Author: Philip J Reed

I’ll probably be accused of being too polite, but season two has been a big pile of fucking shit.

It got off to a legitimately good start with “Working My Way Back to You,” but everything else has been an insult to my intelligence at best, and a staple through the scrotum at worst.

Okay, granted, we’re not even a third of the way through the season, but the reason I’m not holding out hope is that the storylines have actually been decent…it’s the execution that’s so frustratingly flawed. Unlike season one, which almost never found a story worth telling, season two has already found several, and simply pissed them away.

“Take a Look at Me Now” was about Mrs. Ochmonek discovering the central premise of the show: the fact than an alien lives among them. That’s a major occurrence, but all ALF could think to do was stick her on a talk-show and make avocado jokes. Then, last week, ALF used Halloween as an excuse to mingle with humanity, face to face. That’s a great concept for tying the traditions of a popular holiday into the actual premise of the show, but all ALF could think to do with it was make an old man limbo.

So forgive me for not getting particularly excited over an episode about Lynn entering a beauty contest. Forgive me also for being surprised that it turned out to be a pretty darned good episode.

How in the world did season two take such good ideas and turn them into garbage, yet manage to elevate such a worthless premise to make it the best episode in weeks?

I know how, but it’ll be a while before we get there, so, play along.

Anyway, it opens with ALF watching TV. Speaking of which, is Polka Jamboree still on? We got an entire episode about ALF’s efforts to save that show, but it ended, oddly, without any kind of closure at all. ALF admitted he rigged the ratings, but David Leisure was still fired, so I guess it’s still on? Why am I asking this?

ALF is watching the Miss Universe pageant (or something similar), but he thinks it’s a United Nations meeting. That’s both a funny line and one of our rare acknowledgements that, hey, since our main character is from another culture, perhaps he could humorously misunderstand ours once in a while.

Willie comes in, and I notice he hasn’t worn his glasses many times this season. He still does wear them, now and then, which is why it’s odd. If he stopped completely, we could assume either he (or Max Wright) started wearing contacts instead. And that may still be the case, but you can’t have a character wearing glasses in a few scenes every episode, and then not in the other scenes. Either he needs them, or he doesn’t. If you’re hopping back and forth, it needs to be for some kind of plot-relevant reason. Otherwise it’s just confusing.

Of course, this is ALF, and all throughout this scene and the next, Willie is holding some circuit board or something with dangling wires. He never mentions it, and it never comes into play.

This isn’t a newspaper or a coffee mug. This isn’t the kind of prop a character can walk around the house carrying without comment. There has to be a reason for it…and there isn’t. This is such a strange show, sometimes. It seems to operate on this plane of reality that’s completely divorced from the one in which any human being has actually lived.

Lynn comes home, and she’s upset. Everyone asks her where Rick is, and she says he’s still at the dance.

What happened to Lizard? He was mentioned in one episode and appeared in another, making him the only boyfriend of Lynn’s that wasn’t immediately discarded between weeks. Instead, he was quickly discarded between weeks.

I wonder why they bothered having Lizard span two episodes if he was only going to span two episodes. It can’t even be a change due to actor availability, either; Rick doesn’t appear here at all…they just talk about him. Why bother keeping Lizard in Lynn’s life if it doesn’t change anything, and he’ll disappear after another episode anyway?

Oh well. I can’t be too upset, because Andrea Elson’s acting has never been better. It’s still not good, and will never be this show’s strong point, but she’s at her best when a sort of hollowness of mind is allowed to inform her line readings. Here, she gets to do that for a nice, long speech, and she gets to do it while being emotional, too.

It works pretty well. She fidgets with her sleeves anxiously as she relates the story (Rick asked if he could dance with Cindy Bennett, and when she said yes, he danced with Cindy all night), and it manages to be exactly the sort of thing a teenager would find catastrophic, and which an adult would recognize immediately as nothing really worth dwelling on. In short, she gets to be human.

And then — mercy of mercies — ALF does, too. Willie and Kate ask him to turn off the TV, but he refuses, because he’s watching something. Then they tell him that Lynn is upset…and he does turn it off. It’s a sweet little moment. It means nothing to the rest of the episode, but I like that ALF puts aside his own interests, for once, in favor of actually being part of this family. You know…that point of conflict that we’re always supposed to believe matters so much to ALF but which he’s made almost no effort to bring about?

Yeah, that. So it’s nice to see even some small granule of actual consideration on his part.

Lynn says that Cindy is gorgeous, so of course Rick would have ditched dumpy old her for the hot blonde cheerleader, and this leads to a really great Kate moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: thank Christ for Anne Schedeen. She tells Lynn that it’s not that she’s unattractive, it’s just that “these things happen all the time.”

Her daughter replies, “Great,” and that single word is the finest Lynn moment ever on this show. Which is fitting, because this is also the only good Lynn episode.

The joke compounds, however. Kate tries to make Lynn feel better by telling her that something similar happened to her when she was young. She explains that, many years ago, Kate was also at a dance, and met a really great guy. The night was a lot of fun and everything seemed wonderful, until the end of the evening, when she found out something terrible: the jerk had ditched his date to be with her instead.

Schedeen’s delivery on this is perfect, especially the silently dawning double realization that not only is this going to make her daughter feel worse, but that she’s too far into the story to stop.

Lynn even offers her a potentially face saving, “…and?” when the story is over, giving her mother a chance to actually pull a salvageable moral out of this, but the best Kate can do is, “And even though I kept dating him, I always felt that what he did was wrong.”

It’s great. Schedeen is on point here, and I’m glad, because for once the material deserves her talent.

Then Willie condescendingly tries to rephrase the story his wife attempted to convey “in her own special way.” Fuck you, Willie. Since when are you a god-damned master wordsmith? I don’t think I’ve had too much opportunity to say this since the middle of season one, but I’m bringing it back: WHY IS SHE WITH THIS GUY?

Sure, her story wasn’t very helpful, but she’s not an idiot, and here he is treating her like she’s some moronic goon he always needs to follow around and apologize for.

Then ALF himself stomps all over the joke by pointing out overtly that the story made Lynn feel worse when it was supposed to make her feel better, presumably for the benefit for anyone who was watching and fell asleep during the minute and a half that was already made clear.

You know, if the ceiling collapsed right now and killed only ALF and Willie, this show would get instantly better.

