Category: alf

Way back when I started this project (almost two years ago, for those keeping track of just how much of my life ALF has sucked away) I grabbed a list of episode titles from Wikipedia. That ended up serving as the base for my main ALF page, with the titles linking to the reviews as they were written. In doing so I didn’t deliberately look at the plot summaries, but, of course, I saw some of them. One of those summaries was for this episode…and though I’ve had some pleasant surprises along the way, this is the one I kept looking forward to.

See, I’m a sucker for “cute” stories. I don’t know why…maybe it just taps into my memories of childhood and I let my guard down. But ALF getting an ant farm, and being overcome with grief when he accidentally destroys it? I like that idea. It’s no more creative than the show’s storylines usually are, but it sounds like a nice idea for a breather episode…and one in which ALF could actually have to process the emotions one feels when faced with the death of a loved one. It’s filtered through a silly $8 ant farm, but since the last time ALF dealt with death he was fisting Uncle Albert’s corpse in the back yard, I’m more than willing to give the show a do-over.

In short, “Funeral for a Friend” seemed to me like exactly the kind of episode I would enjoy. And…overall, I think I do. There’s a lot to like about it, certainly, even if it’s not quite the episode I wished it was. The best thing about it is probably its cute concept, when it should have been a series highlight.

Is that much of a complaint? No, probably not. “Funeral for a Friend” didn’t quite live up to its potential, but it blows 96% of ALF out of the water by virtue of the fact that it had potential, so that’s something.

Anyway, enough stalling; let’s get started! We’re finally on the final disc of season three, so let me just dig it out and…

oh dear Christ no

Willie, I was looking forward to this. Why you gotta be so gross? He looks like he just caught me masturbating.

Anyway, the episode opens with ALF and Brian leafing through some book of animal pictures. ALF tells Willie that he’s picking out a pet, but Willie reminds him that they already have a cat.

Do you, Willie? Nobody’s mentioned it for weeks, and I don’t know if we’ve seen it since season two. I think Lucky got stuck under the house and none of you assholes noticed. You don’t have a cat anymore. You have a cat skeleton.

Brian gets to deliver some kind of joke. At least, I assume he does. The laughter kicks in and he rolls his eyes after saying whatever the fuck he said, but for all I can tell you he was speaking in tongues. It’s completely unintelligible.

I think it was some kind of irrelevant joke about how he’s taller than ALF now, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying because he’d accidentally sat on a testicle.

ALF suggests they get a horse, and I’m sad that Willie shoots it down so fast. Seeing ALF and Willie get kicked to death by a horse would instantly cement this as the best episode ever made.

After the intro credits ALF rides around the living room on a hobby horse. He does a John Wayne impression while wearing that actor’s iconic sleeveless jean jacket.

Come on. Surely ALF was low-budget, could it not afford another costume? So far this exact jacket has been deployed to make ALF look like Bruce Springsteen, a hippie, and John Wayne…three things that have no item of clothing in common, let alone this thing that a middle schooler on a class trip left behind in the NBC bathroom. If ALF ever has to dress as Abraham Lincoln he’ll probably be wearing this fucking thing.

Anyway, ALF makes a joke about the hobby horse driving splinters into the underside of his sack, so fucking fuck me for getting my hopes up.

Willie tells ALF that he’ll get a horse over his ugly, hate-filled body, so for fuck’s sake shut up about it. Then he puts an ant farm on the table.

ALF looks at it. He says, “You got me a pet beach?” …and that’s actually a really funny line. Not too obvious, not too silly…it’s one of those rare ALF jokes that you can laugh at without having to apologize afterward.

Seeing this ant farm brings back a lot of memories. I had one exactly like it when I was a kid. (I assume that many of you did, too.) Specifically I remember the fact that it didn’t come with ants. Willie’s does, which is fine, as this is television, and we don’t need to watch ALF dick around for 6 – 8 weeks before the plot can begin, but I definitely had to mail away for them.

I remember that because when they arrived, the ants were frozen. I don’t recall what we had to do to reanimate them, but when they were unfrozen two of them were stuck together at the head. Both of them were alive, but they couldn’t separate from each other; they were permanently melded forehead to forehead. After a long struggle, one of them decided to decapitate the other. The headless one died, of course…and the other one just had some other dead ant’s head stuck to its face for the rest of its life.

It was pretty fucking miserable. I think it taught me a valuable lesson about hating life.

Willie explains that ALF is a dumbass; this is a chance to observe the behavior of ants as they “work and play in their natural environment.” ALF calls him out rightly on green windmills and plastic trees not being a natural environment, but I find it much more objectionable that Willie thinks the ants are going to play.

Ants don’t play, Willie. They dig and they fall over dead. What you’re seeing are crack goblins. Take your lips off the glass cock for a few days and you’ll stop seeing cartoon characters everywhere you look.

Later on ALF is in the attic. Brian and Lynn come in to see how the ants are doing, and he says they suck dick; he can’t even teach them to fetch, speak, beg, or suck dick.

Brian agrees with him that ants are pretty fucking boring. Then again Brian has a pet space alien and can’t be arsed to spend time with it so his judgment is probably at least a little skewed.

Lynn has a welcome, human moment with ALF as she tells him the way her parents operate: if ALF is able to prove he’s responsible enough to take care of these ants, they might let him have a bigger pet. It’s exactly the kind of thing we get shockingly little of in this show: an observation about family dynamics. Lynn is somewhere between eighteen and fifty-six years old (depending on the episode), so she’s had a lot of time to learn about the way her parents react to things. Here, she’s passing on the knowledge. If ALF treats the ants like shit, then they’ll always be able to use that as justification for why he can’t have a better pet. If he treats them well, they might be willing to grant him a little more leeway.

It’s good, and ALF’s mildly confused response works well: “So if I take care of these ants I can have…what? Big ants?”

Look at that. Believable human moment punctuated by joke. It’s not that hard, ALF. When you give a shit, you do just fine.

Brian says that his first pet was a turtle, and ALF assures him that nobody even cares if he lives or dies, so there’s no way in fuck they care about his turtle. The kid wisely shuts up.

Lynn asks ALF, “Have you read this question and answer section of your ant watcher’s manual?” That’s a line Jack Nicholson wouldn’t be able to deliver naturally, so you can imagine how poor Andrea Elson trips over it. Honestly, try reading that out loud. The writers sure didn’t, or they’d have realized pretty quickly that no human being speaks that way without a spike through their brains.

ALF tells her, no joke, that he’d planned on reading it the next time he had to take a long shit. Sometimes I exaggerate in these reviews for humorous effect, other times something like this is said and I realize that even my wildest exaggerations are right within the show’s idiotic wheelhouse.

She reads aloud from the booklet and sure enough it says that ants play, which I’m still positive is complete bullshit. Ants don’t fucking play, ALF. They work themselves to death for the good of the colony. They have little or no sense of self, and exist solely to be productive little workers. Ants have been on Earth for over 90 million years, and at no point have any of them invented the beach ball. They don’t fucking play.

Oh, but wait! Brian and ALF conveniently see two ants “playing” just as she says that. The way this episode has panned out so far I genuinely expected the joke to be that these two assholes are watching some ants hump each other, but no. The ants are actually fighting.

Which is not quite the same thing as playing.

Like, not at all.

In fact it’s pretty damned close to being the opposite of playing, as these two insects are slowly hacking each other to death…an activity not commonly associated with one’s leisure time.

So the fact that they view this as evidence of “playing” is pretty stupid, but it’s still a lot better than hearing ALF compliment an ant on its cocksmanship.

Later on ALF throws a bunch of rice all over the house. Why? Is it because he’s a cunt?

Yes!

But, coincidentally, two of his ants are getting married. He invites Willie and Kate to watch the ceremony with him. It says a lot that in a scene like this, the least believable thing is Kate looking into the ant farm and reporting that the ants are dancing.

Fucking hell. Remember when Kate was a human being, and not the brain-dead pod person she’s been for what feels like this whole season? It’s actually really disappointing how far her character has fallen. Did I miss an episode in which ALF concussed her with a 5-iron or something?

Post-lobotomy Kate aside, I like the idea of what’s happening here: ALF is getting wrapped up in the lives of his little pets. He likes them, and they’re making him happy. Willie even takes ALF’s picture next to the ant farm, and that’s…really cute, actually. I like it when ALF gets to be a child.

Remember, he’s been on Earth for only three years. He’s still learning, and he’s still figuring out how to process things. Essentially, he is a child…just one that can articulate his feelings better than an actual three-year-old kid could. Or than Benji Gregory ever will.

The episodes that acknowledge that — such as this one — tend to at least be interesting. So, yeah, the episode sucks so far, but this is an adorable concept, and I love the fact that they’re exploring it.

Willie asks ALF if he’s happy they didn’t get a horse, and ALF responds with one of those song-lyrics-as-jokes things that WE ALL LOVE SO MUCH. This time he recites the theme to Mr. Ed.

You lucky people.

In the attic both Lynn and Willie are leaving presents for ALF while he’s in the shower. Lynn’s gift is an “Alan Thicke’s World of Ants” calendar, which I won’t even pretend to understand as a joke, but which I like anyway for some reason. Probably the specificity of it. I have no clue if Alan Thicke is an amateur myrmecologist in addition to being an actor / failed talk show host, but it almost doesn’t matter. A yearly calendar devoted to his findings is a funny idea, whether or not it has any basis in reality.

Willie’s gift is a bunch of little farm toys to display with the ants…and I love, love, love the fact that these two are encouraging ALF’s new hobby. It’s so rare that anybody on this show seems happy, so it’s nice that the one time it happens, the others join in and don’t try to crush it. Also, it must be a really nice change of pace for them to have ALF engaged in something that doesn’t involve rape.

There’s a lovely little moment when Willie finds the photo he took of ALF with his ant farm, on a table beside replacement sand, food, and a model he built of an ant. It’s a super cute moment, and it hints at a warm side of ALF that we almost never get to see. Willie beaming is pretty nice, too, since he so rarely shows any kind of pride in his slutty daughter or learning disabled son.

I really, really like this part.

But then Lynn sees that the ants are dead.

Well, that’s that, then. The good scene was fun while it lasted. See you in another 16 episodes, everyone.

It turns out that ALF left them by the window and they baked in the sun. Granted, we find out that he’s been in the shower for an hour, and that’s a long shower, but is that enough hot sunlight to kill ants?

I honestly don’t know. I’d imagine they’re more resilient to heat than most pets would be, but I guess I can’t say that for a fact. If one of you assholes had bought me an Alan Thicke’s World of Ants calendar I wouldn’t have to do all of this guesswork.

ALF comes back from his shower and they break the news to him. It’s a sweet moment that doesn’t get too sappy, but the emotion that is present is pitched quite well. In disbelief, he says, “An hour ago, they were working the farm!”

Willie says, “And now they’ve bought it.” This is a historic moment, folks. Max Wright got a joke that didn’t involve ALF slugging him in the nuts.

After the commercial, ALF is moping alone, sitting quietly with his ant model…which he’s turned upside down out of respect.

Willie brings him a sandwich, but ALF is too sad to eat. Willie asks, “Do you want to talk? I’m trained in this area.” And…

wait.

wait.

Did…am I…

Is this a dream? Or is Willie actually acting like a social worker?

Assholes! WILLIE IS ACTUALLY ACTING LIKE A SOCIAL WORKER

This is a genuine shock to me, since he usually addresses his family’s problems by bludgeoning hobos and stabbing farmers to death with pitchforks. I…I am gobsmacked. I really don’t know how to react. It’s as though this episode had such a good idea at its root that it’s even managed to affect Willie, a guy who’s seventy-four years old and has yet to be affected by an interest in intelligible diction. “Funeral for a Friend,” you magnificent bastard.

What’s more, the writing here is pretty good. Willie really does get to be a social worker for once. For instance, ALF says that the ants might have survived if he hadn’t taken so long in the shower…and Willie tells him that that’s okay; it’s common to experience guilt when something you love dies.

ALF asks if anger is natural, too, because he’s mad that Willie got him the ant farm in the first place…and it’s not just a sitcom moment. Willie tells ALF that, yes, it is natural, and it’s healthy to work through your emotions like this. He encourages him to keep going.

For the first time in this entire fucking idiotic show, I actually believe that Willie has the job that people keep telling me he has. Fuckers…this is not bad.

ALF does make some crack about also being mad at CBS for canceling Frank’s Place…and that’s a reference I don’t get. I’ve never heard of the show. Looking it up reveals that it is actually still held in pretty high esteem, though it never made it to a second season.

I feel as though the joke is that ALF liked a shitty TV show or something, but consensus says that it wasn’t that shitty. It was a racially-charged comedy/drama starring Tim Reid, who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati. That…sounds kind of interesting to me. I’d watch it.

Maybe this reference was just the writing staff’s way of venting frustration that a pretty good show on another network wasn’t given a fair shake. But I’m at least mildly worried that the joke is that ALF watched a “black people” show. God knows what he would have shouted at the television.

Willie offers to buy ALF another ant farm, which is a reasonable solution, but ALF was attached to those ants, which is a reasonable response. He compares it to getting Willie a new wife if Kate died, which is certainly overdramatic but makes a fair point about the scale of loss. Something that seems small to outsiders might be huge to the person who is experiencing it. Willie realizes this, which is why he doesn’t bitch slap ALF.

It all fits as part of a surprisingly well-handled discussion about grief, and I really like this version of Willie. (Have I ever said that before?) Pity he doesn’t even survive to the next scene.

Yes, this being ALF, we need to follow that very good exchange with a prolonged view of Willie having nocturnal emissions.

God. Dammit. ALF.

He writhes around and giggles because he thinks his wife is giving him the first blowjob he’s had in years (The National Enquirer is NOT to be believed), but it turns out he just has a bunch of ants crawling all over his genitals.

Try to guess how much of that I made up. You’ll be pleasantly horrified.

Ants are all over the house because ALF left a shitload of food out. Willie and Kate go into the kitchen to survey the mess, and Kate gets to be Kate again by burning holes through ALF with her eyes. Man, I’ve missed her. I guess the filth and infestation shocked her back to life. I’ll take it.

Kate really has been a shell of her former self for too long, but this scene almost makes up for it: Willie tells her to go into the living room and he’ll do the cleaning, but she suggests burning down the house and starting over.

And, man, that’s the Kate I’ve missed. Overall I don’t know if Anne Schedeen has finally given up on trying to make the most of this awful show, but it’s nice to have her back…however briefly.

It turns out that ALF invited all the world’s ants into the house to make some kind of amends for killing a bunch of them. Willie says he has an idea about how to handle this, and Kate tells him to go fuck himself; this time ALF is hers.

It really is the best Kate scene we’ve had in ages. Especially when Willie stops her from murdering ALF and suggests that they hold a memorial service for his dead pets.

Kate says, “A funeral for ants?”

She looks at him like this.

Then she looks at him like this.

