Category: alf

Well, lucky us. Kate Sr. is still around…making this her third episode. She’s actually the only side character apart from Mr. Ochmonek to reach the three episode mark, and she did them all in a row. Huh. So this must be that Kate Sr. Trilogy I’ve heard so much of nothing about.

The other side characters just get introduced, wave to the camera, and then ride off into the sunset. Technically I should be happy that Kate Sr. is still around for that reason alone; this is a kind of progress. But she still isn’t much of a character, and since the previous two episodes were practically identical in terms of their themes and conflict, I’m not especially glad to see them tapping the same well a third time.

Anyway, Willie and Kate carry boxes around while ALF lays naked on the couch watching them. If you had to distill the entire narrative essence of ALF down to three seconds of footage that would loop forever, this would have to be it.

Kate Sr. is moving out, and Willie wonders aloud if her new apartment can fit all of these boxes because it’s so small. I was going to complain about the clunkiness of Willie’s exposition, but the real problem is that Kate Sr. arrived with a briefcase, yet is somehow leaving with more than a whole apartment can potentially fit.

Also, later on we see the apartment and it’s fucking massive. It’s like a penthouse. This isn’t the only time that the episode will tell something that we can contradict as simply as by opening our eyes, and that’s puzzling to me. I can understand using a word like “small” in the script, and then seeing the set was built differently…but wouldn’t you drop the word “small” in that case? Why not make a tiny alteration to the script in service of not coming across like you aren’t paying attention to your own show?

And the more I think about it, the shittier Kate Sr. seems to me for turning up like that and just moving in. I know Estelle kicked her out (that Estelle!) but how long did she expect to keep up the lie? Did Kate Sr. intend to say every week that Estelle broke another bone? She might have been in a tight spot, but a lie like the one she told should only buy her a few days…what the hell was her long-term plan?

ALF asks Willie to lick a stamp for him, and Willie angrily replies, “Can’t you lick that yourself?” I’m only pointing this out because I’m genuinely shocked this line hasn’t made it into a Mr. Meatloaf video. What are you waiting for, internet?

It turns out that ALF ate the chocolates Willie was going to give to Kate for Valentine’s Day. So, here. This is the ALF Valentine’s Day special, I guess.

Kate Sr. enters the room and announces that the painters aren’t finished in her new apartment, so she will have to stay with the Tanners longer than expected. Oh, excellent. All three episodes of the Kate Sr. trilogy have the same premise. Exactly what I was hoping for.

ALF is tired of having Kate Sr. around, and, buddy, I am on your side. Not that the show was better without her, per se, but it was at least bad in different ways. With three episodes in a row based around the same “Kate Sr. is staying longer than expected” setup, it’s getting claustrophobic. Sure, ALF wrecking the car or Willie skydiving or the family getting stuck in an RV didn’t lead to episodes any better than these…but at least they were bad in unique and interesting directions.

I wouldn’t harp so much on the fact that three episodes in a row have the same premise, except for the additional fact that this isn’t the first time this has happened: earlier this season we had three episodes in a row about ALF falling in love. That’s two long stretches of identical plotlines, and this is only episode fifteen! It’s not bad enough that they pad out every installment of the show…they also have to pad out the season as well?

Anyway, ALF is mailing a canned ham to Sally Field. Willie comes over and tells ALF that he is not to send any meat to celebrities, and if you listen closely you can actually hear Max Wright mentally composing his suicide note.

Some guy comes in — Kate Sr.’s new neighbor, as we learn — and I could have sworn to God the family called him Wizard Beaver. Even by ALF standards though that’s absurd, so I looked him up and sure enough his name is actually Whizzer Deaver. Which…isn’t any better? Ah well; I tried.

Anyway he comes in so everyone has to pretend ALF is a chicken because WHO CARES THIS WAS A VERY POPULAR SHOW DO YOU HEAR ME

Whizzer Deaver looks kind of like the guy who played Doug on Flight of the Conchords and Gale in Breaking Bad, but I’m sure I recognize the actual actor from something I can’t put my finger on. His name is Paul Dooley and if you look him up you’ll see he’s been in about ten million things. This is unquestionably the worst.

Whizzer “Wizard Beaver” Deaver is helping Kate Sr. move her boxes into her new apartment, which will certainly make the painters very happy. He’s only in the living room for about a minute but he manages to say an incredible amount of things in that short time that make it overtly clear that he wants to plow Kate Sr. It’s actually really creepy how direct and persistent he is, but everyone acts like it’s charming and sweet.

I think the writers were going for something like William Powell playfully toying with Myrna Loy in The Thin Man, but because this is ALF and cleverness and subtlety have no place here, Whizzer Deaver seems like he’s barely able to keep himself from hopping on the couch, wetting his pants, and screaming, “I WANT TO PENETRATE YOUR DEAD WOMB.”

Whizzer and Willie go out and come back later on, laughing it up. I can’t imagine a pair of human beings with whom I’d less like to spend a night on the town. The Whiz brings Kate Sr. some flowers, but then he offers them to Kate Jr., and then he takes them back and offers them to Kate Sr. again, and I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to see him as some hilarious, smooth, middle-aged casanova. Really he’s just coming across like a horny idiot.

There’s a really strange moment when Whizzer asks if there’s anything that still needs to be moved. Kate Sr. says that all that’s left is her suitcase, and some things “over there,” indicating stage left. Yet as she does this there’s a pile of boxes visible right behind her…the same boxes Willie and Kate were moving earlier that belonged to Kate Sr. This is why the syndication edits don’t bother me. Yes, I’m sure sometimes a line is cut that makes a little more sense of things. But here we have a woman standing in shot with some boxes that we’re supposed to pretend aren’t there. If the show couldn’t couldn’t be arsed to move some boxes out of the way so that their scene made sense, I don’t have faith that another two minutes of alien hijinx would make things much better.

One of the things Kate Sr. pointed at is a clarinet in a case, which Whizzer picks up and Kate Sr. tells him to back off and takes it away from him. She then wipes his finger prints off of it, and says it belonged to her dead husband. Well, hey, that’s fine, but if she didn’t want him touching it why did she specifically point to it when he asked what needed to be moved?

Willie miraculously remembers that Whizzer Deaver is the name of a man he used to see at a club playing the clarinet. Must have been a hopping club, there, Willie. Whizzer says yes, that was him, and offers to bring his own clarinet over so the family can have a “jam session.” In my experience jam sessions don’t involve a room full of strangers staring blankly at one man huffing through a woodwind, but I’m no Whizzer Deaver.

Kate Sr. slaps down the whole idea though, making it perfectly clear that she would never, under any circumstances, go to bed with a man Willie looks up to. Her philosophy on romance is very similar to my own.

Later on everyone’s in the kitchen. ALF is eating jellybeans or something and Willie is fixing the toaster ALF ruined by cramming a pickle in it. THIS WAS A VERY POPULAR SHOW DO YOU HEAR ME

Everbody tries to pressure Kate Sr. into having sex with the guy who helped her move, and as someone who helps old ladies move all the time, I can tell you that this is a perfectly common arrangement. She refuses, and ALF interjects that she is “saving herself for a corpse.”

He’s referring to her dead husband, who she still misses like a big fucking idiot!!! Anyway, we find out that her husband’s name was Sparky…and though I didn’t mention it and can’t remember which episode it was now, there was a joke in a previous story where Willie brought a hamster named Sparky home to ALF, and returned it immediately because ALF wanted to eat it. Needless to say, it was hilarious. But now I have to wonder why Willie named a hamster after his wife’s dead dad.

ALF reveals that he has the ability to speak with the dead, and he’s been in contact with Sparky. (The dead man, that is…not the forgotten hamster.) Hey, why not. It’s not even in the top 200 most ridiculous things I’ve heard in this show, so fine. ALF is a medium. Who cares anymore.