Lynn then asks her father if he would ask her out, if he were her age. I’ve never been a teenage girl (just a baby girl and an old woman) so I don’t know for sure if this is as creepy a question as it sounds. Is this the kind of thing a high school girl would ask her dad? I get that Lynn is upset and is looking for any kind of affirmation she can get, but is this really a question she would ask?

It’s Willie’s turn to be caught off guard, and we get what I’m sure is an unintentional reminder of the way he deals with having to speak before he thinks: he stutters and stammers and blurts. “Well…if I were your age…and you weren’t my daughter…and if I weren’t married…and…if I had a car back then…”

Again, I’m sure it’s not intentional, but I like the difference between the way Willie digs himself out of his ditches and the way Kate digs herself out of hers. One fumbles awkwardly, the other just keeps speaking, calmly and with total composure, so that someone who isn’t listening to her actual words won’t suspect anything’s wrong. Another very human trait for the most human person on the show.

The next scene is ALF and Brian trading Bouillabaseball cards. Actually, remember those ALF trading cards I haven’t opened yet? They come with a Bouillabaseball card. So, I guess that’s a pretty neat tie-in for fans, but if Bouillabaseball doesn’t come up again later in the series, I’m going to be very confused as to why this is the episode they attempted to merchandize.

Thinking on it, I’m a bit puzzled by Bouillabaseball. In “Working My Way Back to You,” ALF was teaching Brian to play Skleen Ball, which was baseball played with fish. Now they’re talking about Bouillabaseball, which is baseball played with fish. That was only six episodes ago. Maybe if the other sport was mentioned in season one instead, this would be fine. But why, in two episodes so close together, is the same sporting concept given two different names?

God damn it ALF.

The cards are yet another worthless piece of junk ALF salvaged from his planet instead of helping anybody else to safety. Brian asks if they came with gum, and, sure enough, they did. In two flavors: tabby and Persian.

Commenter [E]X (or whatever, he hasn’t commented in a while so I apologize if I got the punctuation wrong) asked a while back why there are cats on Melmac. It was a good question that I can’t fucking answer at all. Even more puzzling, though, is why there would be Persian cats on Melmac…what with Melmac not having a Persia.

The phone rings, and it’s revealed that ALF entered Lynn in the Miss Southland beauty pageant. Lynn doesn’t know this, until she conveniently walks into the room while everybody’s talking about it. She’s there to take out the trash, but ALF tells Brian to do it instead. When Brian refuses, ALF offers him a dollar. Then ALF turns to Lynn and says, “You owe him a dollar.”

It’s funny, and it leaps right into ALF’s dedication to grooming Lynn into a beauty queen…which is a plot I really feel like I should hate.

And yet, I don’t.

I think it’s because we actually have a lot of good lines sprinkled throughout. I’m recording a lot of them here, but it’s probably a fifth of what the episode actually has to offer. Or maybe I’m just grateful that we get an episode about Lynn being attractive that doesn’t end with a musical number called “You’re the One Whose Genitals I’d Like to Sniff.”

Kate calls ALF an idiot for signing Lynn up without permission. He says he didn’t ask Lynn because he was afraid she’d say no, to which Lynn replies, “You were right.”

Then ALF calls out to Kate, “See? I’m not an idiot.”

This stuff is not half bad, guys. It’s really not. And it gets funnier when Lynn agrees to enter, because the grand prize is a car. She asks ALF what kind of car, and he says, “I’ll give you a hint: It’s spelled with a Z.” Overjoyed, she leaves, and Kate asks more directly what kind of car it is. ALF says, “Used. That’s spelled with a Z, isn’t it?”

I know I say this every time I compliment ALF, but I really don’t mean it to be insulting: these jokes aren’t great. Even the ones I like aren’t great. But that’s okay, because like The Muppet Show before it, a lot of fun can be had simply from the infectious silliness. While The Muppet Show unquestionably stumbled across brilliant material, even the hollow, punny stuff was enjoyable because we want to laugh. We like these guys. We like these actors. We like these situations. The goodwill earned by the great stuff carries us through the lesser material, evening out the valleys and elevating the experience as a whole.

This is what ALF should be at its worst. Something that’s not great…but is at least competent. When that’s the low watermark, we tend to excuse it. It may be forgettable, but it’s part of a show we enjoy, so no harm done.

Instead, though, this sort of thing is the highlight of the show. It’s nothing more than harmless wordplay and vaguely snappy dialogue, but it still manages to seem like a lost episode of Fawlty Towers when you compare it to the rest of the shit they churn out on a weekly basis.

The woman who runs the pageant comes over, and we get some passable social commentary about how the Miss Southland winners go on to become hostesses. “Not waitresses,” she makes clear. “Hostesses.”

ALF apparently submitted a photo of Lynn from her Sweet Sixteen party, and she complains that that was back when she had braces. I remember there was an episode in season one in which the show gave us a few lines explaining why Lynn no longer had braces, which I’m certain was done because Andrea Elson no longer had braces, but why are we reminding the audience that she used to have braces so long ago that it really doesn’t matter? It’s a bizarre time to drop in a reminder like that, and it’s not for any real reason.

But, whatever. The woman leaves and Willie agrees that there’s nothing to lose by letting Lynn enter the pageant. Then ALF pops up through the plot window and corrects him: there’s nothing to lose apart from the $200 entry fee.

Willie says, seething, “I guess you know what my reaction’s going to be,” to which ALF replies, “Yeah, but I don’t think I’d care to hear it.”

Now that’s an act break!

In the shed, ALF is making Lynn practice her clog dancing routine. Why did he say her talent was clog dancing? ALF explains, “Well, it isn’t singing.”

This episode doesn’t make any effort to soften his dickishness…and yet, for some reason, it doesn’t bother me as much. Maybe because I’m actually laughing. Things feel less cruel when you are actually having fun with it. I guess I just accidentally justified bullying, though, so ignore me.

Lynn complains that they aren’t making any progress with the routine, and ALF replies, “Sure we are. A week ago you didn’t even know what clog dancing was. Now we’re both sick to death of it.”

FUCKERS THIS IS NOT BAD

Lynn comes into the living room, ready for the pageant. She looks like Peggy Bundy, but the fake digital audience isn’t activated, so I guess it’s not a joke. She is actually supposed to look great, as far as I can tell.

