Episode 41: The Cold Equations / Stranger in Possum Meadows

Noise Junkies. It's a music podcast, Babe, covering every musical genre. What we got that the others don't, I'll tell you. We got Mondo, Heathers, Heather drain or Junky. We got Wolf and raisins hp N Junky, we got Dark Destinations, Father alone n and we got you.

We got music and we got you made it and you getting a weird and Wade media noise Junkies Weird. Hello there, I'm Chris Stashue, I'm Mike White, and this is follom Alone and we are the hosts of Dreams for Sale, a once a month look at the Twilight Zone nineteen eighty five otherwise Zone as the second iteration of this show, this show being the Twilight Zone. On this show we talk about the Twilight Zone eighty five. Along with the Twilight we talk about the Twilight Zone in general for the most part, all things Twilight Zone related. On this episode of the show, we're talking about the sixteenth and seventeenth episodes of the third and final season of the show.

Those two episodes are The Cold Equations and Stranger IMPASSA Meadow On the frontier, any frontier, there can be little margin for error. Just as the first covered wagons making their way across the American desert had a finite supply of food and water, so too, on this even vaster frontier are their laws that must be strictly observed. Thomas Barton has been piloting emergency dispatch ships for five years. He has never been faced with this particular law of the frontier. Until now.

Thomas Barton is about to discover firsthand that there are limits even here in the boundless reaches of the Twilight Zone. Cold Equations aired January seventh, nineteen eighty nine, is the first episode of the New Year. It's directed by Martin Lavett, written by our good friend Alan Brenner, based off of Tom Godwin's short story of the same name, and it stars Terence Knox as the captain of a spaceship going to a planet. A young girl appears on the ship and she has to be jettisoned into space otherwise they'll both die. Isn't that sad and fucked up and a really stupid fucking area to put your characters in.

I think this was probably a good short story, but did not translate to the screen at all. Um From what I have read it sounds like it was a good short story until the editor was like, no, you have to kill the female character. That was like the editor. The editor sent it back to Godwin three times and said you need to change the ending. And what he was wanting him to do was kill the female character because quote Godwin kept coming up with ingenious ways to save the girl is what John w Campbelly, which of this, which is why I don't like this fucking story because there are so many ways.

Just I'm not a fucking spaceman, but I thought, I'm sure we all thought of ways that they could have lightened the load. When some stuff and they share the close up share the load. It's a it's a really dumb episode because, like you said, Father Malone, there are I hate to say dumb, but again it goes to this lack of logic thing that the show has been doing, where it's writing episodes that have no logic. Everybody like, oh, yeah, she would have to kill like yeah, she kills herself for what? Like for what?

Like for what? Well to say that that colony that is being raged by some form of disease, I don't know what the fuck is going on, Like they need supplies. Yeah, I mean if beals it feels like a really it feels like they could have adapted this for a next generation script and it would have been so much better, like to give that to the writers there if they probably could have handled that. Isn't this just like the trolley scenario? Right?

Yeah? The trolley scenario? And you guys correct me if I'm wrong here. The way I heard it or I've been told it is there's a trolley going down the hill. There's a hundred people at the bottom of the hill, but you have to run over some people to stop the trolley, right, is that what it is?

Yeah? So like there has to be let these people die or these people do right? Do you let the smaller group die so that the bigger group is saved or vice versa? No, my responses don't use trolleys. I don't know.

Was that there was a recent one which was what the skittles thing, where it's like, if you one of these skittles might be poisoned, so do you eat the skittles? Like each skittle represents a life, So do you eat the skittle and save a life? But one of them might be poisoned? I think it was like the immigration argument, like do you let people in but one of them might be a terrorist or not? Right?

I just remember one person response was, I'm gonna eat, eat all these fucking skittles because I want to save all of these people and I don't care if I die as long as all of these other people are saved. And I think I'd be eating those skittles too. Well, I mean it's like any I mean again, it's you know, it's like any disaster scenario, right, Like why do the firemen run to the top of the building to save the people even though they know in doing so they may die. That is their job. That is literally what they signed up for.

If they didn't do that, they would be shitty firemen. And any fireman who hears me say this would agree because that's literally what they're there for. And in this episode, you are an astronaut who is delivering cargo to a world, and yet in doing so you kill someone. Your mission is now invalidated in my mind, Like, yeah, and which could have been you know, fertile territory had I given a shit about either of these human beings. Yeah, there's no nuance of her adalyts.

That's like the same stock kind of bullshit. She's just a nafe trying to get to her family. And you know, and this guy, I know nothing about him from beginning to end. I didn't learn one thing about him. And it's convenient that they live in a universe where everything is calculated.