He proves his otherworldly communication abilities by telling everyone Sparky’s favorite food. After this air-tight evidence that ALF can communicate with the world of the dead, everyone asks ALF to channel Sparky later that night so that they can talk to him, too. I’ll give the Kate Sr. Trilogy this much credit: when her character first showed up at the house, I had no idea they were building toward a climax in which a puppet summons the ghost of her dead husband.

The next thing we see is this:

Of course. What else could it have been?

Willie asks ALF if that’s their goldfish bowl on the table, and ALF says it is, but the goldfish is fine as long as nobody flushes the toilet. I’m sure glad the writers invented a Tanner family goldfish for that joke.

Someone asks where Brian is, and there’s another zinger as we hear the toilet flush, because he took a shit onto the goldfish and killed it.

Brilliant stuff, ALF. Just pure class.

This whole scene is a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with this show. What’s the logic here? Why are they letting ALF hold a seance in their living room? Why do they believe he’d have the ability to speak with the dead? He’s never been magical before…but all of a sudden they are willing to go along with this schtick as if it’s in any way reasonable?

I guess I’d be willing to believe that they’d tentatively let him get away with saying that everyone from Melmac can communicate with spirits, but they don’t get suspicious when the ceremony looks exactly like it does in some late-night 1950s B-movie? Isn’t that a pretty clear giveaway that this fuckdicker is just doing what he does all the time? Screwing with everyone and wrecking up their lives because they keep giving him the express opportunity to do so?

Why is nobody in this show a human being?

ALF tells everyone to join hands and close their eyes, and then he moans and groans for a while as he slips into a trance. I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed almost nothing about revisiting this show, but this scene is ranking right up there with his music video for making me wonder why I’m doing this. I’m once again overcome with embarrassment for even having this on my computer screen. I feel like I deserve to have the principal of my old school, my boss, and every one of my ex-girlfriends walk in on me right now and see this. See that this is what’s become of me.

ANYWAY THE SEANCE IS GREAT and we find out that Kate Sr.’s last name is Halligan, which is therefore, at least presumably, Kate’s maiden name as well. I like that this awful show needs to drag us through these absurd, unbelievable situations of spirits and mysticism and occult mumbo-jumbo before it gives enough of a shit to reveal even the most basic things to us about the characters involved. We can have an episode with ALF and Willie trapped together in a car and learn literally nothing about them from anything that they say, but strap Willie to a rocket and fire him at the moon and have ALF travel through time to save him and that’ll be the scene in which we learn that Brian’s middle name is Frank.

Anyway, ALF contacts Sparky, and everyone hears his disembodied voice speaking from above. I don’t actually believe that it’s possible to communicate with spirits, or even that there are spirits, but I do know that this is emphatically not how a seance works. If we could just look up at the sky and speak verbally back and forth with dead people, not only would we not need a medium at all, but there’d be no question whatsoever about an afterlife.

Think about that. If you could walk into a room with a bunch of friends, look up at the ceiling and talk to your dead grandfather, would there be any room for questioning life after death? What’s more, it would be easy to document. Set up a camera, ship a copy to James Randi, and collect your million dollar prize. The entirety of human civilization would change, knowing that we go somewhere after we die, and that all we have to do to learn about that place and prepare for it is verbally ask a dead guy.

And yet…nobody in the Tanner family seems to react. What would you do if a ghost started talking to you? …okay, I admit, I don’t know what I’d do either. But I’d sure as hell do something. I wouldn’t sit quietly at a table and wait for him to stop so that I could get on with the rest of my night. This would be a life-defining moment, and very likely the most significant thing I’d ever witness. For the Tanners, though, this is treated like just another night in.

The lack of imagination in this show is absolutely dumbfounding.

Anyway, it’s not a real seance (which is odd since it was so very convincing), and it unravels when the voice of Sparky Halligan starts speeding up and slowing down. Willie looks under the table and finds his tape recorder, at which point he angrily shouts, “You’re a fraud!”

See? This is the problem. I know the seance was fake and therefore much of what I said above shouldn’t mean anything…but the Tanners believed it was real. They believed they were talking to a ghost and they still didn’t react. If Willie stood up and said, “I knew it…what a waste of time…” that would be one thing. Instead he reveals that he fell for it, as did everyone else, and yet they still didn’t see this as anything worth getting excited over.

I understand none of what I’m watching.

Everyone yells at ALF…but, really, shame on them for being such idiots. ALF explains that he learned all of his facts about Sparky from digging through Kate Sr.’s things, but that doesn’t explain whose voice was on the tape, nor how he knew what Sparky sounded like. Kate Sr. confirmed that it was her dead husband’s voice…so how in the world did ALF record him saying things like “I’m dead now, go sleep with that guy who played Doug on Flight of the Conchords“?

This makes no sense whatsoever. Yes, ALF can fake a seance. No, ALF cannot fake a seance using a cassette tape that can’t possibly exist and goes completely unexplained. At that point he might as well be able to actually speak to the dead. God this show is awful.

We then cut to an exterior shot of Kate Sr.’s apartment building, with a dubbed line announcing that she has a delivery.

Then we immediately cut to this shot, where the box is already inside her apartment and the door is closed:

This is really weird. They hired a guy to say the line about the delivery, so why didn’t they open the scene with her signing for the box or something? Why have the line spoken off-camera, and then immediately cut to the box already being inside the apartment? It’s really weird to me. There was no sound of a door opening or closing…just the unseen delivery man, and then, bam, Kate Sr. with the door closed, not even very close to the box that was just ostensibly handed to her.

But that’s not all…

Guess what’s in the box, assholes!

It’s ALF! He felt so bad about lying to manipulate her into sleeping with the neighbor she barely knows that he mailed himself to her apartment so he could continue manipulating her into sleeping with the neighbor she barely knows.

ALF gives a speech to her about moving on, and he uses the destruction of Melmac as his own personal example. While that’s meant to give Kate Sr. the strength to face life without her husband, all it really does is make ALF seem like a pretty massive dick for getting over the annihilation of his entire civilization in a couple of episodes.

There’s somebody at the door, and since there’s only one character unaccounted for it has to be Whizzer Deaver.

I know I said that name might not be any better than Wizard Beaver, but I’m starting to think it’s actually worse. If it was really Wizard Beaver then I could just assume the writers were trying to be funny, and failing as ever. It wouldn’t even stand out in the grand scheme of things. But with Whizzer Deaver were they just trying to give him a normal name? This is what they came up with? Is it that hard to call this guy Jim or something and move on? God knows we’ll never see him again.

The Deav brings her a Valentine’s Day gift, which reminds me, oh shit, this is a Valentine’s Day special. Don’t ask me how I forgot, what with all the Valentine’s Day staples we just saw, like summoning the dead, clarinet jam sessions, and shitting on goldfish. I must be thick as a brick.

Whizzer flirts some more and Kate Sr. agrees to go out to dinner with him, which seems like a great idea to me, since it’s so easy to get into restaurants at dinner time with no reservations on Valentine’s Day.

ALF for some reason sits quietly in the box while they’re gone, wondering what he’s supposed to do since there’s still a few minutes left in the episode and nobody wrote any more lines for him.

In the scene just before the credits ALF is delivered back to the Tanner house, and the same delivery man shows up to drop the box off. This time we see him, and they even made a JACKRABBIT COURIER jacket for him to wear, which means I’m even more confused about why they didn’t show him before. They had a costume for him but still just had him do some clumsy, shittily-edited overdub? I honestly feel sometimes that ALF goes out of its way to do the stupiding fucking thing possible.

Anyway great episode. 10 out of 10. Fuck you.