For my money, she looks way better normally. Yeah, she’s usually lazing around in a sweatshirt, trying not to die of anxiety as she waits to say her line for the week, but she’s got a sort of neutral prettiness, and it works for her.

In fact, to keep up the Married With Children train of thought, I’ve referred a few times to Lynn being funny when she’s allowed to be a family-friendly Kelly Bundy. Less sexualized, more naive. And the “gussied up” Lynn here (new dress, new hair, makeup) contrasts nicely with the “gussied up” Kelly we saw so often (cleavage, legs, leather).

Each of those characters has a neutrally attractive setting, but when enhancing their attractiveness for plot purposes, they pull in very different directions. I like that.

Again, it’s nothing intentional, but it’s something that happens when the writers know what the fuck they’re doing.

Everyone compliments Lynn, but ALF is quiet. Kate asks why he’s not saying anything, and Willie replies, “Please, Kate. Don’t spoil the moment.”

Did even Willie get a good line? I can count the number of episodes in which that happened on one truly mangled hand.

ALF tells the family to pose for a picture, and there’s a joke that reaches well beyond this show’s usual abilities: Willie, Brian, Kate and Lynn smile for the camera, ALF counts to three…and then keeps counting.

Now that in itself is funny, but not totally beyond ALF‘s scope. What really sells it is the visual punch: we’re on ALF as he counts one and two, then we snap to the family for three, because that’s when we’d expect the flash. It doesn’t come, so we linger on the family through four, five, six…

A joke like that requires an understanding of film grammar that I have to assume somebody on staff possesses…somebody who isn’t often allowed to speak in meetings.

Normally ALF would linger too long in one place or the other. The fact that the cut comes on “three” establishes, though, that somebody not only knows why the joke is funny, but that the comedy can be enhanced by playing with the audience’s natural expectation.

When we see ALF start to count, we don’t consciously think, “He’ll reach three, we’ll see the family, the flashbulb will go off, and then the family will be at ease.” And yet, we do think that on some level, a level we don’t even know exists until the reality doesn’t match our prediction and we feel the hollow of unfulfilled expectation. A hollow that’s easily (and, arguably, cheaply) filled with laughter.

Like so much of “Working My Way Back to You,” this is a moment that would have been funny enough of its own, but which bears the stamp of somebody who put forth the effort to make it even funnier.

This is an episode about Lynn in a beauty contest, remember. The fact that somebody chose to invest that effort into this is downright heroic.

They head off to the pageant, leaving Brian alone with his rapist alien babysitter. I actually like this short scene, though, which opens with ALF emptily shoving a toy car off the table.

Why?

Why not? Because it’s funny. He’s ALF the passively petulant child, which is something I wish we’d see more of. The best part: it isn’t commented upon. It just happens. Even more rare than the writers giving Willie a good line is the writers giving their audience credit.

There’s also a nice, cute moment with ALF misunderstanding the concept of Hide and Seek, but explaining it here would take too much work and would also suck the life out of the gag. Suffice it to say that while it’s obvious padding, it’s very good padding, and in almost any other episode it would have been a runaway highlight. Here it’s just killing time, which speaks to how surprisingly strong “Oh, Pretty Woman” manages to be.

The episode ends with Lynn coming home upset. She placed last in the pageant, so ALF and Willie cheer her up. It’s nothing phenomenal, and it’s at least slightly abrupt, but as endings go it’s certainly fair, especially when you compare it to Brian being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for threatening to destroy the Earth with nuclear weapons.

What I’d rather talk about here is what “Oh, Pretty Woman” manages to prove.

A few times I’ve referred wistfully to the show ALF could have been. In fact, in my overall of review of season one, I cited three episodes that illustrated the directions this series could have taken to become legitimately great: “For Your Eyes Only,” “Going Out of My Head Over You,” and “La Cuckaracha.” While they were each very different episodes, my central argument remained the same: they should lean in to their core concept, and build plots around the fact that ALF is an alien, rather than cast him in a role that could have been occupied by any kind of character.

Yet, here, “Oh, Pretty Woman” demonstrates that that’s not the only path to success. You don’t have to be groundbreaking…you just have to be funny.

Here ALF’s extra-terrestrial origin offers nothing but a few offhand gags. The storyline itself does nothing with it, and he doesn’t even attend the beauty pageant. (We don’t get to see any of it, either.) The plot is less of a plot than it is a theme, and the writers explore that theme for as many jokes as they can get out of it.

And they’re actually good. This version of ALF might have been ultimately forgettable, but it would at least have been fun while it lasted.

I’ve complained about cardboard characters and ropey plots and disregard for logic, but “Oh, Pretty Woman” reminds me that while those things can be irritating, the most important thing is the quality of the writing. If you’re laughing, you’re not picking nits.

And “Oh, Pretty Woman” made me laugh. As much as I’d love ALF to be a show that did something interesting with its own premise, this reminds me that I’d be perfectly happy for the show to just have a little fun along the way.

Is that, really, so much to ask?

MELMAC FACTS: Not many Melmac Facts so far this season, but “Oh, Pretty Woman” has a lot, so…enjoy. In Melmacian beauty contests, for instance, the judges wore swimsuits and the contestants sat in the audience. Then there’s Bouillabaseball, which is like baseball except that they use fish parts instead of balls. Also, fish guts are sold at the concession stands. In Alpha-Centauri, they have world peace (even though it’s not a world?) so they wish for shoes instead. ALF’s grandmother once said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say to somebody, don’t say anything at all,” and then she never spoke to him again. Grandma Shumway also used to warn Melmacians that the planet was going to blow up, which might have helped her to survive the blast if ALF hadn’t had her committed. ALF’s orange fur is the result of a permanent dye job. Aaaaand, finally, on Melmac they count to 21 before taking a photo. Nearly all of these either served as or led to a solid punchline, which is damned welcome at this stage in the season.

I’ll say this right now: I have no fuckin’ clue why this episode is called “Some Enchanted Evening.” I know there’s one coming up where ALF recreates Willie and Kate’s honeymoon, so I thought this might be it. But, no. It’s something that has absolutely nothing to do with the title. In fairness, some of it does take place in the evening, but by that rationale you could call any given episode “Good Day Sunshine” and be done with it.

