![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scioscribeThe Chaser (Season 1, Episode 31)
Directed by: Douglas Heyes
Written by: Robert Presnell, Jr.
Based on: “The Chaser,” by John Collier
Opening: Mr. Roger Shackleforth. Age: youthful twenties. Occupation: being in love. Not just in love, but madly, passionately, illogically, miserably, all-consumingly in love - with a young woman named Leila, who has a vague recollection of his face and even less than a passing interest. In a moment, you'll see a switch, because Mr. Roger Shackleforth, the young gentleman so much in love, will take a short, but very meaningful journey into the Twilight Zone.
This episode contains some deeply creepy love potion action with all the related consent and violation issues.
Spoilers abound. Episode summary available here.
Ah, the love potion episode. This is a tricky one.
On the one hand, “The Chaser” recognizes that Roger (George Grizzard) is a pathetic specimen. His abject devotion to Leila (Patricia Barry)—or to the idea of her, since he doesn’t actually care what she wants, thinks, or feels—isn’t heroic or chivalric, it’s humiliating. It makes him annoying to everyone around him. His victory is a complete rewriting of Leila’s personality and priorities, and the episode emphasizes the horror of that moment. It also makes it clear that this kind of fake adoration—obtained entirely by magical force—is massively unrewarding. It’s not actually that satisfying to be deeply loved by someone whose personhood you’ve erased. Leila’s genuinely unconditional, genuinely total love is, and would always have to be, unbearable in the long term. People aren’t meant to behave like this, and the artificial perfection of it all—shades of “A Nice Place to Visit”—makes it meaningless.
I really like all of that. It makes Roger’s tale an elegantly constructed dark comedy of just deserts, in which he gets exactly what he wanted and is trapped in a hell of his own making. “Be careful what you wish for” is a classic for a reason, and this is a well-done, well-acted execution of it.
On the other hand, it is, unavoidably, All About Roger. He sees Leila as an object of desire, and so he makes her into a desiring object, and an object is what she stays. There’s cosmic justice for Roger, but there’s none for her; she doesn’t get rescued by the narrative, she just gets turned into the means of Roger’s punishment. And while I think the episode does see Roger’s co-opting of her as a real moral wrong, I don’t think it’s nearly as squicked out by it as I am. This is, at least tonally, a comedic episode, and it’s a comedic episode about—if you remove the layers of magic and metaphor—a man drugging a woman, raping her, erasing her personality, and then planning to murder her because this has all been really rough on him. This isn’t just dark comedy, it’s pitch-black comedy, and the real world weight of all these plot points means this makes for some uneasy viewing.
But on the third hand (it’s The Twilight Zone, I can have three hands if I want), I do kind of like a morality play that cynically tackles the whole issue by appealing to people’s self-interest. “Hey, treating someone like an object could also wind up being a total nightmare for you”—fair enough.
So … all of that. Lots of unsolvable tensions here! If you’re completely repulsed by “wacky” love potion comedy or the focus on Roger or the allusion to a whole host of adoring wives murdered by “glove cleaner,” I get it. I can see how someone’s reaction to this episode would just be, “Well, this is gross.”
So we’ll take it as read that your stance on this episode probably has a lot to do with whether or not you can accept its combination of premise and approach. If you can, I think there’s a lot to like here.
I love the opening scene with Roger hogging the phone booth, dialing Leila’s busy number over and over again. It’s both an effective bit of characterization shorthand—already, Roger is clearly disregarding everyone else and their needs in his all-consuming obsession with Leila—and a nice comedic setup. I love the people in line all grousing about how annoying Roger is, I love the guy at the back bribing his way to the front of the line by paying people a dollar for their place, and I extra love the random little detail of the old lady in front holding out for two dollars because giving up first place in the line should obviously get her more than giving up third place. It’s just a very lively, human scene. We’re about to spend the rest of the episode with Terrible Roger and Brainwashed Leila; I’ll take all the snarky, out-for-themselves New Yorkers I can get.
