Description: Season 5, Episode 4
Air Date: October 18, 1963
Plot Summary: An annoying man is given a supernatural stopwatch that can freeze the world with the press of a button.
Review: This is an interesting episode in theory, but they don't fully utilize the material until the abrupt ending. You have an annoying little bitch you'd love to punch, named McNulty, that is clueless to reality. He also keeps saying "you think about that now" as if whatever he says is genius level insight. Although you wouldn't recognize him from the episode, McNulty is played by Richard Erdman who is more recently known as Leonard from "Community." Anyway, McNulty bothers everyone is his life which leads to his boss finally firing him. After clearing the patrons out of a bar by never shutting up, McNulty notices a loner that actually wants to engage him in conversation. Nothing is ever explained, but the loner gives McNulty a magic stopwatch that freezes the world in place. You could say it simply freezes people, but we are shown a helicopter frozen in place without falling so we have to conclude the stopwatch manipulates reality itself.
Considering how powerful the stopwatch is, you'd think McNulty would do something meaningful with it but nope. He tries to idiotically show it off to his boss and get it mass produced. When the boss doesn't care, McNulty decides to play pointless pranks. Later on, when bothering the bar patrons again, McNulty further engages in zany antics. It finally dawns on McNulty that he should rob a bank and become someone of importance, but he drops and breaks the stopwatch while the world is frozen. Hmm...one of the most powerful objects in existence, and it breaks from, at best, a four foot fall? Flimsy as hell. The episode simply ends with McNulty freaking out since he will have no one to bother ever again. Ehh, I don't know--this felt like the lighthearted version of "Time Enough at Last." McNulty takes too long to do anything interesting and the ending felt rushed. Realistically, people who have homaged the episode did it better. One example I can think of, that toyed with the material more realistically, was an episode of "Friday the 13th: The Series" called "13 O'Clock."
McNulty was about the most annoying TV character I've ever seen in an older show. He is 100% oblivious to how much he annoys everybody no matter what they say to him, that he drives everyone out of the bar, and cannot tell the difference between getting noticed and getting liked even after the bartender tells him those exact words. And his "walking on his lower lip" gets his ass fired. This is the biggest issue that hurts this episode. The idea of a magical stopwatch stopping time did not need this horrible distraction.
ReplyDeleteThe next issue was with the lack of ideas that were shown here with the concept of stopping everything. Besides a scene of McNulty stopping everybody in the office and then in the bar did help add interest, and we saw a quick montage of streets, an army, cattle, etc. stopping in place when McNulty pushed the button on the watch, but it just wasn't enough because they had to waste so much time with McNulty irritating everyone. He mentioned moving second base and saving an out during a ballgame but they should of shown it. The robbing the bank idea could've been good, but the sequence ended too soon when McNulty dropped and broke the watch. They should've showed more with the outcome of the bank first. The watch breaking thing did bear resemblance to the end of Time enough at last though/
Also, when McNulty was having such a hard time convincing his secretary and boss at his office and the guys at the bar about the watch, why didn't he give the watch to one of them so they could've tried it and seen for themselves? Did the watch work with whoever was holding it and pressed the button, or did it only work with McNulty? They should've made that clearer.