Reviews

I don't know whether, if this were polled among viewers who watch the show, it would be considered.relevant today or not. It was years before mot people had personal computers in their home, and punch cards were still prevalent. But the point-- that "there's no respect for human dignity any more" by having machines compile and share data about us-- may be noteworthy. But I think they really stretch to illustrate it. The quarters Edith kept getting from the prune company-- why would no one be 'over' that to audit, per se, this promotion. And at that time first class postage was going to 10 cents, so was 15 cents, net, worth sending a box top in anyway, for about $1.60 at 50 cents postage today? I don't think I'd go to the trouble. But then the phone call that suddenly connects with the Lubbock Police Dept.-- is that possible? Or, *was* it? And Archie being dead in the VA system because one little punch hole was incorrect. I guess that would be possible. But does/did the VA share (or sell!) their info to outside orgs? I like the scene with Whitehead-- and unlike his appearance 2 years earlier, he uses the term undertaker for himself, whereas before he admonished Edith that's now passe and to say Funeral Director. What happened? Is FD less human dignified? Good play on words when Archie demands his hole to be filled in. But how could it be that Archie Bunker's death was recorded in place of Archie Binker's. How should that one vowel exchange result in the wrong person's death being declared, as is implied? Probably it's just a method of simplifying things for the audience, which would not have been very computer savvy at the time. Nevertheless, it was a valid message, though today it could not be done by the same script. And But still, "somebody's got to be dead-- that's life" (A. Bunker).

If you dislike what your life has come to, this is the episode to consider. And that includes even if your life is much the opposite of Gart Williams' here, as is true of mine. My job is not high pressure-- in fact it's where I am now as I write this after watching the ep-- but the 'rewards' are not much either. And I am not married, though I've had a girlfriend for years, and we surely -would- have gotten married years ago if I had had a bigshot type of career... then, considering this, it's like I am Gart Williams in an alternate world. My girlfriend doesn't seem to be the type who would come to care nothing for our relationship except what kind of money and standing it gives her, but that would likely have been true of Williams when he married Jamie.

Do I live in "Willoughby," then? No, not by a long sight. Problems still engulf, though there's no reason to spill the details. And I can't say I want to live in a permanent dream world. But if Gart getting off the train and walking under the big WILLOUGHBY sign is symbolic of killing himself and being taken to the funeral parlor, it would also mean he is trapped where he got off. If he ever becomes bored with it and wants to go back-- or to some other place and time-- it's an irreversible decision. Compare that to another episode, "A Nice Place to Visit," and we can imagine Gart wanting to get out after he's had his fill of fishing and bandstand music and sitting barefoot under a shade tree.

But personally, I think the real message is nothing about an afterlife. In fact, this is one of the closest-to-reality eps which is saying that if you let the deep longings of your mind confuse your own reality, no matter how harsh it may be, you may not know what you're doing-- in this case, he thought he was stepping off his despised world, but that was just his delusion and he was jumping to his death. The last thing he "knew" was Willoughby, and there will never be anything else to know. Is there any confirmation that some suicide attempts are just like that?-- that the person truly thought he or she was doing something else, wacky or not?

I have re-watched this movie a couple of times recently, and it does stand the test of time-- at least for those of us who have not lived our whole lives in the internet/cellphone age. It goes much deeper into the workings of a big city police department. For example, in either of the Dragnet series, Friday just says they check R&I about a possible suspect and what is revealed. In this movie, we see them asking a clerk at the appropriate aphabetical station to check the name J.Johnson, with her rhetorical questioning about anything more than that, then working the card files till the right bank comes up, which she says contains more than 2,000 J.Johnsons. Obviously this would be a large computer database today. And we see them looking at the "possibles" from the pervert file, auto registrations (by make, model, or color) registered or ever stopped within the city, the monicker file, and the storage of field interrogation cards. We see 2 composite artists draw different faces of the suspect from witness's descriptions-- as the officers' suspicion, which they eventually find out for sure, that one such witness is lying, who doesn't want her profitable 'lonely hearts club' to become known as a place that had a sex offender and murderer as a member (nor become a party in a civil suit for having put criminal and victim together). Although it's off-camera, this woman also does something (some kind of threat, like revoking his paid membership) to a club member witness the investigators had found who 'made' the composite of the reliable witness, as he claims to have seen him at a 'coffee meeting' or something the club holds regularly.