MELMAC FACTS: On Melmac there was a sport called Klaneball, which was like hockey but without skating or a puck. There were also four classes of postage: 1st Class, 2nd Class, Fish, and Ham. Oh, and everyone on Melmac could talk to the dead…or at least convince a family of morons that they could talk to the dead by sticking a flashlight in a fishbowl.

I know I say this all the time, but that’s okay because I mean it all the time: this is one lousy episode. It does immediately grab my attention, however, as we open on ALF nailing a GOOD-BYE GRANDMA sign to the front door.

Does that make this episode and “Mother and Child Reunion” an unofficial two-parter? Normally I wouldn’t ask, but serialization never seemed to be something ALF was interested in. Hell, introducing characters that don’t immediately get knocked over the head with a shovel and buried forever never seemed to be something ALF was interested in. For Kate Sr. to still be hanging around…yeah, that’s definitely got my interest.

In fact, another episode with Kate Sr. takes a lot of responsibility off of the previous one. Sure, it should have been funnier, but its aimless, meandering non-plot is less important if we view “Mother and Child Reunion” as a new character’s introduction rather than a new character’s story.

Of course, in that case “Mother and Child Reunion” would have had to have said something about who Kate Sr. was as a character, and it didn’t. We didn’t even learn anything about Kate Classic. “Mother and Child Reunion” could have made for a fine setup in service of potential payoff in “A Little Bit of Soap,” but it didn’t set anything up, and there’s nothing even close to a payoff here.

Instead these are (once again) two episodes in a row about the same thing: a pair of paper-thin characters treading over the well-worn, passive-aggressive ground of every other mother / daughter pair we’ve seen on any given terrible sitcom already. There’s nothing about their relationship that has anything to do with them…they’re simply reading from a script we’ve seen performed a thousand times before.

This metaphor is more apt than you might think. Read on, friends…

Anyway, Willie comes into the room and tells ALF to stop nailing shit to the door, an exchange which he has probably had with the alien every morning since ALF arrived.

Willie’s wearing a suit, and I’m not sure why. From the context it sounds like he’s driving Kate Sr. to the airport, and though I didn’t travel much pre-911 I don’t remember it being customary to wear your prom tux while dropping family members off at the entrance.

ALF makes the kids recite a poem he wrote, which is just “Goodbye grandma, goodbye goodbye goodbye…” over and over again, but it qualifies as the best writing this show has ever had. He also prepared a travel kit for her so she won’t need to stop anywhere and therefore won’t miss her flight.

He clearly wants her to leave, but I thought the previous episode ended with them patching things up. Sure, she slapped a muzzle on his stupid face, but compared to the crap ALF puts the family through on a daily basis that’s downright friendly. I mean, seriously…if you’re going to pick the story up from where it left off last week, why pretend it didn’t leave off there last week?

His whole reason for hating Kate Sr. was that she moved in and he had to hide in the shed, or under the bed listening to Willie stammer and hesitate his way through sex with Kate. But now Kate Sr. knows he exists, so he shouldn’t have to hide in the shed anymore. The entire conflict should be resolved simply because the context has shifted, but the writers don’t seem to realize this. Instead they treat the relationship between the two characters as though nothing has changed, even though absolutely everything has changed. It’s…weird.

As it turns out, Kate Sr. isn’t leaving after all, because Estelle fucked everything up again. That Estelle!

ALF is pissed, in spite of the fact that this no longer affects him in any way. And so we find ourselves pretending along with the writers that last week’s conflict is still in play, even though there’s no reason it should be. It’s like doing a sequel to Casablanca that picks up right after Victor and Ilsa depart, and we follow Rick around for another hour and a half while he, for no reason at all, runs through all of the same inner conflict from the first film, somehow unaware of the fact that he already reached a decision and if he’s going to go on being conflicted about something, it needs to be something different.

I know I really drill down into and harp on these tiny things in my ALF reviews, but bad writing gets me fired up in a way that so few things can. If a wall wobbles or someone stumbles over a line, I’ll point it out and make a joke…but I won’t rant about it.

When it comes to writing, though? That’s my dog you’re kicking, pal. And you’re going to get a piece of my mind.

After the credits we start the episode proper, and there’s a long, silent view of ALF sitting on the floor, eating popcorn. Nothing is happening. He’s watching TV but we can’t see it, and there’s nothing important or funny to hear. It’s just a needless, extended shot of a puppet doing nothing.

Remember when I mentioned that I’m having to review syndication edits instead of the complete episodes? Well, scenes like this are quickly convincing me that I’m missing nothing. If they can cut three minutes out of an episode and still leave so much filler, then I find it hard to believe I’m being deprived of anything of substance.

Kate Sr. vacuums up ALF’s mess and changes the channel. ALF was watching a soap opera, but Kate Sr. wants to watch a different soap opera, so they bicker for a while about which soap opera is better.

Once again I’d like to remind you that you’re watching a show about an alien. Of course, an argument about which soap opera is better obviously stems naturally from that premise, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to remind you.

I will say that ALF gets the shoe-string, amateurish look of late 80s soap operas down very well. Then again, I doubt this was deliberate, since ALF itself is shoe-string and amateurish. Nevertheless, the stopped clock was right, and it’s only fair to tip the hat when that happens.

The name of the soap opera that Kate Sr. likes is One World to Hope For. We don’t find out the name of the soap opera ALF likes, because that would have required the writers to come up with two things in one week, and we all know that was never going to happen.

ALF complains about One World to Hope For because it’s awful, and nothing happens. He even suggests that it needs a “plot transplant.” That sure sounds familiar…I wonder if he reviews an episode on his blog once a week even though he hates it. Imagine what a loser he’d be!

Seriously, I would love for this to be a meta joke on ALF‘s part, but for that to be the case they would have had to have made the previous 13 episodes terrible on purpose, and I’m not going to give them anywhere near that much credit.

ALF says he could write a better script than that show’s lousy writers, and I get even more tempted to read this as meta commentary. It’s not, but wouldn’t it be glorious if it was? Wouldn’t it be, potentially, good? I love that ALF‘s writing staff could pen these lines without ever realizing that they applied to the very show they were working on.

Of course, yes, it’s possible that they did realize this, but in that case shouldn’t they have, y’know, started writing better shit?

Kate Jr. comes in and tells ALF and Kate Sr. to stop arguing about soap operas, and then she asks if she can move Kate Sr.’s luggage, and Jesus Lord how is this show still so padded with three minutes already missing? What could possibly have been cut? Was it three minutes of Max Wright sitting on the can?

Speak of the shitting devil! It’s the next day, I guess? I don’t know. I wrote the same paragraph about 15 times trying to figure out the span of time that passes in this episode, but I couldn’t do it, so fuck it. I have no clue when anything is meant to be happening. Done.

Anyway, Willie is on the couch, buffing his shoes like the pimp that he is. Kate Jr. comes in and puts her feet up and an ice pack on her head, because Kate Sr. is staying even longer now and it’s stressing her out. I thought this was resolved last week as well, but I guess ALF has outsmarted me by paying no heed to the things it conclusively told us had happened.

Kate Sr. is sticking around (again…this is totally separate from that time earlier in the same episode when she was sticking around) because Estelle sprained her ankle. That Estelle!

I find it tremendously interesting that ALF is so completely lacking in narrative momentum that it needs to rely on a never-seen character that might as well not exist for every one of its plot points. This show is thoroughly populated with characters so uninteresting that they can’t even pull their own story forward.

Anyway, they bitch about Kate Sr. and ALF writes everything they say in a notebook.

You know what you just saw in your head when you read that sentence? The entire rest of the episode. Yep. In that split second you did just as much creative work as the entire writing staff of ALF combined. Congratulations!

The very next scene is ALF herding everyone into the living room to watch One World to Hope For. Doesn’t Willie have a job? Why is he around watching soap operas with everyone else? Does nobody work anymore? Don’t the kids go to school?