There’s no laughter. I don’t think the writers or editors saw this as a joke. And it’s probably not. It’s just Anne Schedeen being allowed to act again. And compared to the rest of this horse shit it’s glorious. It reminds me of who she used to be, and why she was far and away the highlight of this show.

Instead of violently sodomizing her husband with that broom handle, though, she lets him speak. Willie insists on the funeral, because there can be a good deal of therapeutic value in ritualism, and while his consequent flipping out at ALF is kind of unfunny and dumb, I still like the idea that he’s being a social worker, even if he’s now also being an asshole.

Anyway, the episode is almost over so we get right to the funeral. It’s in the back yard in broad daylight because at this point the family is actively hoping that Mr. Ochmonek sees ALF and burns him to death with his cigar.

We do get a great sight gag at the funeral, though, when Willie lays a wreath near a bunch of popsicle stick tombstones. It’s a legitimately funny moment, even if the screengrab makes it look like Willie is about to take a dump.

Brian asks if he can take his black armband off, and you can hear the stage crew panic because that means they need to pay the kid for a second line this week.

ALF officiates the funeral, which is neither as funny nor as sweet as it could have been. But it’s okay…it’s not overtly idiotic or anything, so I’ll take it. The best part is when he calls on Willie to speak about the ants, and the guy has no idea what to say. At a loss for words he ends up complimenting the ants on their hospitality.

It’s a funny moment, but it loses impact as the same joke is repeated with each member of the family in turn.

Then ALF lists off the names of all the ants, and it takes forever because there were a lot of ants. Ha?

While he recites the list of dead, Kate complains that ants are swarming all over the food they prepared. He says, “They’re mourners, Kate,” and that was actually a really cute little joke to end the sequence.

Sadly it doesn’t end the sequence, and he keeps reading names. Was this episode two minutes short or something? God forbid we spend more time in one of the earlier scenes that were actually good.

Later on ALF eats all the food and says Kate’s potato salad tastes like shit. Then he burps and the episode ends. Wubba lubba dub-dub!

In the short scene before the credits, we find out that ALF wrote to The Morton Downey, Jr. Show. Thank Christ ALF had better sense than to write to his own show’s analog, otherwise we might have had to see that jackass Lenny Scott again.

Anyway, ALF suggested that they add a segment about civil rights for ants. The letter tells him to go fuck himself.

MELMAC FACTS: Orbit gnats were a thing, and they’d get cooked to death by the heat shields on ALF’s space ship.

“Torn Between Two Lovers” is by no means a very good episode of ALF Hell, it wouldn’t be a very good episode of anything. It is, however, a pretty interesting one. More interesting than I’d have expected an episode about sitting around talking about a school dance to be, at least.

One of the interesting things is that there’s a subplot in this episode, which is pretty rare. Thinking back, I don’t know how many episodes actually more than one story unfolding in parallel. “Movin’ Out” was one; that had Willie’s new job and the impending sale of the house. “Fight Back” had Willie pursuing bureaucratic justice while ALF’s faction went for Melmacian street justice. And here we have whatever the fuck Lynn is doing, while ALF cleans the kitchen.

I didn’t say it was a good subplot, but it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Well…it ends, anyway.

The episode opens with the subplot, as we encounter ALF making hilarious puns about the names of cleaning products until the cold open is finished and the episode can finally begin.

He’s surrounded by all of these cleaning products because he’s helping — in an extraordinarily elastic sense of the term — to keep the house clean while Kate is away at detox. (Because damn, guys…how can a house stay presentable without a woman on 24-hour cleanup duty?)

And, no, the detox thing is not my joke…it’s ALF’s. Lynn clarifies that Kate’s actually away at a real estate seminar. So…she still works at that place she we’ve only heard about twice and haven’t seen for 11 weeks? Sorry Lynn, but I think ALF’s right. It’s far more likely she’s at detox.

Actually, does this “the family has to pitch in” subplot imply that nobody pitched in with the housework before this very moment? Even though Kate’s heavily pregnant and working a full-time job? And even though none of them have any social life or other obligations to speak of?

What a pack of assholes.

After the credits, some guy comes over and slips his tongue into Lynn. She calls him Danny, and…

…wait. Danny?

As in Danny Duckworth? From the first episode of this season?

I don’t want to go back and watch that one again (ever), so I’ll have to rely on IMDB for confirmation. And, yes, this is the same character. A character that we have neither seen nor heard about for 18 weeks. Wow…and I thought Kate’s occupation was a deep cut.

There’s no problem with bringing Danny back, in theory. In fact, I should like this, because it’s evidence that somebody, at some point, paid some degree of attention to some fucking thing that’s happened in this show. But Danny was a complete non-entity the first time around. Of all possible characters, why bring him back?

What’s your favorite Danny Duckworth quote? Do you remember anything he said or did? I sure don’t, and I’ve written more about ALF than anyone else will for the remainder of time. So while I like the idea that a character has come back for another episode, I’m not sure Danny Duckworth is the one that deserves the honor. And since it’s been almost an entire season since we’ve seen or heard anything about him, why not just invent a new boyfriend at this point?

That latter question is a good one, I think…especially since “Promises, Promises” (working title “Sexual Predation Follies”) aired a few weeks after that, and centered on Lynn’s involvement with three different guys: Patchouli, Eddie, and Randy.

“Lynn is still dating Danny” isn’t such a terrible thing to tell the audience, but telling them that so long after she started dating him, with no indication that he still existed within the universe of the show, and after we’ve seen her date at least three guys other than him, you have to wonder why they bothered. It really should have been a brand-new boyfriend for all it matters to the episode, let alone to the audience.

Danny tells her that he can’t take her to the spring dance tomorrow, because he has a family reunion, which is the sort of thing only sitcom characters have to deal with spur of the moment. Lynn is devastated by the news that the guy she hasn’t heard from for four and a half months (not counting reruns) won’t be around tomorrow, either.

She’s clearly disappointed, and Elson’s acting here is not that bad. At the risk of sounding rude (something I hope NEVER HAPPENS IN THESE REVIEWS), I think she’s good here because she doesn’t have many actual lines. She doesn’t have to say sad things, she simply has to seem sad as she closes the door behind him…and she’s good at that. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think she’s much of an actress…but she definitely understands emotions, and when she gets to channel them, she’s not bad.

After she closes the door she sighs sadly. I actually like that part…but then, for some inexplicable reason, there’s a laugh from the audience.

And that’s just…odd. Normally I’d assume a joke was cut, but I’m watching the uncut episodes now so it’s not as though some careless syndication editor snipped a punchline and left the laughter. This is, I have to assume, exactly how the original episode aired.

Even stranger: ALF doesn’t have a studio audience, which means that somebody actively decided to paste laughter here.

There was no joke…she just closed the door and then started moping around on the verge of tears. Cue massive chuckle.

…what? Why would you trigger the laugh track for that? What the actual fuck was going through somebody’s mind?

Anyway who cares why we’re laughing at a young girl’s heartache because back in the kitchen ALF shrunk a sweater!!!!!!

Jesus Christ. Is every lousy sitcom required to do exactly this joke, with exactly this prop, at some point in its shitty life?

Lynn comes into the kitchen to repeat for us everything we just heard in the previous scene. It’s not a good sign when an episode can’t bring itself to get out of bed in the morning.

Willie asks if there’s anyone else she can take to the dance, because, let’s face it, Lynn, those pants have never been buttoned for long. ALF thinks he might be free, and says he’ll check his Week At-A-Glance.

But then he doesn’t move.

He just stares vacantly for a while as the fake audience yuks it up endlessly.

Did we really need to give ALF a glory hold for that? I didn’t even think it was a punchline…I figured he’d dig out a little book and read out some hilarious appointments or something.

I don’t know. I’ve given up on this show being funny…but is it too much to ask that it at least respects what a joke is?

Lynn and Willie talk briefly about how she’s feeling, and abandon it immediately when ALF starts talking about Melmacian courtship. Man, if that’s not the entire series in microcosm, I don’t know what is; some characters have to deal with something, but then have to ignore it completely because ALF’s started talking about life in St. Olaf.

They wait for ALF to finish his rudely interjected monologue, and then talk about whether or not Lynn and Danny are “going steady.”

There’s some confusion within the show about what qualifies as going steady, how you’d know, and so on…and I have to admit, I’ve always been pretty hazy on it too. I think the episode ends up defining it as something like “dating exclusively,” which makes sense, but that also seems a bit redundant. Maybe it’s just me, but if you’re dating someone, that’s supposed to be exclusive. If it’s not exclusive — and you’re just hanging out, having fun, having sex, or whatever — then you’re not dating that person. You’re just hanging out, having fun, having sex, or whatever.

But maybe I’m just misinterpreting the concept. I’ve always had a similar confusion about the phrase “hooking up,” and I can’t be alone because people use it to describe everything from something relatively small (making out) to something a bit larger (getting a joint punchcard at Planned Parenthood).

Phrases like these feel useless to me if they don’t actually mean something specific. If two people are using the same terms to mean different things, then I don’t know how those terms endure. Why do people keep using them? What’s the value in using them if they just create further confusion?

If you’re together, you’re together. If one of you cheats, then one of you cheated. It doesn’t matter if you were “going steady.” You were dating. If you want to run around with other people, don’t date.

Of course, the confusion behind this is at least somewhat factored into the episode; it’s not necessarily about the confusion, but it does acknowledge it, so basically I just want to complain about people having sex.

Later on we see Lynn tutoring Randy and…

Wait a minute. Randy is back, too? What the hell is this, a clip show?

So here’s one of the guys from “Promises, Promises” (working title: “Lynn’s Bucket of Wangs”). That makes at least three different episodes that are being directly referenced by this one out of the blue: “Promises, Promises,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” and “Changes.” What’s with the sudden surge of continuity? Again, I’m all for this in theory, but as we limp toward the end of season three are these things anyone in the audience is going to remember? Danny? Randy? Kate’s job?

I know I’ve complained about a complete lack of continuity before, but “Torn Between Two Lovers” shows that not all continuity is created equal. If we’re going to be bringing back characters, why not someone that people might actually care about? Lizard? Kate Sr.? Fucking hell, bring back Jodie and Dr. Dykstra. Whatever happened to those two? Did the show get finally wise to the fact that I was enjoying myself, and I got a big scoop of Randy instead?

Jesus Christ.

I will say, though, that I already like Randy more here than I liked him in “Promises, Promises.” There his only joke was that he’d almost invariably say “‘kay” when someone asked him a question. It was the kind of joke that wore out its welcome about two hours before it was introduced. Here he’s being tutored by Lynn, so he gets to struggle through vocabulary homework in a way that’s convincingly awkward. So awkward that it’s almost sad.

You get to feeling bad for poor Randy, because it’s his character’s job to seem like an idiot in a show packed wall to wall with the biggest fucking morons to ever walk the planet. As a result he doesn’t come across as comically dense so much as he seems to be mentally disabled.

Yes, ALF implicitly adds ridiculing the handicapped to its litany of dickitude it thinks we should find funny, but we’ll discuss that more in a bit.

Since he does get a little more to say — and he actually gets to interact with Lynn, as opposed to just sitting next to her — this definitely qualifies as the better of his two appearances. Of course, this being ALF, whose own audience is mentally disabled, the writers outright have Randy blurt, “I’m stupid!!”

You know. Just in case the only character trait he’s displayed in his entire time on screen wasn’t clue enough YOU IDIOTS.

Then Willie comes in, and Randy rises to greet him, which is a nicer character detail than this character deserves. I think that happened in “Promises, Promises,” too, but here it serves as a nice (albeit theoretical) contrast to Danny. We don’t know for a fact that Danny wouldn’t stand when Lynn’s father enters the room, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would think much of it. Randy’s a dolt, but he’s respectful and polite.

A better episode would make more of stuff like this. As it stands, I don’t even think it’s deliberate characterization. It’s accidental…which doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it does mean that “Torn Between Two Lovers” fails to address the most important things: the difference between the two lovers, and why Lynn would be torn.

What we need is more characterization of these two. Right now I have to infer that Danny would treat Willie differently than Randy treats him here, but if we had a scene of Danny and Willie interacting, we wouldn’t have to infer anything. We could more easily compare the two…recognize their differences…and put a little bit of stock in Lynn’s decision.

In “Torn Between Two Lovers,” Lynn does, in some sense, end up having to choose between Danny and Randy. Wouldn’t it be nice if you at home gave even half a shit about who she picked? And if we don’t care…why are we watching?

You know those terrible reality dating shows that all of your friends watch but you can’t stand? Those shows are still on the air — against all standards of good taste — because they do a good job of convincing the audience that a decision like this matters. It’s done through flashy editing and soundbites and a manipulative score; it’s a trick of making the packaging look so important that you lose sight of the fact that you have no reason to want what’s in it. Any such show that fails to make the decision feel important doesn’t last. (Or, more likely, doesn’t make it to air.) Which makes sense; if the show can’t bother to sustain the illusion that the romantic dabblings of total strangers are important enough to watch, then how could the audience?

“Torn Between Two Lovers,” in this respect, has an ace in the hole. Of course, it squanders it spectacularly.

See, in this case, none of the parties involved are total strangers. This episode shouldn’t have to work as hard to convince us that the decision is important, because we should already have some kind of feelings about these people. We should have already made some investment in them before this choice is even raised.

The problem, which I’m sure you smelled a mile off, is that this is ALF. While we may care to some extent about Lynn (the show’s last vestige of anything resembling humanity), we definitely don’t care or know about Danny or Randy.

We should know about them, because they were each important parts of their previous episodes…but what do we actually know? I’m tempted to conclude that Danny is the dickhole, but that’s only because my brain wants (desperately) to be able to shape this crap into some recognizable structure. And however charitable I am being toward the show by concluding that there’s some kind of contrast between the two characters, the episode’s ending doesn’t bear out that reading anyway.

“Torn Between Two Lovers” is giving us three characters who aren’t strangers, and tossing them into some romantic entanglement that should feels like it matters. But once the question is raised, we see clearly that they might as well be strangers. We’ve met them before, but that’s it; we don’t know anything about them.

Again, we should be dealing with two new suitors for Lynn, as both of these bozos were blank slates in their previous episodes anyway. The most disappointing thing is that “Torn Between Two Lovers” doesn’t develop them much further than that, even though the choice Lynn must make is central to the plot.

There’s some more accidental characterization of Randy that I like: he lapses back into saying “‘kay” when Willie asks him how he’s doing, and though I’m sure this is not deliberate, I like the idea that Randy finds it easier to open up to Lynn than to others. That’s kind of sweet, actually, and it’s the sort of thing I wish was deliberate…but the ending makes it clear that the writers had no fucking idea what this episode was about.

Willie tells Lynn that “Julie” called for her. And this is odd, because since when does Lynn have friends?

Yes, I’m exaggerating. In “Baby, You Can Drive My Car” she talked about some girl she was supposed to see The Pretenders with. And in “Changes” she mentioned a friend who was a cheerleader. That’s all I can remember, and we’ve never seen her interact with another girl around her own age. Only her mother, her grandmother, and Mrs. Ochmonek…which is really fucking strange.

