Month: July 2014

There is no God.

Even though I’ve seen “ALF’s Special Christmas” listed as two episodes in some places, the DVD version is the full, hour-long edit, which means I have to talk about this shit in one go. And, honestly, I don’t know what to expect. I’ve got 40 screengrabs and a list of notes that’s longer than most of my finished reviews. My impulse is to whittle it down to the observations I really feel compelled to make…but, at the same time, this is the last ALF Christmas special, and for some reason I feel compelled to give it a proper sendoff. I don’t know…I always feel generous around the holidays.

And…around the end of July.

It’s clear from the start that ALF considers this to be event TV. Aside from its super-sized running time, we see immediately that there’s a different opening sequence. That’s right…this does not even deserve a Captain’s Log introduction, because this is dead serious. The new opening is more like a movie, with the title and credits fading up over the action of the episode, already in progress.

In fact, “ALF’s Special Christmas” plays an awful lot like a dry run at ALF: The Motion Picture, and part of me wonders if it wasn’t, at some point, intended to be exactly that. The budget is far higher, the film quality is well beyond that of a standard sitcom, and there’s actual care taken with the direction of the episode.

Almost every visual concern I’ve had with this show is rectified here. There’s creative (and effective) blocking, there’s impressive camera work, there’s background business that lets the characters seem like they’re actually alive rather than waiting for their turn to react to ALF. It’s good, in that sense.

In that sense.

Because…wow. I’ve been warned about this one so many times, that I figured there was no way it could be as bad as I expected.

People, it was far, far worse. Mainly when folks warned me, it was because of the syrupy crap with the dying girl. And, yeah, that’s pretty bad, but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, enough stalling, I guess. We’ve got an awful lot of reindeer shit to shovel.

The episode begins with Willie driving the family to a cabin, and ALF is singing a presumably Melmacian version of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” which is all about cooking cats. He makes it to day 82 before anyone tells him to shut the fuck up, which, as far as I’m concerned, is impossible. Even the regular “12 Days of Christmas” is grating. It takes forever to make it through that awful, repetitive garbage. I always hate when it plays in a store around the holidays, because I know I’m stuck hearing it for the next nine minutes.

How long would it take to reach day 82? Who knows. I’m not doing the math. I just know it would be way too long for ALF to remain unstrangled.

The Tanners make it to the cabin and the camera rotates around them as they spread out and — gasp! — do things. This is still a set on a soundstage, but by employing a little bit of technical artistry and asking the actors to do something other than stand in the background making funny faces, it feels less cheap. Less slapdash. More real.

Again, this episode isn’t good. In fact, it’s pretty terrible. But none of its problems come from its presentation, which is unquestionably top-notch for late 80s primetime television.

It’s very much of a piece with any of the interchangeable Christmas movies you might see on Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel in terms of its style. While those are never (and I do mean never) groundbreaking works by any rights, they are competently made, and, largely, they achieve the modest goals that they set for themselves. So, for ALF, it’s a compliment to be compared to those things; competency is a huge step up.

So, yeah. Think back on literally any Hallmark Christmas movie you’ve ever seen, and imagine that it starred Max Wright, Benji Gregory, and Paul Fusco. Boom, you have “ALF’s Special Christmas.”

Willie walks around the cabin, reveling in the great Christmas he spent there with his family when he was young. We don’t hear much apart from “Here’s where we hung the stockings,” and “We sang Christmas carols,” but it’s nice to see him giving even half a fuck about something for a change.

He tells Kate, Lynn, and Brian that they’re going to have a heartwarming Christmas full of joy and love, which is ALF’s cue to scream for help because he fell in the outdoor shitter.

What a merry act break!

When we return, Willie and ALF are unloading the family’s stuff from the car, and I’m so glad Willie had the good sense to enlist the help of the guy who just slipped into a vat of human feces.

The camerawork is nice here, as it trails around to the back of the car, and then gives us actual closeups for individual lines…which implies that they probably did more than one take of these scenes before throwing up their hands and saying, “Fuck it, nobody will pay attention anyway.”

I looked up who directed this episode, because it definitely feels like they brought in some external talent, but it was a guy named Burt Brinckerhoff, who directed a bunch of ALF episodes. Some of them were indeed quite good (this season he directed “Oh, Pretty Woman” and “Night Train”) but overall I wouldn’t say he’s a stamp of quality or anything (this season he also directed “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Prime Time”).

So, who knows. Maybe Brinckerhoff was a talented guy who just didn’t get the time or support he needed to elevate the show on a weekly basis. “ALF’s Special Christmas” absolutely proves that he has a good grasp on the language of visual storytelling, and it’s a bit of a tease that this guy doesn’t get to strut his stuff more often.

Whatever. The big joke in this scene is that ALF boxed up the TV, the microwave, and a whole bunch of other shit to bring to the cabin, because he didn’t realize there’d be no electricity. Willie is pissed, but really he’s just a fucking idiot. Did he not notice ALF boxing this stuff up? Did he not notice the appliances missing at any point? Did he not question this earlier when he was loading these heavy boxes into the car?

God damn, Willie. You stupid.

Then Willie does something really fucking weird: he talks to his son.

He tells Brian the story of his father losing his job and their house in the middle of December. Little Willie was out on the streets, but then Mr. Foley showed up and offered the Tanners a place to stay: this very cabin. It’s the best Christmas Willie remembers, so fuck you, Willie’s wife and kids.

They didn’t have any presents, but going by Willie’s earlier statements when they arrived I guess they had stockings and a tree. Oh well, it’s vague, and it raises a lot of questions that go bizarrely unanswered,* but it’s something. Willie is so rarely human that even this aimless, non-committal, half-assed attempt at backstory is welcome.

ALF comes into the room with a sprig of holly, which Willie stuffs down the front of his shirt for no reason except so that they can later reveal it to be poison ivy, I’m sure.

Our favorite alien sex offender is wearing a sweater that Kate quickly recognizes as her gift to Willie, and then ALF reveals that he opened everyone’s gifts and tells them all what they got.

Why the hell did he do this? He’s not misunderstanding Christmas. This is at least his second one on Earth, and during the first one the concept of presents was about the only thing he understood. He’s fully aware of how this works; he’s just being a dickbag.

He also changed all of the tags on the gifts so that they look like they came from him, which is another level of holidickery, I guess, but also sort of moot since he already opened everything. Oh well. I guess he doesn’t give any more thought to the logic of his shenanigans than the writers do.

Willie gives a time-eating lecture about spoiling surprises or the true meaning of Christmas or who cares, there’s still 42 minutes of this shit left. Then Brian comes over and informs his dad that the sprig of holly was actually poison oak.

Damn, ALF. Ya got me! I thought it was poison ivy. I’ll never doubt you again.

So, yeah, fine, Willie has poison oak all over his chest now, but, really, can anyone explain to me why the fuck he stuffed it down his shirt in the first place? Wouldn’t it have been enough for him to have it on his hands? Do we really need to imagine Max Wright’s poisonous, oaky nipples for this gag to land?

Willie then scolds poor ALF, and we know we’re supposed to feel sorry for the guy who just went out of his way to ruin Christmas for an entire family because some sad music plays, borrowing the melody from “Deck the Halls (With Poison Oak).”

He accuses ALF of not understanding Christmas, because he’s a fucking moron who doesn’t remember that they already did this plot last year. Then he asks Kate if it isn’t about time ALF learned how to behave himself, because he’s a fucking moron who doesn’t remember that they already did that plot like 35 times in a row.

He then meanly tells ALF he has to dispose of the poison oak in the woods, that meany, and ALF slinks away sadly, because the mean-headed mean man hurt his feelings, when all he did was deliberately ruin Christmas for the four people he always bankrupts and rapes.

Funnily enough — even though it’s, of course, not a joke — ALF doesn’t go deep into the woods at all. He just walks outside and drops the poison oak. We…didn’t really need the sad walking away music for that, did we?

Seeing ALF behind that boulder reminds me that this might be the only episode so far in which the cast didn’t have to worry about falling into a puppet trench and becoming paralyzed. Since we’ll never see the cabin or the hospital again, I don’t think they would have bothered cutting long passages into them as they did with the main sets. In fact, ALF is pretty limited in his mobility in the cabin scenes. He doesn’t get full roam like he does in the Tanner house, which does kind of support the idea that this new environment wasn’t laced with death traps. No wonder the cast actually seems happy.