Precisely they don't give them enough extra fuel. What the fuck story in reality, in the world that we live in, where the people are writing these stories about magical worlds, even in our real world, fueled planes don't just have enough fuel to get to where they're going. That makes no fucking sense. That is that, if you're trying to make this seem somehow efficient and economical, this makes zero sense. Efficient and economical systems work only when there aren't possible bad things that can happen, And if bad things happen, economic and efficient systems tend to not have a way to deal with it unless they've taken that into account.

This is so unbelievably dumb it boggles the mind. If you run out of gas while you're in an airplane, I mean the airplane, how can it land? Right? Just we'll go around forever. Yeah, it's just just bona fide insanity.

And again, like you said, have the moment, there's a lot to mine here. It is a question worth asking. Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Like that is one or the one? Yeah, that's the what Star Trek right, Like that's a question that Star Trek asks all the time.

You're asking that question, and yet you can't even ask that question in an interesting way, not at all. It's like the scenario was enough of sort of tantalizing for Alan Brennert as the writer, but then chose not to really explore it at all because they don't even really have the conversation of like why should I have to die? Like it's it's just like, okay, we're gonna try and keep you alive. I didn't even realize that when she walked into that airlock that was the end of the episode. They gave it such little emotional weight.

Well, yeah, there were no emotions. I mean, was the main guy unable to have emotions? I mean he, I guess there was. It just felt like he was so wooden the whole time, and I was like, okay, is he like a company a little bit more? Yeah, I didn't get the same stoicism will get you somewhere is anything interesting about you?

And this guy was not. He's just some pilot. I don't know where he came from or where he's going or in some girl. Okay, if you're going to write a character piece, you have to have characters. And if he was an android, Mike, wouldn't it not matter if he were on the thing?

I couldn't he just hurl himself into space and then like another ship come by and get him, Like that's what I like. There's no scenario that makes sense here that they could explain this, like, oh, we can't get rid of the extra weight. We can't get rid of the extra supplies because that would mean people on the planet died. Like you're telling me you can't take like a hundred pounds off. It's all one giant pack.

It's like there's too many logic leaps that are just like base level logical leaps for me to not be able to get past. Like it's the scene where she becomes like she's resigned to the fact she's sitting in a chair that I immediately went throw out that chair, Come on everything, When when she first showed up, he like contacts his like superior, and my immediate thought was, okay, that is jettisonable, Like clearly this is where this is going. You have to start thinking, now what do I need to get rid of in order to save this girl? And it's so easy to have done, Like at least, if you're going to make it a no win scenario, make it a no win scenario. They didn't even bother with that.

They gave us the possibility of of I mean, I guess because that's dramatic. But but if your solutions don't equal the fucking drama, who care? I don't know. I think my favorite thing is the way I would write this in a comedy scenario is like the woman's looking around like what about that? No, no, I need that?

Like what about that? No? No, Like I need that too, Like take only what you need to survive. Like he's got like this giant espresso machine on the countertop, like no, but I need my espresso. Like there you go, Like that's funny as hell, Like he just like is so oblivious that she's gonna die because he's an idiot.

But no, this is just this this lamp. Yeah, it's instead it's just like nope, I just we just don't care. We just we just don't care. Let's just kill this character because that would be shocking exactly how entire episode was based on the bummer ending, right, and the bummer ending creating an emotion within me, which it doesn't like. I was just disappointed, Like there's the emotion that you got out of me was not like shock or horror.

It was like, okay, like what a bummer. I need to care about you in order to feel bad when you're gone. Yeah, it's not enough to just go one. Human life is as equal as I don't care, invest us in some way. For God's sake, you can't lament a character who isn't a character at all.

Right, That's what like early two thousands horror movies that did not understand, like I don't care about these characters because like I know that I'm not supposed to because you don't care either, and you've done nothing to get me to care about them. So I just want to see them die, and like you know where that they you know where this episode is going. The moment it's on and you see this girl show up, you're like she's gonna die, Like that that's the show's idea of a good twist. Their thought process, obviously, was that the ending will justify everything that comes before, Like, we don't really have to there's no heavy lifting involved. We just set up the scenario, set up the complications and how they are or are not solved, and then the ending will be such a bummer or like slap in the face to the viewers that they'll forgive everything that came before.

Girl, we call it a gut punch ending. Yeah, yeah, what I mean, I guess because we can't do the twist endings this season. Maybe I guess we go for the gut punch I guess, sure, Yeah, yeah, twist twist endings are out killing characters with want and abandon is in. Yeah, that's what's hot this year. It must be because coherent storytelling is definitely not on the docket for this year, especially not an eighty nine for this show.