Even terrible, terrible shows like Full House or Saved by the Bell showed their teenage characters having friends…many of whom we actually saw more than once. And do you know why that is? It’s because teenagers have friends.

Seriously.

All of them do.

Even the nerdiest kids find some kind of clique. NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW.

The point is that when you’re a teenager, you have some degree of a social life by default. If this girl* doesn’t, then we’re firmly in We Need to Talk About Lynn territory.

What kind of teenage girl on a sitcom never interacts with another girl her age? It’s so…odd. How are we almost four seasons into this shit and we still don’t know what she does with her downtime? (Apart from spending it with Willie’s rain gauge that she keeps in her closet.) It’s really odd…and it unflatteringly paints Lynn as a misfit. That’s some more accidental character development, I guess, but it’s not the welcome kind.

Randy discovers that Lynn isn’t going to the dance, and he says that he’s not going either…an observation he tries to spin into an invitation.

It’s the kind of thing even a naturally suave and charming young man would have trouble swinging, and Randy’s fumblings are convincingly awkward. In fact, I like this sequence a lot, because it feels like, deep down, this one-note character might be recognizably human after all.

Very deep down.

Very, very deep down…

It’s nice. And there’s a moment when Lynn hesitates to answer him…and Randy immediately backs down, defeated. It’s actually kind of painful to watch, because Randy plays it convincingly. We’ve all been there, bud. Exactly there. :(

Ultimately she agrees to go with him, and he’s so excited he walks away with the bowl of pretzels that was on the table. Then we get the episode’s best moment. (Who could have guessed that this honor would ever go to Randy?) He comes back to the door and hands her the pretzels. She thanks him. “They’re not from me,” he says.

And, I’m sorry, but as shitty as this episode is, that whole bit was very well-acted by sitcom standards.

She goes to the kitchen and tells ALF that she’s going to the dance with Randy. He replies that it’d better be a slow dance…which is a moderately clever joke but still comes off as incredibly mean. I don’t even like Randy and I want to kick this guy’s ass that.

The phone rings after Lynn leaves, and it’s Danny. ALF talks to him anyway, because fuck everything.

Danny says he’s free after all, but ALF tells him to keep it in his pants because Lynn has another date now.

Good thing this show has an alien in it. I certainly can’t imagine any of this magic happening on those lousy “all human” comedies.

ALF and Brian play Atari while Lynn gets ready. Can anyone make out what cartridge that is? I keep wanting to say it’s Demons to Diamonds, but I’m really just hoping someone else played Demons to Diamonds. (I loved Demons to Diamonds.)

Any guesses as to why the veins are bulging out of Benji Gregory’s hand and neck? Is he throttling that joystick like it’s Paul Fusco’s throat?

I know we joke about this kid not being a very good actor, but since the set of ALF was seething with hatred and idiotic tension I think we should all take a moment to appreciate the fact that he did not grow up to be a murmuring serial killer. I mean, I guess there’s still time for him to become one, but still. I wouldn’t have lasted this long.

Lynn comes into the living room to ask about her purse, and ALF says he hilariously destroyed it while doing laundry. The show cares even less about that particular development than I do, so we skip right along to ALF telling her that Danny called while she was in the shower.

She’s pissed because ALF told Danny that she was seeing Randy now, and she doesn’t know what to do. ALF suggests telling Randy that “your boyfriend’s back, and he’s gonna be in trouble. Hey na, hey na, your boyfriend’s back.”

Fuckin’ ALF has really taken a liking to reciting song lyrics and hoping they miraculously pass as jokes. “Suspicious Minds” has loads of Elvis ones, obviously. Then we got similar ones with “In the Year 2525” (in “Running Scared,” where it admittedly did miraculously pass as a joke) and “I Can See Clearly Now” (in “Standing in the Shadows of Love”).

It’s supremely lazy, and I’m still reeling from the shock that Jake didn’t quote “Sunglass at Night” in the last episode. Maybe such stellar non-material is only allowed to go to ALF.

Lynn says she can’t believe this situation, and ALF says, “I know what you mean. I can’t believe Bruce Willis is a star, but there it is.”

And that is a joke that sure hasn’t aged well. Disagree? Compare Willis’s career trajectory to Paul Fusco’s and let me know how much room ALF has to talk.

Someone comes to the door, but it’s not Randy! It’s Danny, and you know he means business because he dug out his spring dance bolo.

Danny knows exactly what he’s doing; he’s showing up unannounced to catch Randy with his woman. Well, a lot of people’s woman, but that’s not important right now.

I like the idea of having the episode build to a “showdown” between two characters…but, again, we’ve only seen them each once before, way back at the beginning of the season, in different episodes, and we’ve never heard a peep about either of them since. It…kind of loses the impact, don’t you think? I really do wish they’d have invented new characters for this. Maybe then they’d feel obligated to develop them somewhat, instead of just settling for this guy from this episode versus that guy from that episode.

Part of me wonders if this was intended to air right after “Promises, Promises.” Someone in the comments brought up the fact that the scheduling of certain episodes was shuffled around for availability reasons, so it’s possible that this was intended to air then.

…however, Kate’s working as a Realtor, so that can’t be the case; this would have to air sometime after “Changes,” which came several weeks later. By that point, why bring back these characters? And all of this is irrelevant since “Torn Between Two Lovers” has to also air after “Promises, Promises,” in which Lynn is fucking other guys anyway.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF ANY OF THIS

Whatever. It’s kind of interesting, I guess, that both Danny Duckworth episodes have to do with Lynn planning to go out with one person and ending up with another. But by “interesting” I mean “fuck it, even I don’t care.”

They argue for a bit, and Danny tells her to blow Randy [off]. Sure enough the doorbell rings, and it’s our favorite pretzel thief. He’s all snazzed up, and he hands Lynn a 2-liter bottle of soda because he wasn’t sure if she liked candy.

…that probably works better in text than it worked on the screen, to be honest, but I did like that joke.

Randy’s clearly the nicer guy in this scene. He’s civil to Danny who is rude in return, but, to be fair, it’s easier for Randy to be civil; Lynn’s not his girlfriend. He’s just some putz who lucked into getting her to go to a dance with him. Danny is angry, yes, but he has a reason to be, and Randy does not.

As I mentioned earlier, I’d think that this was a clumsy way of demonstrating to us that Randy’s the nicer guy overall, and the guy Lynn is actually “with” is a schmuck, but the episode doesn’t work out that way, so who knows what the fuck is going on. Maybe the writers didn’t realize he was coming off as nicer than Danny at all. They certainly don’t treat him the way one might treat a character we’re supposed to like, so who knows.

ALF listens in from the kitchen, because it’s his name on this show, god damnit. Brian asks him if Randy’s mad, and ALF says, “He doesn’t know yet. The information has entered his head, and is now searching desperately for his brain.”

There’s a lot of humor at Randy’s expense in this episode, all of it in this vein, and until now, as I’m writing this, I wasn’t sure why the jokes were playing so poorly.

After all, Randy can be dumb; that’s fine. Make a list of all the great comedy characters who were a bit thick and you’ll be up all night before you even have to scratch your head. So why do the Randy jokes feel so nasty?

Well, here’s why. It’s because Randy doesn’t get to be an idiot. Instead, we’re told he’s an idiot.

See, when a character does something stupid, it can be funny. (Obviously.) But when one character insults another for being stupid, apropos of nothing, it feels cruel. Indeed, it often is; we’re not often meant to enjoy that kind of behavior. We’re meant to see it for what it is: pretty damned dickish.

The better Randy jokes (the 2-liter soda here, the bowl of pretzels earlier) come from Randy getting to do something dumb. The worse Randy jokes (every time ALF opens his fuckin’ mouth) are characters repeatedly telling us what a worthless moron he is. What sounds funnier to you: someone accidentally doing something silly, or someone getting insults shouted at him because he’s less intelligent than the shouter?

We like stupid characters. We must, otherwise they wouldn’t be in every comedy ever made. But we want to laugh at their stupidity without feeling complicit in it. We laugh when they slip on banana peels because we find it humorous; we find it harder to laugh when some asshole steps up and chews them out at length for being stupid enough to have slipped on that banana peel.

We want to laugh at stupid characters…we don’t want to make fun of them. Why would we? That’s just…mean.

Some shows — Fawlty Towers comes immediately to mind — do play up the insult comedy. In Basil’s case, he did bully poor Manuel, who was trying his best. But Manuel wasn’t dumb; he may not have been the brightest bulb, but unquestionably most of his sillier behavior was due to communication issues beyond his control. When Basil insulted him it was funny because it functioned on another level: anything Manuel did wrong could be traced back to Basil. Basil, that is to say, was causing his own problems. Manuel was just trying to help…and was punished regularly for it.

It probably wouldn’t have been funny if Manuel had actually been an idiot. It certainly wouldn’t have been clever. It would have been easier to write, sure, but so what? Manuel getting yelled at for being shitty at his job isn’t comedy. Basil relentlessly scapegoating a day laborer is.

But there’s another reason these kinds of assholish comments from ALF don’t work: they muddy the water.

Clearly the show wants us to like ALF. That’s fine; we’ve been through why that’s insane many times over, but, by this point, we just need to accept it. ALF is supposed to be clever and charming, gorgeous, the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful Melmacian we’ve ever known in our lives.

Fine.

But in this scene, we’re also supposed to see Danny’s behavior as dickish. And it is; the show is correct. Danny is being an asshole to Randy, and we know that because Lynn — again, the closest thing to a human being ALF has anymore — calls him out for it.

Unfortunately, his dickish behavior is indistinguishable from ALF’s. We’re supposed to hate Danny because we’re supposed to hate Danny, and supposed to love ALF because we’re supposed to love ALF. What’s the difference between them, then? “Torn Between Two Lovers” tells us the answer, whether it means to or not: nothing.

The writers have painted themselves into a corner. They wanted us to fall in love with one character in spite of the fact that he’s raging asshole, so when it’s time to introduce a character we’re supposed to dislike for the same behavior, we’re in a tonal trainwreck. We’re meant to love one and hate the other for behaving in the exact same way.

If the writers cared, I bet they’d wish they’d given ALF a character trait other than “cunt.”

ALF and Brian watch from the kitchen, and Brian asks why they’re fighting over Lynn anyway, since she’s not all that hot. You see, Brian is quite discriminating in his incest fantasies.

Lynn comes in for a few seconds to get her thoughts together. Of course on this show that means that she sits quietly while ALF does an irrelevant comedy routine. This one is about “time-freezing phasers,” which Brian mentions they saw on Star Trek.

Now, I don’t know the first thing about Star Trek, so I had no idea whether or not time-freezing phasers existed. To find out, I turned to our resident expert, Sarah Portland:

No. There was an episode where time appeared to be frozen, but in that case, Kirk was just sped way up so everyone appeared to be frozen. Just to be extra-thorough, I skimmed through the synopses of TOS, TAS, the first five films, and the first two seasons of TNG. While there are certainly plenty of BS time travel plots in Star Trek, none of them involve phasers, which are self-defense weapons.

Not sure why I even asked. I should have known something was fishy when Brian was allowed to speak.

Anyway, Lynn stumbles upon a resolution to this non-plot that I actually kind of like: she realizes this whole mess is her fault. (I know, I know…but bear with me.)

She returns to the living room where she finds two forgettable nobodies from previous episodes circling each other with their fists raised, which is something no human beings have ever actually done. Lots of cartoon characters have, though, and I think that says it all.

She tells them that if they want to fight, they each only get one punch. Randy says that that’s all he needs, and so she invites him to hit her.

See, she’s the one who caused the problem, so if they really think it’s worth beating someone up, then she invites them to beat her up. Obviously they don’t, but I like that little twist. Lynn didn’t do anything knowingly wrong, and I think that’s important to take note of, but she did do the thing that set this whole mess into motion: she agreed to go to the dance with Randy. As friends, yes, but that was still the catalyst for this whole kerfuffle.

Her point is decently made. These two are fighting over nothing…but it’s a nothing that she herself created. Clearly neither of them are going to crack her in the jaw, and it makes them realize instead how stupid the whole thing is.

Granted, realizing how stupid the whole thing is is not the best way to end an episode of a sitcom, but I’ll take what I can get, and Lynn’s gesture at least shows that some thought was put into resolving this premise.

She decides to go with Randy, because he asked her and she accepted, and it wouldn’t be right to break it off. And she tells Danny that if they want to be more serious they can be more serious, and they can have a long talk about it.

Hey, remember the episode in which we met Danny? She had dived right into (almost) marrying some guy in a planetarium. Now she needs a ratified document outlining the terms and conditions of her relationships. Change of heart or what? I’d call it character growth, but I’m approximately fifteen zillion percent sure that nobody involved with the show even remembers that Lynn was almost married.

The really odd thing about this resolution, though, is that Randy really did seem like the better guy. He was nicer to her and her family. He was humble when he asked her out. He brought her gifts. All we saw of Danny was that he shipped out unexpectedly the night before the dance, then stormed into her house to kick the teeth out of the guy she tutored.

He was kind of an asshole…but that’s who she went with. The entire episode seems to be building toward Lynn making the decision to leave him because of the ass he revealed himself to be. Maybe she’d end up with Randy (idiot with a good heart isn’t the worst stock character to hitch your wagon to), or maybe she’d realize they’re both impulsive dickwads who just initiated a fucking brawl in her living room. But, either way, the episode seems to be built around the idea that Lynn is with a schmuck…

…until it isn’t, and it’s actually about expressing your feelings and making sure you know what going steady means, and still going to the dance with that poor guy who actually seems to care about you so that it hurts him twice as hard when you move on forever.

So I don’t really know what this episode was about. Randy seemed like the nicer guy (and the better match; Lynn herself isn’t getting into Mensa anytime soon), but ultimately she just goes to the dance with him out of obligation. Danny seemed like a dicktard, but she stays with him because…he’s hotter? I guess? Is he? I don’t even know if she thinks so.

Basically two people we’ve met once before but still know nothing about get into a fight that doesn’t matter and Lynn resolves the episode by saying that nothing has to change, even though she strung Randy along and her boyfriend revealed himself to be a violent, jealous assbag.

I hate this fucking show.

In the short scene before the credits Anne Schedeen returns from her vacation, visibly traumatized by being back on the set of ALF.

MELMAC FACTS: The three stages of courtship on Melmac: exchange left socks, trade belly button lint, spit in each other’s soup. (“Ours was a polite society” my dick.)

—–
* Of course, we’re assuming that Lynn is a teenager in this episode. She could be in her 20s for all we know. But the point is that she’s either in high school or college, and in either case she’d have to work to not make friends.

Someone on Twitter was excited to see me get around to reviewing “Superstition.” At first I couldn’t tell if that was because he loved it or hated it. In fact, I still don’t know. But I will say this much: I can understand completely why somebody would have fond memories of watching this one as a child.

