Category: alf

Okay, so it’s the last episode of the season, and I’ll have a lot to say about it, but first can we take a moment to talk about how fucking gross the song “Having My Baby” is? I’ve never really listened to it attentively before this. And why would I have? It’s that kind of easy listening pap that exists just so elevators can give you something to ignore. But Paul Anka manages to weave an offensively stupid tirade against abortion into this shit.

Seriously…listen to it. He keeps thanking the woman he knocked up for deciding to stay pregnant. “You could have swept it from your life, but you wouldn’t do it,” he says, ostensibly romantically. “I’m a woman in love, and I love what’s going through me!” she replies, in what’s probably both the most superficial and most disgusting way of talking about the wad of fetal tissue you’re about to discharge.

He even directly equates her keeping the child to demonstrating her love for him: “You’re having my baby. What a love-l-y way of saying how much you love me!” There are better ways, Paul. Ones that don’t involve being guilted into birthing your damned kids.

At no point is he marrying her or offering to help support the baby or anything…it’s just one big middle finger to anyone who might consider not keeping the baby that some scumbag musician squirted into her against the cigarette machine.

It’s really bad. Like, I never would have guessed the song was secretly good…but this definitely stirs the bile in a pretty unexpected way.

So, there’s some great insight for you ladies out there. If you’ve ever had an abortion, now you know that you don’t understand love. Hell, if you’ve even considered it you’re a pretty awful person. And don’t you go telling me any reasons you might have for not wanting to stay pregnant; Paul Anka and I don’t care. Love is love and if you aren’t mature enough to appreciate the life somebody left behind in you, then maybe you weren’t mature enough to let yourself get sexually assaulted in the first place.

Ugh this fucking song. What a love-l-y way of opening our season finale.

Anyway, we join ALF as he demonstrates his hilarious misunderstanding of how to take care of kids. In this promising example of ALF ‘n’ baby jokes to come, he wraps a diaper around his fist and violently attempts to stuff it up a doll’s anus.

Season four is going to be really good, isn’t it?

Then we get a serious rarity on ALF: several minutes of really solid, inventive comedy.

…and by that I mean we’re shown clips of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

“We Are Family” pulled this crap, too, with its nature documentary…but at least that episode waited until it was almost over to start padding itself out with clips of something somebody else made. Here it’s the first proper scene in the episode, and all we’re doing is watching a superior show on a smaller screen.

Come to think of it, “Like an Old Time Movie” showed us actual clips from The Sheik (as far as I can tell…please correct me if I’m wrong), meaning ALF might be the only example of a sitcom that would rather show you better programming than what you actually tuned in to watch.

ALF explains to Brian that he’s studying the show. Evidently this is the episode where Laura Petrie gives birth…and I’ve never seen that. Odd. I watched a lot of The Dick Van Dyke Show (which, for the record, is still very funny and holds up incredibly well) when I was younger, but never knew of the pregnancy arc. I Love Lucy seems to get all the attention for that one, but whatever. I’m not complaining…just observing that I somehow wasn’t aware that The Dick Van Dyke Show did its own take on the situation.

Brian isn’t sure why ALF is studying this, though; he says his father already told him where babies come from, and he didn’t mention this show at all. Really, Brian? Your dad explained sex to you and didn’t once mention Dick?

GOODNIGHT EVERYONE YOU WERE A WONDERFUL AUDIENCE

It’s a dumb joke (theirs…not mine, which was great), but it’s also bullshit. In “Changes,” which introduced ALF‘s own pregnancy arc, Willie was going to explain the birds and the bees to Brian, but found out that ALF already did. It was a hilarious joke at the end of that episode which explains why Brian’s been releasing the pods into an old sock ever since.

But, whatever. Maybe ALF talked to him about sex. Maybe Willie talked to him about sex. Maybe they both took turns talking to him about sex. The main takeaway here is that people on this show really enjoy talking to Brian about sex.

Kate comes into the room and screams and hollers at Brian for leaving his baseball glove on the floor. Lady, if I were you I’d be thrilled that my socially retarded shut-in son seems to have finally found someone to play catch with.

It still boggles my mind that we’re entering the final season of this show, and nobody — apart from the one character we’re told can never, under any circumstances, interact with another human being — has any friends. How is that even possible? When you create characters, there a few things that immediately get addressed by even the shittiest writers: where they live, what they do for a living, what they want, and who they associate with.

ALF addressed where they live predictably early, but we didn’t find out what Willie did for a living until halfway through season one, or what Kate did for a living until halfway through season three. As far as what they want and who they associate with, we still don’t know these things about any of them. And that’s pretty fucking bizarre to me. I honestly can name cereal mascots that have more backstory than these assholes.

Anyway there’s some crap about Kate having mood swings because of her pregnancy, which is why she’s screaming at Brian and then hugging him…and that might have made for a story a few weeks ago, but in the same episode in which she gives birth it’s hardly even worth raising the idea.

Then ALF does some observational standup about skeet shooting while Benji Gregory tries very hard to set him on fire with his thoughts:

Later that night ALF comes into Willie and Kate’s bedroom and bitches at them for not acting exactly like the characters in The Dick Van Dyke Show. It sucks, and it goes on way too long. But it does lead to some welcome, if not necessarily good, attempts at meta comedy.

For instance, Kate explains to him that The Dick Van Dyke Show was just television. “They exaggerated things to make them funny,” she says. Yeah, yeah, we get it. It’s a pity that doesn’t work as well for ALF, though; this show is full of the most exaggerated horse shit I’ve ever seen and I don’t think I’ve laughed ten times in the entire run.

In fact, oddly enough, the best episodes of this show are the least exaggerated ones. “For Your Eyes Only,” “Going Out of My Head Over You,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” “Night Train,” “Fight Back,” “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow”…those are the episodes that come first to mind when I think of my favorites, and they’re also — every single one of them — grounded in an identifiable reality. Yeah, there’s still a naked space alien humping the furniture, but overlook that and you find some very simple, basic, relateable stories.

Granted, ALF has had a few exceptions to that rule (like “La Cuckaracha” and “I’m Your Puppet,” both of which go batshit crazy with their premises in a way that works), but overall I’d say the show’s hit rate is much more reliable when it’s not exaggerated. It’s legitimately interesting to me that in a show with such an odd premise, it never quite figured out how to use that oddness to its benefit.

Then there’s another winky gag when Willie says, “Laura Petrie was a character. And the actress who played her wasn’t even pregnant when she did the show!”

Take that, Mary Tyler Moore! You shitty actress, you…not even having a fetus growing in you while you tried to avoid tumbling into puppet trenches.

Actually, come to think of it, that dumbass Dick Van Dyke Show probably didn’t even have puppet trenches! No wonder history has forgotten Mary Tyler Moore and whoever played her on-screen husband; it’s the cast of ALF that has truly endured.

Anyway, during this terrible scene (seriously, ALF, don’t call attention to the fact that you’re doing a story similar to the stories better shows have already done) Willie accidentally refers to his wife as cranky and fat. And a shitty cook. And she’s getting pretty old, and also she’s kind of a bitch, and she ruined all of his chances at happiness. And her feet stink. And there was one time she did the laundry and burned a hole in his favorite shirt, and that scarf she got him for Christmas was ugly as fuck. And she spends all his money and shrivels his nards and keeps accidentally calling him Joe Namath on the rare occasions he can get it up over her. And…

She interrupts him and says, believably upset, “Honestly, Willie, I don’t know why you even married me.”

And there.

THERE.

THAT is the plot I’ve been waiting for.

THAT is the story I want this show to tell.

Willie, to be frank, is a fucking dirtbag. He treats his wife like garbage, has no interest in his kids, and is this kind of distant, condescending dick without he or the show realizing it. As a result he’s a maddening character to spend time with. I’m only half joking when I say Kate should leave him…maybe a third joking. Fuck it; she should. Unless they really do love each other, in which case…

…well, in which case, this needs to happen. Exactly this. Kate needs to step up and call him on his bullshit, so they can hash it out and he can either a) stop being a dickbag or b) do something that reassures us of his love for his family in spite of everything we’ll continue to see to the contrary.

A is hard for a weekly sitcom to pull off, but but it’s not impossible to see permanent change in a character. See something like Cheers, in which characters evolved over time without the show losing its story-of-the-week accessibility.

B is pretty hard, too, but something like Married…with Children proves it can be done; that show gave us just enough warmth (with just enough of a sardonic twist) that it let us understand that there were real people with real feelings underneath the backstabbing and infighting. We could go weeks and weeks without seeing any of that warmth again, but when we did catch it, it registered, and it kept the atmosphere from feeling oppressively caustic.

Then again, there’s c) reinforce and embrace the fact that your character is an incurable asshole. See It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for ways to do this without losing your audience along the way.

There’s no right or wrong solution, but you have to do something, otherwise you’re just suggesting that you don’t know what the fuck your characters are doing.

Here, Kate raises the issue…a real issue within the universe of this show…and I sat up and listened the moment she did, because this is a conversation the show needs to give us.

But no. It’s just another one of Kate’s mood swings. She holds Willie’s hand and everything is fine and we’ll never, ever have to face the fact that her husband treats her like shit.

So glad they’re bringing another kid into this house. Those always fix ailing relationships.

After ALF leaves they see that he’s packed them an overnight bag. Willie looks inside and finds a bag of Kettle Chips.

Seriously, ALF fucking loves those Kettle Chips. He ate them (and shat them) in the tub in “We Are Family,” he was eating them while waiting for the blackmailer to call in “Running Scared,” and now he’s packed them for Kate in the hospital. I can’t blame him; those chips are really god damned good. But it stands out to me because I don’t think the show has referenced any real world product like that more than once. The Kettle Chips feel like a legitimate (and unspoken) runner. Did the ALF staff just want the company to send them free Kettle Chips for mentioning them so many times?

If so, Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips Kettle Chips

He also packed a photo of himself, and I’m glad he did, because it gives me a chance to spotlight a comment that Dan_the_Shpydar left on my review of “Funeral for a Friend.” In that review I mentioned a nice scene in which ALF displays a photo of himself with the ant farm. But there was a major problem with that that didn’t occur to me. Here he is to explain what I overlooked:

Because i know you love to have moments that yield the reaction of “FUCK. THIS. SHOW”, i have to point this out…

Willie takes a picture of ALF with the ant farm. Cute, yes. Later on, we see that photo on ALF’s little table desk thing. Also cute. But riddle me this…

How did that photo get there? We saw Willie take the photo, right? But wait — this is 1988 or 1989. There’s no digital cameras. The photo’s clearly not a Polaroid insta-matic photo. It’s an actual photograph — meaning it had to be developed. And unless Willie has a darkroom (that is used for something other than clandestine homeless crack parties) and YET ANOTHER hobby as an amateur photographer, that means that the photo was developed at the local Photomat Hut or whatever.

Yes. They took a picture of their alien, and took that film to get developed. Because that’s a perfectly logical thing to do when you’re trying to keep your secret alien a secret.

Fuck. This. Show. (You’re welcome ;) )

So, yeah. Good points. Massive logical flaw. And it takes on another layer here because not only does this photo of ALF exist in the first place…but he’s giving it to Kate to display openly in the hospital.

You charmed me in “Funeral for a Friend,” ALF. I was enjoying myself and so I overlooked how fucking stupid you were being with that picture. You just had to press your luck and try the same thing again at the end of the season, didn’t you?

Anyway, ALF also packed a bottle of wine to “christen the baby.” So, hilariously, we have jokes about the Tanners’ infant child being brained with a glass bottle seconds after it’s born.

SEASON FOUR IS GOING TO BE REALLY GOOD ISN’T IT

Then ALF watches some more of The Dick Van Dyke Show and, of course, we watch it along with him. They really had to show us another clip? The season finale is really turning itself over to somebody else’s work? It’s so bizarre.

ALF even says, “Ha! This is my favorite part!” and then rewinds a scene so we can watch it again.

This show is fucking with me now, right? Like, this has to be intentional. They must be choosing to do this as some kind of joke on the audience for watching.

…right?

Lynn comes in and tells him that watching television isn’t going to help anything, let alone get any kind of plot into gear, but ALF counters by saying that Kate is really fat.

THEN HE PUTS THE SHOW BACK ON AND WE WATCH MORE OF IT

I don’t know. I really shouldn’t complain. I mean, yeah, this is a pretty fucking ridiculous thing to do with your season’s final chapter, but any episode of ALF that’s 15% Dick Van Dyke Show is at least 15% worth watching. That’s a better ratio than I usually get, but it doesn’t do anything to distract from the oddness of watching a Dick Van Dyke clipshow with ALF in its frame story.

Kate calls from work, and ALF goes ballistic because that’s what happened in The Dick Van Dyke Show. Except whereas Rob Petrie demonstrated impressive pratfalls and peerless comic timing, ALF just screams.

It’s…actually a lot like the silent films episode; in each case this show invited its own unflattering comparisons between a comedy legend (Charlie Chaplin and Dick Van Dyke) and the dishrag wrapped around Paul Fusco’s right hand. And in both cases ALF “reenacts” specific scenes of theirs, replacing what made the original work with mindless, incessant bleating.

Lovely stuff.

Later that night ALF wakes up Willie and Kate to rehearse for the birth, but all he really does is piss them off. Kate, on the verge of fairly convincing tears, begs her husband to stop the alien from bothering her. She pleads with him to get out of bed and chain ALF to the radiator or something so she can go back to sleep because she’s tired and pregnant and upset.

Willie just lays there, pretending he didn’t hear her, I guess.

What a fucking asshole. Guys, I’m not even exaggerating anymore. He is being a selfish, disinterested, piece of shit fuckbag who can’t be arsed to help his heavily pregnant wife at any point, with anything, ever.

Fucking Willie.

Guys, this is one lousy damned show.

The next day Brian is eating some shitty-ass pancakes. He asks his dad what he did to make the pancakes so shitty-ass, and Willie replies, “I added some muesli, some chopped nuts, and some raisins.”

Brian bitchily asks, “Why?”

It may have taken three seasons, but the show finally wised up and tapped into Benji Gregory’s natural, seething hatred of the world around him.

ALF comes in and burps, which I’d love to say is the kind of thing you get after three full seasons have exhausted the writers’ creativity, but they’ve been pulling that shit instead of writing jokes since episode one.

There is a funny moment when Willie explains to ALF that even though they’re upset at him for waking them up all the time and trying to induce labor by funneling white vinegar into Kate’s vagina, they do appreciate his concern. Then he says, “Right, Kate?” and she replies, without a moment’s thought, “No.”

