Despite what all stories say, legends always die.

John Wayne rode off into the sunset in 1979 after The Shootist.  Alfred Hitchcock made his last film Family Plot.   All the ancient gods that man once worshipped as creator suddenly became myths and things you quote to make you sound smarter and more metropolitan.  Despite the constant change in our world, the above meaning has a second part to it.  Legends die, but other legends form in their place.

Since it's Halloween and a full moon, I decided to review something a bit different with a bit more history.  You see, I would love to do something from the Twilight Zone again but I'm figuring it's a bit too mainstream for my tastes.  Sure, I have done it before but I'm in the mood for something different, with a different angle on it.  So, it came to me when I was thinking about various things at school today....I should do something from Night Gallery.

Ah, Night Gallery.   Once the legend that was The Twilight Zone had passed onto TV Heaven, this show tried to take its place and didn't quite succeed.  Sure, it had the right options:  it was a horror anthology show, had Rod Serling tied to it in some aspect, and sometimes came out as being quite creepy.  But in other cases, it didn't do so well.  While Serling was attached to it, it wasn't his creation.  It was Jack Laird's, another horror writer who not only wanted the show to be horror, but to have a humor aspect to it as well.  Plus, the show was a full hour long.   While not a big deal back in the '70s, it became a hindrance to those who would syndicate the show and as a result, all of the shows were horribly edited into half hour shows, combined with another failed Universal show called The Sixth Sense (which was itself cut horribly and will be featured on this site soon enough).  Even sadder is that if you caught this show during its Sci-Fi Channel run, you could see the state of disrepair the film prints themselves were in.  Some of the worst I have ever seen.

Even worse was the state poor Rod Serling was in.  Like I said before, Gallery wasn't his baby and whenever went wrong was blamed solely on him.  But he was only the host (unlike Zone where he pretty much controlled everything) and part-time writer of some of the episodes.  Sadly, this was probably the very last high-profile project he worked on before his untimely death.  And quite ironic as well:  personally, Serling was a very preachy writer who was able to take the edge off of his sometimes heavy-handed approach with good writing skill and a genuine talent for hiding the obvious endings.   And in the '70s, when all art forms had to become relevant to attract viewers, it is surprising Serling didn't flourish even more than he did in the '60s.   But for all of this, Serling was one hell of a writer.

One of the examples that anyone could call off is the infamous "Eye of the Beholder" episode (originally titled 'The Private World of Darkness' for some reason) of Zone which features the pig people and Ellie Mae Clampett.  Trust me, if you don't know it as least in passing...well, welcome to the Internet and please press the Home Key on your browser.   Fortunately for us, today's experiment is the NG equal of that episode.  Not in popularity or memory wise (that little title goes to the old earwig episode called "Boomerang" which I refuse to see to this day), but in plot wise.  In a sort of way, it's a retread of the same story in a different sitting called "The Different Ones."

Actually, I shouldn't call it a proper episode.  I saw this story (which was a half hour skit, roughly half a true hour episode of Gallery) in its cut bastardized format a few years back and it stuck with me with its similarity except for the bite of the story. In short, it fails because it had been done before, better, by the same man.

Onward with the plot:  the story starts with a young man in a room.  His father doesn't know what to do with him because of his disfigurement.  The government offers them a solution of sorts:  use the young man as a guinea pig to meet an alien race or such.  The father finally relents when his son is being picked on at school.    At this time, we see the extent of the young man's deformity.  In short, he looks like the human equal of a cheese pizza shaped like a human head that has been under a blowtorch for a few minutes.   Honestly, this is the one aspect where this story almost became better than the "Beholder" episode:  the pig faces in "Beholder" were shocking.  This one is just plain out gross and disturbing.  Which, of course, is the intention.

Eventually, the boy is shot into space to take over for the first ambassador who is a normal human.  The normal human looks at his 'replacement' and smiles and we see why:  the aliens are the same exact replica of the disfigured boy.  He has found his place with his people of a sort.

I'm not sure if my memory is tricking me, but the plot didn't sound that linear.  Of course, since I saw the cut syndicated version, I imagine that some of the plot was cut to make room for more commercials.  Either way, I'll cut the story some slack (until I can find an uncut version) and just imagine that the more logical points of the story were initially covered and that the whole 'preparing for space' padding sequences were just put there for tension.  But beyond that, aside from the makeup, the story is the same except it leaves a mystery:  was Serling just tired at that point in his life and decided to redo a story he had done better before?  Or was it a last minute thing?  Perhaps it was originally supposed to be 15 minutes long and one of the other stories was abandoned?

I can't honestly say.  But I'll think the latter.

BOTTOM LINE:  Not a bad story, one of Gallery's finer moments through that isn't saying much.  Two stars out of four.   Excellent makeup job, however.