I have no memory of it. By this point in the show’s life, I definitely wasn’t watching regularly. As a result, I’m pretty sure I missed out on this one. And though the episode is by no means a masterpiece, I’m perfectly happy to concede that missing it was my loss.

This is probably an episode I’d have liked a lot as a kid. Even as an adult, there’s a sense of grounded silliness that I really enjoy. It’s fun without being nonsensical. Imaginative without being insane. It’s a decent idea elevated by its execution…and how often do we get to say that while watching ALF?

“Superstition” starts off with ALF attempting to do something nice for the family for once. He’s cooking them a delicious meal of junebug scallopini. “Hence the crackling noise,” Kate says, in a line that’s by no means necessary — what with the fact that we can hear it ourselves — but is still somehow…kind of funny. I can’t really explain why; her comment doesn’t feel like it should enhance the joke in any way, but, somehow, it does.

So the family retches for a while before ALF reveals that that’s not all he’s cooking; he has Brian’s history textbook in the oven. Why? Because “Someone accidentally knocked it into his fishtank…Willie.”

Willie fires back that he did no such thing, and ALF says he knows that; he never said Willie did it. And it’s a really, truly funny moment. It got a real laugh at me, probably because it’s not actually a joke. It’s just this small little emphasis that ALF places on Willie’s name…and that’s that. There’s no punchline, and it doesn’t need one. It’s a joke of the performance, one that’s left to live or die on the capabilities of the actors, and I like that. It shows a level of respect this show doesn’t usually have for its talent or its audience.

Anyway, they open the oven and the textbook is not only dry, but it’s burnt to a crisp. ALF panics, because there’s a Melmacian superstition about destroying a history book. Set aside a few niggles — such as the fact that ALF should have kept a much closer eye on the baking book if destroying it was so bad, and the fact that he should know by now that HUMAN BEINGS DO NOT EAT BUGS — because, for once, they’re worth overlooking. “Superstition” might have the kind of plot that unravels the more you think about it, but it’s also one of those rare episodes in which it’s worth turning off your mind for a half hour and just enjoying the ride.

Of course, I won’t be doing that. Ahem.

Lynn asks ALF if the superstition is something like what humans say, about getting bad luck from opening umbrellas indoors. My heart goes out to Andrea Elson on this one. She tries hard…so hard…to pronounce “an umbrella indoors” without sounding like she needs a breathalyzer, but she can’t. And trying it myself, I can’t do much better. It’s an unexpectedly tricky phrase to get through without being exceptionally carefuly, and it’s not totally her fault that she trips over it.

ALF says it’s worse than bad umbrella luck, though. He says it’s “Bad luck like jilting a mafia princess.”

Kate says that superstitions are silly, right before ALF’s junebug scallopini catches fire. So…that was actually a pretty efficient way to kick off the episode. We set up the problem, ALF outlines — vaguely — the consequences he’s about to face, and then we have an illustration of those consequences coming to pass. Of course, the scallopini was also left unattended on the stove, which leaves open the idea that ALF’s bad luck could well be coincidental. That’s everything we need to know to enjoy the episode…and it was pretty funny, taboot.

But my favorite thing?

This Melmacian superstition makes sense.

Not, you know, logical sense…but cultural sense. With most Melmacian customs, the show just pulls out some cockamamie nonsense and hopes you find it funny. Sometimes, admittedly, it is…but it’s no less cockamamie for it. (The word of the day is “cockamamie.” Scream whenever you hear me say it!)

Here, though? I can understand it. After all, we have a saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Granted, that’s more of a maxim than a superstition, but it takes the same form: if you do this, that will happen. Broken down to its core components and taken literally, it’s not miles away from a superstition.

For Melmac’s version, it’s taken a step further. Instead of history as a concept, we have a symbol of history: the textbook. On Earth, if you don’t learn from history, you are doomed. On Melmac, if you destroy the thing meant to teach you history, you are doomed.

It’s a clever enough twist on an idea we know well, and I like that the episode doesn’t go so far with the connection that it takes the joy of discovering it away from us. It takes a familiar concept, alters it just enough to make it feel foreign, and leave it to us to bridge the gap.

It’s also a very welcome change when some aspect of Melmacian culture causes us to see own own traditions and assumptions in a new way. You know…something that any sci-fi book, movie, or TV show worth its salt does on a regular basis. Invented cultures and societies are great filters through which to view our own culture and society…it’s one of the things science fiction — even the lousy science fiction — is best known for. It’s how it earned its artistic credibility.

ALF, by contrast, usually resorts to its “On Soviet Melmac…” jokes for the sake of being silly, which is fine. I no longer expect it to make grand or impressive statements that go beyond inflicting bodily harm on Max Wright. But now, here, at last, we have some aspect of Melmacian culture that comments on Earth culture as well…

And…

Shit. I like this, guys.

After the credits Brian says, “My history book is history!” He is then loaded into a crate and removed from the set, the production crew secure in the knowledge that they’ve met his contractually-obligated appearance for the week.

ALF is convinced that the fire was due to his bad luck. After all, destroying a history book means “seven years of bad luck, followed by seven years of really bad luck.” The fact that he feels guilty about this — however silly the premise might be — is one of the best things about “Superstition.” After all, the fucker takes a powerdrill to Willie’s dick on a weekly basis, so it’s nice to see at least a little bit of remorse.

Later on we hear him fall down the attic stairs as Willie builds a crib for whomever’s kid is growing inside of Kate. ALF IS HAVING BAD LUCK.

Jake comes over and integrates himself deeply into the plot, so we can be truly baffled when he returns to his home planet in another few episodes. His role here is an important one; while Willie and Kate (and, in a more friendly way, Lynn) dismiss ALF’s concerns, Jake is willing to listen to him relay all of the shit he’s been going through since he triggered the curse. While I’m all for ignoring ALF, I’m even more for shutting him the fuck up, so this week I’m siding with Jake.

Jake poses the kind of question that makes no sense in real life, but plenty in sitcoms: can’t we stop it? And Willie, you dumb fuck, why didn’t you ask this in the first place? Yes, the superstition thing is clearly bullshit, but you’ve lived with ALF for three years at this point; bullshit is just another word for daily routine. Figure out what dumbass thing you need to do to end the episode, and jut fucking do it.

Jake’s question causes ALF to bring up the bibliocide ritual that they’d hold on Melmac to break the curse. Thank god Jake came over and asked that question, otherwise this might have been a two-parter. The ritual had to take place under the green light of a full moon, and the cursed textbook destroyer would “ask atonement” from a bunch of people wearing meat. Can you really “ask atonement?” I think you just atone for something; you either do it, or you don’t. You can ask forgiveness, of course, but that’s because forgiveness is external; it comes from somebody else. Blah, who cares. I’m listening to a dishrag talk about breaking curses on a fictional planet and I’m worrying about verb agreement.

Jake and ALF go into the kitchen, where there’s a big crash. I guess ALF’s bad luck resulted in something getting very unexpectedly rammed up his ass, because we hear him say to Jake, “Remove…it slowly.” This is an oddly saucy episode, considering it’s about a textbook getting ruined. Earlier we even had ALF say “gosh darned” in a way that was clearly meant to bring “God damned” to mind…something that ALF even comments upon. (“Ours was a polite society.”)

I’m not complaining (though the fewer times I have to imagine Jake pulling something slowly out of ALF’s anus the better), I just find it interesting that such a benign plot led to some more risque jokes.

Hearing the rectal shenanigans unfolding in his kitchen, Willie says the best line he’s had in ages: “Lynn, never have aliens.”

Later on, ALF locks himself inside of Brian’s sex crate. Willie and Lynn come in to find him all bandaged and bruised from the injuries he sustained while locking himself inside. He repeats the “gosh darned” joke from before, and it’s maybe the only time on this show that repeating a joke really does make it funnier, probably because it’s played differently the second time. Lynn cuts off his “Ours was a polite society” with a curt, “We know.” And like Kate’s line about the crackling junebugs earlier, I don’t know why this works…but it does. With “Superstition,” all of the individual parts are just working together…moving in tandem and not against each other. The episode works, in this case, not because any of the individual parts are better, but because they all seem to be working toward something.

ALF tells them that he intends to stay in the crate for 14 years, until the curse runs out, but Lynn tells him that they have an idea: if he does something that, by Earth custom, is meant to bring good luck, maybe he can cancel it out.

And…you know, all this talk about luck makes me wonder why we don’t get any jokes about Lucky. Where is Lucky? I remember that cat being a major part of the show, but I guess I was wrong; it feels like he’s hardly been around since the first few episodes. I wonder why I remember his name at all.

Anyway, ALF thinks that Lynn’s idea is far-fetched, so Willie reminds him that the alternative is 14 years in captivity. ALF concedes, “Maybe your idea is more nearly-fetched than I thought,” which is a pretty good line.

You know when I complain about stories in this show having nothing to do with the fact that ALF is an alien? This is what I’m always hoping for instead.

“Superstition” is a good example of how to take ideas that could have been done on any sitcom (somebody’s possession getting ruined, a silly superstition, a run of bad luck) and give it a show-specific twist. Again, ALF is a show about a fucking space alien; the twists should come frequently and easily. Instead the identity of the central character is nearly always irrelevant to what happens to him, because of him, and around him…and that’s frustrating.

The reason I hated “A Little Bit of Soap,” “Prime Time,” “Keepin’ the Faith,” and others like those wasn’t that they were built on lousy ideas…it’s that they were built on lousy ideas that could have been done anywhere else, on any other show, without any alteration. There’s a wall-to-wall blandness that makes even the rare good lines and moments feel immaterial; you’re not laughing so much as you are wondering why you’re watching a show that’s only intermittently any good, and which never seems to know what it’s about.

Here, this feels like an ALF plot. It’s not that we can’t imagine this happening to Uncle Jesse, or Balki, or Gilligan, or Marcia Brady…it’s that we can’t imagine this happening to them in this particular way.

The way “Superstition” pans out has has something to do with who ALF is, his background, his culture. It’s silly…but at least it’s his.

Anyway, to cancel out his bad luck, Lynn gives ALF some salt to throw over his shoulder. He throws the entire shaker and hits Dick in the willie.

Realizing that there are many more jokes to be made about negative superstitions than positive ones, Lynn brainlessly suggests that ALF do some traditionally unlucky things to cancel out his bad luck. Somehow that makes sense to her, but try as I might I can’t see any possible way that that’s meant to work. Maybe she’s just hoping that ALF’s bad luck will compound so severely that he will die and she’ll be able to go to college.

She tells him to break a mirror, which he does. Then Willie tells him to walk underneath a ladder, but he immediately steps on broken glass…and gets salt in the wound from the shaker he threw earlier. By ALF standards, that was pretty masterful buildup. By the standards of any other show, of course, it’s not even worth mentioning, since it’s little more than evidence that the writers remembered more than two lines back in their own script. But don’t take this away from us.

Then Willie goes to get him a bandage and falls down the stairs. And even by ALF standards, that was shit.

Later on Lynn is applying an ice pack to her father’s head, which reminds me of when he fell down in the kitchen in “Suspicious Minds” and she was the only one who came to help him. Man, she really is the only Tanner who gives half a shit about anyone other than herself, isn’t she?

Then Brian comes home, and we see that it’s pretty dark when he comes through the door, so what was this kid doing all night? Wandering the neighborhood unsupervised? I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about it; they do live in the famously safe L.A. But I do find it more than a little funny that his family is treating him the same way the writers do, shoving him out of sight and not caring at all what does or doesn’t happen to him.

Brian sees his father sprawled out on the couch and asks what happened. ALF replies, “WILLIE’S DEAD.”

It’s the funniest thing in the whole episode. Shit, it might be the funniest thing in the entire series. I’d gladly watch a half hour loop of ALF proclaiming Willie’s death. It’s probably be my new favorite episode.

ALF explains that the curse can spread to others, and he’s convinced that that’s what’s happening. Then the TV explodes and Willie makes some funny faces.

After the commercial break, Jake fixes the TV. It was just a short in the plug, but I’m impressed both by Jake’s electronic acumen and his ability to retain a consistent character trait. Seriously, with all of the hobbies and passions of Willie’s that have been introduced over the past three years, how many of them have we heard about more than once? The ham radio, I guess, so that’s one out of sixty-eight. You’d think that due to the sheer number of hobbies this asshole keeps accumulating the writers would have at least accidentally tripped over the same one a few times, but no.

Jake, on the other hand, was introduced to us as having a preternatural knack for fixing things and, sure enough, he still does. This means that he somehow managed to remain the same character from one episode to another, which isn’t an easy feat in this show, and also that he’d make a great addition to your team the next time you play Maniac Mansion.

When the TV is fixed, ALF turns on some kind of call-in psychiatry program. There’s a good line when Jake asks if they guy is any good, and ALF replies, “He’s on channel 129. You be the judge.”

Very interesting to me is the fact that this joke has aged well. Back when “Superstition” aired, there were far fewer channels than we have now…yet that line, unchanged, would still work today. You’d think that when the number of channels has inflated so substantially, we’d have to do some adjusting in our minds for the joke to make sense…but we don’t. As written, it’s just as funny now as it was then.

I don’t think it’s a matter of foresight so much as it is a matter of the fact that for all of the new channels, most of it still is crap, and no matter what your tastes in television you’d have a hard time filling 129 channels with anything worth watching. Whatever the reason, I find it interesting that a punchline so specific holds up well today. Especially on a show where most of the punchlines weren’t any good to begin with.

ALF calls in to what looks like David Cross hosting the pre-taped call-in show. It’s actually something called Video Couch, which is coincidentally the name of the most boring porn site I ever signed up for.

The guy who plays the TV shrink is named David Wohl. I looked him up and he’s definitely been in loads of things I’ve seen, but always as some guest character, and never as anybody I can remember. But what’s really interesting to me is his performance. He plays this character with a kind of subtle weariness that we definitely don’t often see in this live-action cartoon show.

I almost wonder if he had any idea what ALF was; he’s obviously acting on his own, without the…ahem…benefit of working directly with master thespians Paul Fusco, Max Wright, or Benji Gregory, which means he is solely responsible for setting the tone of his scene. And…I like his tone. He doesn’t choose to play this character as either a sitcom psychiatrist (“Very eeeeeenteresting, Mr. Shumway. And, zell me, how long haff you been haffing these dreams of your mutter?”) or as the exaggerated local-access jackass we’ve seen on this show before (“Take a Look at Me Now”). He’s just…a guy. A guy who doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about his job of helping his callers, but who is doing it anyway and is at least more interested in giving them advice than cracking wise and running around the studio with his pants around his ankles.

The Video Couch sequence isn’t particularly clever — it’s just a way to get an outside character to tell ALF that it’s okay if he wants to do his phony baloney whatever-the-fuck ceremony nobody will remember next week — but it’s welcome, because it feels we get to a couple of minutes in another show entirely…one that still isn’t very good, but one that at least isn’t beating us over the head with shitty jokes and grating performances.

