopedia next to Luther Burbank. Luther Burbank (1849-1926) was a pioneering horticulturalist who developed more than 800 varieties of new plants in his career. A Californian, many schools and public buildings have been named after him. In 1986 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Curtis promises Leonard three weeks paid vacation. He plans to go to Hawaii to lie on the beach. This is the third mention of Hawaii in the series. In the first episode, Curtis had just returned from vacationing there and in the second episode guest star John Ritter says that his wife is Hawaii with the kids. Hawaii was a popular destination with Lucille Ball and her sitcom characters. It was also a favorite get-away destination of the Arnaz family, has been mentioned since the early days of “I Love Lucy”, even before it officially became a state!

On the telephone, Curtis asks a reporter if they've got a connection with “60 Minutes.” He thinks the story of Lucy's Gigant-a-Grow would be perfect for Morley Safer. The CBS TV prime time news magazine show began airing in 1968, the same year as “Here's Lucy.” Safer was a host of “60 Minutes” from 1968 until his death in 2016.  

Lucy briefly does her famous 'spider' face “ewww” when Curtis threatens to get the formula out of her head “one way or another.” Unfortunately, the moment is obscured by background music fading out to commercial and the omnipresent laugh track.

The recipe for Lucy's 11th attempt at duplicating Gigant-a-Grow:

1 ounce of ginseng extract

3 drops of lecithin

gobs of garlic powder

wonderful (God-given) wheat germ

yeast to rise it to heaven

blend on high

In “Ethel's Home Town” (ILL S4;E15) a old vaudeville gag makes it appear that a potted plant grows into a tall tree – all behind the back of Ethel Mae Potter (we never forgot her)!  

When the Ricardo's rent their Connecticut home to the Williams family in “Lucy Makes Room for Danny” (LDCH 1958), Lucy is worried if they will take care of her houseplants. When Ricky finds out she's been rescuing them against his wishes, she physically demonstrates how badly wilted they'd become.

In “Lucy's Mystery Guest” (TLS S6;E10) Lucy Carmichael is plant-sitting for a neighbor when her health nut Aunt (Mary Wickes) sprays the plant for bugs, and it promptly wilts. 

In “Lucy and Mannix are Held Hostage” (HL S4;E4) Lucy Carter suddenly starts naming and talking to her plants. Their names are Ruthie, Hugo, and Priscilla. Ruthie meets an untimely end when she is tossed out a window in an attempt to stop a robbery.  

This Day in Lucy History {had this episode aired as planned on December 6th}

"Ricky's Contract" (ILL S4;E10) – December 6, 1954

"Lucy Saves Milton Berle" (TLS S4;E12) – December 6, 1965

"Lucy in the Jungle" (HL S4;E13) – December 6, 1971

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LUCY, THE SHOPPING EXPERT

S1;E20 ~ February 17, 1969

Directed by Jack Donohue ~ Written by Milt Josefsberg and Al Schwartz

Synopsis

Craig gets a part-time job in a supermarket to earn money to buy a surfboard. At the same time, Lucy is giving Kim some valuable lessons in smart shopping. When the two accidentally converge, chaos ensues - naturally!

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Carter), Gale Gordon (Harrison Otis Carter), Lucie Arnaz (Kim Carter), Desi Arnaz Jr. (Craig Carter)

Guest Cast

William Lanteau (Mr. Sherwood, Supermarket Manager) first appeared with Lucille Ball in The Facts of Life (1960). In addition to an episode of “The Lucy Show,” Lanteau did four episodes of “Here’s Lucy.”  He is best remembered for playing Charlie the Mailman in the play and the film On Golden Pond (1981).

Mr. Sherwood is the winner of the Golden Can Award for his shelf arrangements.

Ernest Sarracino (Mr. Nicoletti, Produce Manager) played the Judge in “Lucy and the Runaway Butterfly” (TLS S1;E29), also directed by Jack Donohue. This is the first of his two episodes of “Here’s Lucy.”  His screen acting credits span from 1939 to 1994.

Although never actually referred to as Mr. Nicoletti, the character is credited in honor of Louis Nicoletti, a long-time member of the Desilu family who was the assistant director of “Here's Lucy” from 1968 to 1969, including this episode.  In addition to making on camera appearances on “I Love Lucy” and “The Lucy Show,” there were two characters named after him on “I Love Lucy.”  Here the character is played as a stereotypical Italian fruit vendor and speaks in Italian to Lucy: “You make-a da dent?  Dat's-a 39 cents!”  

Irwin Charone (Mr. Garfield, of the Nippy Whippy Whipped Cream Company) made five appearances on “The Lucy Show.” The expressive character actor also did an equal number of “Here’s Lucy” episodes. He died in January 2016 in Maplewood, New Jersey, at the age of 93.  

The restaurant patrons and supermarket shoppers are played by uncredited background players.

At the start of the episode Kim brings home ethnic foods because the grocer Mr. Goldapper recommended them.  This is an inside joke as Goldapper is Gary Morton's real last name.   Gary Morton's loud guffaw can be distinctly heard on the soundtrack throughout the episode.

Craig says he knows all about the facts of life since he was seven because he watched “Peyton Place.” Based on a 1956 novel, “Peyton Place” was a primetime soap opera that aired on ABC from 1964 to 1969. The title has become synonymous with the personal problems and scandals of small-town life.  It was mentioned several times on “The Lucy Show” including in “Lucy and Joan” (TLS S4;E4) which also took place in a supermarket.  