And speaking of incoherent storytelling, let's talk about the seventeenth episode, Stranger in Possum Meadows. For Danny Wilkins, a sunny afternoon is a world of adventure. He's a typical boy who likes nothing better than following a trail just to see where he goes. But today that trail will lead Danny through a private reserve which lies just inside the borders of the Twilight Zone. So this episode air January fourteenth, nineteen eighty nine.

It is directed by Sterla Gunnerson, written by Paul Chitlick and Jeremy Bertrand, and it stars Steve Canley as a small child who meets an alien. Yeah, alien question mark, intergalactic species acquirer, the collector, one might even say, indeed, and yeah, that's it, good night, folks, that's really it, that's really it. Yeah. Twist is that he's an alien. Goodbye.

Okay. I didn't see that coming at all. This mean, this weird guy in the middle of nowhere is actually an alien. Weird the man who speaks very stiltedly Mike Farrell from mash It was not, but I can saw you would think that. I really thought it was him the whole episode.

Yeah, And you know, this episode started out and it wasn't necessarily promising, but when the kid's toy boat was floating into that fog, I thought, oh man, we're gonna get like a different world, Like he's gonna wander way and something. It will be going back and forth with the mom trying to find him and like this new whatever it is, and all that promise just went out the goddamn window. Nope, there was just missed on the ground that day. Yeah, yeah, that whole stay away from Possum Meadows thing And it's like, oh, what is possum Meadows? Oh that sounds like it could be, you know, possibly a pet cemetery or something something anything, something's forbidden and bad that that will come to bear on the drama that we're supposed to be engaging in.

It's just an over makeup to actor from Dallas. Yeah, who would have thought? Yeah he almost had that, Like I know, his forehead wasn't nearly as tall, but he had kind of a forbidden zone alien thing going for him. But it was just like it was like textbook how do you make someone look like an alien when you have no budget? Right, Like, dress them in weird clothes that are too bright, maybe, puts more makeup than they need on their face to look them, make them look kind of orangy and strange.

Make his teeth super white, Like I guess he looks like an alien? Sure? Sure, why not? They're telling us he is he is, but we're not going to spend one dime on makeup this season. So get that out of your heads when you start writing your Alien episodes.

Oh and man, oh man, does the kid have a thick Canadian accent? Doesn't he? And he's he's so expressive, I think in the in a series with an incredible amount of bad child acting, this one, this kid he's the worst, right, Yeah, the most stilted delivery. You can just like that. You can hear, you can almost hear the director saying the line and then the kids saying the line.

Yeah. He was last seen in Billy Madison as the tenth grader, So yeah, that was a hard role. A lot of people were up for that role. Long and fruitful Hollywood was a buzz, long and fruitful career for that one. Everyone's sending in moundition tapes.

Do you have a callback? I bet this kid did not? This kid new somebody? Go ahead, go ahead. I don't want to be a dork, but how does this kid?

So we should probably say so. Basically, the guy is one of these interstellar collectors, as we said, and he's collecting the kid and the dog and I don't know, frogs or whatever. How does the kid escape? Does the guy just jettison them out of the ship, or because it's just like the kid just shows up. It's it's Spielbergian.

It's best left unseen, though, did you get on the ship? You'll never know. It's it's just it's it's too wild. It would blow your mind. Our minds would be able to comprehend how that happens.

Yeah, I mean this is the one episode they thought too much. Yeah, they were like, we don't want to pair it back just so weird, understand. I mean, I didn't like look down and miss something today. No, no, okay, they literally don't say how the kid comes back. He's just there in the grass, you know why, because it would be too big of a bummer if the alien went away with the child inside of his spaceship.

You can murder the woman in the previous episode, but you can't steal the child from the mother and Mike. To be fair, though, haven't we seen that our culture really doesn't you know, care about women. Hasn't true had brutally apparent to you in the last you know, a couple of days, So they can steal the host. They can kill the host body, but they must leave the fetus. Okay, all right, God have priorities here.

Yeah, that's if they had. If the alien had taken the mother and left the child defend for itself, defenseless in the middle of nowhere, that would have been unacceptable. Yeah, but then nobody would have helped it either or that's that's my point. Well, that's fair. Yeah, well that was a person since conception.

Correct. Yeah, it's a pizza when you put it, put your hands on the dough cherry. Yeah, that's how you do it. That chicken was fried while it was on the bone. That's how we eat fried chicken.

Eat bite the chicken, and the chicken is just cooked. That's the way it works. There's no such thing as a waiting period. I think for me, it's an okay episode, but it just doesn't offer much in the way of substance. No, Like, it's not bad, right, and I think that's kind of they've been.

The last couple episodes have been bad. Like the last episode is a bad episode is a dumb, factually problematic without any sort of reasoning why it does things. I mean, this episode has the I don't know how the kid gets back in and alive at the end. But it's not terrible. It's not actively offensive, which is what we've been running into lately, right right, which at this point is that like all we can ask for is don't be actively offensive anymore.