David Wohl doesn’t make me laugh here, but if I had the choice between spending the rest of the episode smoking cigarettes in silence with him or returning to the ALF set to see how that mess pans out, there would be no choice at all.

This brief detour into less obnoxious television ends with one of the studio lights crashing down and almost killing David Wohl so that there will be no danger of someone acting like a human being in this show again. It’s not much of a punchline, especially since it undercuts the possibility (which should be probability) that ALF isn’t really cursed. Yes, bad things are happening to him and around him, but we should definitely have the option of seeing it as a little bit of coincidence and a lot of confirmation bias; ALF expects bad things to happen, and convinces others that bad things will happen, so that when the “bad luck” manifests, that’s what the characters latch onto. Instead ALF is supernaturally able to transmit bad juju through the phone lines and affect the lighting rig of some local access shrink we’ll never see again? Fuck that.

Willie comes into the living room with a rag wrapped around his hand. Jake asks what happened, and Willie tells him that he cut himself while swabbing out his crack pipe. This causes ALF to raise again the importance of doing the atonement ritual, but Willie, desperately sucking residue from his fingers, tells him to fuck off.

In order to aid his cause, ALF outright threatens the safety of Willie’s unborn baby. After all, does Willie think his kid can survive 14 years of this bullshit? Man, I’m sure glad that ALF now considers inflicting grievous bodily harm upon a toddler to be an acceptable method of resolving plots. I predict wonderful things for this show once the baby is born.

Willie agrees to do the ritual, but ALF reminds them that it needs to be performed under green moonlight, so they’re fucked. ALF, you cunt, why did you just threaten Willie’s stammering, nearsighted fetus if your dumbass plan wouldn’t work anyway?

Jake resolves the green moonlight issue by suggesting they all wear green sunglasses under regular moonlight. This raises an interesting question, actually; if the color of light is important to the ritual…whose light?

Wearing tinted glasses doesn’t actually change the color of the light, does it? Well, sure it does. Kind of.

For the person wearing it, it does. And since “color” itself is dependent upon perception, what of the colorblind? Or the blind? If filtering the perception of one is a valid solution, are those who can’t perceive green at all unable to participate in the ceremony? And what if one set of sunglasses actually makes the light look more bluish than green, or…?

Blah whatever who am I kidding. It’s all just an excuse to get the cast looking even sillier.

I do like a few things about this scene, actually. Specifically, I love that Willie left his meat in its packaging. That’s a perfect little character detail that I buy completely. (Of course, if he could get away with that, why in fuck’s name wouldn’t everyone follow his lead? Surely the warm trickle of salmonella down their shorts can’t be that welcome.) Even better, though: the side-effect of the Oscar Mayer cold cuts resembling military epaulettes. That takes a funny character detail and turns it into an additional visual joke. That’s very welcome, and remarkably clever for this show.

There’s also a fun line when Jake, with steaks hanging down his chest, asks Lynn how he looks. She replies, “A-1.”

…fuck you. I liked it.

ALF then tells everyone at the ceremony to pour gravy into their hair. They complain, and he calms them down by explaining that that part is optional; he was just trying to make it fun.

“Superstition” does a pretty great job of walking the fine line between stupid and clever.

Then ALF does something pretty new and innovative for this show: he remembers Brian.

Oh yeah, that kid! The one whose textbook kicked off this whole mess. How could we forget?

Well, pretty easily actually.

After ALF asks in the voice of Paul Fusco where the hell that kid is, when he says on the set at six o’ clock he means on the set at six o’clock, Brian stumbles into view and asks his mother, “Is my hot dog on straight?” So if you’ve been wondering where that massively popular catch-phrase, now you know. Say it the next time you walk into a room and you’ll be the life of the party!

ALF dicks around like a dicking dick instead of performing the ceremony. Mr. Ochmonek then does what he could have done at any point during the past three seasons, but these fuckholes never worried about: he comes into the back yard while they’re all doing stupid alien shit.

The tableau he encounters is pretty funny, though, I admit. Even if Lynn looks like she just inhaled a bumble bee.

ALF hides under the table. Mr. Ochmonek asks Jake why he’s wearing his sunglasses at night, and I can feel the restraint of the writers when he doesn’t reply, “So I can, so I can.”

Honestly, how they managed to avoid not making that joke, I’ll never know. Not that they make any other joke in its place…Jake just says he wants to wear them. Ha ha?

They tell Mr. Ochmonek that they’re having a barbeque, and are thawing their meats with body heat. It’s pretty fucking dumb, but it leads to maybe the best Willie / Mr. O exchange ever. Willie says, “Trevor…haven’t you ever wanted to let your hair down and slap on a flank-steak?” Mr. O pauses, then concedes, “I’ve always thought about it.”

It’s funny…and it’s a moment well-handled by both actors, but since most of their exchanges take the form of Mr. Ochmonek buying the Tanners gifts while Willie punches him repeatedly in the testicles, calling it the “best ever” feels a massive understatement.

Mr. Ochmonek leaves and the family tries to get ALF to perform the fucking ceremony already. Instead he makes them do the Hokey Pokey until Willie is on the verge of shredding him with his bare hands in a red haze of crack withdrawal.

At last, ALF reads from the sacred text. “Sorry about the book,” he says.

And it’s over.

It’s funny…it really is…but there’s more to the scene than the punchline.

The fact that that’s it…that all of the buildup and ceremony was for that…is legitimately funny, and the frustration of Max Wright and Anne Schedeen is felt very clearly here. Notice I don’t say Willie and Kate. No…I think it runs a little deeper than that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the actors are channeling their real world frustrations in this scene. After all, the 20-odd-hour recording time for an episode of ALF must have a pretty similar high-effort / low-payoff ratio for them as this ceremony had for Willie and Kate. Deliberate comment on the inner workings of the show or not, this scene allows them to react to exactly that imbalance. It allows them to vent — or at least to display — the frustrations that they feel when ALF — like ALF — takes so long to accomplish so little. And when it’s over, there’s not even a sense of satisfaction. So little was accomplished that all they can do is go home and wait for the next disaster.

Am I reading into this? Almost certainly. “I’m Your Puppet” showed that the series isn’t totally averse to meta-commentary, but that doesn’t mean “Superstition” wants to accomplish the same thing. But whether or not the script had meta-commentary in mind, Wright and Schedeen almost certainly did. The frustration and seething anger on display here is the best acting we’ve gotten from either of them in quite a while. In short, they’re channeling something…that much is clear. And if I had to bet on what it was, I’d feel pretty comfortable doing so.

Mr. Ochmonek comes back…not to join in the barbeque but to take their picture.

Why? His wife is out, and she’ll never believe this horse shit unless he has a photo to prove it.

I fucking love you, Mr. Ochmonek.

Then he leaves and so does the family, abandoning ALF alone in the yard while he loudly sings the Hokey Pokey to himself. Since Mr. Ochmonek already dropped by twice, unannounced, within the past three minutes, the Tanners must be getting pretty comfortable with the idea that somebody could find and murder their alien. Pretty…pretty comfortable.

The episode ends with a short melody that combines the ALF theme with the Hokey Pokey, and, jesus, just the fact that I’m typing an observation like that makes me wish I had the guts to kill myself.

In the short scene before the credits ALF dumps a shitload of potato chips on Jake.

This episode wasn’t great, but it was definitely good. In fact, it’s probably one of the most solid episodes yet. Its quality wasn’t sky-high…but it was even. For the purposes of comparison, think of something like “Alone Again, Naturally.” That episode, I’d argue, had higher highs, but it also had far lower lows. “Superstition” hits (and holds) a level above competency but below greatness. Its sturdiness, however, and the fact that it sits so comfortably at that level, is an achievement in itself.

It was a nice, sustained riff on a clever idea. And while it could have been done much better, it deserves a pat on the back for not sliding back into laziness and stupidity.

I don’t know if this will scratch my list of best episodes, which I’m going to do at some point to remind everyone that I’m not a totally miserable bastard, but it wouldn’t miss out by much.

“Superstition” does a few things very well, and that’s nice, but its biggest achievement is the fact that it does almost nothing poorly. It’s one of those rare episodes of ALF that takes full advantage of its possibilities, and makes effective use of every scene.

I liked this one. It wasn’t great, but I liked it anyway. In fact, talk to me again at the end of this project, and I have a feeling it will have grown on me.

Of course, I’m sure everything from the first three seasons will look better once Jim J. Bullock joins the cast.

Gosh darnit, ALF.

MELMAC FACTS: On Melmac it was bad luck to destroy a history book. They were “a polite society.” Melmacian culture valued books highly. The society’s motto was “Are You Going to Finish That Sandwich?” The curse of destroying a history book can be broken through a “bibliocide ritual,” which I already talked about above and don’t want to type out again. Melmac’s moon was green under certain atmospheric conditions, or when someone threw up on it, and the planet’s High Priest also worked as a butcher. All Melmacian rituals required the wearing of meat, unless they took place on a Friday in which case the participants wore fish. At weddings the preacher would say, “You’re hitched. Go for it, babe.”

If last week’s episode (quality notwithstanding) was a story that needed to be told, this week’s is easily, unquestionably, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a story that should never have even been conceived.

This is a show about a space alien, remember. I’d forgive you for forgetting, because the writers so often do as well. I don’t expect (or want) thrilling space battles every week, but since the central premise of the show is “an alien lives with some humans” it’s a source of bottomless frustration that nearly every episode is indistinguishable from the countless shows in which a human lives with some humans.

There are a lot of places you can take an alien sitcom. Infinite, I’d argue. The fact that you’re inventing an emissary from your own fictional alien civilization — with its own customs and mores and history and culture and physiology and everything else — means that you have, more or less, a blank canvas. You’ll have to earn your decisions, and they still need to be filtered through a kind of Earth-logic so that the viewing experience makes sense, but that’s it. The number of chains that ground your story are very few. You can make your show distinct from anything else on television in almost any way imaginable.

But this show doesn’t have imagination. It takes a unique concept and goes out of its way to make it bland. The show that should by default be the most interesting thing on television tries embarrassingly hard to look and feel like everything else. Anything that should have made ALF special is sidelined in favor of bland homogeneity. The inherent promise of the show is treated by the writing room as something to be avoided. The question is almost never, “What can we do next?” It’s, “What have other shows already done?”

Which is why we end up with episodes about ALF rigging TV ratings, writing for soap operas, buying cars, angering bookies, befriending immigrants, getting the hiccups, acting as an A.A. sponsor, tagging along on dates, selling makeup, and so on. Admittedly, we also end up with episodes about ALF fighting giant spaceroaches and searching for his alien cousin…but make a list of ALF‘s standard sitcom plots and compare it to a list of ALF‘s concept-specific plots and tell me which one is much (much, much) longer.

All of this is a long-winded, roundabout way of saying that we have a literal universe of possibility and potential here, so little of which has been explored…and we get an episode about ALF helping Mr. Ochkonek’s nephew get laid.

It opens with Jake sitting around, thinking about other things while ALF does whatever the fuck he’s doing, and I think that’s the most relateable way I’ve ever seen anyone spend time with ALF.

They’re ostensibly playing board games, and I expected some kind of joke about why there are several games on the table for only two people (there’s Monopoly closest to ALF, and Trouble closest to the camera, well as whatever the hell that long blue thing is in the middle), but they don’t. There could have been a cut gag here, but we never get an explanation for why it seems like there are multiple games in progress. Or maybe it was just the props department giving the middle finger to the rest of the production crew.

Also, you can’t see it in the angle above, but each of them has their own jar of peanut butter. I feel like I’m describing a boring dream about a hypothetical episode, but I promise that this episode really does open with ALF and Jake eating jars of peanut butter while playing multiple games and not speaking to each other.

It turns out that Jake is daydreaming about some hottie from his school named Laura. He asks ALF if he’s told him about her eyes, and ALF says, “Yeah, they’re on springs and they bounce out of her head!!!” The fake audience erupts in appreciation of this non-sequitur. It was neither a joke nor a setup to one nor the punchline to one. I mean, I know he’s referring to those gag glasses or whatever…but what’s supposed to be funny about this? That ALF said something after being asked a question? Fucking hell, ALF.

Then…the intro credits start. That was fast. It’s never a good sign when the episode is in as much of a hurry to get to the end as I am.

After the credits Kate walks by, so ALF repeats for her everything we just heard, rightly convinced that his audience has the attention span and IQ of a goldfish. It does lead to a good line, though, when he says, “Kate, you’re good at unsolicited advice. Tell Jake what to do.” It nearly balances out the gag that comes late in the episode when ALF believes, for some fucking reason, that Willie is trying to whore his wife out to him.

the problem is that Jake’s too nervous to talk to Laura. Remembering that she’s in a sitcom, Kate suggests that he practice on her. He says no thanks, though; he’d rather not work up a boner for some disgusting old hag.

Hilarious!

She leaves and ALF tells him that when he was wooing Rhonda (which, as we all know, ended very well…what with their entire planet being destroyed and ALF deciding he’d rather hang around some grade school kids than ever see her again) he would write her letters from a secret admirer. Remembering that he’s in a sitcom, Jake agrees to let ALF write letters to Laura on his behalf.

You might think it’s icky enough that this hundreds-of-years-old galactic pedo would be writing love letters to a teenage girl…and you’re right! But it gets better, dear reader.

Sadly, disgustingly, stomach-churningly better.

ALF is composing some verse in the shed, which seemed odd to me since he now has the whole attic to himself if he wants privacy. But this setting actually turned out to be a well-chosen one, for a reason I’d never, ever have expected.

There is a pretty good moment when ALF keeps asking Willie for synonyms for the word “beautiful,” with ALF ending up flustered that none of them rhyme with “oh, baby.”

Willie asks why ALF is writing poetry, secure in the knowledge that ALF has very good reasons for everything he does, and nothing wacky will be revealed at all.

ALF explains that Jake is in love, which gets Willie Willie all giddy and excited for reasons I don’t understand. Maybe if it was Brian I could see him getting emotionally invested, but since when does he care about the love life of the nephew of his hated neighbors?

It’s odd, but if you think about “Fight Back,” there was another (very) brief moment that suggested, just barely, a kind of kinship between Willie and Jake. It seemed, almost, like there could be a relationship between these two, in which they each serve as kind of surrogate family members to each other, since they have difficulty connecting to their actual families.

At that time, I figured it was just some unintentional subtext that, in better hands, could have been explored very interestingly. But now we have a second suggested connection between Willie and Jake…something that reaches a little deeper than the kind of “relationship” that would normally exist between some distant, doddering idiot and his teenage neighbor.

Knowing what we know about “Monday scripts” (the idea, cited by several folks involved with the production of ALF, that the scripts would be in good shape on Monday, but be hollowed out and crippled by the time of shooting with all of the best lines being either removed or reassigned to ALF), it’s fully possible that there was supposed to be some kind of relationship between Willie and Jake. Moments like this — in which his enthusiasm and interest is otherwise inexplicable — and the one in “Fight Back” — in which he commiserated with the boy over having to sit through the Ochmoneks’ vacation slides — have me willing to believe that that was the case. These are vestigial echoes of character building that were excised because neither character involved was ALF. Somewhere, in a parallel universe in which Paul Fusco’s ego ate up less volume than an elephant orgy, there would unquestionably have been a better version of ALF. And moments like this give me the frustrated feeling that it might have even been worth watching.