We also get an effective snapshot of Roger’s relationship with Leila. When she finally answers the phone, she’s so hilariously meh at finding out that he’s the one calling her—Patricia Barry kills it throughout this entire episode, and her lounging in bed in high heels, eating chocolates and being languidly annoyed by Roger Shackleforth is A+.
And Leila is completely straightforward with Roger! She tells him she doesn’t want to see him and that he’s acting like a baby; when he begs her to say something to him, anything, she comes back with, “All right, Roger. I’ll say something. Why don’t you take a flying jump at the moon?” and hangs up on him. She rejects him, insults him for emphasis, and concludes with the network-approved substitute for “go fuck yourself.” She couldn’t be any clearer.
It's entirely Roger’s fault that he fails to take the hint even when it’s engraved on a brick and chucked at his forehead. What he does take is the proffered business card for—drumroll for one of my favorite TZ names of all time—PROFESSOR A. DAEMON. The audacity of this name! I love it. I also love Professor A. Daemon’s townhouse, which comes with creepily self-opening doors, a black void hallway, and an immense library. A. Daemon (John McIntire) is clearly putting all of that glove cleaner money to good use.
The interactions between the naively obsessive Roger and the cranky, contemptuous, world-weary A. Daemon are great, and they’re where we get the script’s sharpest dialogue. A. Daemon tries to tell Roger that the love potion is a mistake, the amatory equivalent of gorging yourself on cake until you make yourself sick—“I promise she’ll never leave your side. When she isn’t telling you she loves you, she’ll be gazing at you lovingly …. Frankly, you’d get the same shake from a cocker spaniel”—but Roger, listening to a description of hell, thinks it sounds like heaven.
There’s also something really chilling about the combination of frankness and euphemism surrounding the “glove cleaner” A. Daemon tries to offer him instead. It’s colorless, odorless, tasteless, painless, and leaves no trace; it’s also called the Eradicator. But glove cleaner, A. Daemon says, is nicely “non-descriptive.” And the men who come to him want it so much that they give everything they have for it. (That’s another good, eerie line, with real supernatural weight. “But that’s all my savings!” Roger protests, when it’s eventually time to buy the glove cleaner. “I know,” A. Daemon says calmly. “It’s always that way.”) There’s just something so quietly creepy about discussing a woman’s murder using this kind of painfully clear substitution—it reminds me a little of the excellent Korean film Burning, which is high praise.
When Roger takes the love potion to Leila, he inveigles his way in with flowers, champagne, and—most effectively—the insistence that this will just be one last drink together. Leila eventually agrees to spend five minutes with him. Yes, she insists on getting dressed for it, but that’s clearly about her personal beauty standards and not about him, considering she also calls him “a silly, stupid, sophomoric, moronic clod.” Does any of this prompt Roger to rethink his plans, either because he’s obviously changing Leila against her will or even because he has some self-respect? Nah.
It's a nice touch that the love potion doesn’t quite kick in immediately. After she drinks, Leila still tries to get him to leave, even as he follows her like an anxious, grinning puppy; she can still tell him exactly how she feels: “I don’t love you. I don’t want you here. I don’t even like you at the moment.” I love the starkness of this.
But then she starts to crumble. She gives him a single dry kiss, saying it’s the best she can do … and then wonders if she’s being cruel. “Let me make it a little nicer,” she says, and there’s a full-on kiss and embrace—and then we get the sharpest horror moment of the episode, when Leila is right on the cusp of total transformation but still just herself enough to be terrified at this hijacking of her will. “What’s happening?” she cries. “What’s happening?” This is, in a sense, Leila’s death scene, and Barry makes you feel that; it’s haunting long after the new Leila gleefully propels herself into Roger’s arms.