But that’s about the only good thing in the entire scene, and it ends with ALF doing a spot-on impression of me watching this crap:

Later that night (how many fucking days pass in this single episode?) ALF is pitching diapers into a bin. He sinks one and the fake audience applauds, which is the most disgustingly self-indulgent thing you can do on your shitty sitcom. It’s bad enough when you synthesize laughter, but faking applause is just embarrassing. It’s the prime time equivalent of taking your mother to the prom and then still pretending you got laid.

Also, ALF does one of those “The crowd goes wild!” things where he exhales really loudly to sound like a distant group of impressed spectators. And the fake audience laughs at that…which, in itself, is fine. But in context, that’s really fucking weird. So the joke is that ALF pretends that people were applauding him? But didn’t the show itself just do that exact same thing and pretend that people were applauding it?

What the actual fuck is going on?

Also, he calls himself Kareem ALFdul Jabbar.

We have another year of this shit, folks, so strap in.

Anyway, Kate comes in and tells him to fucking go to cunting sleep or fucking go to cunting hell.

She leaves, ALF pitches another diaper, the fake audience fake applauds again.

What am I doing with my life.

The next scene is pretty nice, though. We see ALF sleeping on the floor, while Willie and Kate pass by the open doorway.

Kate is going into labor, and ALF’s missing it.

Lynn runs in to wake him up…but she sees how much he needs his sleep. She says, “Poor little guy,” and drapes a blanket over him.

Maybe Lynn will be the vestige of humanity to carry us through season four. I can only hope, because as much as I hate the way the show treats her character, she sure provides an awful lot of these great moments.

And speaking of great moments…

…there are no more fucking great moments. ALF wakes up on the floor and finds that there’s a baby in the crib now. Wonderful! So Kate gave birth, the Tanners brought the kid home, and then they immediately abandoned it in a crib. Wonderful parents. I hope they never stop having kids.

Oh well. She may not give a shit about her own baby, but at least Kate didn’t abort. What a love-l-y way of saying how much she loves her emotionally manipulative husband.

This, of course, is to say nothing of the fact that the baby was abandoned in a crib next to a sleeping, confused, dangerous space alien. Jesus fuck this show.

The best part is the baby, but not in the way the show might have hoped.

See, in “Baby Love,” there was some other baby on set that made goo-goo eyes at ALF, absolutely in awe of this giant, talking stuffed animal. That was pretty fucking adorable. But now we meet the permanent baby character on the show, and he couldn’t care less about this shit. He just burbles and looks away. It’s especially funny when ALF says, “He smiled at me!” when the baby very fucking clearly won’t give him the time of day.

I find that hilarious. They hired two babies for two episodes this season…and the one they decide to keep is the one that just wishes it could go the fuck home. He’ll fit in perfectly with this cast.

And that kid looks way more like Mr. Ochmonek than Willie.

I’m…

I’m just saying.

Willie comes in and introduces the new character: Eric William Tanner. It’s actually kind of beautiful that this baby was born so soon after the kid next door broke his neck in the tub and died. Sure, that was tragic, and our heroes lost someone they really cared about, but the circle of life continues unbroken. We lose one, but we gain another. There is no darkness without the light. How wonderful of ALF to embrace such a beautiful sentiment.

Or maybe they’re just introducing another character they’ll never do anything with. EITHER ONE

Willie apologizes to ALF. He says Lynn tried to wake him when they left for the hospital. But come the fuck on; what were they going to do? Bring him along? If he woke up Lynn would have just had to say, “Mom’s going into labor! Anyway, sit here alone and do nothing until we get back.”

ALF sleeping was the best case scenario all around, unless Willie really did plan on bringing him in which case fuck it just fuck it fuck it hard to fuck.

Willie brags for a while about how he has something to show for each of the three times he’s had sex, which causes ALF to mope. He’s got no chance of becoming a father, which is suddenly very upsetting to him.

And, hey, understandably so. I’m not questioning the timing of his concern…I’m just wondering if it’s not better suited to an episode of its own than to be shoehorned into this one. Kind of like Kate’s mood swings earlier. You can do something with these ideas…but it’s better to do nothing with them than to just mention them offhandedly while you’re doing something else.

But Willie cheers him up. He says, “You can never give up hope,” which, like last week’s advice, is fine on its own, but it loses all meaning when you’re addressing the concerns of the last survivor of a nuclear apocalypse about never getting to fuck anyone.

In the midst of all this excitement Max Wright elevates his speech impediment to high art by managing to slur even a simple name like Eric. It’s impressive.

Brian comes in and announces that Kate says it’s time for Eric to eat. Just like a new mother; sending someone to fetch the baby from the spare room.

Has anyone writing for ALF ever interacted with a pregnant woman?

Or a woman who has just given birth?

Or…a woman?

In the short scene before the credits, ALF warns Eric that Kate is a bitch.

And, again, the baby is abandoned. It’s sitting on a fucking table, for crying out loud. Yeah, it’s in a chair, but I can’t imagine setting a newborn kid down on an elevated surface and just walking away. For god’s sake, this baby is literally one day old. Are they already that sick of him? What in fuck’s name is the family doing that’s more important than taking care of their god damned newborn? In what family does a new baby arrive and then everyone just goes about their day?

What an odd, inhuman show.

Anyway, I’m really glad we spent all that time watching The Dick Van Dyke Show. That sure paid off in spades when nothing happened at all.

“Having My Baby” is a really weird episode. It feels like they came up really short…stuck at the end of the season with an episode that had to introduce a baby, so they just stalled for time until that happened.

Personally I don’t see any reason that the birth couldn’t have occurred between seasons. It’s not like anyone was watching ALF for its impressive serialization. I can understand wanting to tell one last big pregnancy story…but they didn’t have one. ALF just watched some other show on TV because it had a better story than the one he was in.

I guess it could have been worse, but for such an “important” episode, it sure meant nothing. Although it’s nice that they establish right off the bat that no Tanner will ever give a shit about this baby.

Roll on, season four.

MELMAC FACTS: On Melmac the father would shoot skeet while the mother gave birth. Melmacians babble when they’re nervous, and also during white sales. ALF says, “A Melmacian almost never goes back on his word sometimes.” Melmac may or may not have had Pasta Polo and Gerbil Hockey in addition to Bouillabaiseball…they come up in conversation with Willie, but in a joking context.

The good news is also the bad news: if this were season four, we’d be done already.

Maybe it’s just me, but damn, season three sure feels like it’s dragging. It’s only one episode longer than the previous seasons, but I can definitely feel fatigue setting in. Don’t worry; I still intend to do season four and Project: ALF because if I had to suffer through this you are going to keep suffering right along with me, but this season felt draining.

I have more to say on that subject, but I’ll wait. It’s just another couple of weeks before I review the season as a whole anyway, so I’ll save it for that.

“Shake, Rattle and Roll” is something I knew nothing about, except that it happens to be Jake’s final episode. I wondered if his character would be brought to any kind of conclusion and…yeah, he was. But not the one the show probably wanted to bring him to. We’ll get to that later.

On the whole it’s not a terrible episode, and it has some good ideas and funny moments. But it’s still ALF, and ALF is still shit, so don’t expect me to be sucking this one’s dick.

It opens with ALF walking around the kitchen, doing everything except shutting the fuck up. The whole idea is that ALF is acting like a hunter and quietly stalking his prey (he says exactly this, in case you’re a fucking idiot) and that’s all fine and good, but it leads to a pretty hilarious moment of unintentional comedy. See, it’s hard to operate a puppet when you’re stuck down in a dark trench and can’t see what you’re doing, so when ALF opens the refrigerator door it cracks loudly against the wall and a bottle of barbecue sauce falls over. It’s not part of the joke and it’s not acknowledged in any way; it’s just ALF telling us he’s supposed to be quiet while a puppeteer fucks up and makes noise.

It’s some unfortunate fumble that goes entirely against the mood the scene is trying to build, and I love it for that.

Some of my favorite ALF moments come from season one, when nobody on the show knew what the fuck they were doing, and absolutely everything looked like garbage. They’d cut to a midget in brown pajamas every time ALF needed to walk across the room for fuck’s sake. Moments like this bring me back to that kind of ropey silliness. ALF is slicker now, but by and large it’s not any funnier. While the package as a whole is superior to what it used to be, all that does is rob the show of its original charm.

Son of a bitch I miss that midget.

But then there is an intentionally funny moment, when ALF sees a sign that says DON’T EAT THIS affixed to the food he was hunting. He picks up the sign, reads it, and then asks, “Why would I eat this?” and throws the sign away. Legitimately funny. Credit where credit is due.

Then Paul Fusco jiggles ALF around for a bit while stagehands throw shit onto the set to make it look like there’s an earthquake. Well, I can honestly say I didn’t see that coming.

After the credits the Tanners run around screaming ALF’s name, and I like that his safety is more important to them than the safety of their home, any of their possessions, each other, the Ochmoneks (just kidding), or Kate’s unborn black baby.

Then we get what I thought was a hilarious sight gag. Honestly, I laughed louder than I ever have at this show when Brian opened a cupboard to find ALF there, shivering in catatonic shock.

I thought it was a riot. But there’s no fake laughter so I guess we’re actually supposed to be worried about him.

Fuck. That. It’s hilarious and you’re not taking that away from me.

In a moment ALF starts babbling and Willie slaps him across the face in what I have to imagine was the most cathartic moment of Max Wright’s life.

So maybe I’m not supposed to like ALF quaking in terror, but fuck you if I’m not going to like him getting backhanded by a crackfiend.

They calm him down enough to get him out of the cupboard, and, really, the episode’s got to be all down hill from there, doesn’t it?

ALF asks what the fuck happened so Willie explains plate tectonics to him. It’s not funny, exactly, but it’s a great character detail. Willie would launch into a scientific explanation, and Willie would think he’s being helpful. And it does actually build to a funny moment when ALF shuts him up and asks Kate to explain it in a way he can understand; she likens it to Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. I’m pretty sure I like everything about that little exchange.

Kate gets another good line shortly when the Ochmoneks come over to check on the Tanners. She…

…wait, hold on. What’s that? The Ochmoneks came to check on the Tanners?

Fancy that.

Open your hymnals, dear readers, and join me in song: 55 choruses of “TELL ME AGAIN WHO THE BAD NEIGHBORS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE.”

God fucking dammit. Seriously. One of the very first impulses the Ochmoneks feel is to go over and make sure their friends the Tanners are okay. By contrast, I’m pretty sure the Ochmoneks could die in their sleep though and the Tanners would go for years without noticing they’re gone.

I don’t care that the Ochmoneks are the better neighbors. I really don’t. What I care about is the fact that the show doesn’t realize it, and still, even now, with one family coming to check on the other in the aftermath of a natural disaster, we’re supposed to like the wrong ones.

It doesn’t make sense. It’s distracting. It’s inhuman.

Blah. I hear that season four turns the Ochmoneks into the antagonistic piles of shit we were always meant to believe they were, so I guess we’ve got that to look forward to.

Anyway, the funny line Kate gets comes after Mrs. Ochmonek says, “We had an earthquake!” Kate replies, “So did we.” Kind of bitchy, but good enough.

Jake asks about Lynn, because he knows full well that this is his last episode, so if he’s going to fuck her he needs to stop being a pussy like, right fucking now.

Then there’s a nice reveal then of Mr. Ochmonek on the Tanners’ porch, gripping tightly to it in fear.

It’s overacted, but, fuck, this is cocksucking ALF. I’ll take some overacting if we at least get something good out of it.

And we do…we get that legitimately well-composed shot. The best part is that this isn’t the only example of visual inventiveness in the episode. Like “Working My Way Back to You,” somebody involved with the episode actually cared enough to figure out the best ways to shoot the action, as opposed to being satisfied with making sure they took the lens caps off. The Mr. Ochmonek reveal is a good one, but I also liked the kitchen scene earlier, as the camera followed ALF around while he narrated his midnight hunt. There were even some nice reverse shots on Willie when ALF was in the cupboard.

I like that. I like all of that, because it’s evidence that somebody cared. If I can sense that somebody making the show cared, I’m more likely to care myself. On the flip side, if I can sense that nobody making the show cared, why on Earth would I?

But, yeah, let’s accentuate the positive. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” has already had some good stuff…

…but nothing as good as this:

I FUCKING LOVE THAT FACE IT IS PERFECT

He’s scared, and I assume that makes sense even if he has lived in California for most of his life. I remember living in Florida, and there were loads of people who got very worried over hurricanes, even though they happen regularly out there. I don’t know how common it is to have an over-the-top reaction like this to a minor earthquake, but I can definitely believe that somebody would. It’s probably pretty scary, and Mr. Ochmonek actually has stuff to live for, unlike Willie who I’m pretty sure is one personal slight away from stepping into traffic.

Mrs. Ochmonek says that her husband always gets like this after earthquakes…and whenever Whoopi Goldberg is on Star Trek. I guess the joke is that Mr. Ochmonek is exactly as much of a racist fuck as anyone else who’s ever worked on this show. Lovely.

Anyway, Willie’s sick of these assholes checking up on the safety of his family so he kicks them out of the house, and closes the door in the face of a still clearly shaken Mr. Ochmonek.

Another 55 choruses. Lift your voices to the heavens, folks!

Anyway, ALF overhears the conversation and is told after the Ochmoneks leave (and/or are thrown out in the middle of the night afraid for their lives) that earthquakes are usually a lot worse, so he should stop being a pussy like, right fucking now.

This scares him, and we’re supposed to care about that. Which would be fine…

…if we didn’t just establish that we’re not supposed to care about Mr. Ochmonek going through the exact same thing.

Fuck this fuckass show.

Later on the Tanners head out to the garage to take inventory of their earthquake supplies.

It’s a good thing they do; they find out that ALF drank all of the emergency water, ate all of the emergency peanut butter, and smoked all of the emergency crack. It’s a nice little nod to the continuity of the show, I admit; ALF lived in the garage for a few years, and that’s a reasonable place for the supplies to be kept.

This isn’t a cheat at all, or a manufactured development. It actually feels like a pretty smart reveal. Kudos to the writers for connecting dots in a natural way like this.

Anyway Kate fingers herself for a while because all this talk of starvation and dehydration and flaming bowels is upsetting ALF.

I understand, Kate. I’m fingering myself, too.

The next day or who cares it turns out ALF ordered a shitload of water so Willie and Kate make angry faces. It sucks.