Someone mentioned in a comment a few weeks ago that the kid who played Jake had some scheduling issues this season, and while I have no idea what did or did not change as a result of those conflicts, it’s pretty clear that the Jake stuff is back-loaded. In the entire first half of the season, I think we only saw him in “Turkey in the Straw.” I even remember thinking it was odd that they bothered to introduce the kid in the middle of season two if they’d lose interest in him entirely by the beginning of season three.

But the back half of this season looks to be very Jake-heavy. He played a central role in “Fight Back.” ALF moved in with him in “Baby Love.” This particular episode is essentially about him. In a later episode we meet his mother. (Both of these episodes also have “Standing in the Shadows” in the title, which I’d love to believe is thematic resonance but is obviously just laziness.) Thanks to a screengrab somebody sent me on Twitter I know he plays a part in “Superstition.” And in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” he helps Brian overcome his fear of heights or bees or the dark or dying alone…one of those things. And those are just the episodes I know of.

It’s bizarre to me that they wouldn’t have wanted to spread these episodes out a bit, so that it didn’t feel like we were shifting between versions of the show in which Jake is an important, central character and in which he doesn’t exist at all.

Willie says that ALF’s scheme reminds him of Cyrano de Bergerac, a French play about a romantic with an enormous nose who helps a less eloquent man to court the woman he loves and also makes a lot of shitty jokes about his home planet.

He actually spends a long time talking about the plot, but that’s okay as I’d be willing to bet that most people watching a dumbass prime-time puppet show aren’t huge theater buffs. And, to be totally honest, I’ve never read Cyrano de Bergerac myself; I know of it entirely through references and adaptations. One of the ones that stands out most clearly to me (and probably the one I saw first) was Roxanne, which starred Steve Martin. And, come to think of it, that came out just a couple of years before this episode aired…so I suppose Cyrano de Bergerac wasn’t entirely removed from the public consciousness after all.

Then something truly magical happens: Willie climbs up to a bookcase that I forgot was even part of this set.

You win, “Standing in the Shadows of Love.” The fact that you remembered this was here, and wrote it into your story is pretty damned cool. I was impressed when “Night Train” remembered Willie’s train set…but this even more impressive. The train set was a centerpiece of the garage (at least early on), and we had a scene of ALF interacting with it. It was more (even if not much more) than set dressing. In this case, however, I don’t think that bookcase has even been referred to in the past. The only time I ever remember taking note of it was when my eyes started wandering during the music video ALF made to support his single, “(Willie) I’mma Fuck Yo Daughter.”

So, yes, once again ALF managed to take some background detail that’s been there all along and weave it into somebody’s characterization. I’ll take it. But, once again, it makes me wonder why Willie was bored out of his mind by Jimbo talking about Mark Twain in “Hide Away.”

At that time I was skeptical that Willie would be completely disinterested in literature, and now we get conclusive proof, just a few episodes later, that that was indeed bullshit, and he was just being a nasty cunt.

Willie finds his copy of Cyrano de Bergerac and brings it to ALF, who turns it over in his hands a few times and then sets it down.

That’s a well-observed moment, actually, whether it’s intentional or not. In fact, I’m sure it’s not, but book nerds know all too well the heartache of excitedly handing someone a book, only to have them not even bother to open it.

It actually reminds me of a moment in Kubrick’s Lolita that I didn’t bring up in my piece. When visiting his step-daughter in the hospital, Humbert brings her several books, despite the fact that Lolita is very clearly not the bookish young lady he wishes she was. It’s a drily funny moment, as he brings her reading materials that she’d obviously have no interest in, such as a book about the romantic poets written by a colleague of his, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then, he offers a concession: “Here’s something you might like. The History of Dancing.” It’s a perfect moment of subtle comedy; he knows she likes dancing, so in his begrudging effort to meet her halfway, he brings her a history text guaranteed to sap all enjoyment from the subject.

Fuck. There I go, talking about books and movies again. Why do I keep forgetting that I was born into this world to summarize ALF?

Later on Lynn freezes in an awkward position as ALF at first seems to be reading from Cyrano de Bergerac, but ends up talking about “four lips, slobbering like a dog on raw beef.” Hey, look! Now you’re frozen in that exact position, too.

Then he calls himself Cyrano de Melmac because of course he fucking does.

Jake comes over and says the letter was great, and Laura loved it, especially the parts in which ALF described “the vanilla ice cream of her skin under the hot fudge of her hair.” BRB, updating my eHarmony icebreaker…

Now that we’re spending so much time with Jake, I have to say…I don’t hate him.

The character, yes, there are issues, but that’s no surprise. The actor, however? By ALF standards, and especially in comparison to the other youngsters in the cast, he’s downright revelatory.

I don’t know why I never bothered to look him up before, but he’s played by a kid named Josh Blake. Which…is one hell of a coincidence, as his character’s name seems like a contraction of his given name.

J’ake isn’t in any danger of becoming the best character on the show, but when you compare his performance to Lynn’s, you’ll see that Blake doesn’t strain in the same way that Elson often does. Acting comes more easily to him…whether it’s great or not is certainly open to debate, but whatever his level of competency is, he’s able to hit it without his effort showing. (And compared to Benji Gregory, this kid’s fucking Sean Connery.)

In looking him up, it doesn’t seem like he’s had much of a career since ALF, exactly…but he did go on to make appearances in much better shows, like Married…With Children, The Wonder Years, Home Improvement, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. (He also apparently voiced a character in Psychonauts, for you gamers out there.) Considering that ALF was career suicide for literally everyone else involved with the show, Josh Blake deserves some kind of medal just for limping out alive.

Most interestingly, though? (To me that is…) He played Sylvio in the “Greek Week” episode of Full House. Big deal, right? Well…right. But, for whatever reason, that’s one of the guest roles on that show that I remember best. Sylvio was Jesse’s distant cousin, or something, and when he came to visit he fell in love with DJ, and walked her around the kitchen table which meant they were married in some bullshit sitcommy way.

Believe me, I’m not mentioning this because I think it’s wonderful…it’s just bringing back a lot of memories. I’m genuinely shocked that that was the same kid. It’s a small world, I guess.

Okay, enough of that shit. Laura liked the letter, and told everyone how wet it got her, so J’ake thinks that the next step is to reveal his identity.

ALF, remembering he’s in a sitcom, says no; Jake should give her five letters a day for the next five days instead.

No idea why, really…if she already loves this horse-shit letter from a centuries-old space rapist, I wouldn’t press my luck. Make hay while the sun shines, Jake!

Then we get…oh yes…a montage.

Or ALF‘s understanding of a montage, which is a few minutes of nothing happening while royalty-free library music plays.

I know that people make fun of montages (and, for the most part, with good reason), but they really can serve an important purpose. After all, whether you have a half hour, an hour, an hour and a half, or any other length of time to tell your story, there are times that the story is simply bigger. There’s some amount of your tale that you can effectively tell, and some amount that you will necessarily have to skip over. It’s why even Rocky so famously had a montage; condensing moments of incremental progress is going to stir in the audience a feeling of inspiration, whereas laboriously documenting an entire training regimen would instead be wearying. Even if you end on the same moment of triumph, there isn’t the same sense of momentum.

Dramas like Breaking Bad use montages to advance the plot (or to skip around the meth-making process in order to avoid imitation…ahem…), and deployed artfully they can serve as fond series highlights rather than cheats of narrative convenience. Comedies like Futurama use montages to emphasize visual gags and provide another approach to the humor.

Done well, at the very least, montages feel like variations. They tweak a familiar formula, and present important information in a way that it’s not normally presented. They’re fun. They’re interesting. Even when they’re lazy — which they often are, or seem to be — they can be fun and interesting. It’s a way of elevating material that needs elevating.

Unless you’re ALF, in which case montages are an excuse to get away with not having to write dialogue. Nothing is even advanced in them. In fact, the other montage that comes to mind in this show is from “The Gambler,” and in both cases they’re just a series of scenes of ALF sitting on a fucking chair.

Of course, the montage in “Standing in the Shadows of Love” is well worth it for the hilarious sight gags, which include ALF eating a flower, and later on sneezing.

I promise you, dear reader, no show is padded more gracelessly or unapologetically than ALF.

So yeah, ALF wrote a shit-ton of letters and Laura fingered herself silly. Montage over.

Jake comes into the shed and says there’s a problem; he decided to talk to Laura after all, and he sounded like an idiot. Now he’s worried that when he reveals himself to be the admirer, she won’t believe him.

ALF brainstorms various ways to resolve the plot, and mentions having to worry about the Alien Task Force, so that we will know that the show isn’t accidentally treating us like idiots when he ultimately decides to stroll around the neighborhood with Jake, find Laura’s house, and shout a whole lot of bullshit at her from the yard.

Outside Laura’s house, ALF does his typically stellar job of avoiding detecting by going apeshit on a metal garbage can.

I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t think this episode about ALF helping helping Mr. Ochmonek’s nephew get laid is quite creepy enough.

Granted, I don’t know exactly how to fix that, but…

Oh, cool. Laura came to the window and ALF started gushing about how fuckworthy she is. That’ll do just fine.

It’s Carla Gugino, who, thanks to this appearance in ALF, has officially been in everything.

And you know what? Good on you, kid who played Jake. Not many girls grow up to look like Carla Gugino. Way to get in on the ground floor.

Anyway, she’s at the window shouting back and forth with these idiots, which is a really clever way of penciling in the backstory that her parents are hearing-impaired morons.

ALF feeds Jake things to say, and his fawning teenage fan thinks he’s hilarious. Jesus Christ, did we just get a frightening glimpse into Paul Fusco’s fantasies?

Before long she simply must ask who her admirer is. And I don’t think that was a joke, but I found it pretty funny. Jake’s got a pretty easily identifiable voice, after all. Does every kid in her school speak with a cartoon Bronx accent?

Anyway, ALF pops an irresistible boner over this teenage girl, so he pushes Jake aside and attempts to court her himself.

So, you know.

Just want to make that clear.

For all my joking about how skeevy ALF’s behavior sometimes is, and how seemingly inappropriate his interactions with the kids are, I need to make it known that now, right now, at this point, ALF is actively attempting to fuck a 15-year-old girl.

Let that sink in.

Or…actually, yeah, don’t. Just do what the rest of the world does and pretend this horse shit show never existed. Christ fuckmighty.

She says she’s coming down, and Jake convinces ALF not to grind against the little girl he’s been sending anonymous lovenotes to and stalking for the past week. Well, not so much “convinces” as “tells ALF her dad’s a cop and he will go to prison if he so much as lays a finger in her.”

It’s a lovely little episode, really. Just wholesome family comedy.

ALF hides in the rosebush. Jake introduces himself as her secret admirer and walks her back inside. Carla Gugino develops her lifelong taste for Brooklyn calzone.

Later on, or the next day, or who gives a shit, the episode recreates that famous scene in Cyrano de Bergerac in which Willie digs thorns out of ALF’s anus.

It’s nice to see Willie bending him over the living room couch for practical reasons at last, but it’s still fucking gross to watch. ALF even braces himself as Willie fondles one out that’s pretty deep.

Willie and Kate start to lecture ALF about not going outside, but they back down when they realize he’s sad he’ll never see Rhonda again.

You know, it’s nice that they care about how he feels and all, but if he ends up stuffed and mounted in the Edwards AFB giftshop it won’t matter what’s in his heart, so they should probably chain him to the radiator first, and worry about his feelings for his ex-girlfriend second a distant second.

He mopes for a while about how he’ll never see Rhonda again, and…you know what? For maybe the first time ever, ALF has wrenched a plot away from another character for a perfectly good reason. This is a great time to explore his own doomed romance, how it makes him feel, and how he deals with knowing it’s gone forever.

At least, it would be, but the whole thing is pretty significantly undercut by the fact that we just saw him nursing a raging hard-on for a fifteen-year-old girl he just met.

In the shed ALF is sad because he’s only ever able to have sex with the Tanners’ laundry. Willie remembers that this episode had something to do with Cyrano de Bergerac, so he tells ALF that there’s a big difference between them: for all his poetry, Cyrano was unable to tell anyone how he actually felt, whereas ALF never shuts the fuck up.

ALF waddles away to go hang himself, but Willie, lacking foresight, stops him.

He tells ALF that he rigged up his ham radio to the satellite dish using a complicated process known as my fucking ass. Then he pointed the dish at Andromeda, which is really easy to do and you should try it at home.

Why Andromeda, though? Well, way back in the seventh episode of this show, we found out that that’s where Skip and Rhonda (the only other confirmed survivors of the Melmapocalypse) were heading.

Yeah, I’m as surprised as you are that they dug up this old chestnut. I didn’t even remember this offhand, and I know more about ALF than I do about my parents. I actually had to refer back to my review of “Help Me, Rhonda” to be sure they weren’t just inventing some bullshit for the sake of wrapping up the episode.

Willie did this impossible nonsense garbage so that ALF would be able to communicate with Rhonda in Andromeda. Which is pretty impressive, considering ham can radios barely hold a signal if it’s being broadcast from across the street. Anyway, now ALF can transmit his words of love to his lost flame. Or accidentally tune in when it’s nighttime there and hear her getting reamed by Skip.

Anyway, ALF talks into the microphone for a while about how fine Rhonda’s big hairy ass is, then he quotes the first few lines of “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash, just to prove by contrast how much more clever the “In the Year 2525” reference from the last episode was.

That one was at least a joke. Seriously, this one just gets shat here.

Admittedly he does say the word “popsicles” instead of “obstacles,” but even Willie can’t be arsed to acknowledge that shit. The episode ends with ALF calling Willie a dumb piece of shit for not realizing that Andromeda is kind of far away and Rhonda will be long dead by the time anything they say will make it there.

Another classic in the can, folks!

In the short scene before the credits a bunch of disconnected shit happens. ALF reads the paper over Willie’s shoulder, for instance, and Brian comes in with a dog whistle.

Hey, everyone, it’s Brian!

Remember?

That kid you didn’t even notice wasn’t in this episode yet? Yeah, we sure missed him.

It’s actually pretty funny to me that I didn’t notice until this moment that he was absent for the entire show. I’d notice Lynn or Kate missing for sure…but Brian? It doesn’t even register.

Jake comes over to tell ALF that if he still wants to baste Laura’s turkey, she’s all his. He says that he hates her laugh, and also the handjob under the afghan was passable at best. Then they all blow the whistle, which at first causes ALF great pain, but then brings him to writhing, sexual ecstasy before our eyes.

…and now another classic is in the can.