Instead of “Peyton Place,” Harry says he regrets wasting his time watching “Captain Kangaroo.”  “Captain Kangaroo” was a children’s television series that aired weekday mornings on CBS from October 1955 to December 1984. The Captain (Bob Keeshan, above right) would tell stories, meet guests, and indulge in silly stunts with regular characters, both humans and puppets. Captain Kangaroo was previously mentioned on several episodes of “The Lucy Show.”  

Gale Gordon's monologue about the birds and the bees is nearly four minutes long and gets a round of applause from the studio audience. It is highly unlikely that teenage Craig would let him go on so long when all he wants is $100! 

There is a poster in the supermarket featuring pumpkins and pilgrims so this episode was likely filmed in November 1968.

While most of the prop canned goods look like actual products, the cans of Chef Claudio's Ravioli Dinner look like something contrived by the Desilu prop department.  It is likely a tribute to director Claudio Guzman, who started with the company in 1958 and directed 15 episodes of “The Lucy Show.”  He was best known for his association with “I Dream of Jeannie” (1966-70).  Curiously, although they are visible on camera, they are never referred to in the dialogue – or at least it didn't make the final cut.

Some sample 1969 supermarket prices:

Cantaloupe Melons are 39 cents each.

Strawberries are 50 cents a pint basket.

Medium Eggs are 53 cents a dozen.  

Lucy says the store puts the nicest looking strawberries on top of the basket, but underneath “things can be as rotten as the Harper Valley PTA”!  “Harper Valley PTA" is a country song written by Tom T. Hall that was a hit single for Jeannie C. Riley in 1968. Riley's record sold over six million copies.  The song lyrics tell the story of a woman who is accused of immorality by her daughter's junior high PTA and how she gets her revenge on her hypocritical accusers. The song later gave life to a film (starring Barbara Eden) and a failed television series.  

When Lucy is sloshing the cans to hear how full they are, the clerk asks if she expects to hear Lawrence Welk.  Lawrence Welk (1903-92, above) was a musician, accordionist, bandleader, and television impresario, who hosted TV’s “The Lawrence Welk Show” from 1951 to 1982. Welk was mentioned several times on “The Lucy Show” and also on “Lucy's Birthday” (S1;E8).  Welk will play himself on a 1970 episode of “Here's Lucy” (above, with Vivian Vance). 

Later, when Lucy is holding up the eggs to the light, he tells her they are eggs, “not the Hope Diamond.” The Hope Diamond is one of the most famous jewels in the world, dating back almost four centuries. It is housed in the Smithsonian Institute.  

Lucy is never able to control nozzles and hoses – even on the tip of a can of whipped cream.  The end of the episode is actually a good excuse for a cream pie fight – without the pies!  

A banner in the supermarket advertises a “Storyland Sale” - whatever that may be!  The same banner was used in a supermarket in “Lucy and Joan” (TLS S4;E4).  

Lucy Carmichael also hangs around several different supermarkets to buy a lot of cans of Bailey's Beans for her get-rich-quick scheme in “Lucy the Bean Queen” (TLS S5;E3).  

In this episode, Kim says about her Uncle Harry: “Compared to him, Jack Benny is a regular Diamond Jim Brady.”

On “The Lucy Show,” Lucy Carmichael says to Mr. Mooney: “Compared to you, Jack Benny is Diamond Jim Brady.”  

Comedian Jack Benny (1894-1974, inset right) was a frequent guest star on both shows. His comic persona was that of a skinflint who had every penny he ever made. The same evening this episode first aired, Lucille Ball appeared on Benny’s birthday special on NBC. James Buchanan Brady (1856-1917, inset left) was a real-life millionaire and philanthropist who was fond of jewels (hence the nickname). Brady was first mentioned in “The Business Manager” (ILL S4;E1).  

Craig says he learned the facts of life at age seven while watching “Petyon Place.”  If Desi Arnaz Jr. and Craig are the same age (15 or 16), he would have to have turned 7 in 1960.  “Peyton Place” didn't start airing until 1964. If this were true, the character of Craig Carter would be just 11 or 12 years old!

Craig asks his mother for $100 for a surfboard which Lucy decides against as an unnecessary luxury. However, in “Lucy Visits Jack Benny” (S1;E2), Craig packs his surfboard (much to Lucy's dismay) for his weekend in Palm Springs. 

The precariously stacked display of oranges is built on a slanted surface to allow the oranges to more easily tumble to the floor.  The gag works by the collapsing the structure on which the oranges are arranged on cue – probably a by a stagehand hidden under the table.

Most of the items in the dairy case have their brand name labels conspicuously taped over. Conveniently, the brand name labels on the canned goods are too small for the camera to pick up, so they aren't obscured.

When the whipped cream spray lands on the end of Mr. Sherwood's nose, Craig takes a cloth and wipes it off. Irwin Charone ad libs the line “Never mind my nose.”

“Lucy, The Shopping Expert” rates 3 Paper Hearts out of 5

This is a very colorful episode full of lots of physical gags and some broad acting from the supporting cast. In the middle of the chaos, Gale Gordon delivers a meandering 4 minute monologue about the birds and the bees - literally.  A contrived ending feels forced.