Anyway, the reason for the alien’s excitement becomes clear when they see ALF Shumway listed on-screen as the credited writer.

This is why I was trying to figure out the time-frame. I know soap operas have relatively short turnaround times, but I’d imagine it would still take months for them to start filming the work of a new writer, especially if the scripts he’s submitting are unsolicited. Yet from certain details in the episode I think we’re supposed to believe that this happened the next day or something. I don’t know. I can’t tell. I don’t care. I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.

Maybe they’d accept his work the next day. I won’t argue about that. It’s fucking impossible, but I won’t argue about it. Maybe they’d love it so much they’d want to shoot it as soon as possible.

Fine. But wouldn’t they have other scripts that they need to shoot and air first? Soap operas have long plot arcs by design. It isn’t like a sitcom where everything can reset the next week and stories are often written to be told out of order. Soap operas need to keep their balls in the air, so why is this one happy to drop all of its plot-threads wholecloth for the sake of producing this irrelevant script by a writer they’ve never heard of and who has no previous credits to his name?

The show starts and there are two characters on the couch recreating the conversation that Willie and Kate Jr. had in the previous scene. This is a decently funny idea…it’s not particularly original, sure, but filtering the day-to-day reality of the Tanners through ALF’s (ostensibly) well-meaning pen could lead to some great comedy. I’m reminded of that episode of The Office* when Michael is away and they find the screenplay that he wrote. It re-defines the world (and characters) around them through the magic of warped perspective, and something similar could happen here, with ALF saying nasty things about Willie or the kids via proxy.

But…no. There’s no twist. It’s literally a straight recitation of the conversation we just saw. There’s no attempt whatsoever to turn this into a joke on any other level. What squandered potential.

The family realizes quickly that ALF just wrote down everything they said, which comes as a shock to them despite the fact that while they were having this conversation ALF was writing down everything they said.

Kate Sr. is upset when she finds out that her character is named Dorothy, which, based on her reaction, I assume is her name. I don’t know, though. The show still hasn’t told us what her name is, so whatever connection we’re supposed to make here as viewers, it doesn’t get made.

So, yeah, the Kate Sr. character walks in on the Willie and Kate Jr. characters and joins the conversation. The Kate Jr. character tells the Kate Sr. character that she doesn’t want her to live with them forever, and the real Kate Sr., watching this, is hurt by this revelation and gets up to leave.

I don’t understand this. If all ALF did was write down exactly what happened — which the episode keeps telling us is the case — then doesn’t that mean Kate Sr. was already present for this conversation? None of these words should be new to her. If her own daughter asking her to leave didn’t hurt, why is it now suddenly unbearable to hear two fictional characters having the same exchange?

I suppose it’s possible that Kate Sr. is actually upset because ALF put such a hurtful conversation on TV, but in that case shouldn’t she be angry at him instead of her daughter? This is one of the simplest possible plots I can imagine, and yet the writers are still confusing me.

In the next scene ALF is putting together another script, but Kate Jr. tells him he needs to stop writing for soap operas, but ALF explains that for some reason the staff of that show is now relying completely on scripts appearing in their mailboxes from this mysterious writer they’ve never met who doesn’t have any understanding of the show’s characters or what they’re meant to be doing.

Then Kate Sr. reveals to her daughter that Estelle never sprained her ankle…Estelle’s just a nutbag so Kate Sr. moved out and has nowhere else to go. That Estelle!

Someone from One World to Hope For calls ALF on the phone and reminds him that they’re shooting his new script tomorrow, and he needs to have it there pronto. This is totally how TV works, btw.

Seriously, this is ridiculous. They received, filmed and aired ALF’s first script in one day, I guess, because now they need another script for tomorrow, which is insane to me. What was the crew of One World to Hope For doing? Sitting around in the dark hoping somebody watching at home would write a script for them? And after one single script they refuse to do anything but wait for that same writer to provide them another? This is absurd.

I guess One World to Hope For is the one show in history whose writing staff does even less work than ALF‘s.

ALF sits in the shed sticking clothes pins to his face. He screams and Willie comes running in to make sure he’s okay. Willie arrives very quickly so I assume he was hiding outside the door for salacious purposes that are mercifully not revealed.

ALF is fine…he’s just having trouble finishing the script, and he needs to hurry because they’re going to be shooting in a few hours. Isn’t “shooting in a few hours” too late? Won’t the actors need to learn their lines? Won’t the scenes have to be blocked and the sets have to be dressed? However small that show’s staff is, these are people who need to know what they’re doing in advance. Soap operas aren’t improvised by the production crew…that would be chaos.

WHY CAN’T THIS PLOT MAKE ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER

Willie expresses his displeasure to ALF. The Kates are fighting, and he insists that the space alien that lives in the laundry room write a script for a soap opera so that the family can watch it and feel that their problems have been resolved, which is the most roundabout, ridiculous solution to such a mundane problem that I’ve ever heard.

People fight with their parents. It happens. Very rarely do we need to count on daytime television written by extraterrestrials to repair the damage, but here we are, and for some reason that’s the only solution anyone’s thinking of.

Can’t Willie just make them sit down and talk it out? Watching ALF is like driving drunk. You keep passing these landmarks that you recognize, but you have no recollection of how you made it from one to another.

Whatever. Nobody cares. ALF’s next episode airs and it’s full of forgiveness and fence-mending. But then, all of a sudden, the Kate Sr. character says all this nasty stuff to the Kate Jr. character, who replies with some nasty stuff of her own, and everyone gets mad at ALF for writing such a shitty episode of television that didn’t fix everything.

This is probably the only time I’ll ever be on ALF’s side. Why was this their solution to the problem? Instead of banking on the healing power of soap operas they could have dealt with this crap like adults. Delegating this to ALF Shumway, amateur soap operateer, represents a madness several layers thick.

Anyway, ALF says that he didn’t write that stuff…they changed his script. Fortunately, he has multiple copies lying around just in case there was a significant alteration made to his work and he needed to stage a live reading of the pivotal scene in the Tanner living room instead. Classic alien foresight.

He hands out the scripts, and there’s a joke at Willie’s expense based on the fact that ALF didn’t give him any lines. This could well be another jab at Max Wright, who was actually upset that Paul Fusco hoarded all of the funny lines for himself and didn’t give the other actors much to work with. Either way…it’s kinda funny.

But only kinda. And it doesn’t last long. The Kates read ALF’s script to each other and we find out that Kate Sr.’s name is indeed Dorothy. Fuck that, though. I’m calling her Kate Sr.

Anyway, ALF’s script has all of the mystical healing abilities as they knew it could have, and they end up hugging and promising to never fight again, which would probably mean something if “Mother and Child Reunion” hadn’t ended the same way.

Willie celebrates with history’s most pathetic attempt at a thumbs-up.

ALF’s script really shouldn’t have moved them this way. It’s just some boilerplate nonsense about loving each other even though they drive each other crazy, and there’s a moment where Kate Sr.’s character confesses to being very sad since her husband died, which is treated as a shocking revelation. Because widows are normally extremely happy people I guess.

We also learn from the script that Kate Sr. didn’t really move out…Estelle kicked her out.

That Estelle!

Personally I think Estelle needs a spinoff. She’s the only character in the ALF universe who’s done anything, and we’ve never met her.

Needless to say, she’s my new favorite.

MELMAC FACTS: On Melmac they used accupressure to relieve writer’s block. On Earth we just tell the same story we told last week and hope nobody notices.
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* But not the episode where they actually see the finished film. Because that one was horse shit.

So, some bad news has been brought to my attention. It turns out that the episodes of ALF that are on Hulu — the ones I’ve been watching — are the syndication cuts. At first this disappointed me, but then it made sense: they’re using the same edits that were mastered for the DVD releases, which themselves used syndication cuts because the budget did not allow them to dig back and remaster the originals.