The story itself does not bear much resemblance to the actual case, other what the suspect was charged with, and one or a few parallels to how the case was solved-- which is typical for Dragnet. But the timeline, the 'red herrings,' and about all personalities involved are all off. But we Dragnet fans don't care, as long as we are given a good story with true police procedures-- which we are. But if you have never seen this before, you may assume at the beginning that it's going to be about an international incident, for Friday is being sought out, while still on vacation, to help with the security of a visiting Russian Deputy Premier. That's not what we expect from Dragnet. I'm glad we are quickly disabused that Joe Friday is going to have to ward off an assassination plot that might jeopardize world peace. Instead, since he has been drafted back from 3 his 3 remaining days of vacation, he is put on the case of 3 missing young women, 2 of which have second jobs as models. The most recent missing woman is the one the pervert met through the lonely hearts' club, and is not a model; but her worried, though still astute, brother is the one who supplies the description that leads to the composite that collars the right suspect-- after a murder victim who is a virtual dead-ringer for him leads to a capital crime solved along the way in just 10 hours. Now that's Dragnet!- with a little drag and a lot of net.

Sure, a few things are kind of 'swept away'-- like, Bill Gannon guarantees the personnel rep that he will be there in the personnel office to sign his retirement forms within 20 minutes, then instead he goes with Friday on a venture to identify, then arrest, 2 suspects in the secondary murder-- which he knows should take hours. Even though this is Gannon's first appearance as Friday's partner (that is, the movie, not its eventual release date), we already trust him enough to not lie that badly to an anxious personnel man, who must secure his police-issued equipment before he can leave for the day, and thus leave him hanging indefinitely. And there is clearly an error in Friday's narration when he says the dead body of the suspect's look-a-like was judged to have been killed some time Saturday morning. It is on Friday that the body is found-- if he had been dead for almost a week, then he couldn't be their suspect, who was seen within the last 2 1/2 days.

Of course, we don't get the WHOLE story on any Dragnet episode, I'm sure, as they had to take a case file and make a 25-minute drama out of it that viewers will want to come back to after a commercial break. It starts off believable enough, as the 2 officers, working Homicide Division, on a Monday are given a case where a person is missing and 'could' be in trouble or dead. They get the basics-- her business it was certain she wouldn't abandon, her car, her boyfriend-- and find she was apparently last seen by any acquaintance at her boyfriend's apartment the previous Thursday night. The boyfriend is suspected, but he has no record and has been calling her office, and he says he tried but could not reach her over the weekend. Her car is found in a parking lot, but the culprit was really ignorant to leave a fuel receipt, a near-full tank of gas, and her book of real estate listings right in the seat. They begin checking the houses listed and find her body in a vacant unit-- but Friday only becomes aware of it as he walks into that room, while we later learn that she has been dead for 3 days... I get the idea he wouldn't have had to see it to know it was there ["...it was warm in Los Angeles..."]. After determining that her death was caused by strangulation, and her beaded necklace is broken, and the same kind of beads are found in the boyfriend's apartment, obviously he has now become the prime suspect, and his guilt is further suspected when they know he lied about his birthday having been that previous Thursday and had withheld that they had a quarrel that night. But a polygraph indicates that he did not take her car, know where the car was abandoned, or know the location of the house where her body was found. They decide he must be released.