Yeah, yeah, don't don't. Like you can tell your gentle story with no point as long as you don't do something egregiously dumb at any point during it. Yeah. I mean again, it feels like I've seen this story before. I mean, the whole idea of like a human zoo where you know what, first episode of Star Trek the Cage, right, So it's like, Okay, I've seen this kind of stuff, and even this whole idea of like taking the kid, it felt very like Gammera to me, you know, Gammera versus Gearon when they climb aboard the ship and the ship takes them to the planet with the Midwestern aliens.

You know it just I've seen this to before, and I've seen it done better. It feels it feels almost like, you know, Richard Kelly's going to adapt this and stretch it out to two hours and you know, try to like add weird shit to it just to make it deep. Hey, Mike, don't forget you've you've seen this idea on this show in children's zoo. Yeah, that's true with a human zoo, like there you go. And that was directed by a Better West Craven Yeah, yeah, better how long?

And that was an interestitia one, like, yeah, get out and make the point. Yeah exactly. We don't have to have dinner with the guy who's stealing the children. No, right, yeah, Scout, that's an interesting name. Oh yeah, thank you, my father Atticus gave me that name.

Oh, twilight Zone, Why have you forsaken me? Yeah? Do we honestly like we have what two, four, six, eight ten, We have eleven episodes left before the end of the show, genuinely, do we think that even half of them will be good? Or do we think at this point it's like if we're basing it on what we've gotten so far. Yeah, no, I'm very curious because we've got another Harlan Ellison coming out right towards the end.

It's Harlan Ellison, directed by Paul Lynch, who I think we saw a lot of his stuff in the first season, So like, is this the last hurrah? Or will they have just removed the teeth from this. You know, the article that I read about the sort of production of the show when they decided that they were going to split season two up and throw some into season three and then pad out the rest of it. Like, I don't honestly know which episodes were holdovers from the previous season, so theoretically we might get a couple of good episodes. Oh, I mean, if anyone had any mercy at all in the running of this show, they would have said, let's at least go out with a bang and save everything for the last few That's I know, that's hopeful in the face of very little hope.

But I'm gonna I'm gonna continue to Oh don't want for hope. It is forbidden that these lands. I think if Tales from the Crypt has taught us anything father them alone, it's that there is no God. I mean, the Twilight Zone did not pull up out of the nose dive it or not, excuse me, Tales from the Crypt didn't pull up out of the nosedive. It crashed into the ground with inctacularly.

But yeah, but not enough. That's the thing. Like, if they had really gone for it, a Viking funeral. Then you know, I would have been ecstatic, but and you don't care about anything anymore. Yeah, I honestly worry that this is where this is going.

Is this kind of like limps along to the finish line? You know, this is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimpers like that's I think that's where this is going. So stupid. Oh they Harlan ellis an episode as crazy as a Soup Sandwich, which was a funny short story. But I'm I'm petrified at the adaptation that we're going to endure.

So, speaking of enduring things, on the next episode of this show, we're gonna be talking about Street of Street, Street of Shadows, and something in the walls. Cool. Sound fun? They could be good, could be, could be. I've watched ahead they're not.

Oh well great, But don't stop. Don't let that stop you from tuning into the next episodes. Want to hear three idiots complain about a show that nobody gave a shit about. Come on back next both we got more for you, so much so than they fucking canceled it, and just throw a third season together from scraps. This is the Twilight Zone in sausage for scraps from a cave until then?

Where can people find you? Hosted the Projection Booth podcast, mister Mike Waite, Well, you may or may not have heard, but I am the host of the Projection Booth podcast and you can find that at Projection Booth podcast dot com. And you you're Chris, and I talk about Barney Miller on the Barney Miller Podcast and you can hear us talk about ranking and bass on the Ranking on Bass Podcasts, So enjoy that. How about you, Father Malone? Where can people find you?

You can find me over at father Malone dot com, where there are links to my podcast, Dark Destinations, it's half hour radio drama I do. There's links to my YouTube channel which you can see my sort of cuckoo animations and video essays on movies. And you can also hear me occasionally on the Culture Cast and other things. See stashi dot com is where you can find me c stacchiw dot com. Things that I work on that they've already mentioned, along with my main show, The Culture Cast, where we talk about movies, and then the other main show, Scary Stories We Tell, where we talk about weird things that are weird and will stay weird, so come be weird with us.

As for this show, twilight Zone eighty five dot com Dreams for sale on all your podcast platforms. Big thanks as always to roxy Drive and Neutron Dreams for the awesome music for this show. We'll catch on the next episode. M