Then later on ALF is nailing his bed to the floor and Willie tells him to knock that shit off. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” isn’t horrible, but it feels more like a disjointed collection of scenes in which people talk about earthquakes than it feels like a story about earthquakes.

There’s a really poor line reading by Paul Fusco in this scene, in which he emphasizes the wrong word. I can honestly say that this is a rarity; Fusco’s performance is usually pretty solid. Of course, I imagine that’s because if Fusco flubs a line he demands that everyone stand by for 55 hours while the puppet trenches are reset so he can try again…whereas if anyone else flubs one he just keeps going because they’re shitty actors and he wants the world to know it.

So, honestly, I don’t know if Fusco is a much better performer than walking gaffe Max Wright…but he was signing the stage crew’s paychecks, so I’m sure he got as many mulligans as he pleased.

This time, though, he doesn’t realize he flubbed anything…which is proof that he didn’t understand the joke.

See, Willie asks ALF why he’s nailing his bed to the floor, and ALF replies, “It wouldn’t make such to Scotch tape it now, would it?”

What he really means to say is “It wouldn’t make much sense to Scotch tape it, now would it?”

He drops the comma in the wrong place, making it sounds like at another time it might have made sense to Scotch tape it. What ALF is actually supposed to convey is that he’s nailing it because Scotch taping it wouldn’t be as effective.

The delivery is wrong, and it changes the meaning of the line. In fact, it removes the joke entirely, making audience laughter seem even more fake than it usually does.

Fuckin’ Fusco.

Willie and ALF sit around for a while giving each other handjobs until an aftershock hits and a globe falls on ALF’s bed.

This is actually staged pretty well, as Willie tries to get ALF into the doorjamb (which, at the time, was considered to be a safe place to stand, but I get the feeling that’s changed) but ALF tries to hide in bed instead. The globe just misses him, and his expression as he realizes he was almost brained is very effective. You can see in his eyes (lifeless eyes…black eyes…like a doll’s eyes…) that whatever small amount of faith he had in his own safety immediately drains away.

But Willie tells him the globe weighs nothing so he should stop being a pussy like, right fucking now.

The scene ends with ALF saying, “Face it, Willie. Earth is hazardous to your health.” It’s a shame that such a ham-fisted attempt at profundity ends an otherwise pretty good scene, especially since Paul Fusco delivers the line like he’s closing out a keynote speech at some poor kid’s graduation. Fucker, you’re talking through a puppet, not changing lives. Tell a joke and cut to commercial.

The next day everybody’s hanging out in the kitchen, and Jake stops by for the second-to-last time in his life. When he knocks Lynn calls to him, “It’s open.” His hopes are dashed, however, when he realizes she’s referring to the door.

Then ALF gushes about how much he loves everyone, which is neither funny nor interesting enough to say much about. I mean, it’s a nice development and all, but ALF’s near-death experience wasn’t near enough to death to mean much. It’s the sort of thing that I can fully understand making it through a pitch session, but when they were writing the script they must have forgotten to make any of it matter, so we just have ALF acting like a man reborn for surviving something no more dangerous than eating a slice of day-old bread.

There is a fucking lovely moment though when ALF says that the incident with the globe “gave me pause.” Lynn walks over and says, “I thought you already had paws.” Which is so fucking stupid, and she knows it, because she just stares at him while the two pretend to laugh at the dumbass joke, and if I’m ever going to fall in love with Lynn Tanner it’s here, at this moment, when she’s so goddamn human it’s adorable.

This might actually be my single favorite moment of season three. ALF thinking he sees Blinky on the highway…Jake confronting his mother…the elaborately staged ceremony just to say “Sorry about the book”…all of that is great. And I mean that. But it pales in comparison to Andrea Elson telling a stupid joke she knows is stupid, and then owning the awkwardness behind it. It’s such an unexpected bright spot that I can’t help but love it.

ALF explains that he’s going to be nice and appreciative now because he realizes that any breath he takes could be his last. He’s going to savor every moment he has left.

“There goes one now…” he says, in what’s legitimately one of the best lines this show has ever produced. And, again, it’s a very human moment.

“Shake, Rattle and Roll” is kind of shit. But, hey, almost all of these episodes are kind of shit. Not all of them have a shred of identifiable humanity.

I’ll take it.

Then he tells everyone to join hands for a chorus of “Kumbaya.” They all ignore him, but the scene transition music doesn’t; it blends “Kumbaya” with the ALF theme song in a way that fucking hurts to listen to.

Not because it’s bad…but because whoever spent the time arranging and performing that mashup did it for motherfucking ALF.

Later on Lynn is studying French, which surely assuages her parents’ concerns a few weeks back that she wouldn’t make any money after college. Art History doesn’t sound so bad now, does it bitches? ALF comes in with a rose and says, “plz can we fuck i mite die.”

It’s not quite as gross as all the other times he asked her to slip his barbed, hairy cock up her cooch, so kudos to them for that, I guess.

It actually leads to a good moment, though, when he stops talking about fucking her (imagine that) and starts talking about the theme of the episode (IMAGINE THAT).

See, ALF is worried about dying on Earth without having enjoyed his life to the fullest. As I mentioned earlier, that’s not a bad idea for a plotline on its own, but it’s enhanced by one detail very specific to ALF as a TV show and ALF as a character: he already lost a life on Melmac without enjoying it to its fullest.

In other words, he’s been here before. He knows what it’s like to be too late…to have actually let all of his time slip away. And he doesn’t want that to happen again.

It’s why he’s so concerned about dying all of a sudden; he was reminded of the death he already lived through. It rings true, and it’s insightful enough that I really wish they did more with it.

His previous life is gone, and he can never have it back. He took it for granted, just as most of us do. Now he’s on Earth and he’s spent most of that time watching TV and probing Brian. He got a second chance at life, and so far he’s taken that for granted, too.

It’s good, and it’s a shame that the idea is introduced midway through the episode and abandoned completely before the end. It’s a teasing glimpse of the second draft that could have been.

There’s even a funny line when he tells Lynn about all the things on his own planet that are lost forever: “Like the time Benny Futterman and I… See? I forgot!”

Dumb joke made poignant by its context. You’re so close this week, ALF. So close.

In the next scene he’s in the shed with Brian, setting up Willie’s train set. I happened to notice the train set was missing earlier in the episode. I mean, okay, it’s usually missing, but this time the big, flat wooden table was there, when usually the whole setup is just gone, so it’s kind of nice that they brought the table out for an earlier scene in anticipation for this one.

I like the idea that ALF seems to be going around to each of the family members, making a point of spending quality time with them. It’d be nicer if they had personalities so that they could do things specific to their relationship (see Homer’s last day alive in “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish”), but instead he spends time with Lynn while she’s sitting, and Brian while he’s standing.

I guess we should have given these characters some traits or hobbies at some point. Oh well.

His conversation with Brian is nothing new (“WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE BRIAN”) and I find it hard to care much about ALF saying goodbye to a kid we haven’t even met yet. In fact, setting this scene around the train set just makes me remember how much better “Night Train” was than…well, almost any other episode.

I didn’t mention it before, but commenter Justin emailed me a link to this interview with Max Wright, conducted while they were shooting season three. It’s the most positive I’ve ever heard the guy be about this show…which is saying something since it’s still full of him bitching about how awful ALF is. But the interview does end with this:

Wright says that because of production logistics with the character ALF, scenes are usually short. He fondly recalls an exception, the touching episode last season in which Willie and ALF became hobos, chatting philosophically inside a freight car and around a campfire. “It was unusual. The two of us did a 10-page scene. That was the peak for me, my favorite show.”

I feel somewhat vindicated by that. “Night Train” wasn’t just an exception for me…it was an exception for the guy who wished more than anything that the set would cave in and kill everyone involved. I don’t know if it’s actually my favorite episode (any guesses as to its competition? And which of these are your favorite episodes?) but I’m sure it will make my all-time-best list when this show is done.

It was a chance for two characters to be characters. I might have liked it sitting at home, watching it…but it makes me very happy to know that the cast liked it, too. Who’d have guessed that acting in a good episode of TV is more rewarding than getting buried in a weekly shit avalanche?

Anyway, this ain’t no “Night Train.” This ain’t no “Fight Back.” (This ain’t no foolin’ around.)

This is “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” Brian gets the train running and ALF smashes it. So much for quality time, dickbag.

Brian serves up his weekly bitchface just as Jake comes over. ALF tells Brian he can fuck off now, because Jake’s more fun to hang out with anyway.

But Jake is already sick of this crap. He tells ALF to knock it off with the “we’re dying” talk. Pretty soon he, too, is walking out the door.

Then ALF calls to him: “Oh, Jake! In case this is the last time we see each other…”

Jake tells him to cut that crap out; he’s just going home and nothing’s going to happen to him there. This inspires ALF to list off a bunch of ways that Jake might die in his own house. Jake doesn’t listen to it for long, though. After all, he can’t. He has to go now. His planet needs him.*

Man, ALF sure had terrible luck with real-world logistics. Here we have Jake’s last appearance on the show…which happens to be a conversation about all the ways he could die the moment he steps off-camera. The implication is unintentional, but too bad. It’s still morbid as all fuck. What should have been a pointless, forgettable exchange between the two instead seems to presage the post-episode development in which Jake slips in the tub and breaks his neck, twitching and drowning while nobody thinks to check on him.

It’s like the way the final episode of the show ended, with the government closing in, ready to skin ALF alive. It was supposed to be a cliffhanger, but, hilarious mercy of hilarious mercies, the show got cancelled right after that and we’re left to assume ALF was harrowingly vivisected to death in an underground research facility.

ALF is one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen, but not in any of the ways it wanted to be.

Later Willie has a heart to heart with Brian, who is hiding under the bed because he thinks he might die. There’s a really fucking stupid moment when Kate comes in and sees this, and she says “WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO BRIAN’S BED LOL”

Man, remember when Kate was a human being? That was awesome. Talk about taking things for granted.

Sure, once her character started to succumb to this show’s pervasive idiocy, Jake’s rose to fill the void. And that was nice. I wasn’t happy to lose her, but at least we had someone else we could count on to be an actual human.

But we can’t say that anymore. We’re stuck with Pod-Person Kate, and the unwelcome knowledge that Jake is already gone and no one will ever mention him again, under penalty of torture.

There was nobody else for Jake to pass the torch to, I guess. It’s snuffed out with him.

I’m convinced that this show has lost its last reliable vestige of humanity, and I am really worried about finding any raft of sanity in season four.

Anyway, Willie acts like a father for the second time in this entire show’s run by telling Brian that if he worries too much about all the bad shit that might happen, he’ll miss all the good shit that does happen.

It’s solid advice. I mean, I’ll never follow it, because worrying is about the only thing I’m good at, but you probably should.

He essentially gives the same speech two more times, though, because the episode budgeted way more time for this scene than it should have. Eh, whatever. It’s still a nice thought and a decent moral to end the episode with. Then again ALF’s day consists of sucking Dorito crumbs out of his pubes so it’s not like he missed out on much by being worried all the time.

In the short scene before the credits, the delivery guy comes back to take the extra water away. WHEW. I’m so glad that once an episode decided to definitively resolve something, it picked the amount of bottled water the Tanners have on hand.

Then the delivery guy leaves and ALF complains that without enough water for a waterslide, Tannerland is never going to catch on! And even the fake audience of dead people can barely muster up the energy to applaud that shit.

The episode’s moral as it applies to ALF is still up in the air for me. I get Willie telling Brian not to worry; that makes sense. But ALF’s concern this week was that he’s not making the most of his life on Earth. “Don’t worry” is still a nice thing to say, but it doesn’t exactly relate to ALF’s situation.

If your son is hiding under the bed because he’s afraid of being killed by anything and everything, “Don’t worry” is fine. If your alien hobo is pissed off that he’s slowly wasting away in your attic, “Don’t worry” is a non-sequitur at best.

And, man, I really wish they did more with the “ALF faces his mortality” idea than boil it down to a single scene in which he slaps Brian’s train off the track. What a rich, fruitful idea. It’s a shame they didn’t bother to see it through, because there could have been some real pathos in there.

Still, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” had some funny moments, some nice visuals, and a decent idea at its core. I can pick its nits all day long, but, ultimately, it wasn’t the massive pile of catshit it could have been.

I assume they’re saving that for the season finale.

MELMAC FACTS: Melmac had a dating service called Catastrophic Expectations. That’s a funny enough name on its own, but based on the reputation of its real-world analogue, it might not be much of an exaggeration.
—–
*Note: Jake died on the way back to his home planet.

I think I first made this observation back in season one, and when I did I was just being a smartass. Here we are, though, ending season three, and it’s still held true: there can never be two good episodes of ALF in a row. We are coming off of a well-acted, well-scripted, well-observed story about toxic parents…watching ALF jack off to fantasies of being in a silent movie.

It’s really awful. And while its placement after “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” makes it seem worse than it really is, I assure you, it’s still fucking terrible.

On the bright side, nothing happens in this dick-heap, so it should be really easy to write about.

It opens with the family getting ready to go to a wedding. Hey, cool! Whose wedding?

We never find out. How can the writers still avoid developing these people after three full years on the air?

Well, maybe we can do some deductive reasoning to figure it out. We know it’s not Kate Sr.’s wedding because she’s already married, and we know it’s not Jake’s because he turns up later. And they are the only two people who exist outside of this house, so I think it’s safe to conclude that this “wedding” is just an excuse to leave home before dropping a hot tip to the Alien Task Force.

Since they’re leaving and since he’s an asshole, ALF threatens to burn the place down with Brian’s chemistry set and Willie’s matchbox collection. Willie’s matchbox collection, folks. Another fucking hobby. It has to be deliberate at this point.

…right?

Please?

Anyway, ALF’s threat to destroy everything they own is met with a disinterested shrug. They’re probably used to being openly threatened by the naked rapist that they let live with them rent free, and this doesn’t even register. Willie gives him some movies to watch instead.

One of them is The Sheik, a silent film from 1921, and the other isn’t specified (though we can see from the box that it’s City Lights). According to Willie the latter stars “Chhahhhrl-ee Chhahhhplinn.” Slurring a name like Charlie Chaplin should be impossible, so hats off to you, Max. I underestimated your commitment to unintelligibility.

So Willie pops in one of the films and does his best Joker face, in the sad hope that Tim Burton is watching.

ALF rightfully asks what the living fuck they’re doing giving him crusty old silent films. For once I’m on ALF’s side. He likes garbage TV; you don’t need to stock him up with this crap he doesn’t want to watch. Just leave him with a TV Guide and fresh batteries for the remote control; he’ll finger his prostate to My Mother the Car and you don’t have to go through this song and dance where you act all superior for appreciating silent-era Hollywood on a deeper level than a fucking space alien who’s never heard of this shit.