Way back in “Keepin’ the Faith,” I complained that they named a company Terry Faith Cosmetics only so they could justify the pun in their title. In retrospect, though, that at least represents a kind of effort, which is far more than “Some Enchanted Evening” has going for it.

Season two so far is very strange. Aside from the first episode, the much-missed “Working My Way Back to You,” there’s been almost no concern for narrative. Season one failed spectacularly at maintaining coherent storylines, but the episodes in which there was no attempt to tell a story at all were small in number. Here, it’s been literally every episode apart from the opener. With season one it often felt like the writers were just stapling any old shit together and calling it a script. With season two they don’t even bother with the staple.

Anyway, “Oh, What a Night” begins with Brian being dressed up like a pirate. How many episodes start with Brian in costume? There was the asparagus, the Gilligan’s Island outfit, Friar Tuck, and now this. In fact, three of those are from this season, and we’re only on episode six. That’s pretty ridiculous. I wonder if the writers realized they’d never have anything for Brian to do, so they just started treating him like a mannequin.

Of course, the writers don’t have much for their title character to do, either, so, hey, what the fuck, let’s put him in a silly costume, too.

It’s Halloween, apparently, and for some reason everybody’s acting like it’s ALF’s first one on Earth. It’s not. He crashed in August,* so I doubt this is his first October. In fact, according to my nerdy footnote, it demonstrably can’t be.

I can understand the writers wanting this to be his first Halloween, because that allows for the kind of story they want to tell: ALF getting excited, believing he’ll be able to leave the house and go trick or treating.

It’s a good concept, actually. ALF argues that he could pass for being a child in costume, and it’s the one night of the year that a little hairy grub shuffling around wouldn’t draw suspicion. But they still could have told the story if it were ALF’s second Halloween. All they’d need is some throwaway dialogue about what happened last year.

ALF: Aw, come on. You can trust me to go trick or treating. Wasn’t I very good last year?
WILLIE: No, ALF, you raped all the children.
ALF: But it was very good rape!
[applause, Mr. Ochmonek farts]

You know, something like that, but a lot less subtle.

But, yes, “No More Lonely Nights” is a Halloween episode. And I’m okay with that. The holiday episodes aren’t, on average, any better than other episodes are, but you can usually count on at least one decent joke about human traditions filtered through an alien perspective. You know…the sort of thing that should be driving a sitcom about a marooned alien, instead of being doled out twice a year and otherwise ignored.

In short, unlike ALF hiring a bookie, or the cat running away, or Alan Hale and Bob Denver being free for an hour’s worth of shooting, the holiday episodes can matter. We know what Valentine’s Day, Christmas and Halloween entail, so before the story even begins, we have some sense of what might happen, and part of the thrill is seeing how that plays out.

Of course, Valentine’s Day gave us the Kate Sr. fuck quest and Christmas ended with Willie’s wet dream about a family that actually loved him, so I’m not holding out much hope for this.

In bed, Willie initiates foreplay with his wife by bitching about work and worrying that he won’t get a “job promotion.” Who the hell says “job promotion?” Isn’t it just “promotion?” “Job” is implied. This is the sort of evasive nonsense about Willie’s employment that we saw in the first half of season one. I was hoping that once we learned he’s a social worker, annoyingly vague shit like this would stop.

And he is still a social worker; the conversation confirms that much. He’s upset because he was taken off of the “teen runaway project” and assigned to internal investigations.

Does reading that make you horny? OF COURSE IT DOES so as soon as he’s finished groaning about office politics he leans in to have some warm, limp sex on his wife. ALF, of course, shows up and spares us all.

How often does ALF walk in on Willie and Kate about to penetrate each other? I’m pretty sure we’ve had more of this than we’ve had of ALF eating cats. Why isn’t this the running gag he’s remembered for? WHY IS THIS A RUNNING GAG AT ALL

He still wants to go trick or treating, so Willie and Kate delay sex for another lunar cycle and talk to him about it. ALF’s cause is pretty much lost, until he says that he can help Willie get his conveniently vague job promotion. They’ll do this, he says, by digging up dirt on Willie’s boss, Mr. Burke.

Willie’s not keen on that, but then ALF suggests that they throw a big party, and invite the boss. Kate in particular likes this idea…not because they’d invite Willie’s boss — in fact they nix that idea outright — but because they haven’t actually done anything social since the Space Pedo moved in.

I like that they’re acknowledging this, and I also like that it’s Kate — the only human Tanner — who leaps at the chance to be normal again, if only briefly. It might be a bit unwise to embrace one of ALF’s whims so enthusiastically, but I buy that she would. She’s no dummy, but she is starved for a social life. Or even just a life. I know I’m reading more into this than the writers did, but it works. The stopped clock has its moment, and for that I’m grateful.

Of course, time doesn’t stand still when that happens. It marches inexorably onward through the sewage treatment basin that is the rest of “Night Moves.”

ALF still wants Mr. Burke to come, but Willie ain’t having it.

Hey, wasn’t this episode about Halloween a few minutes ago?

Eh, no matter. The ostensible adults kick ALF out of the room, and while they do…look at that. Just look.

What the living frignuts is that horse?

There is no reasonable explanation for that thing being next to the bed. That alone makes this the scariest fucking Halloween episode of anything I’ve ever seen.

Jesus H. Cock.

Anyway, now it’s Halloween. Alright…that was fast. The house is made up for a party, so I guess ALF was suggesting a Halloween party?

I mean, okay, there was some Halloween talk early in the episode, but then we got onto a whole other tangent, I thought, about Willie’s job promotion, which was to be resolved by inviting the boss to a dinner party.

Or, I thought it was a dinner party. Because inviting his boss to a fucking Halloween party is a pretty god-damned different story. But who cares. This is where we are now. This is the sitcom we’re watching. This is the tale we sat down to hear.

Whatever. You probably want me to explain that screenshot, so, here goes: two kids show up trick or treating, dressed as The Three Stooges.

Where’s Moe, you ask?

He’s not there because he had to take a shit.

Classic Moe!

The kids say “yuk yuk yuk” in exactly the way you’d guess kids who have no idea who The Three Stooges are would say “yuk yuk yuk” and leave.