What does this mean? Well, in syndication episodes typically run shorter, in order to make room for more commercials. In the pre-DVD age, this was extremely annoying. I remember catching syndicated episodes of The Simpsons that cut out my favorite scenes and jokes. In addition, the folks responsible for editing a show for syndication may or may not pay any attention to the story, and are simply cutting things to get it as short as it needs to be. In the case of shows like The Simpsons this can be problematic, because while you probably could cut the classic episodes down a bit and still leave the larger experience of watching them intact, hacking away a few seconds here and a few seconds there more or less at random makes for a pretty disappointing at-home experience, since so much of what gave the episode its “flavor” can be lost.

With ALF I can’t say that I’m worried that the minute or two that was cut from each of these episodes would have elevated the show to tolerability, but I’m still pretty disappointed that I don’t get to watch and review the original edits, which may only exist at this point in the form of audience VHS recordings from their original airings.

Interestingly enough, the first episode I reviewed after learning about this is “Mother and Child Reunion,” which opens with evidence of something missing.

The very first moments of the episode see ALF holding one of those toy claws…remember those? You hold the handle and can squeeze a trigger to make the claw close. I don’t know what it was supposed to be for…you could theoretically reach things with it, but it wasn’t particularly strong and you’d probably just end up breaking something. Regardless, we never see what ALF intended to do with it.

There are ingredients everywhere and we find out from a line of dialogue that they were making pasta. It seemed a little strange that this all happened before the episode started…as in seconds before…and sure enough under the end credits we see a clip of this scene that’s longer than we see here. Syndication spares us, for better or for worse, from the Alien ‘N’ Tanner Pasta-Making Family Fun Night.

Anyway there’s somebody at the door, and it turns out to be Kate’s mother, who, impressively, is only about five or six years older than Kate. They shut the door on her and run around the living room like idiots trying to conceal ALF, while Kate Sr. waits outside patiently like the guy from the Alien Task Force in episode one.

I predict this episode will be brilliant.

It’s actually not a bad setup. The appearance of Kate Sr. gives the show a chance to flesh out Kate’s character, as well as introduce another outside force to the group dynamic. Additionally, the fact that she’s staying with the family means that ALF’s primary complaint — his isolation — gets dialed up even further, as he’ll be restricted from even having full run of the house. Of course, now that I type that out I realize that that’s the exact conflict we had in “Strangers in the Night” and it sure as heck didn’t do anyone any good there.

Anyway, Kate Sr. exposits that she’s in town because she’s traveling with a friend to Hawaii, and they decided to stop in Los Angeles to see their daughters who, conveniently, both live in the same city. None of that explains why they wouldn’t have called first, but at least we now know, 13 episodes into the show, where the fucking thing is meant to be taking place.

Kate Sr. says she brought gifts, and ALF sticks his head through the window that connects to the kitchen and says, “GIFTS?!” Then Willie shouts, “NOOO!” and ALF ducks down and Willie has to pretend that he shouted, “NOOO!” for a reason other than the real reason he shouted, “NOOO!” and that’s the kind of episode this is going to be, I guess.

Brian gets a scarf and Lynn gets a sweater, because Kate Sr. thinks it’s too cold in the house for them. Kate Jr. says the kids are fine and to fuck off if she doesn’t like it, but Brian hobbles between them and simulates sadness so the dueling Kates agree to a ceasefire.

The interesting thing is that throughout this scene and the previous one, Willie has been wearing a jacket indoors. I can’t quite give this show enough credit to assume it’s a background joke meant to silently suggest that Kate does keep the house too cold…but there you go. Willie is wearing a jacket.

Kate Sr. and Kate Original Recipe snipe passively back and forth for a while because this is a sitcom and that’s the only thing you can have visiting mothers do with their daughters.

Women, amirite??

I’ve defended — and even praised — Paul Fusco’s puppeteering in the past, but there’s a joke here that fails to land due to his lousy performance. Kate Sr. leaves the room and ALF pops up through the kitchen window again. He asks if the fact that this woman is staying in the house will affect him in any way, and some very loose editing means we linger on him far too long after he asks the question, allowing everyone to guess the joke and undermining entirely what would have been a decent smash-cut.

That’s not Fusco’s fault though. What is Fusco’s fault is that when we do cut to ALF in the shed, shouting “Help!” into Willie’s ham radio, ALF’s just standing there with his mouth open. Fusco doesn’t sell the panic at all, and doesn’t even seem to be making any attempt to do so. It’s strange to me, as Fusco is typically very interested in “animating” ALF in ways that are nearly always the highlight of any given episode. Here he’s content to open the mouth and leave it at that.

It’s strange, and it’s disappointing. Fusco is far better than this, and he’s every bit as capable of selling ALF’s panic as much as Jim Henson* always sold Kermit’s. But instead of a puppet waving his arms around and shouting to the heavens, we have one standing behind a desk with his jaw hanging open. There’s no effort here whatsoever, which is odd because the puppetry is usually the only place I can find any effort.

Kate and Lynn come into the shed with dinner for ALF and tell him he needs to stay in there until Tuesday, when Kate Sr. leaves. Actually, they call it a garage…and I’m not sure if I confused myself at some point or if the characters really do alternate between calling this set a shed and a garage. If it’s the same thing, then does that mean this is what ALF crashed into in “Baby, You Can Drive My Car”? If so, why didn’t Willie give a crap about the ham radio against the wall that took him a solid decade to build and is the most important thing in his life except when it sometimes isn’t?

Anyway ALF doesn’t want to stay in the shed, Kate says tough titty, and Lynn is a terrible actress. Moving on.

The very next scene is…Tuesday morning. Wow…so we really blew right past that whole conflict, didn’t we? Kate puts a meal on the table, ALF walks into the room with a protest sign, and the fake audience of nobody that actually exists goes wild.

They herd ALF back into the kitchen because Kate Sr. is taking a shit and she’s almost done, in fact might already be wiping at that very moment, and he needs to get the eff outta there, stat.

I like that any time ALF needs to have a character out of the room they put them on the toilet. Not having to worry about coming up with any other reasons for them to be occupied really frees up the writing staff for snack time.

Kate Sr. comes out of the bathroom drying her hands, which is a bit strange as I usually do that before I walk around the house dripping bathroom water everywhere, but the much more disturbing thing is that she comes out wearing an apron. Who the hell wears an apron into the bathroom? And then she’s going to wear it into the kitchen? That’s disgusting, lady.

The phone rings and it’s Kate Sr.’s friend Estelle. They have an argument and Kate Sr. decides she’s not going to Hawaii after all and will just live with the Tanners forever and ever amen.

I’d like to take a moment here to point out that my constant referring to this character as Kate Sr. is more than just a hilarious joke that you really like…it’s because the episode never tells us who she is. Granted, she gets referred to as “mom” and “grandma,” both of which are accurate, but we don’t ever learn her name. Why not? We learn that her never-seen friend is named Estelle, and we have no reason to give a shit about that. So why don’t we learn Kate Sr.’s name?

It’s bizarre. This would also be a chance to find out what Kate’s maiden name is. Not that that’s crucial information or anything, but it’s a chance to do some character work, and make these people feel like people instead of stiff wind-up toys that recite pre-recorded sound-bites when you squeeze their bellies.

The problem isn’t that the writing staff isn’t telling me Kate’s maiden name…the problem is that the writing staff doesn’t know or care about anything like this, and therefore have no clue who their characters are. This particular example is a symptom rather than the problem, but even if you think I’m reading too deeply into this (since 1981!) the fact is that the show just introduced a new character without even caring what her name is, and that’s a pretty clear sign that something’s wrong.

Willie and Kate talk in bed for a while about what to do with Kate Sr., and while they do ALF climbs up from underneath the bed to pitch his own two cents in.