Whatever. Kate tells ALF to get fucked and they leave for the wedding.

Who is this episode for, anyway? ALF‘s target demographic of 8-year-old kids who don’t know better than to play Uncle Touchy? Something tells me they’re not huge fans of pre-talkie cinema. Jesus Christ, most adults around this time couldn’t have cared less about it. Why in the name of cock are we going to spend half an hour gently ribbing it through a hand puppet?

After the credits ALF has a pointlessly short phone call with Willie. I honestly don’t even know why it happens. I guess Max Wright just demanded a scene, at some point, in which he wouldn’t have to share the room with the insane puppeteer.

Then ALF calls Jake. Since that kid just gave a bravura performance in a standout episode last week, ALFusco wants to make damned sure he knows his place, so he’s forced this week to help Moe’s talking bar-rag write a shitty silent film.

Yeah. Remember “A Little Bit of Soap”? For your sake, I hope not…but we’re doing that shit again.

In a way, “Like an Old Time Movie” makes more sense, because nobody’s actually producing ALF’s crap or paying him to write it. In another, more accurate, way, “Like an Old Time Movie” is a lot worse, because nothing he writes has any impact on the episode at all.

And it has no impact because…you guessed it, motherfuckers!

It’s a fantasy episode!

Hooray!! Everybody’s favorite excuse to write a fuckton of bullshit that doesn’t even matter to the episode itself!

…Jesus Christ I’m sick of these fantasy episodes. If you want to do one a season, fine. Tell a few decent jokes and I won’t complain. But these are just…fuck. They’re awful. They somehow manage to take a show I can’t stand watching and make it worse.

And it doesn’t help that this one centers around ALF’s pitch session for a silent movie. Who fucking cares? With the Gilligan’s Island one, there was some fun in seeing the old actors back in character. With “Hail to the Chief” there was at least an opportunity to tell the kinds of jokes ALF didn’t usually get to tell. (It didn’t tell any of them; it just had ALF rap for a while…but still.) Here, I have no idea who this is even for.

Why wasn’t this squashed instantly in the writer’s room? “Wouldn’t it be funny if we parodied silent films by having ALF try to write one?” is the kind of thing that should have had people shouting “No!” ten times before the end of the sentence.

…but here we are. Fuck dammit.

ALF dreamed he was in a silent movie. And that he was the star of the movie. This really blew his mind, the fact that he (some overfed, hairy-assed, child-raping space hobo) should be the star of a silent movie, but there he was!

He imagines that he’s some Arabian whatever, and that his harem is hanging around, waiting for him to come home and fuck them.

Lovely stuff. It’s always the highlight of any family sitcom to see the main character’s dreams of strange women dying to slide down his cock.

And just in case you didn’t think it was offputting enough to have your kids watching a show in which narrated sex-play is presented as a constructive use of one’s imagination, Jake interrupts his fantasy to tell him that his movie sucks dick. ALF explains to him about Sheiks and how they all have harems that they like to fuck constantly. So, there you go. ALF invites a teenage boy to his empty house, and enthuses to him about the wonders of polygamy.

How fucking gross is this show? Seriously, guys. I feel sick just watching this.

Anyway, even though this is a silent film, ALF speaks. His lips don’t move, but we hear his dialogue. At first I thought this was some kind of mistake (even though he just finished shotgunning silent films and loves silent films and is now writing a silent film, he doesn’t seem to know what the fuck a silent film is), but maybe that’s just the way The Sheik worked. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t say, and the more standard intertitles are used later, when ALF’s film is instead influenced by Charlie Chaplin.

So it’s more of an observation than a complaint. If that part of the fantasy is true to The Sheik and the later part of the fantasy is true to the works of Chaplin, then I’ll give ALF credit for attention to detail. (Even if it’s attention to detail nobody in the audience will recognize or appreciate or bother watching longer than the first commercial break.) But if it’s not, then I don’t know what the fuck the show was doing.

So, yeah, ALF decides to do a Charlie Chaplin style comedy instead of All-Night Arabian Fuckapalooza, presumably because the show ran out of black and white stock footage of deserts.

Now he’s “The Little Scamp,” standing around begging for food. Willie comes along dressed as a cop and shakes a long black dildo around so it looks like he’s beating off on ALF’s shoulder.

I’m not exaggerating even slightly. Look at that fucking screengrab.

LOOK AT IT

PRINT IT AND KISS IT YOU FUCKS

Could he possibly hold it more like a cock? What the fuck is this show?

ALF tells Jake to take over on the typewriter, because writing sucks. It’s much more rewarding to take the scripts that other people have written and give yourself all the funny lines.

Jake asks if he’ll get to be in the movie, too, and ALF is unable to stop laughing long enough to tell the kid he won’t even get to be in season four.

ALF continues spitballing his shitty movie with a scene for Lynn, who plays a blind girl that falls for him.

And I have to admit, that’s a good idea! Think of all the great stories that could come from a blind girl who develops feelings for ALF, not realizing that he’s an alien. Why, they’d both be social isolates in their own way, and they could forge a kind of relationship in which…

…wait. Didn’t we already do that?

Yes fuckdammit we already did that. What happened to Jodie anyway? We haven’t seen her all season. Has ALF really forgotten about her? It’s one thing if we imagine that they hang out and fingerfuck every so often and we just don’t see it, but this sequence seems to disprove that. How is it possible that ALF is having this fantasy of a blind girl being in love with him without realizing that that’s actually something that he’s already living through?

He’s forgotten completely about Jodie. He’s here dicking around writing silent vanity films and, somewhere, she’s ignored, devastated, and alone. That’s what you get for not being as fuckable as the teenage girl I secretly live with, you hideous blind bitch.

Guys, this episode is terrible. It’s nice that ALF recognizes the similarities between this fantasy and City Lights, but it’s fucking disorienting that ALF doesn’t recognize the similarities to itself.

Anne Schedeen gets to still be pretty good, in spite of the fact that we don’t hear her line readings. Her look of confused disgust when ALF walks into her apartment with her blind daughter and crippled son is pretty perfect. In fact, it almost makes up for the ickiness of ALF using his dumbass movie to fulfill a fantasy of Kate being a miserable, penniless, broken old crone.

Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot to mention that Brian is in this. He plays the shoe-shine boy, and I have to admit that I’m impressed how well his shitty acting comes through even when we don’t hear a word he says.

ALF walks into the home of this poverty-ridden family of suffering invalids and demands dinner.

Have I mentioned how much I love this show IT IS SO GOOD

The fake audience of dead people goes wild, because ALF did something, and then Silent Kate serves the family a boiled shoe. This leads to the big punchline of the entire scene, in which he shouts at a blind girl and her crippled brother:

Back in the Tanner house, ALF laughs until he shits again at how funny he is.

Jake tells him that it’s not even his joke; it was in a Charlie Chaplin movie. Was it really? I honestly don’t know.

Well, let me qualify that. Chaplin eats a shoe in The Gold Rush, but ALF was specifically praising his “You’re eating footwear” line…which I guess qualifies as a joke in the same way that “I am wearing a white shirt” qualifies as a joke. (Nota bene: I am wearing a white shirt.)

As far as I’m aware, the joke itself is not Chaplin’s, but it does, admittedly, lead to the only funny line in the episode: “Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism.”

Also, if you’re ever overcome with self-loathing and decide to watch this episode, compare the shoe-eating scene to the one in The Gold Rush. It’s a great way to compare two vastly different comic approaches to the same gag. On one side, you have Chaplin’s masterfully understated performance of inventive physical comedy. On the other side, ALF screams at poor people.

AND ALSO ALSO if this is indeed meant to be stolen from The Gold Rush, how does ALF even know about it? He watched City Lights. AND ALSO ALSO ALSO why in the name of shit is Jake deeply familiar with the works of The Little Tramp? Did he accidentally buy the collection thinking it was pornography?

There’s a knock at the door, and Silent Kate tells ALF to hide under the table. His observation (“Some things never change.”) is actually decent. It’s one of those rare moments of subtle comedy that is improved by someone pointing it out, so, okay. That’s like, 1.5 laughs so far. About 20 times the amount of laughter I expected to get out of this episode.

Kate opens the door to find that John LaMotta and Liz Sheridan got roped into doing this catshit, too.

Mr. Ochmonek actually looks pretty dapper. Which at first I thought was pretty cool…until I thought more about it and realized it was disappointing. See, in response to my review of “My Back Pages,” Perfect Strangers enthusiast Casey said it was nice that in Willie’s dream sequence, they gave Mr. Ochmonek the kind of shirt he’d have been wearing back in the 60s.

And you know what? Yeah. That was actually a cool touch.

Mr. Ochmonek has the most clearly defined sense of fashion of any character on this show, and it’s one of ALF‘s most consistent character details. I’ve mentioned before that I could probably walk through a department store and pick out exactly the kind of outfits he’d like. For any other character, I’d have no clue at all.

Mr. O’s wardrobe was one of the first things I liked about him; it gave me the sense, consciously or not, that he was human…that on this show packed full of unbelievable assholes he could behave in some identifiable, understandable way. Even if the depths of his character didn’t go any further than the kinds of shirts he’d reach for when he came across a discount rack, it was (and is) something.

So what would he wear in the universe of a 1931 Chaplin film? Like the question of what he’d wear in the 1960s, there should be a pretty fun answer. Instead, the show gives us a prom tux, whatever. Fuck it, let’s just shoot this thing and go home.

And that just makes me sad. When ALF robs me of the joys of another Mr. Ochmonek outfit, you know it’s intent on pissing me off.

Anyway, they’re here so ALF can daydream about the evil Ochmoneks taking Kate’s life savings so that she can’t afford operations for her kids. Which, I admit, is perfectly in keeping with their real-life characters. Like all of the times they bought the Tanners gifts, loaned them cars, checked in to see if they needed a ride to work, invited them on all-expenses-paid vacations, dropped by to wish them luck at their new jobs, invited them to holiday dinners when the Tanners had nothing to eat, babysat their kids with no notice in the middle of the night, organized a neighborhood watch to protect everyone from a burglar, threw Kate a baby shower, and all that other really awful, selfish crap they keep trying to pull.

Those dastardly shits.

Anyway some library piano music plays while the actors wave their arms around silently, which pretty much sums up 90% of this fucking episode.

Guys, I cannot express how much this episode sucks.

After the commercial Jake bitches about not being in the movie. Which accounts for almost all of his dialogue this week. He really wants to be in this imaginary silent film that will never be mentioned again.

He gives ALF an idea about having the blind girl sell the same flower over and over again by attaching a string to it, and this whole thing is really very riveting and I wish my mom aborted me.

Then Silent Mrs. Ochmonek comes back over and finds one of ALF’s hairs, so she calls in Officer Willie, who sees ALF under the table and makes a face. But he reports to Mrs. Ochmonek that there’s no “non-human” on the premises, so I guess this whole thing is the silent movie equivalent of the Alien Task Force. I have no idea. The fucking Alien Task Force barely registers as a threat in the “real” world of the show, so why I should give even half a shit about it in this jackass nonsense silent film is a question nobody could possibly answer.

Mrs. Ochmonek leaves and Willie thinks about fucking Kate, so he lifts one leg and thrusts his boner at nothing. ALF wants to end the movie here, because, really, how can you top that image, but Jake tells him that it can’t be over; nothing’s been resolved. Not that I disagree with you, Jake, but if a lack of resolution ends this shit sooner I’m definitely casting my vote for lack of resolution.

So ALF writes a scene in which Silent Mr. Ochmonek comes over and thinks about fucking Kate, too. Silent ALF takes his picture and blah blah whatever. The idea is that he shakes Mr. O down for the operation money, which Mr. O pays because he doesn’t want to have his picture in the paper for getting it up over someone who’s not his wife.

It’d be a decently logical conclusion if it weren’t for the fact that Mr. O could in return reveal the existence of alien life, which one might argue would constitute bigger news.

Officer Willie comes in and proposes to Kate and ALF wants to end the movie again, but Jake tells him there’s still a few minutes left in this dumbass episode, so we get a scene at the hospital instead.

In it, Lynn and Brian get operations so that they can see and walk respectively. Also, ALF gets some kind of operation that lets him talk in a silent movie. That latter part is actually decently funny, but fuck you if you think I’m going to bother explaining it. I’ve had more than enough of this shit; I don’t feel like dallying even for the relatively good stuff.

Then the family all hugs and grinds their junk on each other until it’s fucking finally time for the credits.

For all the talk of loose ends, it’s odd that Jake kept complaining throughout the episode that he wanted to be in ALF’s shitty movie, then the episode ends and he’s still not in it. It felt like some big setup for a scene in which he’s revealed to be a scummy hobo or something, but instead it’s like a running joke that never gets to the joke part.

There is one scene in which ALF tells Jake he can direct the film, so I guess that’s meant to be the tradeoff for Jake not appearing in it. But even so, this qualifies as a pretty half-assed episode, even by ALF standards. And that’s one hell of an achievement.

In the short scene before the credits, ALF sits on the floor waiting for the Tanner women to come home and fuck him.

I’m done.

Countdown to Jake ceasing to exist: 1 episode
Countdown to Jim J. Bullock existing: 9 episodes (single digits, bitches!!)

MELMAC FACTS: At Melmacian weddings they threw “the bridal squid.” Was Melmac a really wet planet or something? An awful lot of their customs had to do with fish.

There’s a reason that most sitcoms either rarely attempt emotional episodes, or make sure to undercut them when they do. To put it flatly, emotion is a tricky beast. Shows that traffic in it (see just about any daytime drama) become easy punchlines, and shows that don’t run the risk of annoying or alienating their fans when they make an attempt at seriousness.

Comedies are problematic when it comes to emotional content. People tune in to them not only because they like to laugh, but because they like to laugh with that particular show’s characters, tone, and comic sensibilities. When you hijack an audience’s regularly scheduled sitcom to present A Very Special message about drug addiction, date rape, or divorce…and when you put that Very Special Message in the mouths of the very actors we expected to make us laugh…it feels like a kind of betrayal. The messages and emotion are almost necessarily ham-fisted, because they so clearly don’t belong in a multi-camera sitcom with a live studio audience, a peppy theme song, and a wacky neighbor.

That’s not to say “serious” episodes can’t work, but it is to say that there’s no definite recipe for success, and thousands of examples of quite varied failure.