This part sucked and all, don’t get me wrong, but isn’t this a little unfair to Benji Gregory? How must he feel when “Warm San Franciscan Nights” includes a scene with some kids being ostensibly funny, and he’s not even involved? They brought in two disposable idiots we’ll never see again, just so they wouldn’t have to give this kid something to do? That’s kind of sad.

Brian comes home from tick or treating just in time to not be involved in any comedy. Instead he engages his parents in conversation about every eight-year-old boy’s favorite subject: his sister’s sex life.

Willie and Kate are upset to hear that their daughter is being pumped full of the seed of a man named Lizard…but in “Take a Look at Me Now” they already knew his name was Lizard. Why is it suddenly a problem? Shouldn’t they be at least a little bit happy that she’s been with the same guy for a few weeks instead of blowjobbin’ her way around town like she was in season one?

In the interest of fairness, I do have to concede that Brian does get the episode’s best line. He tells his parents that he agreed to give ALF 70% of his candy. When Willie tells him that that’s a lot, Brian says, “He wanted 90.”

Then he goes out to the shed and we watch him and ALF divvy it up because it’s not like anything else is happening in this episode. ALF tries to take too much so Brian pulls out his cutlass and flays him alive, ending the show forever.

…no. :( He just chops the table or something. I’m more focused on the “booty,” which seems to be the contents of a single bag of Hershey’s miniatures and a few of those caramels that come in clear wrapping without any indication of who the fuck made them. That’s a terrible haul. Could the props department really not be bothered to grab a few candybars from a checkout line somewhere? This is the shit somebody probably had sitting in their desk drawer from last Halloween.

Lizard comes over, and I guess because he’s not some cartoonish biker guy, Willie is relieved. It turns out Lizard’s real name is Eric, and the scary-sounding (…presumably) nickname is something he earned by operating on a lizard in biology class and removing its brain tumor.

…whaaaaaaaat kind of biology class is that, exactly? I remember having to look up vocab words, and maybe if we were good they’d bring out the microscopes and we’d spear some hydra with toothpicks. Granted, I wasn’t on the more advanced science track, but I definitely don’t remember any of my smarter friends coming into the lunch room in blood stained scrubs, talking about the dying animals they just saved.

This might have made sense if they were talking about Lizard interning under a vet, or something. Even then he probably shouldn’t be removing brain tumors, but this anecdote is more suited to that context than it is to the thirty-five minutes he’d have between Spanish class and gym.

Anyway, Willie is happy now. I’m not sure why, because his daughter is still getting plowed by some clown, but he doesn’t have a beard or a tattoo so I guess it’s fine.

The guests start showing up in costume, and one of them is Mr. Burke, who starts verbally abusing his wife for making him dress up as The King of Cartoons.

Who the shit is this guy? This isn’t the boss I remember from “Border Song.” That was actually an actor I wanted to see again. They already had a character they could have slapped into this scene…did they really need to create a new one?

And all of the costumes are generic. Did nobody at this party dress as anyone specific? It’s all kings, cowboys, Swiss Alps guys…what a lack of imagination. Roseanne always became very inventive visually around Halloween. The Simpsons is legendary for the way they throw themselves into it. “Midnight Train to Georgia” not only fails to take full advantage of its own holiday; it barely seems to be interested in it at all.

Which, hey, is fine…

BUT THEN WHY MAKE A HALLOWEEN EPISODE

And speaking of generic, these guests are all characters Willie and Kate seem to know, but we’ve never seen any of them before. Would the Tanners really throw a big Halloween bash and not invite the Ochmoneks? What a pack of assholes.

Then another guest turns up…and it’s ALF with a zipper on his chest. Now that is actually pretty funny.

He introduces himself as Gordon and immediately starts mingling, but Willie takes him into the kitchen for the cornholing of a lifetime.

What I liked about the zipper was that it was just there. You get the joke without having to hear it explained, and that makes it kind of cute. But then, of course, Willie ruins it by pointing it out and asking where ALF got it.

The truly surprising thing, though? I’m okay with that, because it leads to the episode’s only other funny line: “You know that old jacket you were going to throw out? Better hang on to it. I ripped this out of your new raincoat.”

It’s the kind of line that works just fine in isolation, but it really shouldn’t qualify as one of the highlights of the episode. Unfortunately, it does.

Like…really. It does.

Back at the party, ALF tells jokes and sings “In the Ghetto.”

Think about that for a moment, though. For us at home, the joke is that ALF is doing an Elvis impression. Fine. That’s one layer of absurdity to enjoy, or not to enjoy, but it’s a reasonable thing for the character to do.

Now forget you’re watching this from the comfort of your couch. Pretend you are at the party. As far as you know, this is a man dressed as an alien, who then is impersonating Elvis.

Does this register as bizarre to anyone but me? Imagine going to a costume party and seeing a guy dressed in a really good Hitler costume who’s making a spectacle of himself by impersonating Michael Jackson. Would you not think that was in-fucking-sane? You’d probably think you were dreaming. Or hope you were, anyway.

Until the guy in the cowboy suit spoke I wasn’t sure where I recognized him from, but that’s Lewis Arquette. I looked him up to be sure of the spelling of his name (and I’m glad I did…I thought it was “Louis”), and just learned the sad fact that he passed away in 2001. I had no idea.

He was in a lot of things, but I remember him mainly from two: the narrator in Waiting For Guffman, which is one of my all-time favorite films, and Whittlin’ Willie in Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, which is one of my all-time favorite video games. He had such a distinctive voice and such a fantastic presence that it’s kind of sad to see him here. Especially since he gets exactly jack squat to do but laugh at ALF’s antics.

Then they all fuckin’ limbo.

ALF gets a round of applause by successfully clearing the bar, even though it’s held, for some reason, at forehead level. Then he makes Willie’s boss limbo, because fuck you.

Mr. Burke immediately falls over in pain — like, before he even starts, which I don’t think was a joke but rather just a really shitty acting choice — and I get the idea that it’s because he threw his back out, but the way it unfolds makes it look more like a heart attack.

This guy sucks. BRING BACK THE ONLY GOOD THING ABOUT “BORDER SONG” THIS GUY SUCKS

So, yeah, it’s a back injury. ALF gives Mr. Burke a sensual massage, because fuuuck you.

Mr. Burke asks how he can repay ALF, because I guess he forgot that he’s currently lying on the coffee table with a broken spine because dicknose here made him limbo.