And, of course, the rest of these scenes are outside. The ability to walk unafraid across smooth surfaces must have been Paul Fusco’s gift to the cast.

While ALF is outside, Mr. Foley pulls up. ALF calls to Willie, but Willie mishears him and thinks he said, “Mr. Foley is near.”

It’s Cleavon Little, people!!

The star of Blazing Saddles! A firm candidate for not only the funniest film ever made, but one of the most effective social satires Hollywood’s ever produced!

…and now he’s guest starring in “Melmac Christmas A-Go-Go.”

Anyway, since Mr. Foley’s here, Willie tells everyone his backstory. Even though, y’know, Mr. Foley could do it? Maybe? Nah…everything’s better when it comes from Max Wright.

It turns out Mr. Foley repairs old toys every year and delivers them to children in the hospital. But Mr. Foley corrects Willie: he says he delivers them to Santa Claus, who gives them to the kids.

The camera lingers on Mr. Foley’s one-shot for way too long, and there’s no laughter so I know that wasn’t supposed to be a joke. I guess it’s meant to be inspiring…somehow? I don’t know. I’d be a lot more inspired by the story of some old guy passing out toys to sick kids than I would am by an awkwardly long shot of somebody who just finished saying “Santa Claus.”

While Mr. Foley is standing still and the Tanners are quietly watching him blink, we see ALF open up the Foleymobile and get a hard-on over all the toys in it. He climbs in, and I’m glad, because it really is the next step in ALF’s natural progression to start fucking with a hospital full of dying kids.

Mr. Foley gives Willie an envelope which he says is his Christmas present, and then says his wife died a few weeks ago and drives away.

Really, ALF? You cast the lead from Blazing Saddles and turn him into a live action Hans Moleman? Let the guy tell a fucking joke.

Santa Cleavon gets to the hospital, and we see him pushing a big sleigh of toys through the halls. ALF, of course, is sitting in it like a big doll, which I guess might fool the kids, but how did it fool Mr. Foley? He’s supposed to have repaired these toys himself. Wouldn’t it occur to him as he unloaded the van that he’d never seen this enormous, hideous, breathing, heat-generating monstrosity before in his life?

Whatever. They parade through the halls singing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” which must be Mr. Foley’s way of really twisting the knife for the kids who are too sick to leave their rooms.

We get a crane shot of the Christmas ward, and see that ALF is the last toy left to be given out. Weird that none of the kids wanted a sociopathic alien rapist of their own.

But if ALF is really the last toy, and if he was sitting on top of all the other toys, did Santa Saddles have to pick him up every time he needed something else for a kid? And then set him back perfectly in place? ALF sure is lucky Mr. Foley is gentle with horrific toys he’s never seen before. What if he’d just dropped the “doll” out of the sleigh and ALF broke his neck and died?

Fortunately, ALF’s mysterious presence means Mr. Foley has exactly enough toys to go around, as the little sick girl at the end of the line gets stuck with him. I guess that was a pretty damned big stroke of luck, because if ALF hadn’t shown up, Santa Claus would have had to look a terminally ill girl in the eyes and say, “Tough shit.”

In fact, before Cleavon hands over the toy, he blabs for a while about how ugly and shitty that thing is. You know. That thing. This dying child’s only Christmas gift. So even though Mr. Foley’s supposed to be some really saintly guy, he sure is trying hard to make this terminally ill kid cry.

She likes ALF, though. She thinks it’s a female doll, due to ALF’s glorious tits, so she takes him back to her room, and the next time anyone saw her she was a semen-soaked corpse.

Merry Christmas, everyone!!

Santa carries ALF to the girl’s room, bitching the whole time about how heavy it is, because he really wants her to feel guilty for wanting this thing. When Jolly Old St. Bitcholas finally leaves, the girl starts brushing ALF and talking to him.

She says her name is Tiffany and she’s eight, but not to worry, unlike that other eight-year-old kid in this show she’ll have something to do with the plot. Then she uses the remote control to crunch ALF in the adjustable bed, because the dying kid ward of the local hospital is a very natural place for physical comedy.

The nurse comes in and takes Tiffany’s temperature. She makes a really disappointed face when she reads the thermometer, which I’m sure is done to let the audience know that Tiffany’s really up Shits Creek, but within the reality of the show, what an awful thing to do. Who cares if Tiffany is dying? Your bedside manner is to look disgusted because she can barely stay alive?

This isn’t even a running theme in the episode. At least, not a deliberate one. We’re not supposed to see ALF as a dick, even though he ruined Christmas for the Tanners. We’re not supposed to see Mr. Foley as a dick, even though he made a point of rubbing in the fact that Tiffany’s gift was a real piece of shit. We’re not supposed to see the nurse as a dick, even though she rolls her eyes at this girl for being at death’s door.

This is a weird fucking episode.

Tiffany then returns to ALF and serves him fake tea. She tells him about her previous roommate, who had to leave because Tiffany is totes dying and that was making the other girl sad. But, you know, this is a hospital and all, so there’s probably going to be some sadness no matter what room you’re in.

She then grabs some earrings and is about to force them through ALF’s ears but, sadly, we don’t get to see a little girl mutilate him. He speaks up and reveals himself as a living creature.

The sad music plays while he explains that he’s not a stuffed animal, he’s in danger, and he needs to get home. So it’s like Follow That Bird, from a bizarro universe in which Big Bird was always stealing cars and spying on people using the toilet.

You know, as much as this episode is asking me to weep, Follow That Bird manages it almost without trying.

That scene where he’s painted blue and he sings the sad song?

Fuck. I get the shivers just thinking about it.

It’s a good point of comparison, actually. They’re both long-form stories about puppets who are separated from their families and want to get back home. They’re both emotional, but still intend to make us laugh.

Follow That Bird, however, is a really, really good film. Seriously. Watch it as an adult. It holds up.

“ALF’s Special Christmas” is its moronic, bastardized opposite. Sure, Follow That Bird had a bigger budget, and awesome songs, and better actors, but I’m not comparing them in any of those regards. I’m comparing them simply in terms of what they wanted to make the audience feel, and how they went about doing that.

There’s a reason that when Follow That Bird comes up, people tell me about how sad that scene of poor, blue Big Bird made them feel. And there’s a reason that when “ALF’s Special Christmas” comes up, people say, “Just you wait.”

Anyway, back to whatever the hell this is. Tiffany tracks down Santa Claus and returns ALF. Why is Santa still at the hospital? And how does he suddenly have a teddy bear to give Tiffany instead? I thought the whole point was that ALF was the last toy.

Ugh, who fucking cares. Santa takes ALF back and wheels him over to the gynecology wing.

Did you think I was kidding?

Nope. ALF and Santa chill in the gynecology wing.

Come the fuck on. Seriously. Just look at that image for a while and try to count how many things about it make you wish you were never born.

I guess this episode was ALF‘s gift to the black community. Two whole paychecks! Now shut up about diversity, will ya?

Cleavon Little hangs out with his friend the gynecologist. Man, that just screams Christmas.

Cleavon gives Dr. T an envelope, and then the two of them read aloud from the “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” editorial. Only somehow they got their hands on a leatherbound 700 page collector’s edition. They’re aware of the fact that the original was something like 300 words, right?

When they’re done killing time by reading some much better writing, Cleavon asks about Tiffany. The doctor replies that there’s nothing he can do. Then we cut to a one-shot of the doctor so that he can make puppy dog eyes and crack his voice as he asks, “What are you supposed to say to a little girl who’s not going to see another Christmas?”

This guy’s a doctor, though. And he, evidently, works with sick kids. Has he never seen a child die before? I’m sure it never becomes fun, but if this guy starts crying at the mere prospect of one of his patients dying, maybe, just maybe, he isn’t emotionally equipped to be a doctor.

And…wait. Waaait.

Isn’t this guy a gynecologist? What the fuck was a gynecologist going to do to save an 8-year-old girl? Is she dying of ovarian cancer? What the hell is going on here?

ALF sneaks back into Tiffany’s room and tells her to keep quiet so that nobody knows he’s in there with her, giving your creepy Uncle Lou a little more to work with when he spends the night.

I don’t care that we didn’t see how ALF snuck away, but I do kind of care that Cleavon never notices that he’s gone. It was the ONLY THING IN THE FUCKING SLEIGH CLEAVON.

Tiffany shows ALF a picture she drew of them both. ALF is a glob of brown shit, but the important thing is that Tiffany drew herself with wings, because ALF‘s audience is going to cry if it kills Paul Fusco.