Some comedies decided to weave emotion into their stories from the start. In the case of M*A*S*H, for instance, dramatic moments actually suited the context of the show rather than distracted from it; it took place in a hospital camp during wartime, after all. We didn’t need, necessarily, to see the darker side of war, but when it reared its head it was impossible to dismiss as being out of place.

Another emotionally successful comedy is Futurama, and it’s no coincidence that that show’s most memorably devastating moments came at the end of an episode, rather than at the beginning or during. Seymour waiting, the destruction of Fry’s cosmic confession to Leela, the flashback of Hermes saving a defective Bender from the scrapheap…all of these things happen at the end of an episode. Until the curtain falls, you are watching a standard half-hour of the show. As a result, the emotion punctuates the story, rather than overpowers it.

But those are successful exceptions. Most of the time sitcoms swap out their standard approaches for something entirely different. And, most of the time, it’s a fucking disaster.

ALF takes an enormous gamble with “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow.” (As with the Gilligan’s Island episode, I’ve had to truncate the title for the WordPress headline.) It unapologetically goes the ham-fisted route. You may have tuned in expecting off-the-wall alien hijinx, but instead you’re getting a straight-faced examination of a minor character’s strained relationship with his mother.

The fact that it works is a miracle. Of all the sitcoms that have attempted drama over the years, ALF would be the last one I’d expect to be successful. And yet here we are.

I’m every bit as shocked as you.

We’ll get to why it works later on. For now, we’ll focus on the opening sequence, which is quite good. It’s punchy, it’s funny, and it reveals the central conflict of the episode in a clever way. It’s a good start to an episode that, by and large, lives up to its promise.

“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” begins with the Tanners finishing dinner. Kate brings out some pie as Willie compliments her on the meatloaf. She corrects him; it was Salisbury steak. ALF says to Willie, “Great. Meatloaf with an attitude.”

I can’t decide if I actually like the line or not, but the delivery is funny enough that it saves it from just being more Kate bashing. (The deliveries of many other lines in this episode save them, thankfully, from the same fate.)

Then there’s a knock at the door and Jake’s voice, and Willie calls out “Door’s open, Jake!” in a happier tone than I think I’ve ever heard this character speak before.

You know how I’ve floated the idea that early drafts of these scripts established a kind of bond between Willie and Jake? Well, moments like this really reinforce that thought for me, especially since Willie tells Jake he’s glad to see him, because “We haven’t seen you around here for quite a while.” It turns out to have just been a few days…which wouldn’t be long enough to register with someone if they were just neighbors. Friends may visit regularly, yes. But neighbors? Nah.

Somewhere in the hatchet-happy revision process, I’m convinced that we lost scenes of Willie and Jake finding unlikely friends in each other. Two isolates in a world they don’t particularly like, two nerds in their own ways, two people in search of a family and friends that understand them. Echoes of it survive in scenes like this. I sure wish we could have seen the whole thing.

Usually in these reviews I list every line that made me laugh, but already I’m having to leave a lot out in the interest of time. (The brief discussion of Mr. Ochmonek’s dislike of dried fennel — he prefers it fresh — is such a lovely, specific, genuinely funny flourish, for example.) That’s because in most episodes, so little works that it’s easy to be comprehensive. In this episode, nearly all of it works, and I actually have to be selective. It’s…a good feeling, I admit.

Jake explains his absence by saying, dismissively, that somebody’s been staying with them lately. He doesn’t make eye contact. He doesn’t want to tell the whole story. Kate, oblivious, sees that he’s not going to continue, so she asks, “A relative?”

Jake’s reply is instinctive. He says, “Sort of.”

It’s the classic response of somebody who doesn’t want to talk, but is forced into saying something.

When he explains, “It’s my mother,” it both works as a joke and as a punch to the gut.

On its own, this moment might not have meant much. In light of what’s to come, it’s the perfect introduction to a tonally distinct episode. It’s both funny and effective emotionally…two things that never come easily to this show.

The scene continues with the family discussing that Jake’s never mentioned his mother before…and there’s a great unspoken moment when the kid has no idea how to respond and nearly walks out of the house. Willie stops him (again, suggesting a kind of bond between them) and I love the fact that we don’t end with the shock of “It’s my mother.” The show allows that moment to play in its quietly sad way, and also to function as a laugh-line in a larger, ongoing sequence.

In other words, the introduction of this episode’s emotional component doesn’t bring it to a dead halt, which, I believe, is why it succeeds. The emotion doesn’t overshadow the comedy; they coexist. “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” might not try as frequently to make us laugh, but it still does try. And the emotional content gives the jokes more room to breathe, making them seem funnier than they typically are.

I’m surprised at how effectively this episode played on my feelings. I’m even more surprised at how often it made me laugh.

After the opening credits, Willie verbally spars with ALF and licks his lips while eyeballing the alien’s naked, rippling chest.

Once again Willie and Kate are sitting on the couch, facing different directions, reading different things, in total silence, not touching each other. For crying out loud, there was more overt affection between Al and Peg Bundy. If at any point ALF had something to say about the stagnation of this marriage, I’d look at things like this as interesting, subtle ways of reinforcing the theme. Instead it’s just two actors who can’t be bothered to pretend they know each other, let alone act like they’re in a healthy and happy marriage.

Want to know why I believe the Ochmoneks are in love while I’ll never believe the Tanners are? The Ochmoneks touch. One laughs when the other makes a joke. They do things together. They do things for each other. They have date nights. They look each other in the eye. And, as we learn here in an offhand comment from ALF, they have a sex life. How much of that applies to the Tanners? None of it that I’m aware of.

Are Willie and Kate in love? We’re told they are. But if we go only by what we see, I’d never draw that conclusion. Roommates, maybe. Spouses? Impossible.

After the opening titles we see the most surprising thing about the episode: writing credits for Paul Fusco and Lisa A. Bannick.

Fusco, as you know, is the egomaniacal supervillain that began ALF as a legal way to torment and slowly murder Max Wright. He’s also, to be fair, an impressive and genuinely talented puppeteer, but his strengths have never had anything to do with writing or characterization.

Bannick’s previous writing credits on this show include “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Prime Time,” “Hail to the Chief,” “Tonight, Tonight,” and “Baby Love,” which reads like an incomplete list of the worst ALF episodes recited from memory.

Together, somehow, they both have their names on this uncommonly strong episode, which plays to the unexpected strengths of a problematic supporting character and fleshes out his backstory. This is incredible. It’s the ALF equivalent of walking on water.

Mrs. Ochmonek comes over to introduce Jake’s mother. I’ll get to her in a bit, but, first, let’s talk about the other thing we get introduced to: this episode’s approach to the Ochmoneks.

Normally, I’m baffled. Jack LaMotta and Liz Sheridan do the best they can with their characters. LaMotta is especially funny with his limited screentime (and ALF-quality gags), but what makes them stand out is the fact that they’re actually acting. They don’t just turn up, recite their lines, and walk off the set. That describes almost everybody else’s approach to this show, but LaMotta and Sheridan at least try. And I love them for it. I love them far (far, far…) more than I love any of the Tanners, which is what’s so baffling. Aren’t I supposed to hate these guys?

The show never quite got a handle on how to make us like the family we’re supposed to like and dislike the family we’re supposed to dislike. Even if we ignore the fact that LaMotta and Sheridan are clearly better actors, the show doesn’t accurately characterize either family, at all. The Ochmoneks are regularly doing nice things for the Tanners, nearly always spur-of-the-moment, and never receiving any kind of appreciation in return. On the flipside, the Tanners are consistently rude, condescending assbags. We’re about to enter the final season, and nobody involved with the show has realized any of this yet.

But this episode does what’s only been done maybe twice before: it positions the Ochmoneks as the right kind of irritating neighbor, and it does so from the start. Here, Mrs. Ochmonek introduces Jake’s mother to the Tanners and, after letting her gaze linger too long on Kate’s belly, explains, “She’s pregnant.”

The Ochmoneks aren’t cartoon characters, and they’re not assholes. They are (or should be) people who don’t really think before they speak. They’re not bad, they’re just uncouth. A little dim. Unaware of the fact that the way they live their lives isn’t the way that everybody else lives theirs.

And that can be annoying. In fact, in reality, that is annoying, and it probably describes pretty well the kind of people you yourself avoid whenever possible.

The Tanners don’t need to sit around making fun of Mr. Ochmonek’s war injury or Mrs. Ochmonek’s saggy tits. They just need to try to be civil and find themselves up against unintentional rudeness. That’s how you convince me that I’d be annoyed by the Ochmoneks; you emphasize their lack of self-awareness. You don’t tell me they’re fat and old and assume I’ll agree with you that yeah, the world would be a better place without them, and it’s right to treat them like scum.

Anyway, it’s a promising indication of the way the rest of the episode will pan out, and that just won’t do, so Willie reminds us that we’re watching ALF by making a funny face.

Kate suggests that they should all get together while Jake’s mother is in town, and Mrs. Ochmonek immediately volunteers her to make dinner for them tomorrow night. Jake’s mother says she doesn’t have to go through any trouble on her account, but Mrs. Ochmonek says, “Oh, pish. Kate doesn’t mind. Do you, Kate?”

All of which is rude without intending to be rude, and which fences Kate into hosting a gathering that she doesn’t especially care to host. It develops the story, builds character, and sets up the next plot point without feeling forced.

See how much better this shit is when somebody thinks before writing it?

Jake’s mother thanks the Tanners for all they’ve done for Jake. I’d love to make a snarky comment here, but, yeah…they actually have been pretty nice to him. They first met the kid, remember, the day he decided to burgle their house, and he’s been relentlessly trying to fingerfuck their daughter ever since. But he’s a welcome presence in their house; Willie seems to like him, ALF hardly rapes him at all, and he knows Brian’s name. The kid’s a miracle worker.

When he was introduced in “The Boy Next Door,” he stole Willie’s telescope. Later on ALF confronted him about it and taught him that “Repairing is cool, but stealing’s for fools.” Then he rapped a little bit about the importance of finishing your veggies, and always recycling to the extreme. I bring up Jake’s thievery here because it does, as we’ll see, qualify as a continuity error. I also bring it up, though, as evidence that continuity errors are worth having if they lead to a far better episode than the one it’s contradicting.

I’ll explain that later on. For now, Jake’s mother leaves and Willie sees that ALF has been watching and gleefully masturbating throughout the entire scene.

You may still be wondering why I don’t hate this one, but don’t worry; we’re coming to that now.

The Ochmoneks, Jake’s mother, and Jake are all dining with the Tanners, and as soon as Jake finishes (and his uncle asks for seconds) he says he’s full and they should probably get going.

Josh Blake isn’t a stellar actor or anything, but he does a good job in this episode, and specifically in this scene. His discomfort registers, probably because the kid has never been ill-at-ease in the Tanners’ house before. Whenever we’ve see him here he’s been one of the family. In fact he’s more than that, because people actually seem like him and enjoy his company. If Jake is uneasy it’s because something’s wrong, and that’s clear even if we’re kept in the dark as to what.

Jake’s mother also registers as a significant difference. She’s an unfamiliar presence, introduced at the same time we start seeing Jake behave strangely. And not only have we not seen her before; we’ve not heard about her before, either.

At least, I can’t remember hearing about her. Maybe a bigger fan of the show (Kim? Furienna?) will be aware of some reference I’ve forgotten, but, for me, she appears out of literally nowhere, and this episode answers a question I never thought to ask: why doesn’t Jake live with her?

In “The Boy Next Door” we found out that he was moving in with the Ochmoneks (his aunt and uncle) because his father went to jail. His mother’s status, to my knowledge, was never mentioned. I didn’t bring it up then, and probably didn’t even notice it. This is a TV show, after all, and while watching you fill in many gaps for yourself. Stories have to be brief, and not all details can be covered. You allow that. It’s part of the price of enjoying your favorite programs on a weekly basis.

Jake’s mother was one of those missing details, and “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” has fun with that fact: the Tanners and ALF all concluded, independently, that Jake’s mother was dead.

It’s a joke that shouldn’t play as well as it actually does, because that is a pretty shitty thing to say to a kid, but it’s just meta enough that it works. Whether we knew it or not, we all did the same thing.

Jake’s here because his father is in jail? His mother must be dead. Like the Tanners, we didn’t come to this conclusion consciously or rationally…but in the absence of any other explanation, we conclude silently, passively, that she does not exist.

This episode (whose title I’m already sick of typing) takes the previous lack of an explanation and spins it into a pretty good story of its own…and its resolution is one that especially stings when you realize that Jake is more comfortable with people assuming she’s dead than knowing the truth.

Then we get even more fun had with the previous lack of an explanation. When Lynn brings ALF his supper, he theorizes that the woman is an impostor. It’s actually Jake’s father, he says, masquerading as a woman in order to avoid his prison sentence.

It’s stupid enough that it circles around to being funny again, but ultimately it serves a narrative purpose as well: ALF is convinced that something isn’t right, and so he’s attentive to things that the others might overlook. This conversation even leads to one of the show’s better puns, as he quotes a famous Melmacian deli owner: “Something is awry.”

Not sure how well that works in print, to be honest, but I liked it. And Andrea Elson responds with what seems like genuine laughter and — let’s be honest here — a fucking adorable smile, so it’s worth it for that alone.

Back at the table, the Ochmoneks are being the right kind of Ochmoneks. Misunderstanding Willie’s vague comments about ALF to Lynn, Mr. O assumes there’s a problem with the Tanners’ attic. He starts to tell the story of how he used to have an infestation of pigeons: “The place looked like it was stucco’d!”

His wife manages to shut him up, but this is great. It’s convincing. It’s the kind of thing someone might say, thinking he’s telling a funny story, without realizing how disgusting it is, and how the context of a dinner party precludes him from saying anything like that. Again, it’s a lack of self-awareness, which should be Mr. Ochmonek’s distinguishing comic feature. Why? Because this is what works.

Earlier he complimented Kate on the meal, and asked his wife why she said Kate was a lousy cook. Lack of self-awareness again. And it’s still funny.

He asks for more chicken in a moment, but Kate isn’t sure there’s any left. “If not,” he says, “I’ll take a burger.”

And later on, when the Ochmoneks are leaving, Mrs. O thanks Kate by saying, “Several items were simply delicious, Kate.”

These are exaggerated moments, but not by sitcom standards. In reality, it’s some folks who mean no harm but just happen to be bad company. That’s the right way to do these two, and I love it. It’s the only sustained example of handling these characters correctly that I can remember.