ALF, of course, replies that if he really wishes to repay the man who turned him into a paraplegic, he should give Willie the promotion. Which Mr. Burke does right then and there because FUCK FUCK YOU FUCK YOU MY FUCKING FUCK FUCK YOU

Anyway, as a reward for crippling his employer, Willie takes ALF trick or treating after all. An old woman refuses to let him eat her cats, and “The Night Chicago Died” ends.

HAVE A SPOOOOOOKY HALLOWEEN BOILS AND GHOULS!!!!

—–
* According to “Help Me, Rhonda” anyway. “Working My Way Back to You” established Willie’s birthday as being in August, and “Jump” was an episode about his birthday, so either ALF’s been on Earth for over a year, or something’s been retconned. Either way, though, he’s been through one Christmas and sees another one in a few episodes, so I don’t think it’s likely this can be his first Halloween.

ONE FINAL NOTE: While I get The Lost Worlds of Power finalized, things might be fairly quiet here. Thanks for coming back for the weekly ALF reviews…I really do wish I had more time to keep up the work on other posts. So let me just direct you to The Ranger Retrospective. One of my good friends started this up recently, and he’s reviewing Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers one episode at a time. He’s three deep, so check it out. It’s good stuff. And if you like it, picture my face instead.

Two episodes ago, we opened with one hell of an unexpected development: Mrs. Ochmonek saw ALF. But “Prime Time” manages to open with something even more shocking: a black guy on ALF.

A friend and I were discussing this recently. There was Regular Gonzales in “Border Song,” and Officer Designingwomen in “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” and that about covers it for minorities on this show. Am I forgetting anyone? Maybe. Am I forgetting lots and lots of minorities? Absolutely not.

I don’t know. It’s a little bizarre to me that we’re encountering only the second black person this show’s ever had as we creep toward the middle of season two. There’s something off-putting about that, and it makes me wish they set the show in some racially diverse city, instead of the famously whitebread L.A.

Anyway, this guy is here to explain to us — oh, and the Tanners — what the plot of this week’s episode will be: the Tanners are getting set up as a Thompson family.

While the “Nielsen boxes” are still in use, I don’t hear as much about them as I used to. Years ago, though, I seem to recall just about every sitcom making a joke about Neilsen families, or building a plot around the idea as ALF does here.

If you’re not familiar, Nielsen ratings were metrics — though scattershot and far from exhaustive — by which networks and advertisers could measure the amount of viewers any given program pulled in. The “boxes” were probably the best known, even if they weren’t the most common, method of gathering this data.

I never had one so I can’t speak to the specifics (can any of you?), but it would connect in some way to your television, and would transmit information regarding your viewing habits to the Neilsen Company. What channel was being watched at what time, for instance, which could then be used to retroactively determine which specific shows they were.

The more common method — and one I did actually experience second-hand thanks to the fact that a friend’s household was selected to participate — was a simple journal. This was essentially the Nielsen version of the honor system. You’d write down what you watched, and how long you stayed tuned in. Then they’d collect the journals and crunch their numbers.

For reasons you can easily enough imagine, both of these methods were — and continue to be — seriously flawed, which is probably what made them such frequent targets for frightened showrunners. After all, this wasn’t simply unreliable, poorly-sampled data…it was the difference between getting another season and being axed outright.

To viewers at home, this data meant almost nothing. To everyone working in any capacity whatsoever on a television show, however, it directly determined whether or not you’d have a job in a week’s time.

But this is getting too heavy for an ALF review, so why don’t you scroll up and admire Willie, who seems to be re-enacting one of those shampoo commercials where the woman’s hair fans out behind her.

A. Blackman leaves, having rigged up a Thompson box for the family, and ALF opens the episode proper by saying, “Explain how television ratings work, Willie.” Very subtle, ALF. Just…just brilliant.

Perhaps I too quickly embraced the arrival of Al Jean and Mike Reiss…but can you blame me? “Working My Way Back to You” was actually good. It seemed to herald a new phase for ALF, where maybe, just maybe, competence would inch its way closer to being a weekly occurrence. Since then, though, we’ve gotten only lousy episodes, and “ALF fucks around with a Neilsen box” isn’t exactly the most promising setup. It’s also yet another story that could be told without having an alien involved at all. Do the writers even like the concept of their own show?

Lynn in this scene is wearing what has to be the most uncomfortable shirt I’ve ever seen. I can imagine how she must be sweating under the studio lights. Long sleeves and one of those massive vinyl decals on the front? I’m sweltering just thinking about it. Brian, as ever, is staring off-stage, wondering how his life could have gone so, so wrong so, so quickly.

Each family member gets a login code, so that the Thompson Company will know who is watching what. ALF, in the closest thing this episode has to a point, feels left out when he doesn’t get a code. After all, he’s part of the family…right?

This is exactly the kind of emotional component a better show would use to its great advantage, building character through this very human detail that’s tacked on to what’s, essentially, a very silly plot. Something like what Futurama did by attaching Fry’s attempt to win Leela’s heart to a story about mutant basketball players, or what The Venture Bros. did by building a sad revelation about his father into Hank’s episode-length detective fantasy.

There’s nothing wrong with a show — especially a comedy — doing an episode that’s deliberately silly. But the best writers can pull off that episode while still retaining a continuity of the human component. In other words, the characters we love aren’t replaced by caricatures for a week; they’re the same characters, and it’s the situation that’s grown crazier.

Of course, this is ALF, and the whole, “Am I not really a member of this family?” angle is dead on arrival. It never gets mentioned again, making it seem like the last work of the One Good Writer before he leapt out the window to his death.

Kate decides to give ALF a code of his own, which sure is nice of her, but it raises the question of how she gives him a code. Weren’t these codes assigned by the Thompson Company? That would seem like a very basic part of the setup process. And is there no concern about the potential discrepancy when there are four people watching TV in this house, while using five unique codes?

All of this could have been resolved by having ALF use Willie’s code, or something, which would be the least dickish thing he’s ever done to something of Willie’s, but instead they go out of their way to assign him his own. It doesn’t come into play in any way that another family member’s code couldn’t, so I like to see this as a big “fuck you” to anyone dumb enough at home to be paying attention.