After the commercial break, we come back to find that Roger and Leila have been married for six months, and that Leila now wears a floaty dressing gown and loves to kneel at his feet. Both Barry and Grizzard have great comedic chops, and the script is hilariously over-the-top in providing New Leila’s non-stop, sickening adoration. She loves sitting at his feet! Does he want his slippers? They make his feet hot? Oh, if his feet are hot, she can soak her hands in ice water and then caress them! Does he want to smoke his pipe? She could break it in for him! Is she disturbing his reading? Did she disturb him by asking if she was disturbing him?
Roger snaps into murder mode: “I JUST REMEMBERED I NEED TO LEAVE IMMEDIATELY.” He suggests, “Why don’t you stay here and hug my jacket or something?” like she’s a dog that’s going to get anxious without her owner’s scent, and she is, more or less, because that’s what he made her. He deserves the response he gets, which is her sincerely hugging it and saying, “While you’re gone my love will grow and grow, and when you get back ….”
Again, the context for these jokes is deeply disturbing, but the actual execution of all the smothering-love comedy is good, and I get some real laughs out of it. I just wish there was justice for Leila on the other side of all this.
Another real laugh-out-loud moment: Roger going back to Professor A. Daemon and briefly trying to make small talk about the current situation in China just as a kind of polite social cover before he gets around to the “by the way, about that glove cleaner …” part of the conversation. And there’s a nice, brutal stinger here at his expense when we see that despite all his ostensible waffling and stalling and searching for other options, he came to A. Daemon with the check already made out. He was always going to kill her. Of course he was. In a sense, he already killed her once, so what’s one more time?
His would-be send-off for Leila mimics his first “murder” of her, again with flowers and drugged champagne. But right as they’re about to drink, Leila holds up a knitted baby bootie and croons, “I’ve got news for you, sweet little rabbit!” Roger goes wide-eyed, processing it: “Rabbit!” (This is one of those moments that is probably already bound to be confusing to some audiences.) He drops the bottle, and it’s over. Per A. Daemon, he’ll never get up the courage to do it again—which is meant to reassure us somewhat, at least. The Old Leila may be gone beyond recovery, but New Leila is safe, even if she’s still a puppet. And Roger is doomed. Even if he’s already retreating into delusion on one point—telling himself that he could never have gone through with it—he can’t avoid another bit of the truth hitting home.
“We’ll be like this for the rest of our lives,” Leila says happily, and Roger, dead-eyed, repeats, “The rest of our lives ….”
It’s a good ending that absolutely does not need the playful add-on of Professor A. Daemon smoking on the balcony and blowing out a heart-shaped smoke-ring. This isn’t a story about love, Roger just thought it was. Like “A Nice Place to Visit,” it’s a story about hell and appetite.
Closing: Mr. Roger Shackleforth, who has discovered at this late date that love can be as sticky as a vat of molasses, as unpalatable as a hunk of spoiled yeast, and as all-consuming as a six-alarm fire in a bamboo and canvas tent. Case history of a lover boy, who should never have entered the Twilight Zone.
MVP(s): Patricia Barry as Leila. She essentially has a double role—first the bored, annoyed woman who scorns Roger and then his fawning, starry-eyed devotee—and she not only nails both performances, she really emphasizes Leila’s plight in the moment she transitions between them. She gives both great comedy and great horror, which is exactly what the episode calls for.
Fucking Wikipedia: I am beyond annoyed that the write-up for this episode describes Leila as “an aloof tease who plays cat-and-mouse with [Roger’s] affections.” She’s perfectly clear that she wants nothing to do with him! She’s not trying to keep him on the hook, she’s doing her best to drive him away! The most she ever does is give him a dry peck of a kiss out of pity, and even that’s after she’s already been drugged!
Personal Tier: This may be the ranking I’ve vacillated on the most, since my feelings about this episode have been all over the place. Let’s go with the lower end of Solidly Enjoyable to Good. It’s an episode that’s probably more troubling than it means to be, but it’s also clever and funny and surprisingly dark.
Up Next: A Passage for Trumpet. (I will not have a hard time rating this one. It’s a classic.)