Things get uncomfortable when Kate asks Jake’s mother how long she’ll be in town. Jake keeps replying for her that it won’t be long, she’d love to stay, she needs to get back to New York.

Mrs. Ochmonek tells Jake gently that he’s being rude, and should let his mother speak for herself. Jake then tries to explain (convincingly flustered) that he didn’t mean to be rude, and Mr. Ochmonek says, “Cork it, huh Jake?”

It’s a well acted moment all around. It really is. People are being people, and Mr. O being harsh after his wife’s more tactful warning wasn’t effective is a surprisingly good example of escalating tension. I’m not watching a bunch of actors who will never work again pretending to eat dinner; I’m watching human beings interact in a humorous setting.

Amazing what a difference that makes.

Anyway, as all good TV episodes do, this one takes a turn when its main character needs to dump massive ass.

ALF sneaks out of the attic in order to hit the shitter, and when he does he sees Jake’s mother stealing some of Kate’s jewelry. The fact that ALF can’t actually confront her over this is a nice, natural reason that the story doesn’t end here.

It’s not contrived or falsely complicated. There aren’t any fake outs or accusations resulting in them going through her purse and not finding it.

ALF sees it happen, and her actions are unmistakably theft, but he can’t do anything about it. She has to get away with Kate’s brooch, for perfectly organic reasons.

Structurally speaking, it’s not bad. This is one of the (very) rare episodes that I don’t find myself having to make exceptions for.

Afterwards, the party winds down and ALF tells the Tanners what he saw.

This morning, one of my old professors shared an article on Facebook about why it’s nobody else’s business what a woman chooses to wear on her feet. I should like to submit this screengrab of Lynn as my counter argument.

This is one of ALF’s two big scenes in the episode. While I do usually complain about the plot screeching to a halt so that the space alien can do a little song and dance, both of his major interruptions this week actually develop the plot. In itself, that’s good…but even if that weren’t the case, the fact of the matter is that people were tuning in to watch the puppet say and do silly things. A (relatively) dramatic episode about the strained relationship between a supporting character and his never-before-and-never-again-seen mother probably wouldn’t have thrilled most of the viewers, so popping the title character up from behind the couch now and again was probably not a bad idea.

If anything, the fact that I like these scenes proves that there’s no specific formula for what works and what doesn’t. The same thing that annoys me in one episode can entertain me in the next, so long as the writing is good enough. Give me something to enjoy, and I’ll focus on that. Give me nothing, and my mind starts to wander.

Anyway, ALF engages in some pretty decent verbal shenanigans as he breaks the news. As soon as Willie starts yelling at him for waltzing into the living room without the all-clear, ALF does his best to redeem the moment: “Ahhh…Willie! You’re probably wondering why I’ve gathered you all here…”

And when Kate tells him he’s in trouble and not to change the subject, he reflexively answers, “I’m not trying to change the subject.” Then, after a beat, “Okay, I am. But this is really, really good.”

…I fucking like this.

Ultimately Kate goes to check on the brooch and finds out that it’s indeed gone. It’s been in her family for generations, just like everything else they own, apparently, which nobody ever mentions until ALF is caught manipulating his prostate with something for a laugh.

Since nobody apart from ALF saw the theft, Jake’s mother can’t be confronted directly. ALF says that he’ll speak to Jake about it instead. A sitcommy development that is raised in a decidedly natural, non-sitcommy way. Again, people: this is not that hard. YOU ARE DOING IT RIGHT NOW I DON’T WANT ANY MORE EXCUSES

The confrontation between the two manages to feel both realistic and (for the most part) funny. ALF isn’t comfortable bringing up what happened — clearly he knows it will be painful to Jake — so he stalls, trying to get Jake to “go first.” Which obviously doesn’t work, as Jake isn’t the one who called this meeting.

ALF tries to drop hints rather than come right out with it. He says he doesn’t know how to broach the subject. He thanks Jake for stealing some time to talk with him. He doesn’t, after all, want to rob Jake of any time with his mother.

It’s nothing fantastic, but it’s a fun bit of labored wordplay, in which the fact that it’s labored is the joke.

This sort of thing would play just as well on the radio, because it’s built around what people are saying and not saying. Which in turn frees both Fusco and Blake up to perform like human beings rather than flailing clowns. ALF barely makes eye contact, and fiddles with the bedspread as he talks. Jake sits awkwardly, wary of volunteering anything, and only really engages after ALF mentions his mother. It’s here that the boy stands up and says, defensively fragile, “What about my mother?” It’s clear that he knew something like this was coming, but he wanted to be wrong.

ALF tells him that he saw her steal from Kate’s jewelry box, and the look of disappointment on Josh Blake’s face is great. He’s acting. I believe in what he’s feeling right now, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s here that the point of the episode crystallizes. Jake knows about his mother’s behavior already. It’s what he was hoping to avoid anyone else finding out by keeping her squirreled away. And he wanted to believe that she wouldn’t do such a thing to the family that’s been so kind to him…but she did it anyway.

She’s his mother. And he loves her, but he can’t stand her behavior. It’s a sentiment that hits extremely close to home for me, and I’ll be honest and say that that’s, in large part, why I appreciate the episode.

“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” isn’t great television. That’s not why it resonates with me. By ALF standards, sure, it’s downright revelatory. It’s far better than the show’s baseline, which is pretty well represented by the episode in which ALF sings about wanting to finish in Lynn’s butt.

It resonates with me because I understand this. Of course, ALF has mined my emotional past for plotlines before, and that didn’t do it any favors. “Tequila” is a good example of taking a subject I should have been on board with, and botching it so spectacularly that I instead came away insulted. This one doesn’t do anything more than say, “Hey. I understand.” Sometimes that’s all you need to hear.

“Tequila” took the approach of preachy, sledgehammer nonsense. In it, ALF appeared to Kate’s soused friend as the Sobriety Goblin or whatever and scared her straight forever and ever amen. I grew up with an alcoholic, and even if the episode ended up being hilarious I’d have had trouble enjoying a conclusion in which the world is set to rights by a sassy puppet.

Here, ALF doesn’t pretend to be The Ghost of Shoplifting Past or anything. He doesn’t solve any problems. (Unless you count getting Kate’s brooch back, but that’s more of a symptom than a problem.) In fact, the main conflict of the episode hasn’t even been overtly raised yet. “Tequila” couldn’t possibly win me over, because its moral was something like “We can fix this.” And any readers out there who were also raised by alcoholics know that isn’t true. It’s an insulting suggestion to victims everywhere, the idea that a problem as serious as alcoholism still exists because you didn’t say or do the right thing to fix it. There’s nothing wrong with making light of a serious issue (in fact, that’s often a healthy way to process it), but there’s something astoundingly wrong with presenting it as being so easily resolved.

“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” doesn’t see Jake’s mother fixing a thing. We don’t end with a letter from New York thanking the Tanners for solving everything. She leaves, and life goes on. The bad things keep happening, because sometimes, despite your best intentions, despite all of your efforts, despite how much you need things to change, you can’t stop them. No, not even with a magical space puppet.

I remember wondering as a kid — and I still wonder today — what it’s like to watch those Very Special Episodes if you’ve experienced exactly the topic they’re covering. I guess I have, in some way, my own answer…but I’m curious on a wider scale.

How does that uncomfortable episode of A Different World play if you’ve been the victim of sexual assault? Is it helpful? Is it condescending? It opens a dialogue, but does it do so in the right way? Does it guide the conversation, or just make people more embarrassed to bring it up?

If you were molested as a kid, can you sit through the episode of Diff’rent Strokes in which Arnold’s friend gets diddled by the guy who runs the bicycle shop? Are you glad that people talk about the subject, or do you wish it was raised in a forum that wasn’t overrun with catch-phrases and pat resolutions?

These are rhetorical questions. I don’t expect anyone to answer (though, if you’d like to, remember that you can use a false name and email address below; you can remain completely anonymous).

I remember watching episodes like that growing up and wondering why they bothered. They weren’t as funny. They made me feel guilty to watch, because there I was thinking I was unhappy while sitcom characters endured terrible things that I (thankfully) never had to. Who was I to be sad? But did these episodes make real-life victims less sad? Or did they result in unhelpful discomfort all around? If the episodes weren’t for people who hadn’t been through these things, and they weren’t for people who had, who the hell were we making this crap for? And why?

This episode, though, gets me. It works, as far as I’m concerned. It raises a tricky issue, and leaves it. It doesn’t try to diminish or sanitize the fallout.

Granted, a woman stealing a brooch isn’t as “significant” as alcoholism, sexual violence, or your friend Dudley getting raped by Gordon Jump. But attempting to grow up under (and out of) the shadow of a broken home, of damaging parents, of a family you try really fucking hard to love but who will never change…of people you know you’ll have to leave behind if you’re ever going to save yourself, however selfish or cowardly or unnatural that might feel…of leaving behind all of your friends, your school, your entire world because your very family won’t let you become a better person…that’s heavy stuff. And as someone who’s been there, and as someone who struggles almost every day to push forward, I promise you it’s difficult. Difficult to talk about, difficult to write about, and difficult to carry with you.

Jake’s reactions here are both pained and painful. After he opens up about his mother’s problem, he promises ALF he’ll get the brooch back…and the exchange between these two gets uncomfortably realistic. First, he says he’ll steal it back when she’s sleeping. (ALF replies, “Who are you people? The Capones?”) He tells Jake to talk it out with her instead.

Great sitcom advice. Often terrible real-world advice.

And Jake calls him on it. He tells ALF, bluntly, that he’s been through this. Again and again and again. Yes, he’s a little kid on some dumbass puppet show, but that doesn’t mean he can get through to his mother. It doesn’t mean he can pull the world together in 22 minutes plus commercials. It doesn’t mean that this problem is going to go away next week. He can’t fix her. He has to live with this.

He’s tried. He’s tried hard. He’s done his best for her, to help her. When she came out to visit, he hoped she was going to tell him that she’d gotten better, and turned herself around. Because then, maybe, he could go back home.

But she hasn’t done any of that. Nothing has changed. He’s stuck here, living with an aunt and uncle that he doesn’t particularly like, longing for the New York he grew up in, being reminded in the worst possible way that he’s never going to be able to go back. Through the decisions his parents made, and continue to make, he ended up having to leave if he ever wanted to make something of himself. And now he’s stuck somewhere he doesn’t want to be. His frustration comes through in what’s easily some of the best acting this show’s ever had. (And, I’m positive, ever will have.)

At last, after all of this, Jake says, “I’ve had this fight with my mother a million times.” Then he takes a breath and admits, defeated, “I give up on her.”

And most shows — including many shows better than ALF — would see to it that this conflict is resolved by the end of the episode.

Jake, in some way, will give his mother a second chance, and he’ll be glad he did. He has to. That’s the way these shows work.

But that doesn’t happen.

He gives up on her, and he gives up not because sitcoms work that way (they emphatically do not), but because, sometimes, however painful, however unfortunate, however absolutely fucking awful that feels, you need to give up on someone you love.

You try to help, and nothing changes. You find yourself hindered by who they are, by how they wish to live their lives. It’s a toxic relationship, and you don’t have the ability to change that. There are few images sadder than that of a young boy locking his mother out of his life, but this episode, incredibly, understands that that’s exactly what needs to happen sometimes.

The right answer isn’t always the one that makes you, or anyone, happy. Jake tells us her that he’s given up on her, but his very presence here in L.A. proves that he actually gave up on her a long time ago. All this conversation does is reinforce his decision, and it suggests that he’s made the right one.

And ALF, like everybody else Jake will admit this to (I promise), says, “How could you give up on your own mother?”

And Jake tells him to back the fuck off.

He promised to get the brooch back, which is all he can do, and he storms off.

How could you give up on your own mother?

The question that hurts the most, because the person asking will have already decided that you can’t answer it.

Jake confronts her in the next scene, which is also the episode’s last. One thing I really, really like about “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” is the length of its scenes. There are only a few in the entire episode, and it gives the cast a chance to breathe. Its moments are long, dialogue-driven, and largely human. It feels like a stage play at times, in much the same way that “Night Train” did…which was to its credit as well.

A commenter a while back suggested that I seem to like episodes better when they have an emotional component. I don’t think s/he is wrong, but it might not be exactly that; I think I like episodes better when they let the characters act like people. Often, that’s in order to explore some kind of emotion, sure. But not always. “Superstition” is a good example of a very enjoyable episode without any emotional content…but with a lot of human content. And this episode, like “Funeral for a Friend” before it, is an example of one that balances both. I think, ultimately, I just like episodes that don’t insult my intelligence. Whether that’s because it makes me laugh or because I can identify, I’m happy.

Here we have the big conclusion of an emotional episode, and it still manages a few good laughs. As Jake confronts his mother, for instance, he notices that the initials on her suitcase aren’t her own. She covers by saying, “I won it!” and pulls it out of his view, in a really impressive bit of comic acting for this show. It’s a gag, but it’s also a punch in the gut for poor Jake. It’s equal parts joke and characterization.

I looked up Randee Heller — who plays Jake’s mother — to see what else she’s been in, and it’s a lot. Nothing I recognize her from personally, but evidently she was in a bunch of episodes of Mad Men, which I hear somebody somewhere probably liked a little bit. So, yeah, I’m sure she knows her way around a script.

Before Jake can confront her, she tells him that she knows school is almost out for the summer (nice real-world timing, as this episode falls at almost the very end of the TV season), and invites him to come back to New York with her tomorrow.

He doesn’t answer. He’d rather talk about what happened during dinner at the Tanners’ house.

This serves as a nice — though probably unintentional — echo of his conversation with ALF. In each case, neither party really wants to bring up the problem and talk about it. His mother here says that all that happened is that they ate roast chicken. He says, “After that.” She says that they had coffee. Frustrated, he says, “Before that.” She continues to play dumb and even turns it around on him with a sarcastic remark about enjoying this “trip down Memory Lane.”

All while she sees how frustrated her son is getting. Blake is on point here, demonstrating better acting chops than nearly anyone he’s shared the stage with on this stupid show, and is even better than even Anne Schedeen has been lately. It’s legitimately painful to see him here, forced into an uncomfortable conversation with his mother, who is trying to make him feel crazy for accusing her.

When he talked about this to ALF, he was criticized for giving up on his mother. When he talks about it with his mother, he is criticized for inventing nonsense. Jake is in a no-win situation. He’s in this alone, and that’s the most painful thing about it.

Ten years ago, I left New Jersey. I left my job. I left my friends. I left the only world I’d known, and it was the most difficult and painful thing I’ve ever had to do.