There is a single well-observed moment in the episode, and it’s this: ALF comes into the living room to find Willie and Kate watching The MacNeil / Lehrer Report, which is said to be followed by the only fake show in the ALF universe that’s gotten a smile out of me: Weather Maps of Developing Nations.

ALF correctly calls them on their BS. They don’t really watch this stuff; they just want to seem like they watch this stuff. That’s what people do when they suddenly find themselves being observed while doing something they normally do in private…they try to make it look impressive.

And I like that. It doesn’t shed any light on Willie’s relentlessly vague characterization, but it also doesn’t run afoul of anything we know about Kate. This isn’t a bad thing for them to do…it’s just something that people do. And it’s being pointed out by an alien. Which, y’know, could probably stand to happen more in A SHOW ABOUT A FUCKING ALIEN. He should be pointing out these passive human hypocrisies ALL THE COCKSTINKING TIME.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe if I stop thinking of ALF as an alien and start thinking of him as a smaller, hairier Paul Fusco this show would make a lot more sense.

Mr. Ochmonek comes over, and there’s this really strange moment when Kate tells ALF to get in the kitchen, and ALF riffs for a while about what an anti-feminist statement that is. It’s the kind of thing that might have landed as a joke in the hands of a better performer, but instead it just lies there, feeling vaguely offensive if not for its content then at least for its stupidity.

Anyway, Mr. Ochmonek sees the box and assumes the Tanners are stealing cable. They explain that they’re a Thompson family, which for some reason makes Mr. Ochmonek start talking about Polka Jamboree. On ALF that qualifies as a graceful segue.

Polka Jamboree, according to Mr. Ochmonek, is like “a Slavic Soul Train.” This is similar to ALF’s anti-feminist rant a moment ago in the sense that it sounds more offensive than it really is, but it works much better here, simply because John LaMotta delivers the line the way a normal human being would, rather than making it sound like a desperate bid for attention from a struggling stand-up comic.

I don’t think I’ve given LaMotta nearly enough credit. Granted, in some episodes (such as “Come Fly With Me” and “Take a Look at Me Now”) he comes across as a flawed but ultimately believable human being, and I was happy enough to praise him there. But the more I see how utterly awful ALF can be in all respects, the more I appreciate having LaMotta around even when he’s given nothing to work with. He’s the only one of the “regular” cast that doesn’t seem to be slugging his way through 24 minutes of abject misery, and considering the fact that he’s been just as damning toward the show in recent years as pretty much everyone else involved, that means he qualifies as a pretty good actor as well.

His material isn’t always so hot, as evidenced by the writers sticking him in “Prime Time” just to do a silly dance…

…but it’s reliably nice to see him. Anne Schedeen might have managed to find a real human being in her character, but Jack LaMotta knows how to have fun, and that’s surprisingly rare for a show about a cat-eating space puppet.

Anyway, the reason he stopped over is to let the Tanners know that he’s taking his wife to “The Big Apple.” Not New York, though…a farmer in Washington state grew a 60 pound red delicious, and they want to go see it. I guess the joke is that they’re idiots for wanting to take this trip, but when’s the last time Willie and Kate did anything? At all?

Sure, maybe going with your spouse to see a giant piece of fruit is a pretty uncommon activity, but who are the Tanners to judge? At least the Ochmoneks like each other enough to spend time together.

After Mr. Ochmonek leaves, ALF comes running out declaring that he’s in love with Polka Jamboree. That night we see ALF in the kitchen watching TV, and I thought the joke would be that he was watching his new favorite show 24 hours a day. …somehow.

Instead, though, it’s some news program. The interviewer is speaking with “Brandon Tartikoff,” who was the real-life president of NBC at the time. NBC, in case you didn’t know, was ALF‘s network.

Tartikoff is played here by David Leisure, and I couldn’t be happier that he got a mulligan* after “The Gambler” forced him to deliver all of his lines through a tissue.

They talk about the Thompson box, for plot reasons of course, but the way Leisure is talking about it, he makes it sound like it’s some proprietary system of NBC’s. What good would that do? Does it just measure the viewers of NBC programming? And what kind of news program interviews its own network president?

Oh well. Leisure at least does a great job of illustrating for us how a capable comic actor can sell subpar material. While his lines consist of circular nonsense (the inconsistencies are consistent with the expected inconsistencies, and shit like that), he sells it the same way Saul Goodman convinces women that he’s Kevin Costner: by believing it himself.

His speech here isn’t a laugh riot by any means, but it’s serviceable, and anyone who can elevate ALF material to that level deserves respect.

A perfect counterexample comes in the form of the interviewer,** who immediately after the speech says, “Wow, our time’s up already?” The fake audience loves it, and I’m glad they do, because no flesh and blood viewer would be impressed by the way that joke shrivels and dies. The interviewer relied on the material itself to be funny. Leisure, wisely, chose to make the material funny.

Willie comes in and tells ALF to fuck the fuck to bed. Then he sits down and we get a wholly unwelcome glimpse of his belly fur. I guess I should be glad he wasn’t wearing boxer shorts.

ALF asks Willie what happens if a show gets bad ratings, and Willie replies that it goes off the air, right after a cliffhanger in which the government comes and hauls the title character off screaming.

Realizing that he hasn’t fucked up anything this week yet, ALF begins to fret about Polka Jamboree getting cancelled, which is a fate that might be avoided if more viewers tuned in. Willie says, “That would take a miracle.” ALF replies, “Just call me The Miracle Worker.” So, hey, toss a Helen Keller joke into this mess. Why not.

Earlier ALF made some kind of comment to the effect of, “I can understand. I’m an alien, not a foreigner.” Why is this episode reaching so hard for such vague offensiveness?

Then we get…

Oh, Lord. A montage.

A montage set to library polka music, with ALF hacking computers.

Since when — and why — is ALF a master hacker? I’m more or less willing to accept that he innately “knows” English, but it’s not remotely possible that he’d also know how Earth computers operate…let alone thoroughly enough that he’s able to override their intended purpose and feed false data to the Thompson Company.

My grandmother recently got her first email address. She called me to give me the good news. “You can email me now!” she said, and then she slowly read the address to me. When she was done, she added, “And the password is pinecone14.”

I told her she shouldn’t give that out. She replied, “Don’t you need that to send me email?”

My grandmother’s not an idiot. It’s just that technology advanced at one pace, and she advanced — as so many grandmothers do — at another.