I know I’m always making jokes and exaggerating the sexual deviance of ALF, but in this case I’m just going to report to you what happens here. Are you ready? There is no embellishment whatsoever. This is the episode‘s idea of a joke…not mine.

ALF reveals that it’s cold in the shed, so he’s been sleeping under their bed for the past few nights. Willie asks him if he was under there Sunday night, because that’s the one night out of the year that he allowed himself to fuck his wife. (Okay, that was the ONLY EMBELLISHMENT.) ALF says that yes, he was, but don’t worry…he didn’t hear anything.

That’s…gross. I actually feel sick just writing about it. It’s the sort of joke you could do with Roger, for instance, because within the context of American Dad! it actually fits. It doesn’t make it any less disgusting, but it is at least in line with the rest of the show’s comic sensibilities.

Here it’s completely out of line. This was a family sitcom, and we just had a joke about somebody hiding under a bed listening to two people fuck. What the hell was ALF teaching kids? This would be like stumbling across an old episode of Sesame Street where Cookie Monster hides in the closet and watches Gordon plow Maria. Jesus Christ.

It gets worse, too. After the conversation, ALF climbs back under the bed. Willie and Kate jump up and down on the mattress in order to crush him to death — if I have anything to say about it — and ALF thinks they’re having sex again, so he encouragingly shouts, “Go for it Willie!”

The audience of nobody loudly applauds Paul Fusco’s rapier wit.

ALF sits alone in the dark kitchen, mumbling to himself somehow without moving his mouth, making this officially Fusco’s laziest episode ever. When he can’t even be bothered to operate the fucking mouth you know he’s given up.

There is some nice blocking here, though, as you can see Kate Sr. through the window, walking around the living room yawning before she comes to the kitchen. It makes things feel a little more “alive” than they would have if the scene started with her opening the door, and it’s nice that they’re using the window between the two rooms for something other than having ALF pop up and spout bullshit through it.

She sees ALF and is immediately worried and terrified, which is great, because that’s the opposite reaction the Tanners had to ALF in the pilot, and it’s nice to see that the writers realize that the basic reaction humans might have to meeting an alien wouldn’t be to invite it to move in.

Of course she’s not entirely exempt from stupidity, as she concludes that ALF must be something Willie made, because Willie is always making crazy things. For starters, how could Willie make a creature? Is he a mad scientist? ALF isn’t a robot…he’s flesh and blood. She even touches him to make sure. Does she really think a dipshit like Willie is able to synthesize life? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Secondly, since when is Willie always making crazy things? We saw his mousetrap a few episodes ago, and that was indeed crazy, but more because it was a pile of shit and less because it convinced anyone that he was capable of creating living breathing aliens with his own two hands. I wish Willie was always making crazy things…that sounds like it would lead to some much better plots than we’ve been getting. Why can’t I watch an episode where Willie makes a battlebot that goes apeshit?

The next morning ALF is throwing some cookware around in the kitchen for no reason. Kate Sr. comes in and realizes that the monster she saw last night wasn’t a dream, and then Willie and Kate Jr. enter from the laundry room because that’s the only other direction from which they can enter the scene, and not because there was any reason for them to be hiding in there.

Nobody is worried for long about the fact that someone now knows ALF lives in the house, and when he and Kate Sr. start to bicker it’s clear that she’s mainly concerned that ALF eats people food and gets to sit at the table…not that he’s a hitherto unknown species from a distant world.

It’s absurd. Imagine going over to your friend’s place for breakfast, and a unicorn comes into the kitchen and sits at the table. Is your main concern going to be that unicorns shouldn’t be eating in the house? Why is everybody on this show quietly psychotic?

ALF issues an ultimatum: either Kate Sr. goes, or he goes. This doesn’t seem like a wise gambit for ALF, because if he goes, he’s fucked. If she goes, she’s pissed off with no reason not to turn him in, and he’s fucked. But the episode’s almost over and the writers don’t want Kate Sr. around next week any more than we do, so I guess he had no choice but to say this.

There’s a long, meandering stream of bullshit that ends with Kate Sr. and Kate Jr. mending fences and agreeing to be less intolerably bitchy to each other, which sounds nice but probably means nothing since there’s no chance of us ever seeing this woman again. Kate Sr. demonstrates her newfound decency by allowing Kate Jr. to make pancakes however the fuck she wants.

Damn, that’s good TV.

There’s a little scene before the credits with Kate Sr. giving Brian a hat that’s too big for him. ALF makes a joke and does his obnoxious, “HA! Ha-haha!” laugh, slapping the arm of the couch as he does so. Then Kate Sr. reveals that she’s knit a muzzle for ALF as well, and she sticks it on his worthless face and does the laughing couch-slap thing herself, which I guess means they bonded, and I wish they both were dead.

This was an absolutely terrible episode, and yet I can’t hate it completely, because it put this in my head and it stayed there the entire time I spent writing this review. That’s the best I’ve ever felt after an episode of ALF, and for that, I doff my cap.

MELMAC FACTS: Melmac’s civilization was apparently “millions of years ahead” of Earth’s. And yet they still haven’t discovered comedy.

—–
* Reader / commenter / supervillain Sarah Portland has actually talked to me a bit about some of Henson’s specific techniques that she’s noticed Fusco employing, and while I was fascinated by it I’m not nearly as intelligent as she is, so I’ll leave it to her to explain in the comments below. Suffice it to say, Fusco’s good. So good she had to check to see if he ever worked with Henson’s crew in the past. He didn’t, but the fact that she had to check is one hell of a fine compliment.

The episode opens with ALF starting a motherfucking grease fire. Does it really even matter if I explain why that happens?

I know this is a sitcom. I know we need to suspend disbelief…and I’m happy to do that. Many of my favorite television programs have been absurdist works. Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job, Get a Life, The League of Gentlemen, Father Ted…the list goes on. That isn’t just a handful of shows I enjoy…that’s a list, as far as I’m concerned, of some of the best television ever made.

Of course realistic shows have at least as much potential to rocket up my list of favorites, as my undying love for the original Office will attest, but my point is that I have nothing against absurd shows. I’m willing to suspend disbelief as much as necessary — and more — in order to embrace what absurd programming has to offer.

But ALF doesn’t come off as absurd. I certainly wouldn’t argue that it comes off as realistic, either, but the problem is that it attempts to occupy some kind of hazy middle ground. Its premise is rife with absurdity, but once you get past the fact than an alien lives in the house, there’s nothing left. From then on, it might as well be realistic.

Aside from a few jokey comments here and there — an average of what seems like well less than one per episode — there’s nothing that separates ALF as a character from any number of wacky neighbors, annoying relatives or devious hobos. In Mork & Mindy, you knew you were watching a show about an alien even though Robin Williams looked as human as anyone else. Here, if you tuned into any given episode of ALF the odds are good that you’d only know he’s an alien because he doesn’t look human. His behavior, his words and his hare-brained schemes are too human.

That’s the problem. The problem isn’t that I can’t suspend disbelief for ALF…the problem is that ALF isn’t asking me to.

This can work, but in order for it to work the show needs to be in on the joke. In Get a Life the comedy came from the fact that insane characters and preposterous situations existed within a universe that felt exactly like and was structured exactly like a 1950s sitcom. The disparity between the concept and the execution enhanced the comedy rather than confused it.

I’d also point to The Venture Bros. here as perhaps the gold standard of tonal disparity; each episode opens with an action-packed credits sequence suggesting thrilling adventures, dangerous adversaries and last-minute escapes…but the episodes themselves are about the characters’ downtime. They might be dealing with mundane concerns in bizarre, impossible ways, but the fact remains that we’re always catching these characters when they’re not really up to much, and, again, that fuels the comedy. A quiet conversation between an employee and his boss about a deceased colleague isn’t funny on its own…but put the employee and his boss in rubber butterfly costumes and stick them in a treehouse, and the entire perspective changes.