And I still can’t believe I just watched an episode in which ALF tries to fuck Carla Gugino. Maybe that fever of mine hasn’t lifted after all.

MELMAC FACTS: ALF is a size husky in snout warmers. In the Melmacian numbering system, pepoon is the number that comes after ten. That’s a reference to Steve Peppoon, writer for ALF, The Simpsons, and Get a Life. (I wonder what he’s most proud of?) Melmacian Express Mail took 73 years to get to its destination. Melmacians can hear dog whistles.

First off, apologies in advance for any typos; I’m writing this with a pretty high fever. I thought about skipping a week until I felt better, but since you guys put up with my self-indulgent smarty-pants rambling about Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita, the least I can do in return is make fun of a puppet show for you.

In all seriousness, I had originally considered Fiction into Film to be the replacement series (at least for a while) after the ALF reviews ended. That may still happen, but you’ll get a few of them ahead of that time, since it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while and I finally have time to read again.

The end of this series is slowly creeping in on us, so while I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do next (I’m open to suggestions, by the boo), I will let you know how things are looking as we wind down.

For starters, “Running Scared” means that we’re down to the final 10 episodes of season 3. After that, obviously, I’ll do season 4. Then I’ll likely take a detour back to season one, with a few articles that will look at the major (and/or interesting) things cut from the syndicated versions of the episodes that I watched for these reviews.

Also, my DVD set apparently has an early, unaired version of the pilot that I’ll probably review for the purposes of comparing and contrasting. I say “apparently” because I can’t read German and I’m not sure where on the discs to look in order to find it…but if I have it, I’m reviewing it.

Then, if there’s any interest at all, I’ll host a live-stream of Project: ALF ahead of reviewing that. I figure that’ll make for a nice, communal way to celebrate the end of the series. And it’ll also prevent me from being the Only Person Ever Who Intentionally Watched Project: ALF.

So, there’s your peek into the future. As for the present? Well, we have “Running Scared,” which starts off great…and then ends somewhere else entirely.

I’ve found that I’ve said some variation of “This episode starts out very well…” a huge number of times. That either means that we should be happy that ALF so often hits the ground running, or frustrated that it so infrequently makes good on its own promise.

“Running Scared,” I will say right now, is immensely frustrating, because it feels like it’s a rewrite or two away from being a great episode. I’ve said things like that before, too, but here’s the reason “Running Scared” stands out as being especially frustrating: this is a story the show needed to tell.

We open with an unexpected, quiet pan over the living room, where we see that all of the furniture has been moved and towels are tossed all over the floor. Willie walks in from the kitchen in some galoshes, throws more towels down at his feet, and asks ALF to explain, again, please, what happened.

This is very, very good. See, ALF flooded the living room because he intended to freeze the water and create a skating rink. Maybe you find that funny on its own; I don’t have strong feelings either way. But what I love about it is the fact that we don’t see any of that. The cameras switch on not for the wacky antics, but for the aftermath.

In the first episode of this season (“Stop in the Name of Love”) the highlight was probably the scene in which we see Willie pulling banana peels out of the coffee maker. As I observed at the time, it’s funny because of the idea of ALF cramming them in there in the first place. Had we seen him doing it, it wouldn’t work; there’s nothing inherently funny about someone gumming up Willie’s percolater. Give us the germ of an idea (bananas + coffee maker), however, and the odds are high that we’ll visualize something funny on our own.

That’s what happens here, and it works, but it’s not all that happens here. When ALF replies to Willie, the way in which he delivers his lines compounds the joke very well. He suddenly becomes a little kid who is tired of having to apologize yet again for the same stupid thing he did, but knows he has to because somebody else is in charge, and he’s in deep shit.

It’s great. Giving us this episode’s “bananas in the coffee maker” equivalent would have been enough, but an ALF who is both irritated and apologetic provides an additional layer of comedy. I like it.

Max Wright, I’d love to report, is on point in this scene, but he’s really not. He’s okay, but we’ve seen him much better than this. His repeated calls for ALF to tell him, again, why the living fuck he did this are funny, but they’re funny because they’re funny in theory, rather than because he makes them funny.

Usually the problem with the cast is that they don’t know how to take sub-par material and make it funny. This time, sadly, the material is good and the acting doesn’t rise to it.

Before long Willie storms out of the house to buy a pump, and once he leaves the phone rings. It’s somebody asking forebodingly for Gordon Shumway, and, man, the Tanners really should have forbidden their secret space alien from placing and receiving phone calls, but they never did, because ba hoobie derby dee.

It’s some guy who says that he knows Shumway is an alien, and if he isn’t paid $3,000 by Friday, he’s going to turn ALF in to the authorities.

It’s creepy and all, yeah, but he’s obviously mistaken. Why does he think ALF is an alien? Hasn’t he been watching the show? I have, and I haven’t seen any evidence that he behaves in any more “alien” a way than any of the other characters. Weird. Huge continuity error here.

But seriously…yeah, this episode has my attention.

For all the bullshit ALF gets up to in the backyard, on top of the house, and sometimes all around Los Angeles…and in spite of there being neighborhood watches and nosy neighbors and a general idiotic carelessness on the part of all those who are cursed with the name Tanner, ALF has never really gotten himself into trouble. This is overdue. Since the first episode of season one we’ve been reminded of the fact that ALF can never, under any circumstances, get caught…while simultaneously watching both he and the family engage in moronic activities that should guarantee immediate capture. It’s about time ALF had to face a consequence like this. It is, as I’ve mentioned already, a story that needs to be told.

Sometimes, such as in “Alone Again Naturally” or “Someone to Watch Over Me,” he gets himself into a bind, but it’s never for long. Willie or someone is always there, within arm’s length of the situation, to quickly bail him out using shitty sitcom magic. There are no stakes, and aside from the odd cliffhanger deferring disappointment until the following week, no real sense of danger.

Not until now, at least.

For 66 consecutive episodes, this show has alternately ignored and dismantled its own premise. And all of that — without exaggeration, all of that — could be redeemed with just one episode that makes good on the promise. Placing ALF in real danger of exposure, as a result of his own / the family’s own carelessness, could redeem everything we’ve seen.

“I know this show seems stupid,” it would say, “but trust us. We know it, and we’re addressing it right now.”

It’s the show acknowledging the fact that these pieces have always been here, and taking the time, at last, to fit them together.

In short, I love this premise. “Running Scared” has me from this very first scene; it’s already funny, and it’s already interesting. Its central conflict is specific to the nature and situation of the main character, specific to the premise of the show, specific to the danger ALF is in with the Alien Task Force, and specific to the world we live in…after all, the guy on the phone hasn’t turned ALF in; he’s just shaking him down for some money. And why not? That’s the most identifiably human thing I’ve seen on this show in ages.

Granted, Mashy Magoo the Thanksgiving Hobo had the same idea, but he fell in love with ALF’s…whatever ALF has, before the Alien Task Force arrived. The idea of somebody finding a space alien and immediately thinking to profit from it is a believable one…and this time, the person with dollar signs in his eyes is going to see it through.

It’s good. Visually, too, the episode is keen to push its boundaries. We’ve only had two scenes so far (the slow living room pan and the extreme closeup on the blackmailer’s jaw) and they’ve both been uniquely shot. This isn’t standard sitcom stuff. As much as “ALF’s Special Christmas” wanted to convince me from the start that it was a Very Important Installment, “Running Scared” actually has me believing it. It’s showing me respect, it’s rewarding me for watching, and it’s hoping I come along for the ride; it isn’t dragging me along by the nostrils.

ALF even comments on the fact that Willie always pulls him out of a jam, acknowledging the shortcoming that’s robbed so many other episodes of their tension…but Willie’s not there. ALF looks around and sees the mess he made (WINK WINK), and realizes that he might not get the help he needs now.

Guys…I know we’ve only just made it to the intro credits, but this has the potential to be a really great episode. Surely it won’t let me down.

Surely!

Right, guys?

…?

The next morning Willie and Kate stumble into the living room. They talk about how ALF came into their room last night and apologized for everything he’s done wrong since he arrived three years ago…in alphabetical order. Obviously that’s something else that’s funnier to hear about than to actually witness firsthand, and, again, I like that. By ALF standards, this episode is showing remarkable restraint, and it’s better for it.

The most interesting thing about this scene is the reveal that ALF still hasn’t told the family. He’s convinced, apparently, that this will be the last straw, so in spite of ALF being in significantly more danger than he’s ever been before, it’s also the one time he can’t ask for help. Instead, he’s apologizing for all the other shit he’s pulled since he moved in, and that’s smart from a writing standpoint. It also echoes “Working My Way Back to You,” which was one of this series’ most pleasant surprises. So far “Running Scared” is a good episode channeling an even better one. I’m happy.

Then “Running Scared” gets a real laugh out of me, but I can’t really articulate why; all that happens is that Mr. Ochmonek shouts, “Hey, Tanners!” as he approaches the house. That’s happened at least a dozen times before, but something about it strikes me as funny this time. Maybe I’m just excited because the episode is already pretty good, so my favorite character showing up feels, for once, like a cherry on top rather than a reprieve.

He brings them a sign that was in their yard, which says that their house is for sale for $4,000. (ALF later explains, in a pretty good joke, that he tacked on the extra thousand because he felt the Tanners should get something out of it.)

Mr. Ochmonek was never portayed as the brightest bulb, but the fact that he really believes the Tanners would sell their home for four grand seems much too stupid for him, so I choose to believe that he’s just joking when he says he’ll buy it. Willie declines, and Mr. Ochmonek says he’ll pay $4,100, and Willie can have his lawnmower back…but that’s his final offer. Too stupid or not, that’s a good line.

Kate explains that someone must have made that sign as a prank. And, wow; how did it take these assholes so long to come up with that as an explanation for ALF’s nonsense? Seriously, it’s a good excuse, and not one that you need to explain any further. Kids are always doing idiotic, sometimes inexplicable, things just to be dicks.

Usually when ALF does some dumbass thing that they need to explain, they end up inventing some kind of explanation that is clearly a lie and just makes them look stupider. (This also, it’s worth noting, used to lead to some good Willie moments as he floundered on the spot, but the show put a stop to that as soon as it realized that it was actually being funny.)

So, yeah, when forced to provide an explanation for ALF’s antics, shrugging and saying, “I dunno, I guess some neighborhood kids did it” sure is the smarter approach.

In the kitchen ALF records an audio diary: “Captain’s Log: Stardate 2525. Man, I’m still alive.” Set aside the idiotic idea that ALF is hiding something from the Tanners by loudly recording himself talking about it in the next room, because the line is a really well-integrated music reference. (“In the Year 2525” by Zager and Evans, if you didn’t know…it’s a monumentally shitty song, but Futurama had some great fun with a parody version.)

It’s also more clever than nearly any of ALF’s other pop culture references; as he’s an alien, it really might be stardate 2525 to him. We have no idea, and the joke might be the coincidence of the song’s lyric mirroring his own situation rather than the simple flash of recognition upon which similar gags in this show often intend to coast.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, “Running Scared” is just building itself up to let us down.

Willie and Kate come in and see aluminum cans everywhere. Kate asks him what the fuck he’s doing drinking all that soda. He replies, “Currently, I’m recycling cans. In a short while, I’ll be recycling soda.” It’s…pretty funny actually.

For shit’s sake, “Running Scared,” stop tricking me into thinking you’re going to be good.

They confront him about the recycling and the FOR SALE sign, and he tries to dodge the issue of why he’s raising money by saying, “you never know when you’re going to have to pay off some extortionist.” Then he tries to cover it with a phony laugh, which Kate, as the only Tanner not to have suffered severe brain damage at some indeterminate point in the past, sees through.

Lynn comes in and says good morning, and Kate says, “Oh, no, not so far.” Schedeen’s delivery of the line is stellar.

ALF, cornered, has no choice but to explain himself. And, in a nice subversion, the family doesn’t believe him. They think he invented the blackmail story in order to hide whatever it is he really wants money for, with Willie taking care to use air quotes when referring to ALF’s “extortionist.”

It’s a nice way of evolving the story. Instead of ALF continuing to hide the problem, or the family learning about it here and taking some kind of action (either of which, admittedly, could still have made for a great episode), we get something even better. The family does learn about it, but thinks ALF just found a new way to be a pain in their asses…and ALF does break down and reach out to them for help, only to find himself rebuffed.

We get to see multiple consequences pan out, in other words. ALF keeping schtum or the family rallying around him would each lead to their own kinds of stories, but fairly predictable ones. Instead ALF blabs and the family fails to rally, which helps “Running Scared” to feel like it’s actually jumped the rails. It’s no longer a safe and secure sitcom formula; some threat to the show’s homeostasis was introduced, and the chance to address it has been fumbled. ALF had only one way out of this mess, but he wasn’t able to reach for it. Then he was forced into reaching for it…and it slipped out of his grasp.

ALF, in a word, is fucked.

He tells the Tanners that the blackmailer said he’d call back with further instructions on making the payment, and that the guy called him a pinhead. It’s an exposition dump that isn’t that funny, but he also reveals to Brian that he stole all the money out of his piggy bank, and Benji’s bitchface finally gets some proper context.

Later on, ALF is waiting by the phone with Kettle Chips. I’m not sure if this qualifies as product placement, especially since we can’t see the label this time around, but in “We Are Family” we could pretty clearly see that that’s what he was eating in the tub. Since name-brand products are usually relabeled in this show, I wonder.

Also, they’re really fucking good if you’ve never had them. Even if the subliminal suggestion here is that they taste an awful lot like delicious cat meat.

Anyway, the phone rings, and he lets the answering machine get it. Pretty boring sentence, I know, but it’s actually one of the best ALF moments ever.

The recording says, “Hi, this is Gordon Shumway. I’m dead right now. Please leave your name, address, and extortion demands at the beep, and I’ll get back to you probably never. As I said, I’m dead.”

Funny writing, solid delivery, perfect use of the awkward phrasings and pauses of outgoing messages.

It’s just Willie calling though. He’s calling from work to say he’ll be late, and do cut to him in a non-descript office, but nobody else is there and nothing’s going on. So all of those secretaries and bosses and colleagues that we’ve seen in various other episodes weren’t worth inviting back on the show. In fact, empty space around Willie is a perfectly acceptable substitute for all of them, which provides some telling insight into ALF‘s approach to characterization.

He tells ALF to change the message to something less insane, and ALF does, using the new message to tell people to stop terrorizing him, and to wait for the beep.

It’s a good scene over all, even if the second answering machine gag isn’t as strong (or as unexpected) as the first, but what’s mainly interesting to me is that the blackmailer doesn’t call back with instructions like he said he would.

I’m genuinely curious as to why…and I’m not saying that because I’m playing coy or anything. I’ve seen the episode. I know what happens. I know how all this shit plays out. And I still have no idea why the blackmailer says he’ll call ALF back the next morning and then doesn’t.

ALF lives in the attic so fuck that bullshit last week when Kate read The Berenstain Bears to him in the laundry basket whatever who fucking cares fuck

Lynn comes up because she saw his light was still on, and she finds him hovering in fear around the window.