Directed by: Douglas Heyes
Written by: Robert Presnell, Jr.
Based on: “The Chaser,” by John Collier
Opening: Mr. Roger Shackleforth. Age: youthful twenties. Occupation: being in love. Not just in love, but madly, passionately, illogically, miserably, all-consumingly in love - with a young woman named Leila, who has a vague recollection of his face and even less than a passing interest. In a moment, you'll see a switch, because Mr. Roger Shackleforth, the young gentleman so much in love, will take a short, but very meaningful journey into the Twilight Zone.
This episode contains some deeply creepy love potion action with all the related consent and violation issues.
Spoilers abound. Episode summary available here.
Ah, the love potion episode. This is a tricky one.
On the one hand, “The Chaser” recognizes that Roger (George Grizzard) is a pathetic specimen. His abject devotion to Leila (Patricia Barry)—or to the idea of her, since he doesn’t actually care what she wants, thinks, or feels—isn’t heroic or chivalric, it’s humiliating. It makes him annoying to everyone around him. His victory is a complete rewriting of Leila’s personality and priorities, and the episode emphasizes the horror of that moment. It also makes it clear that this kind of fake adoration—obtained entirely by magical force—is massively unrewarding. It’s not actually that satisfying to be deeply loved by someone whose personhood you’ve erased. Leila’s genuinely unconditional, genuinely total love is, and would always have to be, unbearable in the long term. People aren’t meant to behave like this, and the artificial perfection of it all—shades of “A Nice Place to Visit”—makes it meaningless.
I really like all of that. It makes Roger’s tale an elegantly constructed dark comedy of just deserts, in which he gets exactly what he wanted and is trapped in a hell of his own making. “Be careful what you wish for” is a classic for a reason, and this is a well-done, well-acted execution of it.
On the other hand, it is, unavoidably, All About Roger. He sees Leila as an object of desire, and so he makes her into a desiring object, and an object is what she stays. There’s cosmic justice for Roger, but there’s none for her; she doesn’t get rescued by the narrative, she just gets turned into the means of Roger’s punishment. And while I think the episode does see Roger’s co-opting of her as a real moral wrong, I don’t think it’s nearly as squicked out by it as I am. This is, at least tonally, a comedic episode, and it’s a comedic episode about—if you remove the layers of magic and metaphor—a man drugging a woman, raping her, erasing her personality, and then planning to murder her because this has all been really rough on him. This isn’t just dark comedy, it’s pitch-black comedy, and the real world weight of all these plot points means this makes for some uneasy viewing.
But on the third hand (it’s The Twilight Zone, I can have three hands if I want), I do kind of like a morality play that cynically tackles the whole issue by appealing to people’s self-interest. “Hey, treating someone like an object could also wind up being a total nightmare for you”—fair enough.
So … all of that. Lots of unsolvable tensions here! If you’re completely repulsed by “wacky” love potion comedy or the focus on Roger or the allusion to a whole host of adoring wives murdered by “glove cleaner,” I get it. I can see how someone’s reaction to this episode would just be, “Well, this is gross.”
So we’ll take it as read that your stance on this episode probably has a lot to do with whether or not you can accept its combination of premise and approach. If you can, I think there’s a lot to like here.
I love the opening scene with Roger hogging the phone booth, dialing Leila’s busy number over and over again. It’s both an effective bit of characterization shorthand—already, Roger is clearly disregarding everyone else and their needs in his all-consuming obsession with Leila—and a nice comedic setup. I love the people in line all grousing about how annoying Roger is, I love the guy at the back bribing his way to the front of the line by paying people a dollar for their place, and I extra love the random little detail of the old lady in front holding out for two dollars because giving up first place in the line should obviously get her more than giving up third place. It’s just a very lively, human scene. We’re about to spend the rest of the episode with Terrible Roger and Brainwashed Leila; I’ll take all the snarky, out-for-themselves New Yorkers I can get.