I’m not angry that ALF is absurd…I’m angry that ALF doesn’t seem to know it’s absurd. An alien coming to Earth and doing nothing alien can be funny…but the show has to realize why it’s funny. Instead, it doesn’t. ALF just keeps starting fires and chasing cats and crashing cars and every episode does its best to hide the fact that ALF is an alien rather than embrace it. The show refuses to mine the richest comic vein it has at its disposal. It’s thoroughly disappointing, and it makes it even more ridiculous that Willie and Kate wouldn’t throw him out.

So, yes, he just started a grease fire in the kitchen. That’s the joke. What if he killed the kids?

An absurd show could make the callousness on display here — and letting ALF continue to live in this house is absolutely an act of callousness — a great joke. Instead it’s just an excuse for Willie and Kate to make silly faces while ALF consistently puts their lives and their children’s lives in jeopardy.

After the opening credits we get another missed opportunity, as Willie says grace.

So, Willie’s religious? I’ve mentioned it before, but this would certainly be a great time to discuss the ways that somebody’s faith might be shaken — or at least need to evolve — upon encountering irrefutable proof of extra-terrestrial life. Why aren’t we privy, even in the form of a tossed-off joke, to how Willie’s managed to rectify his spirituality with the fact that he lives with a god-damned alien?

That’s the kind of story that would make far better use of this show’s central concept. Instead, though, the writers want to talk about a much more pressing concern: where the Tanners will go on their vacation.

They want to go to San Diego, but since they can’t let ALF be seen in public and also can’t leave him alone in the house unless they want to come home to a smoking crater, they decide not to go anywhere at all.

This is at least circling the idea that ALF is an alien, but a show like American Dad! handles things like that much more interestingly. By allowing Roger to adopt alternate personas, they not only allow him to get out of the house, but they throw the door wide open for new and unique plot possibilities. Here, yes, they are at least conscious of the fact that ALF is an alien (a far cry from the episode where they ran around town asking everybody if they’d seen the space-monster that lives in their laundry room), but “we can’t go anywhere” isn’t a very interesting place for that to lead.

The one time they acknowledge this fact it’s so they have an excuse to give us a boring episode, and that’s insane. You are writing a show about an alien. If you’re doing that, you should be able to invent incredible storylines. I don’t understand why the ALF writing staff alternates between ignoring it completely and acknowledging it for the sake of avoiding writing anything interesting.

I will give credit where credit is due, however: the set designers or the prop folks bothered to hang singed curtains in the kitchen, even though we don’t actually go into that room and can only glimpse them briefly behind Willie. That’s some downright uncommon attention to detail for this show, and I like that. Whoever bothered to add such a lovely touch to a terrible episode like this one, I hope you’ve moved on to productions more worthy of your enthusiasm.

Anyway the kids are disappointed that the family can’t go anywhere, but they don’t blame ALF. In fact, they reassure him that it’s not his fault. Even though, you know, it absolutely, unquestionably is his fault.

This is disappointing, too, because it’s another missed opportunity for a good story. Willie and Kate regularly get sick of ALF’s shenanigans, but Lynn and Brian stick up for him. Now that he’s taking away their vacation, though, wouldn’t it be nice to see what happens when the whole family is sick of him? How would he handle that? How would he win them back?

I’m not going to argue that it would be a very good episode — I’d be insane to argue that at this point — but it would at least be a good idea for an episode. Instead, there’s no conflict. Why is there no conflict?

The family decides that they can go camping, which will solve both problems: they won’t have to worry about anyone seeing ALF, and ALF will still be right at hand to ruin every moment of their lives.

Kate is disappointed that nobody else wants to stash ALF in a kennel, which would pretty much make her my soul mate if the writing was more consistent.

She then starts making a list of the things they will need, and we only barely hear “pork and beans” and “wolf repellent” before we fade into the next scene. There’s no laughter, so I think it’s safe to conclude that these are really the first two things the ALF writing staff thinks you take camping. They…don’t get out much.

Willie is driving the RV they rented, and everyone apart from Kate sings that bottles-of-beer-on-the-wall song. There’s a decently funny moment when Brian asks his mother why she isn’t singing, and she replies that she doesn’t know the words. Her line is delivered with a perfectly calculated snip of bitchiness and I actually like that a lot. Every so often there’s a hint of characterization that happens in spite of the script. I cherish moments like those.

The audience barely laughs, though, so maybe I’m wrong to find it funny. I guess we’re only supposed to laugh when ALF traps four people in a burning house.

What’s weird watching this is how well ALF and Willie are getting along. I sort of remembered Willie as barely tolerating ALF, but so far in the run he’s been pretty supportive of the guy who keeps ruining his life. Of course, there have definitely been moments when Willie flips out, but watching them sing the song together is like watching two reunited college roommates. What a weird show. They aren’t even able to keep the central relationships consistent.

They stop singing and Lynn says she’s going to write a letter to her boyfriend. I don’t know who that is, or why she’d want to write to him when she’s going camping and won’t be able to mail it until she gets back anyway. More confusing, though, is the fact that this never comes up in the episode again. It’s as though the writers felt the need to invent a reason for her to not be involved in the rest of the scene, but Brian and Kate aren’t involved either and they don’t get any excuse.

Couldn’t they have just had her put on some headphones or something? Why have her announce that she’s nonsensically writing a letter she can’t mail if it’s not going to have any bearing on anything? See what I mean about the show not being in on its own absurdity? It isn’t even aware of the things it’s making its characters do.

ALF asks Willie if he can take the wheel, but Willie declines for the reason that ALF doesn’t know how to drive. Last week’s entire episode hinged upon the fact that ALF could somehow drive, admittedly not very well, but still. I would be fine with it if Willie’s justification was based on the events of “Baby, You Can Drive My Car,” but they aren’t. They don’t even remember it.

This is reinforced by the fact that ALF defends his driving abilities by saying, “I drove through the cosmos, didn’t I?” Why wouldn’t he have said “I drove a Ferrari last week, remember? It’s why your family is dirt poor now and your great grandkids will be working to pay off your debt.”

Easy, because that didn’t happen. This is a new episode and those events occurred in total isolation from everything we’re about to see. It’s really bizarre, especially since these episodes are back to back. Again, I’m not a huge continuity guy or anything, but they could get the same point across if they’d just rewritten the line slightly so that instead of ALF drawing a parallel between driving this motor vehicle and flying a space-ship ten episodes ago, he could draw a parallel between driving this motor vehicle and driving the motor vehicle that he just drove last week.

Anyway, ALF wrenches control of the steering wheel away from Willie, which I guess is the joke because the audience of dead people goes nuts. I said it a few weeks ago but I’ll say it again here: I’m grateful for the laugh track. Without it I’d never now that ALF repeatedly attempting to murder four innocent people was supposed to be funny.

Nobody says anything to ALF about what he just did. The scene ends after the RV almost collides with another driver. Wouldn’t it have been hilarious if they hit that guy and killed him? Man, I’m cracking up just thinking about it.

What a wonderful lesson for kids watching this show at home! It’s so funny to violently yank the steering wheel while somebody’s driving along at 60 miles per hour.

How does nobody pull over and bawl ALF out for this shit? Again, this is beyond suspending disbelief. A show like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia would definitely have a character do this, but even then there’d probably be some consequence. Granted, it could be a warped sort of consequence that sees the gang okay but some innocent people injured, but It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is aware of the fact that this is wrong. It plays with our expectations and, whether you like the show or not, it’s at least clear that the show is aware of what it is doing.

Here it’s just ALF showing all the kids at home a really funny prank they can try for themselves. God damn this show.