They talk for a while about the true meaning of Christmas, of course, and the little girl says it’s not about giving presents. “It’s about giving yourself.” Creepy Uncle Lou is having a field day.

Santa Cleavon told her that, and ALF says, “After meeting you, I know what he means,” which is almost sweet…but it just makes me think that Tiffany’s lucky she won’t live through many more nights. Remember Jodie? And that Mexican kid? ALF has these touching moments all the time. He makes some pretty nice promises, Tiffany, but believe me, he never visits.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Willie opens his Christmas gift early and sees that Mr. Foley gave the family the cabin. Well, that moves the plot along so I shouldn’t complain, but what fucking time is it? Has nobody noticed that their autistic space pet hasn’t been seen in God knows how long?

Eventually they do realize it, but Jesus Christ, how many hours have to go by before they start to wonder about the unsupervised alien they left dicking around in the woods?

Tiffany confides in ALF that she has to move on to “another world” soon and there’s nothing even the bestest gynecologist in the whole wide world can do about it DO YOU UNDERSTAND SHE’S DYING YET, ALF’S SPECIAL AUDIENCE?

ALF consoles her by telling shitty jokes about eating cats, which works, because if there’s one thing that comforts a dying child it’s the thought of somebody’s pets being eaten alive by beasts.

Then something really, really bad happens.

Tiffany says, “I love you, ALF.”

But that’s not the worst thing…

ALF replies, “I love you too, Tiffany.”

…but that’s still not the worst thing.

ALF takes her hand and presses it to his face.

AND THAT IS STILL NOT THE WORST THING.

Nope.

The worst thing…is this:

God fucking dammit.

Really?

I think this is supposed to make us cry with him, but that tear is just stuck to the side of his face. It looks like a white mole.

Follow That Bird becomes an even better reference point. Remember when Big Bird, sad and alone, opens his eyes and a tear comes out?

That kills me.

Why? Because it’s unexpected, maybe. And probably because it’s a real tear. Or…real water, anyway. It’s a very, very human emotional response, coming from a puppet.

But…no. It’s not a puppet. It’s Big Bird. Big Bird is a character we understand. Big Bird is in a situation we want him to overcome. Big Bird is our friend. It hurts, because that tear rolling down his beak is something we recognize. We know the feelings that go along with that tear…and we don’t want Big Bird to have to feel them.

Here? It just looks like somebody got careless with the hot glue gun.

Anyway, the image makes the musicians sad, at least, and they respond by playing “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” which is a very artful reminder of all the things ALF came upon over the years.

We then join the Finding Bigfoot Christmas special, already in progress.

The Tanners walk around the woods, shouting for ALF. Narratively, it’s a complete waste of time. Visually, though? It’s kind of lovely.

The camera dollies perpendicular to the Tanners, revealing each of them in turn, then scurries ahead and circles inward to wait for them. When the four arrive, they’re perfectly in frame.

Jesus Christ…see what happens when you bother to storyboard an episode, ALF? You look like you know what you’re doing!

Anyway, we’re back in the hospital and…

OH MY GOD THE MIDGET.

It’s a Christmas miracle! Thank you, ALF. This really was the one thing I wanted this year, and as you know I’ve been very good.

We don’t see the midget much anymore. In fact, I wonder when we’ve seen him last. Part of this must be the crew getting better at what they do, meaning they use the actual puppet more and don’t have to resort to wrapping a little person in ALF’s empty flesh, but…man. I kinda miss it.

Anyway, I have no fucking clue what ALF is doing running around in the halls, but he crawls into the bottom of a conveniently draped gurney, and then a pregnant woman gets plopped on it.

Great.

She’s going into labor, and her husband is the most annoying caricature of a flustered idiot male imaginable. They guy who plays him is terrible, but the woman is actually pretty alright. She doesn’t get any good lines or anything, but she’s a perfectly capable actress.

I looked her up to see if she did anything else I’ve seen. Her name’s Molly Hagan, and she’s been working pretty continuously in small parts here and there, so, that’s good. What really brought some memories back, though, was seeing that she played the angel on (in?) Herman’s Head.

For those who don’t remember, Herman’s Head was a high-concept sitcom about…some guy, I guess. I dunno. The gimmick was that you could see his thoughts playing out, represented by four (I think…) little humans that lived in his head and argued and stuff.

Molly Hagan played the angel, and I remember thinking she was really cute. I was probably nine years old at the time, but believe me, if I ever met her I would so offer her a stick of my Juicy Fruit. And then pee all over myself.

Dr. Gyno and the idiot husband wheel her into an elevator alone, and press a button for another floor, apparently, and then are somehow surprised when the doors close and the elevator takes off without them.

What the fuck did they expect?

Then the elevator comes to a clunking stop and…oh, shit. You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s not enough that ALF has to learn the true meaning of Christmas. It’s not enough that ALF has to bond with a cancer moppet.

No: ALF also needs to deliver a baby.

FUCK. YOU.

The doctards call the guy who dresses as Santa once a year to fix the thing. Why is he still hanging around, anyway?

They can’t call the maintenance crew, because “they’ve all gone home.” Seriously, people, what the living fuck kind of hospital is this? They don’t stagger their employees’ shifts? I know it’s a holiday and all, but shouldn’t somebody have to be on the clock? The patients sure as hell don’t go home for Christmas. What if something happens? Something like…EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS?

And then this happens, and we can all feel relieved that a space monster is trapped in the elevator with this helpless woman, and will soon fiddle blindly around with her genitalia.

Man, this is the second most gynecological Christmas I’ve ever had.

Think about how stupid this is. This woman doesn’t know anything about ALF. Okay, fine, we know she’s not in danger, but shouldn’t she be frightened in something other than a comical way? What if he has good intentions, but also razor-sharp talons? What if he eats human fetuses instead of cats? We know he hasn’t cleaned himself properly, or sterilized his fur or anything. And didn’t this episode open with him swimming in human shit and playing with poison oak?

WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING I HATE CHRISTMAS

Incredibly, the department store Santa fails to single-handedly repair the entire hospital’s elevator system. So ALF is forced to spring into action.

Whew! Good thing all elevators keep a copy of this book behind an emergency window.

We cut back to the husband and Dr. Cliff Litterous running around the stairwells, then with the sound of a baby crying we’re back in the elevator, where everything went juuuuust fine.

See? You friggin’ women, complaining about childbirth. Look how easy that was! A space alien with no knowledge of human biology delivered and cleaned the baby in the time it took us to watch some idiots run up the stairs. Quit complaining.

The woman says she needs a pretty name for her pretty girl, which you’d think maybe she and her husband could have talked about at any point during the past nine months, but ALF suggests “Tiffany,” and she immediately agrees with the rodent monster that crawled out from beneath her gurney and yanked a screaming child from her cootie-coot.

Seriously, I’m sorry, but come on. Really.

If you were alone in a tiny room with no way out, going into labor, and a fucking creature you’ve never seen before appeared, would you let it deliver your baby?

Hell no. You’d scream yourself hoarse and focus every ounce of energy you have left into kicking its God damned teeth out.

But, nah, fuck all that, it’s over. We never find out how they got out of the elevator, how she explained the childbirth, how (and why) she covered up ALF’s existence, and how ALF made it back to the fucking sleigh.

Anyway, Mr. Foley’s eighteen-month-long residence as Santa Claus has come to an end, so he’s pushing the sleigh out. But why is he out of costume? Why now? What if one of the kids sees him?

He stayed in costume while repairing elevators and playing grabass with his gynecologist buddies, but now that he’s pushing Santa’s sleigh he’s just dressed as Mr. Foley?

Dr. Victor Ulva shows up, so I guess he didn’t think it was worth hanging around with the woman and her newborn, even though she’d just given birth under unexplained circumstances in a filthy elevator without any of the proper equipment or monitoring.

He opened his Christmas present early, and saw that it was a big check. He surmises something’s wrong, because Cleavon…Cleavon likes his money. Doc tries to return it, but Cleavon won’t take it back, all but shouting, “I’m killing myself tonight, you bimbo. Why is this so hard for you to figure out?”

Back at der Tannerhaus we see Willie trying to assemble Brian’s new bike. Again, visually, this is lovely. There’s good camera work, nice blocking, and perceivable warmth from the fireplace.

Brian is sad, though. He wants to know if ALF is coming home, because if he doesn’t, that’s the end of the show, and this is kinda the only acting gig he’s ever going to get.