Then a credit card of hers has been used for a purchase the day after her time of death had been fixed. The officers send a report to other big city departments and a real estate trade journal, and learn of a bail-jumper from Phoenix who has used this same M.O., then a short time later he is identified by his alias as the thief of another agent's credit cards. Finally the call comes in from still another female agent who has an appointment to show a house to a man who fits the description of the suspect. He is apprehended with the woman's cards in his wallet, and we learn he is found guilty of the first woman's murder and is scheduled for execution. But Friday says a line here that I consider unwise, and possibly (though I don't know) against almost any P.D.'s policies-- he says, in front of the agent, "You killed a Realtor by the name of Lillie Burnam, just like you would have this woman is she'd found out you stole her credit cards." Would a cop say that?-- tell her that she was that close to being murdered? It makes me wonder just what the trade journal bulletin said about the man, as well as when she reported her appointment with him what the LAPD told her (just go on and enter the house alone with him??) And as to appointments, one scene ends with the offices gazing at a sign in the real estate office that says "Positively -- By appointment only" Why didn't they go by her list of appointments, which the secretary should have had? But, since it was her company, I suppose she could "make" an appointment on the spot and not call in to her secretary, unwise as that may be.

But then... how did she make the acquaintance of the man who killed her, who had used the credit-card-theft-from-a-female-Realtor's-purse scheme many times before, if he did not call (or go to) her office to make an appointment to see a house? (Or, if he did have an appointment, why did the secretary not know his name or what property?) Might her boyfriend have had something to do with it after all? He could> have known that man and set her up with his scheme, after having the quarrel with her, and the man said he was in a big hurry and wanted to see a house, so she, the boss, didn't bother calling her office to make known her whereabouts. So the boyfriend could have had a motive and been an accessory without knowing where she was killed or where her car had been left (thus, the polygraph affirming those things). I just don't think he should have been exonerated completely after the polygraph. And maybe he wasn't-- that's the part of the story that maybe they left out because of time and other constraints.

I am not a big fan of STAR TREK, but certain episodes do interest me. I am much more a fan of classic westerns, so it's hard not to be interested in what ST has to 'say' about the classic western. I'm sure there is no need to go over the historical inaccuracies as to the time and location (behind, not in, the OK Corral) of the gunfight, nor just sticking in a few extra characters (the barber, barkeep and the girl). But just the logical fallacies....

First, it was either 2 or 3 of the Clanton/McLaurey gang that survived the "battle", so were the 'Melcossians' going to leave the survivors there? The ep gives the impression that Bill Claiborne (Chekov) was the only one who survived, so when he is killed before the gunfight that is what convinces them that history can be changed (as if it already weren't). So one result of this new admonition is that Kirk goes running to the sheriff to encourage organizing the town against the Earps and Holliday-- besides the E's & H and the sheriff, there had only been 3 others seen, none of whom would likely consider that-- Kirk was real bright, wasn't he? But then the 2 really intriguing plot turns take place. Since the tranquilizer made by Dr. McCoy does not work, when it "has to work," Spock tells them the whole thing is an illusion-- well great, had they really thought the Melcossians could resurrect previously living human beings from surely many light years and centuries away? But the interesting part here is that Spock tells them the illusory bullets CAN kill them if they judge them to be real; but this is quickly converted to having "not the slightest doubt" that they are UNreal! So Spock melds their minds to his and so they are totally convinced the bullets (and the guns and their 4 enemies and the corral) are not real. So the 'bullets' pass right through them, then Kirk jumps Wyatt Earp, and is tempted to kill him with his (Earp's) own gun. Then they are back on the ship and Spock wants to question Kirk about "wanting to kill." Kirk admits he did want to kill. LOLOL... It was Spock who convinced them the 'Earps' are not real, and he hints of blame to Kirk for wanting to kill what doesn't exist to be killed? Where is *logic*?

Finally (though this was before the Spock/Kirk exchange) Chekov is alive and back with them and Dr. McCoy says he is in perfect health. But he can only remember the girl who came on to him (as Bill Claiborne). Kirk says that may explain it (why he's not dead)-- the only thing real to him was the girl. Well, if the bullets were NOT real, by that explanation, then how did they "kill" him, even for just a while? It would seem to be a 'both or neither dilemma'-- both the beautiful girl and the deadly bullet were real, and he acted according to this perception, or else neither of them were real, so he wouldn't have 'died.'