We also get an effective snapshot of Roger’s relationship with Leila. When she finally answers the phone, she’s so hilariously meh at finding out that he’s the one calling her—Patricia Barry kills it throughout this entire episode, and her lounging in bed in high heels, eating chocolates and being languidly annoyed by Roger Shackleforth is A+.
And Leila is completely straightforward with Roger! She tells him she doesn’t want to see him and that he’s acting like a baby; when he begs her to say something to him, anything, she comes back with, “All right, Roger. I’ll say something. Why don’t you take a flying jump at the moon?” and hangs up on him. She rejects him, insults him for emphasis, and concludes with the network-approved substitute for “go fuck yourself.” She couldn’t be any clearer.
It's entirely Roger’s fault that he fails to take the hint even when it’s engraved on a brick and chucked at his forehead. What he does take is the proffered business card for—drumroll for one of my favorite TZ names of all time—PROFESSOR A. DAEMON. The audacity of this name! I love it. I also love Professor A. Daemon’s townhouse, which comes with creepily self-opening doors, a black void hallway, and an immense library. A. Daemon (John McIntire) is clearly putting all of that glove cleaner money to good use.
The interactions between the naively obsessive Roger and the cranky, contemptuous, world-weary A. Daemon are great, and they’re where we get the script’s sharpest dialogue. A. Daemon tries to tell Roger that the love potion is a mistake, the amatory equivalent of gorging yourself on cake until you make yourself sick—“I promise she’ll never leave your side. When she isn’t telling you she loves you, she’ll be gazing at you lovingly …. Frankly, you’d get the same shake from a cocker spaniel”—but Roger, listening to a description of hell, thinks it sounds like heaven.
There’s also something really chilling about the combination of frankness and euphemism surrounding the “glove cleaner” A. Daemon tries to offer him instead. It’s colorless, odorless, tasteless, painless, and leaves no trace; it’s also called the Eradicator. But glove cleaner, A. Daemon says, is nicely “non-descriptive.” And the men who come to him want it so much that they give everything they have for it. (That’s another good, eerie line, with real supernatural weight. “But that’s all my savings!” Roger protests, when it’s eventually time to buy the glove cleaner. “I know,” A. Daemon says calmly. “It’s always that way.”) There’s just something so quietly creepy about discussing a woman’s murder using this kind of painfully clear substitution—it reminds me a little of the excellent Korean film Burning, which is high praise.
When Roger takes the love potion to Leila, he inveigles his way in with flowers, champagne, and—most effectively—the insistence that this will just be one last drink together. Leila eventually agrees to spend five minutes with him. Yes, she insists on getting dressed for it, but that’s clearly about her personal beauty standards and not about him, considering she also calls him “a silly, stupid, sophomoric, moronic clod.” Does any of this prompt Roger to rethink his plans, either because he’s obviously changing Leila against her will or even because he has some self-respect? Nah.
It's a nice touch that the love potion doesn’t quite kick in immediately. After she drinks, Leila still tries to get him to leave, even as he follows her like an anxious, grinning puppy; she can still tell him exactly how she feels: “I don’t love you. I don’t want you here. I don’t even like you at the moment.” I love the starkness of this.
But then she starts to crumble. She gives him a single dry kiss, saying it’s the best she can do … and then wonders if she’s being cruel. “Let me make it a little nicer,” she says, and there’s a full-on kiss and embrace—and then we get the sharpest horror moment of the episode, when Leila is right on the cusp of total transformation but still just herself enough to be terrified at this hijacking of her will. “What’s happening?” she cries. “What’s happening?” This is, in a sense, Leila’s death scene, and Barry makes you feel that; it’s haunting long after the new Leila gleefully propels herself into Roger’s arms.