ALF is in the back of Mr. Foley’s van, dressed like Santa for no logistically reconcilable reason whatsoever. And why is he still surrounded by toys? I thought, again, that the whole idea was that ALF was the last toy for that little sick girl. Maybe Mr. Foley just gives away the toys he doesn’t like.

Mr. Foley drives along through the night, silently reflecting upon the fact that he was once the star of a great movie. This in turn reminds him of It’s a Wonderful Life, so he pulls over on the bridge to kill himself in what ALF hopes we will consider an homage. Foley’s first name is even George, for fuck’s sake.

ALF appears and tells him not to jump. After all, Mel Brooks might one day turn Blazing Saddles into a musical and let him make a cameo.

Cleavon Little concludes that this chubby monkey in a Santa suit is the actual Santa because fuuu-uuuuuuu-uuck you!

Sure enough, ALF convinces Mr. Foley not to kill himself in front of all the kids watching at home, as they much prefer rape scenes.

I’m sorry, but this is way too much for one episode. ALF has to learn the true meaning of Christmas, comfort a dying child, deliver a baby in an elevator, and stop Cleavon Little from killing himself. Oh, and he also has to get back to his family. This is a busy fucking hour.

It’s like the end of Groundhog Day, when Bill Murray runs around solving everybody’s problems, but when it happened there, it represented the culmination of the film’s message and the protagonist’s growth as a human being. Here, it’s some space alien dicking around one week, becoming a heavenly Christmas angel the next, and then dicking around again the week after that. There’s no growth at all, because this isn’t actually ALF. This is Touched by a Fusco.

Mr. Foley drives the naked mole rat he believes is Santa Claus to the cabin the Tanners are staying in. ALF acts nervous about having to go down the chimney, but why exactly does he have to go down the chimney?

I get that he wouldn’t want Mr. Foley to suspect that he’s not Santa Claus, but Mr. Foley drove away. We saw that happen. Nobody’s watching ALF now. Why can’t he just climb down from the roof and knock on the door?

And how the shit did he get on the roof to begin with?

Arrrrhghghghghhghhh.

None of this makes any sense. He’s clearly afraid of going down the chimney and returning to his family as a charred and stinking corpse, but he does it anyway, for no reason whatsoever.

He gets stuck in the chimney and the fake audience goes nuts.

The puppet is upside down? Hilarious! But, wait…wasn’t some little girl really sick, and an old man lost the will to live, and some newborn is now dying of alien space flu?

Who cares! Fuck those assholes. The puppet’s back with these people we still…don’t really know! That’s all that matters and Christ died so you could watch this so shut the fuck up.

In the short scene before the credits, the Tanners go to the hospital, where Mr. Foley has been hired on as a maintenance man, thanks to the talent he displayed the previous night when he failed to fix anything. Willie gives Mr. Foley his cabin back, the Tanners give Tiffany a fuckload of gifts, and ALF waves at her through the car window.

Then Mr. Foley recites “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” a second time, and we’re treated to a touching version of the ALF theme song that has sleighbells in it.

Jesus. That…

…god.

That…fuck.

Fuck.

FUCK. THAT.

What a cloying, melodramatic, unfunny piece of sappy horse shit. I don’t even know what was going on. Any of these plots (lost ALF, sick chick, suicidal old man, ALF pulling things out of a prostrate woman’s vagina) would have served an episode on their own, but we get them all at once. I found it a little puzzling at first that seasons three and four don’t have Christmas episodes, but now I see why. They used up every storyline imaginable on this one.

In the spirit of the season (a season, anyway) I’ll say a few nice things about this episode. It looked great, for starters. Visually this was a competent experience, front to back. And even though there’s a dying little girl in a lot of it, she wasn’t a terrible actress. Not great, but when it comes to kids, “not great” is actually great. And this episode reminded me that I used to really want to sleep with the girl in Herman’s Head.

But that’s it. This was the cheapest piece of self-indulgent mush I’ve seen in a long time, and I find it more than a little hilarious that this episode about ALF making the world a better place for everyone he meets is followed in a few weeks by one where he murders Willie’s uncle.

So, yeah. My God. I actually, no joke, need some time to recover from this one.

I die, dear readers, so that you might live.

At least we’re halfway through the Shit Trifecta. And the season, come to think of it. Surely it can’t get any worse than this.

Right?

…surely?

Melmac Facts: On Melmac there was no pavement and no silverware. MEEEEERRY CHRISTMAS!!

—–
* What was Willie’s dad’s name? What job did have have that he lost? Why did he lose it? How did they know Mr. Foley? How long was the family homeless? Any of this would be interesting to know…but it would also reveal character, and God fuckin’ forbid.

When I started this review series, I tried not to look at plot summaries. I saw a few, because that’s what happens when you use the internet for anything ever, but I more or less forgot them quickly. A few specific plots, however, stuck in my head, either because they sounded monumentally stupid, or because some other folks warned me about them.

As I mentioned in last week’s review, three of those episodes come right in a row, starting now. This is the Trilogy of Terror, and I’m worried about every one of these.

“Hail to the Chief” gets the party started with a fantasy episode about ALF running for president. I’m already not a fan of fantasy episodes of good shows, so tossing an even less consequential plot than usual into this garbage factory isn’t exactly promising.

I don’t know. As much as I love Futurama and The Simpsons, the Anthologies of Interest (and its less-structured relatives) and the Treehouses of Horror just don’t do much for me.

It’s not that I hate them. The good ones make me laugh. The lousy ones are over with quickly enough. So, really, I’m not complaining…I’m just not the kind of guy that gets excited about fiction within fiction. I tune in to shows I enjoy so that I can spend some time with those characters, in that setting. Scrambling up the characters and swapping out the setting, therefore, leaves me a bit less engaged.

I guess the thing is that I’m not interested in the question of “What if Alan Partridge was actually a medieval knight? And his catchphrases would all be slightly altered to be period-appropriate puns. Wouldn’t that be funny?”

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

The point is that I found the character funny already, which is why I’m tuning in, so the question of whether or not I’d care about this alternate version of the character that I’ll never see again is kind of moot.

Then again, ALF sucks. Alternate versions of these characters may well lead to something fun, and, surely enough, “Hail to the Chief” opens quite nicely.

It starts with the camera following Willie from the kitchen door over to the table, where it comes to a rest as Willie sits down. I think every single time the camera does something interesting on this show, I take note. It means somebody cared.

There’s no reason the camera couldn’t have been stationary, with Willie stepping into frame and then sitting down. In fact, that’s pretty much always how things happen on this show, and that’s okay.

It’s unnecessary movement, but unnecessary movement is charming. Somebody’s fiddling with the language of the medium, and I like that. It’s not a visual highlight or anything — though such unexpected camera behavior has been in the past, as in “La Cuckaracha” — but it’s nice. It’s something somebody tried, and that’s why it stands out. Somebody tried.

Anyway, ALF is filling out a voter registration form, which causes him to muse on the concept of the pencil. This is also nice, because it makes sense that something we’d see as mundane might actually be pretty fascinating to an alien visitor. Willie’s not an alien, but he is a nerd, so when ALF brings up the question, he excitedly replies that he’s heard many theories about where pencils came from.

ALF says, “How about the shortest one?” Willie, deflated, replies, “The stationery store.”

This is nice, because ALF gets to be a dick without being too much of one (being disinterested in long theories about the evolution of the pencil is something we can sympathize with), Willie gets to be excitable and disappointed in fast succession, and a show-opening warmup gag flows naturally from the DNA of both characters. That’s a great start, so it’s a shame that it’s all downhill from here.

Then Willie reminds him that he can’t vote, so filling out that form is fucking stupid, at which point ALF launches into an elaborate plan that would allow him to vote, which hinges upon him marrying Lynn.

You know, I didn’t mention it in that review, but “Night Train” also had a joke about ALF saying he’d marry Lynn. Maybe that was the original idea for a heartwarming series finale, instead of the one we actually got, with ALF getting hauled off screaming to an underground vivisection facility.

It’s the night of the presidential debate, and ALF has hidden all the effective satire. Lynn is going to the mall, even though this is the first election she’ll be able to vote in.* She’s heading to the mall with her friend Julie, because Lizard got a job at the new Wiener On A Stick place.

Why is Lizard working at Wiener On A Stick? This guy successfully performs brain surgery on dying animals. Won’t some vet hire him? He really needs to work a shitty fast-food job in the mall? This dude’s got a skillset. Why are they treating him like any other high school dipshit?