But that’s the important thing: I had to do it. It was the only choice I had. The only right one, at least.

I didn’t want to leave. I especially didn’t want to abandon my family. But in a small town, in a small state, in a small world, you may need, at some point, to take drastic measures to distance yourself from your circumstances.

I come from a family in which substance abuse (alcohol I’ve mentioned before; it’s also the most benign example), violence, theft, manipulation, and emotional abuse and manipulation are common. If I were not related to them by blood, I would be able to dismiss much of my family as being, simply, bad people. The kinds of people you’re warned against getting too close to. The kinds of people you should never, ever let make your decisions for you.

But because I am related by blood, the narrative necessarily shifts…and I become the villain.

How could you give up on your mother?

The answer is simple: because you have to. Because you’ve done everything in your power to help. Because you can have these same arguments a million times and nothing will change. Because no matter how much you do, you aren’t that other person. They make their own decisions. And if they continue to make the ones that tear themselves down, and you with them, you need to make a difficult choice. The choice that has a right answer, but has no happy ones.

I started fresh, and it wasn’t easy. It still isn’t easy. There’s not a Mother’s Day, a Father’s Day, a Christmas, a Thanksgiving, an Easter, or even a Fourth of July that goes by without me feeling acutely aware of just what I do not have. What I cannot have. And it’s a pain that doesn’t soften over time. The holidays last year were as difficult as they ever were. This year they will be difficult still, and the year after that. And the best part? That I can’t actually open up to anyone about it. That’s one thing this episode gets exactly right about Jake’s predicament, deliberately or not. He tries to talk about it — twice — and he’s the villain. Twice. Because he did the only thing he could do to become a better person.

I know how this kid feels. I know he isn’t happy. He makes perfectly clear how much he’d like to go back to New York with a mother that turned her life around, but that’s not what’s happening here. He can’t pretend it is. Getting out of that house was probably the smartest decision of his life, and it’s one he’s doomed to regret forever.

Ha ha.

She reacts angrily to his accusation. She lists all the reasons that she couldn’t possibly have taken the brooch. But he knows the truth. He’s not trying to upset her; he’s only trying to return an object of sentimental value to his friends. Instead he gets excuses, delivered sharply, designed to hurt him for even asking about it.

He shakes his head and says, “Nothing’s changed, has it, ma?”

This is the fight they’ve had a million times. He knows. He wants to help. He doesn’t want this to be his life. And she turns it back on him. She knowingly hurts him more than he’d ever want to hurt her.

“Yeah, something’s changed,” she tells him. “You got a mouth.”

When she finally admits she took the brooch, and gives it back while insulting its quality, you can see how much it hurts him. He knew she took it, was fully confident of that fact, and yet you can tell that he was hoping — against all reason — that he was incorrect. That she’d somehow prove or demonstrate that she didn’t take it. That she’s not the woman he had to leave last year. That he was wrong and things could be okay.

That’s what he wants. He doesn’t want the brooch back. He wants to find out that all the crap he’s been feeling, and going through, and struggling against was his own fault. He wants to be wrong. He wants this to be something he can fix. Nobody else is fixing it, so all he wants, the only thing he wants in his life, is to be at fault so that he can make things better. So that he can make everything bad go away.

As painful as all of this has been, and continues to be, for him, the fact is that he would rather be at fault. He doesn’t want it to be his mother. The last thing he wants is for it to be his mother. He doesn’t want to give up on her. She’s an adult. She raised him. He’s a stupid kid still learning as he goes. Why can’t he be wrong? Is that so much to ask? That the adult can be an adult and the kid can be a kid? Why is this so hard?

It’s unfair. It’s unnatural. It’s not the way things are supposed to be. Jake, through no fault of his own, is forced to be an outlier. The kid at Christmas without a family. The kid whose phone won’t ring on his birthday. The kid who, one day, is going to fall in love with a girl and have to share all of this with her, and is going to have to deal with the way she looks at him when she finds out that he cut his family out of his life.

How could you give up on your mother?

All he wants is to be wrong.

All he wants is to see his mother again and realize he was wrong.

All he wants it to find out that this was all a big mistake and he’s the idiot and everything can go back to the way it’s supposed to be.

…but he finds out the opposite. And it’s devastating.

She tries to guilt him into coming home. She says that that would help her get better. Jake — smarter than most would be in this situation, I am sure — knows better. He doesn’t go home. To his own mother, to everybody, he’s the villain.

He has to be the villain. It’s the right choice to be the villain.

But that doesn’t mean it feels any better.

She leaves, and ALF pops up to say he’s been watching and solemnly masturbating throughout the entire scene.

Now that he’s witnessed the way Jake’s mother behaves and interacts with him, he understands Jake’s perspective a little more. He tells a few jokes about how shitty Kate’s cooking is and how shitty Kate’s brooch looks and how shitty Kate is at everything that shitty lady does in her shitty life, and that seems to cheer Jake up a little bit, but I like to see this small moment of emotional uplift as coming because someone now understands what Jake has to deal with every day of his life. It means a lot to know that someone, anyone, is on your side.

This is why I write. It’s how I handle things. Whether it’s fiction or essays or reviews or venom spat at decades-old sitcoms, writing is how I express myself. The internet has helped tremendously with that. Every once in a while I’ll get a comment or an email thanking me for something I wrote. It’s often something I’d forgotten I wrote. Somebody was having a bad day, found some old article of mine, and felt better after reading it. Someone took the time to say thanks…which is a larger gesture than it actually sounds like.

I write because it helps me, but if it helps anyone else, at any point, to any degree, that means everything to me. For that moment, I’m able to forget that I’m a villain. I’m able to forget how much I can’t express. The places I can’t return to. The faces I’ll never see again.

The friends I’ve lost and the opportunities I’ve left behind.

The people I’ve hurt.

The doors I’ve had to close, one by one.

There are things you can’t talk about. Not only because they’re too painful, but because nobody will understand. And so we connect with each other the only way we really can: indirectly.

It means a lot to me to know that anybody reads these things. It means more than I can even express to know that anyone enjoys them. Because while I had to leave a lot of things behind, this reminds me of the other things I’ve found instead. I write. I invest myself deeply in the work that I do. I try my damnedest to raise money for charity. All things I enjoy, but all things that are, emotionally, necessary for me. If I wasn’t able to make certain people happy, I’ve found some small ways to do it for others.

I end this episode feeling very close to Jake. I want to hug the kid, to be honest. Because he’s not a bad guy. He’s someone who has to deal with bigger issues than he should at his age. If he’s a prick now and then, we now know why. We understand.

And we can hopefully forget the fact that he was introduced to us as a thief as well. That muddies the water here if we remember it. If he moved to L.A. to get away from his mother’s behavior — which I do buy — it’s impossible to rectify that with the fact that he was immediately willing to do the same things upon starting his own life. Sure, we could see this as character growth (he went from stealing from the Tanners to returning their stolen belongings) but I can promise you that the last thing you do in a situation like that is slide willingly into the very behavior you left to avoid.

“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” recontextualizes “The Boy Next Door,” and in many ways overwrites it. Which I’m happy with, because while the episode gave us an unexpectedly valuable actor, it was also kind of shit.

This is the Jake I prefer. We don’t need windows into his soul like this every week; we only need one. Every time we see him from now on, we’ll understand a little better where he’s coming from.

And that’s fantastic.

…then again, Jake disappears forever in two more episodes. So THERE’S THAT.

Leave it to mother fucking ALF to cap off one of its best episodes, and probably its most affecting, by kicking the central character out the door and never speaking of him again.

Why — why — is it that even when I like this show I have to be reminded of how much I hate it?

In the short scene before the credits Willie silently flashes back to all the shit he saw in Vietnam.

We find out that Jake’s mother left…and took Mr. Ochmonek’s coin collection with her. A joke, yes, but also one that assures us that we aren’t watching “Tequila.” Things aren’t better for Jake’s mother. Things aren’t better between Jake and his mother. Things aren’t better at all. People have problems, and problems — as much as we’d like them to — don’t always go away.

Things are still as they are.

It’s another day, and though that brings with it no promise of change, it’s also the most reassuring thought we have. The sun, as they say, will come up tomorrow.

Thanks for seeing it in with me. It means more than I can tell you.

Countdown to Jake ceasing to exist: 2 episodes
Countdown to Jim J. Bullock existing: 10 episodes

MELMAC FACTS: We learn that Jake’s mother is an Ochmonek “by marriage,” which means his father is the brother of either Trevor or Raquel.

This review series puts me in an odd position. It makes me hate ALF more than anyone else on the planet, yet it also makes me something of an authority on the show. I don’t say that to brag; it’s just that sitting down to write 17,000 words per week about this shit means that I’m more likely to draw connections and notice things than passive viewers would be.

It’s not flawless. I forget things — sometimes major things — that you folks are, thankfully, quick to bring up in the comments. And I’m a human being, which means that I get things wrong and misinterpret them even when I’m not hilariously doing it for your entertainment.

But it’s something. I spend enough time with this show that I’m familiar with it; moreso than I ever, even as a child, would have wanted to be. A tossed off remark in episode 7 might have a payoff in episode 64, and I just might be the only one paying enough attention to point it out.

Case in point: “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” which takes a small development from season one and here, at the tail end of season three, bases an entire episode around it.

See, you probably don’t remember, but early in the first season ALF revealed that Lynn wasn’t the only Tanner child. No…apparently they also had a little boy called Brian. Quite why they bothered to give us this information, I can’t say. They certainly didn’t do anything with it, and it’s not as though the family dynamic changed once we found out about this second kid. It was just sort of casually mentioned, and — as far as I can tell — never brought up again.

Not until this episode, at least, when out of nowhere Brian is mentioned again, and actually gets a whole episode to himself.

It’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t watching as closely as I am. Certainly nobody doing a casual watch of this show would remember that Brian exists, which is why it’s so odd to me that all at once he’s meant to be an important character YES THAT WAS MY GREAT JOKE IT WASN’T A MINOR DETAIL AT ALL IT WAS BRIAN YOU SHOULD BUY A MUG

Yes, I’m exaggerating…but not by much. In fact, let’s play a game. All of you clowns have been reading these reviews for the past two years, so make a list of every time you remember Brian having an impact on the plot.

Go ahead. I’m serious.

He’s one of the main characters. He’s in every episode. And we’re now on episode 72. Surely you should be able to rattle off a couple dozen of examples, easily.

…but you can’t. Because Brian is set dressing. He’s a boy who has an alien, but doesn’t seem all that interested in it. He’s Lynn’s little brother and Willie and Kate’s kid, but none of them seem to want anything to do with him. He goes to school and presumably interacts with the other kids, but aside from that one brat who brought Dr. Potato Famine into our lives, we don’t hear hide nor hair of them. No serious attempt has ever been made to give him anything to do…and midway through season two his role was essentially usurped by Jake, who had personality, character traits, and the priceless ability to not be in episodes in which he doesn’t belong.

Brian was, and is, dead. “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” as a result, ends up feeling like a relic from the distant past…a time when the show wasn’t entirely sure it was done with Brian. It’s not a late-game resuscitation of the character; it’s a bone tossed half-assed in Benji Gregory’s general direction. It’s a way of promising us that they still care about the character that doubles as definitive assurance that they don’t care about the character.

It’s not the worst episode of the show, but it’s also one that fails to serve a purpose. Brian is done, and has been for a while. This isn’t his Vegas Elvis rebirth…this is an episode about him that still can’t think of anything for him to do.

…but, okay, I do have to admit that “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” really does dig up some old throwaway detail and make it part of the plot. Brian is getting ready for his Scout meeting. You may not remember, since I don’t think it ended up in my review, but it was mentioned in “ALF’s Special Christmas” that Brian was a Cub Scout. Scouting was where he learned that you shouldn’t let your father rub poison ivy all over his nipples on Christmas Eve.

So, this is an impressive bit of continuity. Or the writers coincidentally invented the same detail twice. You can probably guess where I’d lay my bet…especially since he was a Cub Scout (a real thing) in that episode, and is a Badger Scout (not a real thing) in this one.

While he gets ready, ALF teaches himself to tie knots. Willie enters the room and asks if that’s his good string, and ALF replies, “Willie, if you have good string, you need to get out more.”

Which is word for word what I was going to type in response to Willie. Either ALF is getting funnier or I need to see a doctor.

After the intro we get a pretty sad scene that I’m sure wasn’t supposed to be sad: Kate is researching daycare centers for when her baby is born. Why? Because she knows it’s too dangerous to keep it in the house with ALF.

And…Jesus Christ. At what point, in the Tanners’ position, do you reconsider this whole fucking arrangement? Yes, I abhor ALF. But even if I didn’t…what does this family owe him? I’m willing to buy (theoretically) that they like him…okay. Maybe they want him around…that’s okay, too. But do you like him more and want him around more than your own unborn child?

Why must even Kate’s pregnancy be twisted to ALF’s convenience? The Tanners find out they’re having a kid, and they know that ALF will kill it. Why is their response to ship the kid off, and not, I dunno…issue ALF some kind of ultimatum? Tell him that he has nine months to get his shit together, or they call the Alien Task Force?

Yes, if it were me I’d stab ALF to death with a busted lightbulb the moment I met him. But you’d think the Tanners would at least threaten some kind of consequence. Come on, you dumbasses. At least try to get ALF to behave before you decide to have your child raised by maids.

God damn it. Fuck this guy.

Lynn comes into the living room to announce that this episode will have a subplot. (Oh, did you think that deciding what to do to prevent the new baby from being killed would be a subplot? Nah…that was a quick decision.) She’s trying to decide on a major.

So…I guess she’s not in college yet? I don’t know…this makes it sound like she’s still finishing high school.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I seem to recall having to either declare a major or declare that you’re a non-degree-seeking student. So this whole “I need a major” thing isn’t the kind of conundrum she can have if she’s already enrolled…which she should have been since the end of season two.

This show really can’t decide what the fuck Lynn is. Is she a high schooler? A college student? This implies to me that she’s still in high school, like in those other episodes that say she’s still in high school, and not in college, like those other episodes that say she’s in college.

See why I’m not convinced Brian’s scouting is genuine continuity?

We learn in this conversation that Kate was an Art History major. And hey, guess what asshole. So was Mr. Ochmonek! We found that out way back in “The Boy Next Door.” So, hey, you have something in common! Maybe you can have actual conversations with him and not just roll your eyes and make jack-off motions every time he opens his mouth.

The Art History thing is another unintentional connection. It’s something, in short, you shouldn’t notice. But, when you do, it just becomes further evidence of what awful people the Tanners are. They have common ground with the Ochmoneks, and they still don’t think those people are fit to lick their boots.