She believes his story, or is at least willing to indulge him, whereas the rest of the family won’t. It’s a sweet moment, and my favorite incarnation of Lynn. One we haven’t seen in ages, actually. For quite a while in season two, Lynn served as ALF’s sobering voice of reason. She took the time to talk with him when nobody else would, and, as a result, formed a bond with him that felt almost human. It was, while it lasted, the most reliably satisfying relationship in the show, and seeing it resurface here reminds me of how much I miss it.

“Running Scared” doesn’t manage to live up to its own premise, but even if I hated it I’d have to give it credit for revisiting a lot of the things I like best about this show.

She calms him down by saying that the guy said he’d call back, and he didn’t. At no point does she completely buy into his story, but she at least believes that he’s not lying to the family. He is scared; that much is obvious to her. It’s just a question of how much she believes or doesn’t believe in the specific conclusions he drew.

Something’s up, but the nature of that something isn’t what’s important to her right now. Her friend needs her, and that’s what she reacts to, even though she doesn’t (and can’t) have all the facts.

Andrea Elson is by no means the best actress, which is why scenes like this give me the sense that she’s a genuinely warm and caring human being. These moments come naturally to her. She doesn’t struggle with her lines the way she usually does. She doesn’t sound confused or robotic; she doesn’t flub her timing or work visibly hard to remember what she’s supposed to say next. Acting, in other words, doesn’t come naturally to her, whereas warmth does.

Even a screengrab gets it across. Look at the picture above and compare it to almost any other time you see her on this show. She’s at ease here because she’s able to channel something she understands: an innate, hopeful goodness.

She leaves him for the night, and as soon as she’s gone the phone rings, because of course it does. It’s the blackmailer again, saying that the Tanners are fucked if ALF doesn’t pay him the money. Then he laughs and hangs up.

ALF makes some joke to nobody. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going. And so do I!!” Which I’m positive isn’t funny, but I’m in pain just trying to work out what he or the writers thought it meant.

What’s really odd though isn’t the fact that he called ALF so much later than he promised to, but that he also promised to give him payment instructions…and he didn’t.

So what exactly was his plan here?

It’s more than just a slightly illogical stumble…it’s the precise, sad moment at which you realize “Running Scared” doesn’t actually know what it’s doing.

At…some time of night on…some day, somebody pounds on the door and Willie and Kate go to answer it. It’s a trio of slumming character actors representing Immigration Services. They’ve received a tip that Willie is harboring an illegal alien.

And that was a twist I didn’t see coming. And it’s a great one. I’m surprised the show took this long to come around to the space alien/illegal alien joke, but the fact that it did take so long makes it legitimately unexpected when it finally does happen. And I like the fact that this isn’t the punchline of the episode; we didn’t build to a pun…instead the pun served as an evolution of the plot. And, in a way, the conflict.

I like this. I really, truly, genuinely do.

I want to make that very clear before we tumble into the trench of bullshit before us.

Ready? Here goes…

See, I’m admittedly fuzzy on the timeline, but as near as I can tell, here’s what’s happened: the blackmailer calls ALF, and says he wants $3,000 otherwise he’ll turn him in. He says that he will call back the next morning with instructions, but he doesn’t. Instead he calls that night, scares ALF all over again, and hangs up. Now he’s turned him in.

But…why? You need to give your extortionee the time — or at least the ability — to pay you, otherwise you don’t stand to extort anything. It’s weird, and it casts a shadow of confusion over everything we’ve seen so far. And it’s not one that episode ever clears up, even when the full extent of the scheme is revealed. (Spoiler: it’s not really full at all.)

The immigration guys come in to search the house, but Willie demands to see a warrant. His whimpering when they immediately show him one is his lone bright spot in the episode.

I’m wondering, though, why the standard immigration officers travel in trios, when the Alien Task Force has been shown to operate in pairs at the most. Aren’t space aliens more dangerous? At least potentially? Sure, they might all be fat little fartbags like ALF, but the Alien Task Force doesn’t know that. (If they did know that, they wouldn’t have a reason to operate.)

The point is that whatever alien life exists or doesn’t exist, the Alien Task Force is hunting down a very unknown adversary…so why does it operate like an even more routine organization than Immigration Services in Southern California?

Willie stomps around the living room screaming that THEY ARE LOOKING FOR A HUMAN ILLEGAL ALIEN, to remind you that you’re watching a really fucking terrible show, even though this episode might have tricked you briefly into believing otherwise.

The main immigration guy asks Kate if they have a basement or an attic. She says they do have an attic, but they just fumigated it.

Of course, as we learned in “Isn’t it Romantic?” they also have a basement, which is (some fucking how, for some fucking reason) where all of the furniture from the motel they stayed at during their honeymoon is kept. But Kate doesn’t mention a basement, because the writers don’t remember that episode, and for the first time I envy them.

Kate offers the man a fan if he needs to check the attic, but he tells her that that won’t be necessary. Then he calls to his two colleagues: “He’s in the attic.”

It would be a great moment if it weren’t punctuated by Willie writhing around like somebody just jammed a thumbtack into his spine.

The immigration guys go up to the attic, and while they’re gone the Tanners find a note from ALF. It’s a goodbye note, his fifty-eight by my count. In his letter he explains that he’d rather be turned into creamed chip beef than have the Tanners go to prison on his behalf. Of course, the exact opposite was the case in “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” but the writers don’t remember that episode, and for the second time I envy them.

The note also says that he took the car, and he promises to leave it on Highway 71, “just outside” Edwards Air Force Base.

One, maybe I’ve asked this before, but who in shit’s name taught ALF to drive? He’s not allowed to leave the house; when would he ever need to know how to operate a motor vehicle? Ugh, who fucking cares.

Two, Edwards Air Force Base is a real place. It’s around two hours from the center of LA by car, so, geographically, that checks out. However I wasn’t able to find a Highway 71 that ran anywhere near it. That could just be me, and I admittedly didn’t drill exhaustively through maps of the region, but if there isn’t really a Highway 71 near there, I’ll be pretty disappointed. After all, they went through the trouble of giving us an identifiable real-world location to cling to, but made up a supporting detail that could have just as easily been gotten right.

There’s a reason I’m digressing into a discussion of Edwards Air Force Base, and it’s not because I’m a picky fuckball. (I totally am, tho.) When Brian asks why ALF is heading that way, Lynn explains to him that that’s where the Alien Task Force is.

So hot damn…we have some more information about this idiotic organization. Here, again, is confirmation that they don’t operate in secret, as a teenage girl knows exactly where to find them. Bums know how to reach them by phone. Rewards for tips that lead to the capture of an alien are offered publicly. Oh, and if they see a crashed UFO on your roof they’ll ask if they can come in, but if you say no they’ll have to leave. So yeah, the Alien Task Force operates openly…which again raises the question of how that could be possible in a world that shuns and ridicules people who believe in aliens. (Poor Mrs. Ochmonek was driven insane by this very fact in “Take a Look at Me Now,” and I was in turn driven insane by having to review it.)

But, whatever, we’ve been through that before. The real meat here is the fact that the Alien Task Force is a one-location thing. They don’t have offices all over the country; there’s a singular, fixed address. What luck that ALF crash landed a couple of hours away from them and not, say, in Portland, Maine. They’d really be fucked, then.

Seriously, if you’re only going to patrol one city looking for aliens, you might as well not even bother. I wasn’t able to find the total number of cities in the world (for understandable reasons) but estimates peg it at around 3,000. So even if you knew that an alien would land in a city, there’s a 1 in 3000 chance that it’ll be the same city you chose to patrol. Of course, we don’t know that an alien won’t land in, say, a town. Or a village. Or a desert, or a forest, or the ocean. On top of that, we aren’t even sure aliens exist, so my completely reliable math says that even if the Alien Task Force operated with a 100% coverage rate of its chosen city, their chances of finding so much as a strand of ALF’s pubic hair are about six hundred thousand zillion to one.

So, yeah, your tax dollars at work.

Fucking Alien Task Force. You want to kill ALF! Why aren’t you the coolest thing in this show?!

Then we see ALF on his way to Edwards AFB. I wish he was listening to some music, though, because instead we have to sit through him amusing himself (he’s certainly not amusing us) with a series of monologues about what he might say to the Alien Task Force. If you think they’re anything but padded bullshit, you’ve not been watching ALF.

Then we go back to the Tanners, and, man, there’s really no winning with this dumbass show, is there? Cutting from the Tanners to the alien sucks, and cutting away from the alien and back to the Tanners again sucks. There’s really nowhere this show can go. Maybe if they cut away to Jake masturbating at his Knotty Peek machine I’d at least give them points for variety.

The main immigration guy explains to Willie how he found out they have an (illegal) alien: a name turned up on a mailing list, and their computers flagged it when it wasn’t tied to a social security number.

Now, I like about 25% of that, which is a pretty good amount for this show. ALF does indeed subscribe to magazines, and he orders all kinds of shit through the mail, so I’m happy that that’s how he was spotted. But I also know that the lack of a social security number thing is bunk. No computers anywhere are tracking that, and certainly no flags would go off if a social security number couldn’t be scraped up.

How many John Browns exist in the country? Are computers working ’round the clock to make sure that each of their subscriptions to TV Guide are linked to the correct social security number? Computers won’t be sorting through them to see who does and doesn’t have a social security number, and confirm that each is linked correctly to the right identity. And also, why would any publisher or mail order company do this on behalf of Immigration Services? I don’t think Fingerhut gives a shit who is buying their junk, and it certainly wouldn’t be cost-effective to perform rigorous background checks on every customer even if they did.

Additionally I get enough junk mail made out to Phlippi J Reed that I’m pretty sure they don’t try to deport people on the received end of clerical errors.

Willie, the fucking idiot, doesn’t ask whose name was on a mailing list…he instead asks who ratted them out, which is moronic even by the moronic standards of ALF & The Fuckass Morons, and acts essentially as a confession that he is indeed harboring an illegal alien.

But the main immigration guy ignores this obvious confirmation and instead calls him a pinhead, which conclusively proves to Willie that he’s the blackmailer. That rings massively false to me, because I refuse to believe that Willie is called a pinhead by any less than 90% of the population he regularly interacts with.

He apologizes to the immigration guy, but says he’ll have to ask him and Darryl and Darryl to leave, which is a reference to Newhart. Man, was this show dying to get Bob Newhart to guest star or something? Thank Christ Bob never sunk anywhere near that low. Can you imagine him playing second banana to fucking ALF?

Thank God we were spared the episode in which ALF becomes a telephone psychic while Bob Newhart plays the guy who stands quietly to the side while the puppet gets all the jokes.

Mr. Ochmonek comes over to find out what all the commotion was. Yes, in the middle of the night Mr. Ochmonek gets up and heads over to check on the Tanners, who regularly wish illness and death upon him, just to make sure they’re alright. Remind me again who the bad neighbors are.

Willie explains it was immigration, and Mr. Ochmonek offers to help. He says his cousin’s a lawyer. “Call this number,” he says, handing Willie a card, “and ask for inmate 24601.” I love you, John LaMotta. I don’t know why you’re even in this shitty ass shitshow for shits, but I’m so glad you are. So, yes, that was a legitimately funny line, but at its core he’s offering a family favor to Willie the moment he finds out he’s in trouble. Remind me, again, who the bad neighbors are.

They ask Mr. Ochmonek if they can borrow his car, and he asks, “Again?” This could have been a callback to “Fight Back” a few weeks ago, but instead they’re referring to a time off-camera that somebody had filled Willie’s gas tank with malted milkballs. So, of course, but he loans them the car yet again, without any kind of explanation of what they need it for or when they’ll be back. Remind me…again…who the bad neighbors are.

Willie and Kate grab his keys and leave without so much as a thank you, and the scene ends with Mr. Ochmonek standing in their open doorway, so I guess he’s also about to babysit their kids.

REMIND ME AGAIN WHO THE BAD NEIGHBORS ARE

Then ALF is in a barn.

Hey, why not.

He’s hollering about needing to use the phone because he ran out of gas, trying to get someone’s attention.

Normally I’d complain about this behavior, but since he’s on his way to turn himself in anyway, I guess it makes sense that he wouldn’t feel the need to be as cautious. Then again, if this fucking monstrosity knocked on a door in rural America in the middle of the night, the odds of him being shot to death on the spot are 100%. He’s even got on a red hoodie…and, no joke, Willie finds him because he leaves a trail of candy wrappers. I can’t confirm for sure that they were Skittles.

Willie stumbles in and finds ALF. Thanks to the candy wrappers I’m not concerned with how he found him, but I call bullshit on the fact that he was somehow only 40 seconds behind the alien who left hours earlier.

They talk for a while and Willie says that instead of running off, ALF should have come to them. ALF reminds him that he did, and they didn’t believe he was in trouble. So, yeah, they’re all assholes.

Then a farmer comes in and ALF hides. Willie picks up a pitchfork to stab this elderly man to death in the middle of the night, like the truly stellar social worker he definitely is.

After they decide not to engage in a rural California pitchforking to the death, Willie tells the man that he ran out of gas, and the farmer offers to give him some for $20. It’s actually funnier than it sounds, but not enough to warrant me typing this shit out.

When the farmer leaves ALF and Willie discuss how to get the cars home, then ALF says goodbye to the cow and tells it to watch its cholesterol.

That was the punchline of the entire episode. “Running Scared,” everyone.

This is where we end up after the blackmail plot, the great Lynn scene, and the alien/alien confusion?

God dammit. This is what I get for getting my hopes up. ALF giving life advice to a cow.

In the short scene before the credits Willie announces to us all that the main immigration guy is in deep shit for shaking down illegal immigrants. Evidently he’s been blackmailing them for a while now, so I can see why he’s fired. Why the family is no longer under legitimate investigation for housing illegal immigrants, though, is conveniently not addressed. I guess once the blackmailers are out of the picture, Immigration Services reverts to the honor system embraced by the Alien Task Force.

It’s strange; if the guy’s been dismissed for shaking down illegal immigrants, what did Willie do? Tell them that he was being shaken down for harboring illegal immigrants? Probably not, of course, but how could he escape any kind of followup visit, at least to close the file?

Whatever. Everything’s back to shitty normal.

ALF thanks Willie for saving his life.

Nobody thanks Mr. Ochmonek for coming over, offering his help, loaning them the car, and babysitting their fucking kids, all without explanation, for allowing that rescue to happen.

Hey, Tanners! FUCK YOU

I don’t know. I’m sure I’m reading too much into it, but the whole final scene feels like Willie is just saying, “Don’t worry, everyone. We’ll never have to deal with a plot like that again. Next week we’ll be back to ALF eating train sets and shitting them all over the rug, just the way we like it.”

“Running Scared,” again, was a story that needed to be told. But mother of Christ it did not need to be told like this.

MELMAC FACTS: The Alien Task Force operates out of, or at least rents a loft at, Edwards Air Force Base.