Also, Lizard being a more or less consistent boyfriend for Lynn in season two makes “Oh, Pretty Woman” even more odd. Why was she at the dance with Rick? Did they really write her a new boyfriend just for one episode? Was that script left over from season one, and they never bothered to fix the guy’s name?

Willie comes home, announcing that he found Lizard’s wiener delicious. Kate’s mad, but it’s not Willie’s fault; he called to tell her he’d be eating dinner at the mall. By the way, ladies, if your husband calls to say he’d rather eat dinner at the mall than with you and your children, you’re about to be served divorce papers. Just sayin’.

Willie asks ALF why he never writes down his phone messages, to which ALF replies, “They’re hardly quotable.” That’s actually funny.

Then Brian says, “Hey! The presidential debate’s starting!” which is the final proof anyone should need that the staff had absolutely no clue how to write lines for an eight-year-old boy.

We see the candidates: Senator Hossenfeffer and Congressman Peal, two assholes we’ll never see again even though one of them is destined to become the leader of the free world. There’s also a John McLaughlin cameo for all the ladies watching at home.

It’s odd to me that they’d go for a fictional president. Usually when a show does that, it’s because that particular fictional universe requires it. Think The West Wing. It’s a clue that the world we’re watching is very much like the one we occupy, and may even see events unfold that are similar to the ones we’ve seen, but they’re not the same. Things can, and often do, turn out differently. It’s a chance to see reality through a distorted lens, and an easy way to distort that lens is to swap out the one person that the entire world knows by name: the President of the United States of America.

Here, though, I’m not sure what’s going on. We’ve already seen (or…heard) Ronald “Win One on the Crapper” Reagan, so for a while we were in actual America…and now we’re in bizarro America.

Even stranger is the fact that this episode aired nowhere near a presidential election. It aired in 1987…exactly midway through Reagan’s second term. There wouldn’t be another presidential election until 1989, when George Bush I ran against (and defeated) Michael Dukakis.

So, what year is it in the ALF universe? Is this taking place in 1989? Was Reagan impeached in this fictional wonderland that actually sounds really awesome now? Ugh, who knows. TV shows air their Halloween episodes around Halloween and their Christmas episodes around Christmas. Surely it can’t be too much to ask that they air their election day episodes in a fucking election year.

One of the candidates — I don’t care who — says, “As Joe Biden once said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” The fake audience laughs at the misquote, but it’s really strange to watch this while Diamond Joe is the real-world Vice President. It still doesn’t make it a good joke, but it does make it one that, all at once, could play today without any alteration. In fact, it may be even funnier today, albeit for a different reason. It seems slightly prescient.

I’m not familiar enough with Biden’s history to know what kind of figure he cut in late-80s American politics, so somebody do please fill me in. I know how this joke plays right now, but I’m genuinely curious to know how it played in 1987.

Paul Fusco launches into his soap-boxing bullshit, just like he did with the power of imagination and / or pig-headedness in “Weird Science.” This time, he’s fixing the world’s problems, through the brown bathmat he wears on his hand.

ALF decisively declares the way to balance a budget (“Spend less than you make.”) and achieve world peace (by telling both sides to kiss and make up).

In the later years of M*A*S*H*, Alan Alda began using his role as “Hawkeye” Pierce to rattle off thinly-veiled commentary on the state of the world, but M*A*S*H* was a legitimately great show, Alda a legitimately intelligent man, and “Hawkeye” a legitimately nuanced character.

I think I can leave it to you to figure out why this similar impulse isn’t working for ALF.

That night ALF walks into the master bedroom and announces that he can see Kate’s tits through her bedclothes.

Some other stuff happens but it’s just aimless, vaguely political bullshit intended to kill time before the big fantasy sequence.

There’s a joke about ALF telling them not to lock the door, because he might have some more questions to ask later, and then Willie runs cartoonishly over to the door and makes a big, exaggerated fuss about trying to lock it. It’s fucking awful.

In the comments for last week’s review, FelixSH pointed out that Willie always looks like he’s on the verge of falling asleep. I thought that was funny, but then moments like this remind me that he’s no better when he’s flailing around like an imbecile. Max Wright has two settings as an actor, and neither of them are anything like human.

On his way to bed Willie mumbles, “At least Mr. Ed stayed in the barn at night,” which is indeed true. To my knowledge Mr. Ed never hid under the mattress to listen to Wilbur fuck.

Willie gets into bed and Kate is already asleep. She’s not even pretending in order to keep Willie’s oily tendrils off of her; she’s really sleeping, and we enter a dream sequence to prove it.

Obviously the dream is Kate and ALF running against each other for president, because obviously the dream is Kate and ALF running against each other for president.

John McLaughlin is there, which makes sense. When you have a guest star so well-known for his comic timing, you make sure to use him as much as possible.

Johnny “The Bod” McLaughlin asks ALF about the environment, at which point ALF starts rapping.

You think I’m fucking with you?

I am not fucking with you.

My solution to pollution will help your constitution, so send a contribution, and start the revolution, n’huh n’huh.

Kate, speaking for everyone who has ever lived, tells him to knock it the fuck off. John McLaughlin replies, “Quiet. Rap-Master ALF is on a roll.” Which strikes me as something that must have been said at least once a week to silence the One Good Writer.

ALF then gives McLaughlin a Wiener On A Stick. I was picturing a corndog of some kind, but apparently a Wiener On A Stick is just an uncooked Oscar Mayer frank on a wooden skewer. Yum.

His real “solution to pollution” is to catch all the factory smoke in big balloons, and yeah, it’s dumb, but it’s a dream sequence so whatever.

But then, just like that, the dream is over.

Kate wakes up mumbling, “ALF, ALF.” He replies, “That’s my name! Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same!”

Then the same exact thing happens immediately.

This seems almost like it was supposed to be a catchphrase, so I don’t know. Maybe he says it in every episode from now on.

Funnily enough, I haven’t heard much in the way of his other catchphrases. “Ha! I kill me!” and “Yo!” come to mind, but I think he also said, “No problem!” or some shit, too. Maybe these were just things the marketing department used to sell dolls, because he certainly doesn’t seem be saying this stuff very often in the show.

ALF asks Kate why the moderator on TV didn’t ask any of the tough questions, such as “Are you going to be a good president, or a bad president?” Kate asks what kind of question that is, and ALF says, “Well, if he says a bad president, I’m not going to vote for him.”

I laughed at that…but the laugh track didn’t. I actually thought it was one of the better jokes in this episode, but I guess it wasn’t a joke at all. That’s one good thing about a laugh track: you can always tell when the writers aren’t trying to be funny.

Here, I guess, they weren’t. Was this supposed to be some touching moment of insightful innocence? If so, let me be the first to say fucking fuck you.

Kate goes to sleep again, and this time ALF is the moderator, I guess because she couldn’t dream up any more jokes about ALF being a candidate.

It’s here that Kate reveals her full name: Katherine Daphne Halligan-Tanner. You know, way back in the middle of season one (“I’ve Got a New Attitude”), I made this smartass remark:

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.

And now, look. We need to have a dream sequence that gets revised as a second dream sequence in an episode about ALF running for president to find out that Kate’s middle name is Daphne.

Fuck.

Anyway, ALF tricks her because he asks if her plans to deal with unemployment will help his brother get a job, then when she says yes he reveals that he has no brother** and starts calling her a liar.

They bicker for a bit about whether or not she’s a liar, because even Kate’s dreams are padded for time. When she wakes up she sees ALF putting her jewelry on.

This episode is fucking terrible.

In fairness, there is a funny moment here. Willie wakes up and asks what’s going on, and ALF says, “Go back to sleep, Willie. This doesn’t concern you.”

Whatever. I laughed. Anything that has Paul Fusco reminding Max Wright that he’s worthless gets a pass in my book.

Kate goes back to sleep so we can have a third God damned dream sequence. Jesus Christ, ALF, commit to the fantasy or just fucking forget it already.

This time, ALF is Kate’s image consultant, and, man, that really is my nightmare. ALF having total control over Kate’s character. That’s downright bone-chilling.

Anyway, the Tanners show up to congratulate Kate on her debate.

Willie says: “You were great, honey!”
Lynn says: “Yeah, mom! You were terrific!”
Brian says: “…neat!”

Again, no laughter, so I guess her son’s crippling autism haunts her dreams.