In the next scene the RV is stuck somewhere, and I thought maybe it was because ALF drove it into a ditch or something, but, no. Again, no consequence. They made it to the campground just fine, but they’re stuck inside because it’s raining.

Here’s another example of where a small rewrite would have made a world of difference. Instead of the rain, why not have it so that ALF hit a tree? Or drove over something that pierced the tire? The family is still stuck in that case, the story can still progress exactly as it does, but you tie some elements of your plot together so that it’s not just a mess of moments that occur in sequence but have little to no bearing on each other.

It would also give Willie’s upcoming tantrum a lot more justification, but who cares about that, right? How is this show this lousy? Really, I’m not asking for spoilers here, but does it actually get any better?

Anyway, they’re all stuck in the RV so Willie suggests a game. They can’t play Scrabble because ALF ate all the pieces, though. Hilarious. I don’t understand why the only way they want to show us that ALF is an alien is by having him eat things that aren’t meant to be eaten. There’s really nothing else you can have this guy do?

Willie suggests charades instead, and there’s another funny line when Lynn says that she doesn’t like charades, because she always feels like everybody’s watching her.

It’s funnier in isolation than it is in the larger context of the episode and the show, though, because I honestly don’t know if Lynn is just saying something silly, or if she’s supposed to be some kind of bimbo.

Also, does anyone say bimbo anymore? Honest question. I remember hurting myself laughing when Harvey Keitel called Ed Norton a bimbo in Moonrise Kingdom just because I hadn’t heard that word in what felt like decades. And also because it was Harvey Keitel calling Ed Norton a bimbo. Now that’s comedy.

Willie eventually gets upset because ALF keeps screaming unreasonable demands at him and blaming him for the shitty trip, even though it’s been repeatedly established that ALF is the reason for the shitty trip. Willie loses his temper, but, ultimately, his point is that ALF should be more considerate, which seems pretty reasonable to me. So, of course, what happens is that ALF storms off into the rain and sad music plays and the camera zooms in on Willie as though he’s the villain.

Again: this show has no idea what it’s doing.

After the commercial the family is displeased at Willie for no reason. Seriously, all that happened is that ALF stood up and left of his own volition, in a fit of self-righteous indignation, and Willie said, “Okay, you can leave if you’d like to, and that might be a good idea since you keep trying to kill us.”

I have to admit, I never expected to take Willie’s side on anything, ever, but here we are. Even Kate is angry at him, which means she can’t even be consistently characterized within a single episode. Is it really that hard to pick a direction and stick with it? Why even have five main characters if you’re not going to give them reliable traits at any point? Why not just have one character who does whatever the fuck the script needs him to do at that point? It’s better than having five that revert to being blank slates at the beginning of every scene.

Willie is guilted into going out to find ALF, who we see has stumbled upon a filthy shack somewhere. He peers inside and sees nobody, so he opens the door and steps inside. When he does, we see the midget again! Yay!

It’s been a few episodes since we’ve seen the midget. I’m always excited to see him, even if I can’t decide if the job of slipping into an ALF suit and shuffling from one side of the set to the other every few weeks is a great job or a demeaning one.

Anyway, ALF dicks around in the shack for a while, and then some manly hunters come home.

You can tell they’re manly because they wash their Oreo cookies down with Jack Daniel’s.

ALF hides from them while they stand around bickering about a rabbit that one of them scared off before the other could shoot it. It has no bearing on anything but they make sure to discuss it as long as necessary to pad out the episode. When they’re absolutely sure that the episode will hit a full 20 minutes, one of them heads over to the bed and sits on it.

ALF groans, because I guess he was under there. The hunters cock their rifles, and I shut the episode off and go to bed, secure in the assumption that ALF was shot to death and I don’t have to review any more of this shit.

…no. I don’t. :( I’m in this for the long-haul. You fucks.

They pull the blankets back and we ALF hiding beneath the highest bed in the history of indoor furniture. Look at how much room is under there! He shouldn’t have groaned when that guy sat on the bed; it’s roomier under there than it is in most people’s apartments.

Our alien hero whimpers and tries to get the hunters to refrain from killing him by acting pitiful. He could always say, “Don’t shoot me, bro,” since it’s not like he has much to lose at this point, and keeping his alienism a secret wouldn’t be of much benefit to anyone if he was dead, but that’s okay. He can communicate through whimpers if he wants.

What’s not okay is that one of the hunters assumes he’s a dog. This happened in “Looking for Lucky” as well, and ALF doesn’t look any more like a dog now than he did then.

And — take a shot, readers — here’s yet another example of where a small rewrite would have helped the episode immensely. Remember all that shit about how it was raining so hard nobody could leave the RV? Well, I guess it cleared up by now, but all you’d have to do is have ALF slip and fall in some mud. That would justify the rain as a plot device, and would also go some way toward making it possible for him to be mistaken for an animal. If he’s covered in mud, there could at least be some confusion over whether or not he’s a dog. Now, though, when he’s so clearly not a dog, it just makes the rest of the world look like idiots.

The fat one goes out to get his chainsaw so they can eat ALF, and then ALF comes out from under the bed and starts talking to the skinny one. This is just more confusing; if he’s willing to talk to one of them, why wouldn’t he have been willing to talk to both of them?

Maybe the idea is that ALF was more scared of the fat one, but that didn’t really come across on screen. They’re just two moronic hunters with no distinguishing characteristics beyond their respective weights.

Anyway, ALF tells the skinny one to “get even with” his friend. Get even for what? Who knows. Nobody cares.

The skinny one agrees. Why? Who knows. Nobody cares.

The fat guy comes back with the chainsaw, and then Willie comes in, too. ALF goes back to whimpering to get Willie’s attention for some reason, even though he was just talking a second ago, one of the guys already knows he speaks English, and now the only man who can rescue him is here looking for him.

I don’t know. None of this makes any sense. Willie does notice ALF, though, because if he didn’t this episode would be a two-parter, and the fact that it isn’t is the first small mercy the writing staff has ever afforded me.

Whatever. The point is that Willie found him and they’re reunited. Nobody bothers to ask how he found him, so I’ll just assume that he found him by following the trail of families slain by ALF’s antics.

The hunters still want to eat the dog, though, so they rev up the chainsaw and Willie gives them $50 each to let ALF go. He also hems and haws for a bit because this is a lot of money to him, but the fact remains that this is the smallest amount of money he’s ever had to lay out for ALF’s misbehavior, by a factor of several thousand.

Then they let ALF go. Hooray.

Jesus Christ, for an episode about an alien being trapped in a torture house by two rednecks, this sure is boring.

Nevermind my earlier question; I’ve decided that the job of wearing the ALF suit is demeaning.

Anyway, these two boobs sit down in the woods and argue for a moment about the correct direction back to the RV. They eventually decide which way to go and the episode ends. Good shit, right there. We don’t even find out which direction was correct…the episode just comes to a dead stop. What was the point of this? Was “On the Road Again” twenty seconds too short?

Back at the house ALF shows vacation slides to the family, and the big punchline is that after Willie rescued him, ALF set the RV on fire and destroyed it. Hilarious. So I guess that’s one more major expense for the Tanner family, but none of them seem even slightly bothered by it and they all enjoy reliving the great memories they shared with the alien dick-hole that won’t move out of the house.

This episode was terrible.

It ends with a reprise of still frames from the pilot episode, which has happened in about two or three other episodes, even though I didn’t mention it then. It’s weird. Some episodes end with long repeated scenes from the episode, others have their own still frames, and last week there were clips punctuated with still frames.

It’s always different, and I don’t know why. It’s like they can’t decide what to do with their end credits, so they keep trying new things. And if they run out of time, they just slap on the same credits from the pilot. It’s so slapdash.

But I don’t know why I’d expect anything else at this point. Oh well. At least next week is the Christmas episode.

That’s sure to be good.