The Ochmoneks are nothing but nice to the Tanners…they keep attempting to engage with them, help them, spend time with them, and the Tanners won’t even accept that they might have something in common.

Tell me, again, who the bad neighbors are supposed to be.

Willie comes home with Brian, sharing hilarious stories with him about when he was a kid and had to dig a hole for his fellow Scouts to shit in.

…I’m not kidding. I don’t even think the writers are playing it for that kind of laugh. I think that the people who ended up on the writing staff for this show were the kinds of kids who used to exclusively draw latrine duty and therefore, to them, its an inextricable part of camping.

The funniest part of this scene is a little piece of popcorn (I didn’t think to screengrab it, sadly) that gets stuck to ALF’s fur. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, as it was stuck to his hand and waved around while he talked. It was pretty obviously not supposed to be there, and I have to imagine that the entire cast and crew were on edge, terrified that somebody would point it out and Paul Fusco would demand that the scene be reshot. On any other show that wouldn’t be a big deal, but on ALF when every flubbed line means another 10 hours of resetting the puppet trenches, the stakes must have been pretty high.

Anyway, Brian is set to go on his first overnight scouting trip next weekend, and ALF is already not looking forward to hearing more adventures of Willie, “King of the Wild Front Lawn.” Which, I’m sorry, is actually a pretty funny line.

Brian says he’s going to change out of his uniform, and immediately he warps out of frame by the miracle of truly shit editing.

It’s pretty bad. We even cut right into Willie’s next line, without allowing any breathing space. As much as I’ve picked on the editing in this show, I can honestly say that I haven’t seen a cut this bad since season one…and back then it was possible that the worst offenders were due to syndication edits. Here, there’s no excuse for such sloppy work. Unless Benji Gregory shit his pants, or something, and they couldn’t use the footage of him stepping away from the table.

Later on, ALF helps Brian pack for his overnight stay in a tent, which is definitely something they need to do right now, with the trip a full fucking week away.

Our Alien Friend senses that this particular bitchface is distinct from what’s become Brian’s standard bitchface, so he tries to get him to open up about why he doesn’t want to go camping. Brian says, “Can you keep a secret?” And ALF says, “No…but there’s a first time for everything.”

…which in itself isn’t a good enough line (by ALF standards I’m happy just to encounter competency), but it feels like a bungle all the same. Twice prior to this ALF was asked rhetorical questions, and responded with either “Yes…next question” or “No…next question.” Here I thought he was going to fulfill the Rule of Three (I was even prepared to chuckle, stupid me), but I guess they forgot their own running gag between scenes. It’s bizarre. The cadence of ALF’s reply is even the same. How did they fuck up such a simple gimme?

Anyway, Brian says he’s afraid of the dark.

Jake comes into Brian’s bedroom to check on the kid he displaced last season, making sure someone is remembering to feed him and change his cedar chips. He overhears Brian’s fear, so he tells him some story about kids who went camping in Central Park and are still, to this day, chained to the radiator of a drifter who treats them like sex dolls.

Yeah, I honestly don’t know how much of this is a joke — Jake telling scary stories to stop Brian from being scared — but it happens multiple times throughout the episode. The way it plays is weird, though, and I don’t think this is Jake trying to help so much as he’s just being a bratty teenage boy. Which is fine…in fact, I hope that’s what they’re deliberately doing, because very little of this would make sense otherwise.

I like Jake in this scene. Actually, fuck it: I like Jake lately. While the episodes he’s featured in may or may not be better than they otherwise would have been, he’s come into his own as a character. When he shows up I start paying attention, because he’s one of the few recurring actors on this show that gives a shit.

A commenter a few weeks ago mentioned that the character doesn’t return in season four…which is a shame for the reason listed above, and also because season three seems to be working hard to make him a real part of the show, as opposed to an occasional diversion. And it’s worked well. “Fight Back” was a Jake-heavy episode, and it was one of the best yet. He also figured into the very fun “Superstition,” and though “Standing in the Shadows of Love” was fucking awful, that was no fault of his. What’s more, that episode made it clear that we’re supposed to care about what happens to him, like we’re meant to care about the Tanners and not care about — for example — Jake’s aunt and uncle. Shit, next week’s episode is all about Jake and his mother.

Season three is trying to do the impossible; it’s attempting to take a hasty mid-game substitution and make it feel like the character is a natural part of this universe. It’s not entirely successful, but I’m impressed by the effort…which makes it all the more frustrating (and hilarious) that the kid vanishes off the face of the Earth in just another few episodes.

Jake was never exactly a good character, but he was certainly coming close, especially by the standards of this show. No wonder Emperor Fusco had him executed.

In this scene I like him a lot. ALF comes up with the idea of camping out in the back yard to show Brian there’s nothing to be afraid of, and Jake declines. “I have a life,” he explains, which is a perfectly reasonable excuse for not wanting to sleep on a soundstage with a hand puppet and a sack of potatoes that has BRIAN written on it.

Then ALF says that it’ll be nice, sleeping out in the fresh air, and Jake incredulously replies, “In Los Angeles?!”

Congratulations, Jake; you’re the first person, place, or thing in this show that has any concept of what L.A. is actually like in real life. You just blew my mind, and I love you for it, kid. You’re getting an ALFie.

Then again, ALF convinces him to join by saying he’ll have a view into Lynn’s room and can spank it to her all he wants, so it’s not all welcome Jake material.

Still. They tried.

Later, in the kitchen, Lynn decides she’ll major in Art History. This causes Willie to laugh and belittle her because only worthless dumbass retard idiot fuckbrains major in Art History. In retaliation, Kate suggests that Willie’s major (Social Sciences) might have been slightly boring, so Willie cold cocks her with a can of beans and kicks her repeatedly in the womb while Lynn cries.

Then we cut to ALF, Brian, and Jake in the tent. Jake tries to scare Brian, but since Benji Gregory uses the same expression for everything from being offered his favorite dessert to hearing an alien rape his sister through his bedroom wall, we have no way of knowing if Jake’s successful.

Anyway, ALF shows up with a duffel bag full of unnecessary shit, and we talk about that until the commercial break. This includes long digressions about why VHS cassettes and blenders are not appropriate camp supplies, and I have to give “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” credit for honesty, at least. It doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it’s already stalling for time.

This continues until the commercial break, but if you’re really lucky you’ll trick yourself into thinking the episode is over and go play a video game or something.

After the commercial we see Willie going insane on the couch.

I don’t know what the fuck he’s doing. He has headphones on and barks every few seconds. Is he supposed to be singing along to something? It looks more like the balloon in his rectum burst open and they just filmed his freakout.

Lynn walks in on this shit and isn’t scarred for life, which says a lot about the baseline level of madness in this house. She tells him that she’s decided to major in Social Sciences, and become a social worker just like her dear pa-pa.

You’d think he’d be happy about this, or flattered or something, but he sure launches pretty quickly into the same “you fucking dolt” speech he gave her before about Art History.

He tells her that he loves his job, but also that there aren’t many jobs like his out there. And that’s certainly true; I’ve never known anyone who had a job where they got paid to be as much of a worthless, ineffectual jagoff as Willie.

He also warns her that she won’t get rich. Which he says, somehow without irony, in his fifty-six-bedroom palace in the middle of Los Angeles. ALF desperately needs a Frank Grimes episode.

In the yard, Jake is telling ghost stories to ALF and Brian. Once again, considering that this whole plan was to make Brian less afraid of camping, ghost stories probably aren’t the smartest thing to put the kid through. Me, I’d probably just lock him in a trunk for three or four nights, then open it up right before the camping trip so he can see that he’s okay; I didn’t really ship him to his new owners. If you ever need parenting advice, feel free to ask.

My favorite line in the episode comes in this scene, courtesy of Jake. But since Jake isn’t played by Paul Fusco he doesn’t get the laugh track to punctuate it. Again, what a lovely, magical, fulfilling experience it must have been to work on ALF.

It comes when Jake is telling a story about the Phantom of the Subway, who in place of one hand has a hook. Jake’s at the point in the story when the Phantom hails a cab…and he backpedals slightly to add, “With his good hand.”

It’s actually a funny, decently acted moment. It gets no laughter.

By contrast, the fake audience of dead people roared themselves hoarse over the reveal that ALF packed a blender, so I’ll let you connect the political dots.

Each of Jake’s tales has something to do with New York, because he’s from New York. Did you know he is from New York!?

In addition to the Phantom of the Subway and the Central Park Child Sex Ring, we hear about the Headless Stockbroker…and while all of Jake’s spreadin’ of the news should be fatiguing, I’m more forgiving of it here than usual. Maybe because Jake’s the best thing about the episode, by a pretty wide margin, and I’m willing to pay the price of having him around.

Or maybe it’s because the poor kid won’t even exist in a couple of weeks, and the least I can do is indulge these relentless reminders of his regional heritage.

ALF gets scared of the ghost cab from Jake’s story and runs inside. There’s the germ of a nice idea there; in trying to teach Brian not to be a pussy, ALF reveals himself to be a massive pussy. But in reality, what this development does is rob Brian of yet another episode that’s ostensibly about him.

In “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” a story about Brian finding a stray pooch shifted abruptly into one about Willie not wanting to fuck Anne Ramsey. And in “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” a story about Brian getting picked on at school was resolved entirely off camera, with a development that was reported by Lynn while Brian was nowhere to be seen.

There have been a few attempts at a Brian episode, but almost all of them (this one included) ditch the kid as quickly as they can. The only episode that actually followed him all the way through his own story was “It Isn’t Easy…Bein’ Green,” and even there he was upstaged by a repainted Transformers toy.

Poor Brian. His character has been in a vegetative state for years, and the show won’t acknowledge his right to die.

Anyway, Jake chases ALF into the house to kick his ass and give him a wedgie. This is what you get for showing weakness after treating everyone you know like garbage for three years, ALF! You’re fucked now!

Jake tells him to get his hairy starfish back to the tent, as the whole point of this was to help Brian get over his fear of the dark. ALF replies, “Let him get over his fear of the dark in the morning.”

Which is funny. Like, genuinely funny. The kind of line I’d have been proud of writing.

But the fake audience of dead people isn’t allowed to laugh, because the show has no respect for them. Instead they have to wait for ALF to explain the joke by adding, “…when it’s light out!!”

Jesus Christ, ALF. Even when you’re funny you don’t let yourself be funny.

ALF ends up coming back out to the tent, because Jake tells him that delicious stray cats roam the neighborhood at night. Of course ALF knew this already since we’ve seen that he leaves saucers of milk out to lure them, but that’s okay. Jake has every right to “remind” him of this fact, so I’m not particularly bothered by it.

I am, however, particularly bothered by the idea that Brian’s fear of the dark will be cured when he watches his jackass alien roommate rip the guts out of cats and feast on their gory remains in the moonlight.

They get back outside to find that Brian is already asleep. We don’t see him sleeping, because if you’re looking to cut costs sending Benji Gregory home early is a pretty good place to start.

And that’s the resolution to this week’s conflict: fuck yo conflict.

It kind of sucks that in this episode about Brian getting over his fear of the dark, we never see Brian getting over his fear of the dark. First he’s afraid, then the camera guys decide to hang out with ALF instead, and by the time we come back he’s asleep. It’s kind of like a version of The Maltese Falcon in which we skip right to Sam Spade shrugging and saying, “I guess the thing was fake or something. Who cares?”

And this is a big shame, because it’s the third Brian episode that should have charted interesting territory. Getting (and losing) a dog, dealing with a bully, and overcoming a childhood fear are all things that a grade school boy on a sitcom should be doing. These are things that children really do deal with, which is why they keep popping up in family comedies again and again.

The best part, for ALF, is that it doesn’t even matter that Brian’s not a character. In plots like those, he just needs to be a kid. He can be a blank slate, because those are stories about the journey more than they are about the character. In fact, those are stories that build character. They define childhood. They push a young boy or girl over an obstacle that they can’t bear to face, and when they come out the other side (after however comical or dramatic a process), they’re that much closer to being an adult.

But Brian?

Brian just sleeps through it. And he’ll wake up tomorrow morning with no more personality than he had when he fell asleep.

Way to go, ALF. You botched the unbotchable.

The punchline of the episode is that ALF is zipped too tightly into his sleeping bag to eat the cats or something who fucking cares this nonsense is shit.

In the short scene before the credits, Willie apologizes to Kate for making fun of her major. He bought her The Evolution of Art History, which is certainly not something an Art History major would have already read. Thanks, Willie. I like to think that this assbag just pulled her own copy off the bookshelf and slapped a ribbon on it.

Lynn comes in and says she’s not majoring in anything, so they can both suck her dick. Whew! I was starting to worry they might make some kind of definitive choice with one of their characters, or tell us something about who she is and who she wants to be. That was a close one.

We do find something out about her, though: her sweatshirt reads CSUN, so that’s confirmation that she attends California State University, Northridge. There’s another stop to add to your ALF tour, if you’re ever in California and really want to waste your life.

There is a funny enough line here when Willie says that it doesn’t matter what the kids major in…they’ll inherit ALF and go broke anyway. I mean…it’s funny until you think about it, at which point it becomes extraordinarily sad. Remember that the episode began with the acknowledgment that their new baby won’t even be allowed in the house, lest ALF accidentally decapitate it.

What the fuck kind of life is this? Why is he allowed to live there?

At some point you have to say, “Look here, you little shit. You killed my uncle, crippled my boss, crashed the car, raped the kids, and sent me to Gitmo. We need to have a talk about your behavior.”

Of course that talk would end with ALF hitching up his suspenders, saying, “Did I do thaaat?” and receiving a standing-O from the fake audience of dead people, so it’s not like I expect change on this show…but seriously, how depressed are the Tanners that they don’t even raise the issue?

We wrap up the episode by…having ALF walk into the kitchen covered in knotted string.

Yep. The perfect way to end a Brian episode: a scene that has nothing to do with the kid.

So, yeah. Did Brian go on the camping trip? Who knows. Did he have fun? Who cares. Was he afraid of the dark? Shut up, assholes, ALF is covered in string.

And so that’s that. Brian faced his Dark Night of the Soul, and slept through it. Not a bad approach, actually. Maybe I’ll do the same with ALF season four.

Countdown to Jake ceasing to exist: 3 episodes
Countdown to Jim J. Bullock existing: 11 episodes

MELMAC FACTS: Kate majored in Art History. Willie majored in Social Sciences. Lynn attends California State University, Northridge.