Why is Kate running for president the only consistent thing in these sequences? Wouldn’t it be better if ALF were the one running, and maybe Kate’s role keeps changing? You know, she’s terrified of him getting elected, so in each dream she’s the opponent, the moderator, the image consultant, whomever else, each time trying to make ALF fail and look like an idiot in front of the voting public, who only end up loving him more? Make it spiral out of control as she tries to reveal him for the idiot he is, unintentionally securing his win every time?

Man, that sounds like a much funnier episode than ALF wearing silly costumes.

Then we cut to another dream within the third dream, because why the fuck not.

Post-image consultation, Kate’s dressed like some loose secretary from the 1920s and goes by the name Sigourney Tanner.

I’m sorry but…come on. Was this the show’s way of punishing Anne Schedeen for making the rest of the cast look bad? I actually feel embarrassed for her. She’s the one human being who found something to work with in this shitheap of a show, and this is what she gets? She did not deserve this.

She wakes up again because Jesus Christ this episode is awful. I do think you could organize each of these screengrabs of her waking up in order and come away with a pretty good illustration of a woman sliding quickly into a state of abject misery, though.

Anyway, while she’s awake ALF says he’s going to run for president, so they could sell shit like this in stores.

And then we get another fucking, fucking, fucking dream.

Hey, look, ALF is president. I hope you think that’s a funny enough joke on its own, because it certainly doesn’t go anywhere from here.

Most interesting to me are the pictures behind him. The one on the left is probably his family, so I wish we could see it better, but the one on the right is a photo from the dream sequence we saw in “Help Me, Rhonda,” since that’s the only time they ever built a Melmac set.

The more I think about this, the stranger it gets. How is a photograph of one character’s dream appearing in the background of a different character’s dream? Man, I thought Inception was complicated.

Kate comes in, having been defeated by ALF, which means her dreams circled all the way back around to the idea of running against him. You know how I always say these scripts feel like first drafts? This is why I always say these scripts feel like first drafts.

ALF offers her popcorn, which he popped “over the Eternal Flame,” and I’m glad, because I was getting really worried the episode would end before we got a joke about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Kate presses him about what he’s done for the country, and special guest star Paul Fusco discusses through ALF how he was able to solve homelessness and unemployment in one fell swoop: he built houses for each of the homeless people, and everyone’s employed because they’re building those houses. #fusco2016

There’s a bunch more crap about what a great leader ALF is, and then I guess somebody on staff drew this…

…so they put it on the screen as a static image for a while with no punchline.

How nice of this show to produce its own fan-art. It really saves the audience the trouble of ever having to give a crap.

Kate wakes up again. Why not.

Seriously, as many times as she falls asleep and wakes up, it’s less an episode flowing from beginning to end than one that just keeps giving up and starting over.

She and ALF talk for a bit about how she dreamed he was president, and he was right about everything, and really good at finding logical solutions to complicated problems, and also she’s not sure if there’s a man out there named Paul Fusco, but if there is she’s sure he has a great body, a peerless sense of humor, and genitals that taste like heaven.

Then she pats his hand and they agree that a country that adored ALF would be a truly beautiful thing, I guess, and the audience claps because, hey, that’s right, ALF is just a big bowl of frosted applesauce. He’s a true national treasure, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate that hates freedom.

The short scene before the credits is really short. In fact, that picture is basically it. Kate is snoozing on ALF’s lap, and while that’s an incredibly cute image, it’s tempered somewhat by the knowledge of how many times ALF has raped this lady.

Whatever. It’s over. It was fucking terrible, and yet, somehow, not quite as bad as I feared.

It was oversimplistic and uninspired and offensively didactic, but at least it stopped short of ending with ALF turning to the camera and saying, “Hey kids, we all had a lot of fun this week laughing at politics. But you know what’s no laughing matter? The democratic process. Be sure to register to vote, even though major elections won’t be held for another two years. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to shit some cat bones. HA!!”

In last week’s comments, FelixSH said that he thought “Hail to the Chief” was their attempt to do with the ALF / Kate dynamic what “Night Train” did with ALF and Willie. Sure enough, the ending scene here with Kate sleeping on him does kind of support that notion enough that I’m willing to buy it…but man, they will never top the ALF / Kate magic of “Working My Way Back to You,” will they?

That should have been left as the final word on their relationship; a kind of passive aggressive stalemate that also represents a comfortable stasis. That was good. Kate dreaming of ALF running for president, and then dreaming that he’s not, and then dreaming that he’s still not, and then dreaming that he did run and was elected…yeah, it doesn’t lead to the ending this episode thought it earned.

Instead of dreaming that ALF was awesome, what if she dreamed that ALF was a piece of shit, damaging the country, and…no, wait. Forget that. Ditch the entire pointless presidential bullshit and just have Kate experience a nightmare about ALF accidentally killing Willie or something. Something that bothers her…but then the next day ALF does something really nice for someone and she realizes she likes him and it was just a stupid dream.

I don’t know. That probably wouldn’t be a great episode, but it’s hard to think of anything that wouldn’t improve “Hail to the Chief” as it stands.

It’s over, though. And next week…

…oh, fuck. Why did I have to go and remind myself of what comes next week?

It’s “ALF’s Special Christmas.” And it’s a motherfucking hour long. May God have mercy and split this into two shorter episodes on the DVD. …please.

Melmac Facts: On Melmac ALF was a registered Democat, which was both a political party and a doo-wop group. Also, if they didn’t understand something on Melmac, they broke it.

—–
* This puts Lynn’s age at 18, so even though she’s still a teenager, I guess we can take solace in the fact that ALF is no longer trying to diddle an underage girl. Now he’s the socially acceptable kind of sex pest. In researching voting ages, I did discover that some states allow 17 year olds to register to vote as long as they’ll turn 18 by or on election day, but California isn’t one of those states, so Lynn is officially 18.

** This doesn’t go in the Melmac Facts because this is just Kate’s dream. I wouldn’t take it as definitive proof that ALF doesn’t have a brother just yet. Look at me. All givin’ shits.

“Isn’t it Romantic?” represents something of a breather. At least, I assume it does. The reason I say that is that the next three episodes…well, I have reason to worry significantly about each of them. I won’t get into why (that might be spoiler territory), but it suffices to say that I think we’re in for a very problematic trilogy.

So, since this is just a “regular” episode, I guess I should be happy to have this half-hour of normalcy before all hell breaks loose. Then again, a half-hour of normalcy by ALF standards is a big pile of shit, and that’s exactly what we get here.

This show really can’t manage two good episodes in a row, can it? Every single time it manages to give us a solid installment, it’s immediately followed up with fucking garbage. To wit:

“For Your Eyes Only” > “Help Me, Rhonda”
“Going Out of My Head Over You” > “Lookin’ Through the Windows”
“La Cuckaracha” > “Come Fly With Me”
“Working My Way Back to You” > “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island”
“Oh, Pretty Woman” > “Something’s Wrong with Me”
“Night Train” > “Isn’t it Romantic?”

I don’t know. I guess it’s better to spread out the good ones than to lump them all together, but all this does is make me feel like an idiot when I enjoy an episode and hope the show might be getting good.

This one opens with Willie watching Casablanca. He’s crying, and, well, of course he is. He’s lived an entire life in a sitcom so devoid of anything like human beings that when he encounters some piece of media that handles them well, his entire worldview falls apart.

There could be something made of the fact that Willie is watching a romantic movie alone, especially considering the plot of the episode that follows, but nothing is. Apart from “La Cuckaracha” and maybe another one or two episodes, the cold opens are totally unrelated to the main storylines. So much so that I wouldn’t doubt that they shot a bunch of them up front without any regard to which episodes they’d end up stitched to.

All of this is fine, but it does make for a few bizarre coincidences, where it feels like nobody on the show realized that the cold open could have resonated thematically with what was to come. Two pieces of the puzzle are sitting right next to each other, but nobody cared enough to put them together.

Anyway, “Night Train” is over which means ALF is back to being a dickcheese on legs. He walks in, spills popcorn everywhere, and switches Casablanca over to some Godzilla movie. Willie chides him not because ALF has no respect for anybody else who lives in this house, but because scary movies give ALF nightmares.

That much…I kind of like. Not Willie’s specific reaction, but the implication. This is another of those rare times that ALF gets to be a child. He wants to watch scary movies, he’s drawn to watching scary movies, but when he does, he’s terrified. We had a similar joke about ALF watching Aliens a few weeks ago, and way back in episode two a midget dressed like him skulked around the house trying to watch Psycho. I’m sure this is all coincidental — again, nobody’s bothering to fit the pieces together — but it’s a nice accidental character trait.