After the commercial break, we come back to find that Roger and Leila have been married for six months, and that Leila now wears a floaty dressing gown and loves to kneel at his feet. Both Barry and Grizzard have great comedic chops, and the script is hilariously over-the-top in providing New Leila’s non-stop, sickening adoration. She loves sitting at his feet! Does he want his slippers? They make his feet hot? Oh, if his feet are hot, she can soak her hands in ice water and then caress them! Does he want to smoke his pipe? She could break it in for him! Is she disturbing his reading? Did she disturb him by asking if she was disturbing him?
Roger snaps into murder mode: “I JUST REMEMBERED I NEED TO LEAVE IMMEDIATELY.” He suggests, “Why don’t you stay here and hug my jacket or something?” like she’s a dog that’s going to get anxious without her owner’s scent, and she is, more or less, because that’s what he made her. He deserves the response he gets, which is her sincerely hugging it and saying, “While you’re gone my love will grow and grow, and when you get back ….”
Again, the context for these jokes is deeply disturbing, but the actual execution of all the smothering-love comedy is good, and I get some real laughs out of it. I just wish there was justice for Leila on the other side of all this.
Another real laugh-out-loud moment: Roger going back to Professor A. Daemon and briefly trying to make small talk about the current situation in China just as a kind of polite social cover before he gets around to the “by the way, about that glove cleaner …” part of the conversation. And there’s a nice, brutal stinger here at his expense when we see that despite all his ostensible waffling and stalling and searching for other options, he came to A. Daemon with the check already made out. He was always going to kill her. Of course he was. In a sense, he already killed her once, so what’s one more time?
His would-be send-off for Leila mimics his first “murder” of her, again with flowers and drugged champagne. But right as they’re about to drink, Leila holds up a knitted baby bootie and croons, “I’ve got news for you, sweet little rabbit!” Roger goes wide-eyed, processing it: “Rabbit!” (This is one of those moments that is probably already bound to be confusing to some audiences.) He drops the bottle, and it’s over. Per A. Daemon, he’ll never get up the courage to do it again—which is meant to reassure us somewhat, at least. The Old Leila may be gone beyond recovery, but New Leila is safe, even if she’s still a puppet. And Roger is doomed. Even if he’s already retreating into delusion on one point—telling himself that he could never have gone through with it—he can’t avoid another bit of the truth hitting home.
“We’ll be like this for the rest of our lives,” Leila says happily, and Roger, dead-eyed, repeats, “The rest of our lives ….”
It’s a good ending that absolutely does not need the playful add-on of Professor A. Daemon smoking on the balcony and blowing out a heart-shaped smoke-ring. This isn’t a story about love, Roger just thought it was. Like “A Nice Place to Visit,” it’s a story about hell and appetite.
Closing: Mr. Roger Shackleforth, who has discovered at this late date that love can be as sticky as a vat of molasses, as unpalatable as a hunk of spoiled yeast, and as all-consuming as a six-alarm fire in a bamboo and canvas tent. Case history of a lover boy, who should never have entered the Twilight Zone.
MVP(s): Patricia Barry as Leila. She essentially has a double role—first the bored, annoyed woman who scorns Roger and then his fawning, starry-eyed devotee—and she not only nails both performances, she really emphasizes Leila’s plight in the moment she transitions between them. She gives both great comedy and great horror, which is exactly what the episode calls for.
Fucking Wikipedia: I am beyond annoyed that the write-up for this episode describes Leila as “an aloof tease who plays cat-and-mouse with [Roger’s] affections.” She’s perfectly clear that she wants nothing to do with him! She’s not trying to keep him on the hook, she’s doing her best to drive him away! The most she ever does is give him a dry peck of a kiss out of pity, and even that’s after she’s already been drugged!
Personal Tier: This may be the ranking I’ve vacillated on the most, since my feelings about this episode have been all over the place. Let’s go with the lower end of Solidly Enjoyable to Good. It’s an episode that’s probably more troubling than it means to be, but it’s also clever and funny and surprisingly dark.
Up Next: A Passage for Trumpet. (I will not have a hard time rating this one. It’s a classic.)