My point here is that she’s co-existed with this technology for decades. It’s been there, in her periphery, all along. She’s heard people talk about it. She’s seen it on television. She’s read articles that reference it. But when it came time for her to sit down and use it, she found out that she didn’t understand something as basic as what to share, and what to keep private.

ALF has co-existed with this technology for maybe a year. None of the Tanners even use the computer they keep stashed away in the garage for some reason. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that ALF can hack the Thompson Company, Mrs. Ochmonek’s TV, and the secret Presidential frequency of Air Force One on a whim. Especially if he can’t fuckin’ fix his own engine.

One week later (thank you, caption, for being the most intelligible thing in the episode) ALF is grooving to some Polka Jamboree. There’s some heavy-handed exposition from Willie about how they might as well let ALF enjoy the show while it’s on, because it’s bound to be cancelled soon, unless a space monster hacks the ratings data at night while everybody is asleep, and what are the odds of that?

We actually get to see a bit of Polka Jamboree, which I didn’t expect. But now that I’ve seen it, I wish I hadn’t.

I definitely don’t believe any major network would have aired this…and certainly no network in direct competition with NBC. Remember, this was the late 80s. There weren’t hundreds of niche channels as we know today. In fact, I’m positive there is a show like Polka Jamboree out there now, but back then there was no way that prime time slots would be turned over to two dancers, an accordionist, and some tinsel.

Anyway, the accordionist announces that Polka Jamboree is number one in the ratings, which is totally something television shows do ALL THE TIME AND HOW DOES ALF NOT KNOW HOW TV WORKS

The Tanners get pissed off for some reason, and they confront ALF about this development. But why the fuck do they care what show is number one in the ratings? Did they bet money on Roseanne or something?

You can tell the episode is off the rails when even Kate starts dressing like the victim of a head injury.

ALF explains that he called 2,000 people and told them to watch the show…but nobody should worry, because he called them during the off-peak hours between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. The joke is supposed to be that 2,000 calls at any time of day would add up, but to me it’s far funnier to imagine somebody getting a call from a stranger at 4 a.m. telling them to watch a polka show, and then that person actually doing it.

But that’s not all! He also gave these people 2,000 Thompson logins (some-fucking-how), and connected the Thompson box to his spaceship’s transmission (some-FUCKING-how), and this in combination with the mindless keyboard tapping on a computer displaying a QBASIC error window totally ended up boosting Polka Jamboree to number one.

What a half-assed answer of bullshit. It would have been less intellectually offensive if ALF just turned to the camera and said, “Fuck you, that’s why.”

We then re-join David Leisure, already in progress.

He’s apologizing on the phone for turning down Polka Jamboree. This episode is a crock of shit, but I have to admit I’m glad that we’ve got David Leisure to keep us company.

Bill Cosby calls to talk to him, and Leisure compliments him on the great episode last week, in which Theo lost his comb. “I never, ever thought he’d find it,” Leisure says, demonstrating very overtly how much better ALF would be if it were stocked with capable actors. Not great ones…just ones that respect and understand their craft.

Whoa, two black guys in one episode! This one’s a janitor, showing up to move Tartikoff out of his office for turning down television’s most popular show. Leisure says, “I guess we can’t be number one forever,” and at the time this aired that was probably a pretty good joke.

Tartikoff — the real one — was the man who more or less single-handedly turned NBC into a juggernaut. A seemingly endless series of brilliant acquisitions gave the floundering network not only a sense of identity, but an association with reliable quality. Tartikoff commissioned Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Law & Order, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Cheers, Seinfeld, Miami Vice, The Golden Girls and a mountain of other shows that have either stood the test of time or at least made their mark on the era.

He was a shrewd and impressive man to whom an entire network owed its success. Now, however, NBC’s fortunes are behind it. The few hits (The Office, 30 Rock) it still had are gone, and even the cult favorites (such as Community) are on their way out. Tartikoff gave the network an identity.

When he was gone (he passed away before he even reached 50, but left one hell of a legacy) nobody with vision stepped up to fill the void. “We can’t be number one forever” is more of a depressing reminder of better days than a puckish wink to the audience, and I have to admit it makes me a bit sad.

ALF calls the president of NBC, because of course he does, and the show uses this opportunity to remind us that they’re so comfortable with black people that they’ll even stick one in the background and not give him any lines.

David Leisure listens while ALF recaps for him the major plot points of the episode. He admits that he tampered with the ratings, but I guess none of that matters, because Tartikoff is still moved out of his office, in favor of Michele Brustin, who plays herself. What, you don’t recognize Michele Brustin? She was the brains behind Knight Rider 2000 and literally nothing good. This episode is framing her as a kind of rival to Tartikoff’s throne. Now there’s a joke that didn’t age well.

The original black man comes and takes back the Tanners’ Thompson box, and when he leaves ALF pops up through the plot window.

But…man. This puppet looks different. The hair looks wrong, the fur looks too thick, and it seems to be a more vibrant shade of orange than usual. Also, he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt for literally no reason, and his face looks like it’s been wedged under boxes in a storage locker for the summer.

What’s more, the puppetry in this scene is really bad. I couldn’t even concentrate on what he was saying. You’ve heard me praise Fusco’s puppetry before, but here it’s not expressive at all. Instead of “acting” like ALF, somebody’s just dropping and raising the puppet’s jaw in concert with the words. It’s really, really strange.

Why is the puppetry so bad? Was Fusco ill or something, and an intern had to do it? And why the rattier puppet? Did Fusco not trust a subordinate with ALF Prime?

Whatever. ALF tells Willie to pick him up a million stamps and the episode is over.

In the short pre-credits scene, we see ALF. The real ALF. See how much different this looks from that soulless imposter a moment ago?

Willie reads the phone bill and ALF plays the accordion, which I like to interpret as a punch in both nuts for anyone who actually sat through this entire thing.

What the fuck was the point of any of this? ALF makes a show we’ve never heard of number one, which results in a character we’ve never seen before losing his job. That’s “Strangers in the Night” level pointlessness right there.

If season two really does turn out to be better than season one, it sure is taking its time getting there.

—–
* Somebody please appreciate my wordplay.

** The credits reveal that this is Tom Patchett, one of the other “brains” behind ALF. The more you know.