Then ALF sees a giant stop-motion penis on the TV and runs away screaming.

…what the hell is that? Did the writers not know what Godzilla even is? I’ll give you a clue: he’s not a fuckin’ brontosaurus.

I understand that they might not have wanted to license actual footage from a Godzilla movie just for this quick cutaway, but in that case, why show us the TV at all? Can’t we just hear Godzilla roar and then have ALF run out of the room? It wouldn’t have been funnier than this, but it certainly would have felt less stupid.

This is like pretending ALF is watching King Kong, then showing us a giant octopus. It’s a totally different animal, you shits.

Nobody on this show cares. I’m convinced. Three times a season the One Good Writer breaks into the office, leaves a completed script behind, and vanishes into the night. That’s the only plausible explanation.

The episode proper begins with Willie heading out to see a play alone. Kate’s staying behind so that ALF doesn’t wreck the house, which Willie fails to interpret as code for “I’m going get plowed by Mr. Ochmonek.”

They talk for a bit about how ALF needs to learn how to behave himself sometime. You know. Like in those nine or ten episodes where that already happened. Willie tries to convince Kate to come, but can you really decide to go to a major play in Los Angeles last minute, without a ticket? I mean, I guess you could find a scalper, but shouldn’t this conversation have happened weeks or months ago, when Willie bought his own ticket?

This would have made a lot more sense if Willie was going to a movie instead. You don’t need to buy tickets for those in advance, so that would have been the smarter setup.

But it’s not a movie. It’s a play, only so that Willie can say it’s called Cats and ALF can make a funny face.

So Willie leaves and ALF sits at the kitchen table throwing drinking glasses at Brian.

He’s trying to teach him to juggle, I guess, by throwing them at the kid. Brian manages to catch them, which is nice, and then Kate comes in and puts a stop to the horse shit. But what kind of joke was this?

Seriously. Step back from the fiction of the show, and think about the reality of what’s happening on stage. Benji Gregory could have gotten injured, very easily.

ALF isn’t a guy in a suit looking out through the eyes. He’s a puppet being operated by some schmoe beneath the floor boards. To be blindly pitching glassware at a fucking eight year old kid is beyond negligent; it’s fucking cruel.

What if a glass hit the kid in the face? What if he failed to catch it and it shattered on the countertop, and a big jagged shard hit him in the eye? What an irresponsible, despicable thing to do for the sake of a shitty joke.

For a while I was able to console myself with the assumption that the props were actually clear plastic, but when Kate gathers them up you can very clearly hear the clinking of glass. So either ALF had a truly fantastic foley artist (…erm, yeah), or the fuckbags who made this show really did just throw glass at a little boy.

Lynn comes home from her date with Lizard, and Brian’s disappointed because it’s his bed time and he doesn’t get to hear how many knuckles.

So, yeah, Lynn is still with Lizard. Which is odd, because in “Oh, Pretty Woman,” which came immediately after the episode in which we met Lizard, she was upset that a guy named Rick ditched her for a prettier girl.

Professional ALF review commenter Mark Moore posited that “Lizard” could just be Rick’s nickname, which, fair enough, but “Some Enchanted Evening” told us that Lizard’s real name is Eric.

So…it’s got to be a different guy, right? I guess I could conceivably imagine a guy named Eric being called Rick, but I’ve never actually encountered that. Rick is usually short for Richard. And even if that guy at the dance was Lizard after all, why would he have two nicknames? Do we really need to keep straight the fact that Eric / Rick / Lizard are all the same guy that we’ve seen a whopping once ever?

I don’t know. I think Rick and Lizard are two different people, which makes it pretty hard to feel sympathy for Lynn getting ditched at the dance when she was ditching her boyfriend to be there with some other guy in the first place.

Anyway, after a long night of Lizzing out, Lynn pours herself a good, stiff drink in the form of two fingers of apple juice.

Damn, girl, go easy. You got school in the morning!

Since Kate is out of the room getting Brian ready for bed,* ALF casually alludes to the fact that Willie and Kate aren’t doing well as a couple. And by “casually alludes to the fact that Willie and Kate aren’t doing well as a couple,” I mean he explicitly tells Lynn that they’re getting divorced.

She says that’s bullshit. He says fuck you. She says Fuck me? Fuck me? Fuck you, pal. Then they fuck each other and Lynn finishes her apple juice.

I don’t know. It’s just a lot of time-wasting, but I like this conversation because we get to see Andrea Elson reading cue cards while she waits for ALF to finish talking.

Man, for a show that took 100 hours per episode or whatever to film, this crap isn’t any more professional than what any community theater could throw together in 20 minutes.

In the next scene ALF is being nice, so he cooks Willie and Kate a fancy dinner, just like in that other episode where this exact thing happened.

It’s kind of weird, because the events of “Working My Way Back to You” are mentioned by Kate in “Isn’t it Romantic?” She refers to ALF blowing up the kitchen, which was indeed the climax of that much, much better episode. So while ALF is spoiling us with an incredibly rare acknowledgement of any kind of internal continuity, we’re also meant to forget that episode, because the joke here is that all the food ALF cooks is horrible, when that episode established that he’s the best chef in the family.

I really don’t care if ALF’s particular degree of culinary expertise isn’t consistent from episode to episode, but why bother reminding us of the episode that revealed him as a master chef if they don’t want us to remember that he’s a master chef?

There is one funny moment, though, when he makes Willie and Kate cover their eyes before entering the room, which causes Willie to talk into the doorjamb and hurt his arm. I find it more entertaining than I probably should that Paul Fusco just commanded Max Wright to walk into a wall for the sake of his personal entertainment.

So, yeah. ALF makes a whole buncha gross shit for them to eat, and he holds up a clearly empty bottle that we’re supposed to believe is champagne that he ruined by sticking a worm in it. I guess they didn’t want to fill the bottle with liquid because ALF is just a puppet, and it would therefore be all too easy for him to spill some on the table or the floor.

Which makes perfect sense, until you remember that the crew thought that having the puppet hurl glass at an eight year old in the previous scene was just fine.

The production staff on this show valued Benji Gregory’s safety less than they valued a cheap tablecloth. Let that sink in.

While they talk, Willie and Kate argue about whether Lynn is old enough to get fingered in a ski lodge hot tub instead of under a blanket while they watch movies with her family.

So, I guess that’s the whole problem. Lizard invited her on a ski trip, which might have been nice to hear about earlier than this, and this manufactured obstacle proves ALF unwittingly right. He thought Willie going to plays alone was proof that they were having marital problems. Really, though, they just have fun in shifts so that one of them can stay behind and keep ALF from destroying the few features of the house that he hasn’t destroyed already.

Whatever. They fight and storm out of the room. Seriously, what happened to the graceful storytelling of last week? What a piece of crap this one is.

ALF comes into Lynn’s…

…bedroom.

He tells her to call 911, because Willie and Kate have been fighting all night, which he knows because he spends all of his nights under their bed hoping to hear them passionlessly hump.

HAVE I MENTIONED THAT THIS IS A GREAT SHOW FOR FAMILIES

Can anyone tell me who’s on that poster behind Lynn? Not that I think the writers gave any thought to what she’d listen to…I’m just curious.

ALF tries to rope Lynn into helping him reunite Willie and Kate. And, you know what? I like that this is becoming an ALF / Lynn story. I don’t like the story itself, or how it’s told, but I like that this is a perfectly realistic reason for two characters to work together…something we haven’t seen since “For Your Eyes Only.”

It works because they each have an investment in keeping Willie and Kate together. Lynn doesn’t want her parents to separate, and ALF needs a place to live / rape things. Again, this makes perfect sense.

But, well…didn’t Willie and Kate used to have another child? I can’t remember his name. Byron or something. He was kind of worthless, but you’d think if he’d ever be a natural fit for a plotline it would be this one.

Were the writers just hoping the kid would die in the glass throwing scene?

Actually, I guess not, since there was a little exchange afterward with Kate shuttling him out of the kitchen. Maybe when she said she was going to put him to sleep, she meant that in kind of an Al Pacino way.

ALF decides they’ll re-recreate the Tanner honeymoon, which will get them back together, because Melmac. Lynn tells him they went to Niagara Falls, and then the two of them work tirelessly to recreate that famous location detail for detail in their living room:

Marvelous.

