Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E34, "The Hidden Thing"

This will be a short review, because I described this to my wife as “not only the worst episode of AHP yet, but also one of the worst episodes of anything ever.”

Biff McGuire–recently our “Gentleman from America”–stars as Dana Edwards, who’s on a dream-tinged date with his fiancée, Laura (Judith Ames, a.k.a. Rachel Ames of General Hospital fame). Even before it all goes tragically wrong, there’s a haunted, melancholy strangeness to the scene, which feels tailor-made to get the audience asking questions. Isn’t a little parking spot necking followed by diner hamburgers more of a teenage date? Is Laura dead all along, or a figment of Dana’s imagination, since he muses that she seems unreal and he can never remember her face when she’s not there? Does his conviction that everyone also admires her beauty carry a seed of jealousy?

None of this, as it turns out, means much. Dana somehow carrying Laura’s loss before she gets creamed by a hit-and-run driver has no plot relevance; it’s just too-obvious foreshadowing, and all for us, not for him. The most powerful–and most functional–part of the scene is the way you can feel how Dana will, for years to come, linger on certain painful details. He didn’t want to move the car. He didn’t go back to it to fetch Laura’s make-up.

“The Hidden Thing” doesn’t do much to create a real sense of this loss, but it can at least latch on to the very human horror that comes with tragedies that we–technically blameless or not–could have easily avoided. Dana didn’t kill Laura (though the eventual discussion of blocked memories may invite us to wonder about that), but he could have saved her, if only he’d somehow known to make different, mostly value-neutral choices, and that will presumably stay with him. If only, if only.

But this isn’t about “if only,” it’s about how Dana saw the license plate number of the hit-and-run driver but can’t remember it. Hypnotist John Hurley (our old friend Robert H. Harris) interrupts his mourning–which Dana’s mother is already tired of one week in, giving us a theme of recent AHP episodes where people are expected to just get over their loved ones’ deaths immediately–with an offer to walk him back through his memories and give him “total recall.” Dana’s suspicious of his motives, but Hurley insists he’s in it for impartial justice, as his son was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Still, Dana remains reluctant, and it’s here that “The Hidden Thing” once again, intentionally or not, feints at being a different kind of story. The trouble with laying out red herrings is that you don’t want them to be more interesting than the tale you’re actually telling, and to mildly spoil an ending that deserves spoiling, that’s not the case here. Yes, there would be nothing all that original about revealing, for example, that Laura was dead all along, that Dana’s memory is years old instead of a week old, or that he’d actually somehow killed her and fabricated all this to deal with it. But any of those options would be better than what we get.

So would the route this all-too-briefly takes, which is a look at grief, where Dana resists revisiting his memory because Hurley’s method means reliving Laura’s death all over again. Even that, though, is diminished by the fact that it makes us sit through their last date a second time, a truly egregious bit of padding. I will accept footage playing twice within half-an-hour if the second time is meant to highlight some hidden significance I wouldn’t have noticed the first time through (again, if this were meant to let us piece together some revelation, it would make a lot more sense), but this just feels like the show is trying to stretch a scant script out to fill its time slot. Still, Dana gets the license plate number right as the cops storm in to demand answers about what’s going on here, so good for him, I guess.

Again, this is just an appallingly weak episode, with a limp structure, dead-on-the-page characters not exactly elevated by their performances, and one of the worst and least meaningful “twists” the show’s had to date. If you can get through this without impatiently looking at your watch, you’re a more patient person than I am.

The Twist: Hurley made up the story about his son being killed by a hit-and-run driver. He’s actually a persistent thorn in the police’s side, constantly trying to get involved in their investigations. Nevertheless, he’s clearly been of some use here.

What even is this? If the episode didn’t want a twist, it didn’t have to have one; a poorly executed nonentity of a narrative turn makes no one happy. It’s not as if the episode has been about Hurley, and we’ve followed him through his desperate attempts to prove himself and his methods. The story doesn’t even make a big swing at the end to reformat itself, in retrospect, as a hard-won triumph for a man who’s been dismissed for too long. The emphasis isn’t on Hurley’s triumph despite the odds, it’s on the “reveal” that he was a kook. But how kooky can he be, if this worked? “The Hidden Thing” has no interest in that, so instead we just get some shots of Robert H. Harris looking sheepishly goofy. Aw, shucks, you got him. We’ve also got the license number of a hit-and-run driver! Does that count for nothing?

It’s such a baffling way to end an episode that, for all its weaknesses, has been about loss, grief, and memory. I am even more confused to realize that James Cavanagh, our screenwriter here, also contributed the script for the upcoming “The Creeper,” which is a standout. I guess we all have off days.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: A. J. Russell (story), James Cavanagh (teleplay)

Up Next: “The Legacy”