Okay, I get that they recreated the hotel rather than the actual falls…but then why bother telling us Willie and Kate went to Niagara Falls? Why not just say they went to…I dunno. Miami, or something. Some place that sounds nice, but doesn’t call to mind very specific images that we’d then expect to see recreated.

If you’re trying to create the illusion that you’re in Manhattan, we expect a view of the Statue of Liberty. If you’re trying to create the illusion that you’re in Paris, we expect a view of the Eiffel Tower. If you’re trying to create the illusion that you’re in Colorado, we expect a view of a bunch of kids getting shot by a madman.

It’s silly, sure, but those are kind of the only reasons to set scenes like this in those places; they contain these sorts of cross-cultural landmarks. When the landmarks are not there** it just feels like the writers didn’t give this any thought.

Why invent the idea that they went to Niagara Falls if the “recreation” isn’t going to take the specific image of that area into account at all? This could literally be any hotel anywhere in the world instead. Why pick a location that you can’t, or won’t, do anything with?

Willie and Kate come home, separately, from wherever they were. And…come to think of it, where was Kate? Willie was probably at work, but what does Kate do all day? This would have been a great opportunity to tell us how Kate spends her downtime*** aside from wetvac-ing alien shit out of the carpet.

Oh, okay. Brian is still alive, and he’s dressed as a bellhop, which makes the fake audience of dead people laugh, because they know that’s the closest this kid will ever get to being involved in comedy.

The fact that this is all they had Brian do in this elaborate scheme ties into why I think one of the next three episodes is going to be problematic…but that’s a story for another day.

Lynn is dressed as a maid, and she welcomes the Tanners to Niagara Falls.

I really, really, really love Anne Schedeen’s face here. Willie is playing along and seems to think it’s cute, and I’m pretty sure the idea is that Kate is in a similar state of mind, but I like to think of faces like this representing a bleeding-through of Schedeen’s frustrations with the show itself. Even when she’s given the chance to express something other than seething hatred, it still manages to come through.

God. Look how miserable this kid is. I know I’ve observed before that in almost any given screenshot from this show, the cast looks like they’re quietly inventorying all the ways they could possibly kill themselves, but I keep bringing it up because it keeps holding true.

At least Andrea Elson manages to smile here. Benji Gregory, growing up on the set of ALF, never learned how to do that.

I’m also realizing that my website is by far the largest collection of ALF screenshots on the web.

Now I’ve forgotten how to smile, too.

Then ALF goes ballistic and starts licking Kate’s clitoris.

No…he’s actually trying to carry her over the threshold, because Melmac or whatever, but even so, Willie’s just standing there while an alien beats his face repeatedly against his wife’s crotch BECAUSE THIS IS A GREAT FAMILY SHOW FOR FAMILIES

Kate’s even shouting at ALF to stop doing it, but he ignores her, holds onto her hips, and keeps forcibly mashing her vagina against his face.

Yet another great thing to normalize for kids. Hey, little tykes! If you’re fiddling around with somebody’s private parts and they tell you to stop…don’t! You’re just being funny! Dig in!!

Jesus Christ. How rapey is this fucking show?

Anyway, when ALF grows tired of nose-fucking Willie’s wife, he shows them the room. He redecorated it to look exactly like their old hotel room, which he was able to do because for some reason they had the furniture in the basement, and yes, that’s bullshit, but jesus christ who cares ALF just raped this lady.

Kate notices the glowing HOTEL sign out the window and asks where he got it. He says he found their HAPPY NOEL sign in the basement and modified that. Believe it or not, the fact that there’s no T in HAPPY NOEL isn’t the stupidest thing about this.

No, the stupidest thing about this is that Willie gets angry at him, because he bought that sign for Lynn on her first Christmas.

Seriously, come on. Who gets a fucking baby a gigantic neon sign for Christmas? She’s not even a year old, so not only will she not be able to read it, but she won’t know what the fuck it means when this asshole tries to explain it to her. Also, staring directly into massive neon tubing cannot be good for an infant’s eyes. And what if she tried putting her mouth on it, or even touching it? She’d be shocked and / or burned horribly.

None of this is the joke, by the way.

We just hear that ALF desecrated Lynn’s first Christmas gift and we’re supposed to feel like he did something hilariously uncouth. Frankly if I was in somebody’s basement and saw a gigantic HAPPY NOEL sign, the very last fucking thing I’d think was that it was the first gift he gave to his newborn daughter. He might as well have gotten her a box of nails.

In the epilogue to “Night Train,” I believed Willie and Kate were in love.

Why?

Because in just a few lines, and with only one half of the conversation audible, there was a sense of honest relief that everything was okay. I’m glad we heard Schedeen’s side of the conversation, because if we’d heard Max Wright’s it may have been markedly less effective.

Here, even though the entire episode is about the fact that they’re in love, I don’t believe it.

Maybe it’s because these two lack chemistry. Schedeen’s a pretty solid actress, so I believe her when she’s frustrated, I believe her when she’s happy, and I believe her when she says she’s glad she married Willie. But when they’re in the room together, I don’t believe it. And I really do have to blame Max Wright.

Schedeen found a person inside of her character, and so when she acts and reacts, that’s what we see. Max Wright has no interest in doing anything but slurring his lines in the laziest way possible, which not only means we never see the “person” inside of Willie Tanner, but it makes it impossible for the person inside of Kate Tanner to connect with him. There’s simply nothing there. He leaves her hanging.

Strand Willie in the woods and Kate can gush all she likes about how much she loves him. Put him in the same room, though, and it rings false, because Wright’s not holding up his end of the deal.

This is probably also why Kate’s scenes with her mother are so lousy; without chemistry, it doesn’t matter how hard one actress is trying. We need everybody to try, and ALF fails to inspire its cast to do so.

Anyway, enough of that shit. Willie remembers that on their honeymoon the water pipes exploded just as they were about to kiss, so of course ALF appears in the window and ejaculates all over them with a garden hose.

The fake audience applauds this brilliant climax, wherein Willie said, “Ahhha suuure do hhope AHHLF d-…doesn’t spray-us with a gahhardennhose…” and then ALF sprays them with a garden hose.

It’s bad enough to have a laugh track yukking it up every time you make a shitty joke, but how egotistical do you have to be to make that fake audience applaud them?

Whatever. The hose shorts out the neon sign and ruins the bedroom, then the firefighters come and blast Willie with a firehose. All of this happens off camera, of course, and in the next scene we see Willie and Kate thanking ALF for doing something so sweet.

Of course.

The episode ends with Willie sick on the couch and ALF tries to kiss him and holy God do I hate this show for the love of Christ my god

Melmac Facts: ALF refers to the destruction of Melmac as a “nuclear booboo.” That doesn’t necessarily rule out war, as even if that fateful nuke was detonated deliberately, that in itself could be reasonably be referred to as a “mistake.” Melmac had a National Rag on the Martians Day. (But…what nation? And didn’t ALF say before that Martians were extinct?) On Melmac, playing Tug of War with a cat takes your mind off your troubles, but doesn’t solve anything, and the best way to get a couple back together is to recreate the happiest moment of their marriage. Duke of the Mist is the hotel where Willie and Kate shared their honeymoon, and they checked in on July 11, 1967. Willie has an Uncle Ned. Either Willie or Kate has an Aunt Agnes. ALF had a Grandpa Satchel who used to say “Don’t look back; something might be broken.”

—–
* Do parents really have to get eight-year-old kids ready for bed? I mean, maybe check on them to make sure they brushed their teeth and didn’t just run the water, sure, but actual supervision? Brian seems a bit old for that, but then again I don’t have experience raising kids of my own. I hate mine and make a point to never see them.

** I’ve used this example before, but only because I really love it. In Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums there’s a scene in which the Statue of Liberty should be clearly visible…but due to some careful blocking, the landmark is completely obscured by one of the characters. It’s there…we feel it…we expect it…but the fact that it’s artistically withheld becomes a kind of joke in itself. Anderson shot the scene on location, presumably because he thought something would be lost if the statue wasn’t really there. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t always need to do something overt with the recognizable landmarks of your setting, just that if you’re not going to show them at all, there needs to be some reason for that. Otherwise, all we’re going to do is wonder why you chose that setting in the first place.

*** Though, why was she gone at all while Willie was at work? Wasn’t the fact that one of them had to keep an eye on ALF at all times kind of the premise of this episode?