“The Night of the Puppeteer” is the mot memorable of the first season episodes. It is completely demented from beginning to ed. I love every minute of it.Jim and Artie are assigned to protect a supreme court justice slated to e killed at two o’clock in the afternoon the same as two of his colleagues. The assassination attempt takes place at a puppet show for his grandson’s birthday when one of the puppet’s gun turns out to be real.
The assassin is most likely Zachariah Skull. With a name like that, how could he be anything else? Skull was an engineer and puppeteer who was, as he claims, wrongly convicted of murder. The United States Supreme Court refused to take up his case and the president refused his request for a pardon. He now plans to kill them all. He was presumed killed when he jumped off the train transporting him to prison. He survived, but wound up badly deformed as well as quite insane.
It is his inanity that makes the episode so creepy. He lures Jim into his underground lair which is staffed by life size puppets he controls. When it is clear Skull accepts these puppets as his own reality, Jim plays along to save himself. He dances with a pretty ballerina, is forced to fight a caveman, and is eventually put on trial, complete with puppet jury, for the “murder” of the puppet who tried to assassinate the justice. The minimalist set, dark cinematography, and the warped appearance of the puppets all add up to a surrealist nightmare.
The handsome guy we thought was Skull is actually a puppet himself. The real Skull has bee manipulating everything from above. Skull has a look that tat may have inspired Vincent price’s Dr. Phibes. I remember his face scaring the heck out of me as a id, but with HD television and modern DVD transfers, the cheap skullcap and make up I painfully obvious. Still, I can appreciate what they were going for.
You may recognize Lloyd Bochner as Skull. Well, maybe not from the immediately preceding photo. He was a famed character actor who had appeared on just about every television series from the ’60’s through the ’90’s. He has appeared in everything from The Twilight Zone to Barnaby Jones, Battlestar Galactica, Dynasty, The Golden Girls, and the Batman Animated Series right up until his death in 2005. In spite of Skull’s reveal not being as shocking as I remember, the Kafka-eque trial of Jim and weird movements of the puppets--real actors with strings visibly attached, more than fulfill the scary quotient. There are some The Phantom of the Opera elements and another Vincent Price film, House of Wax, to make “The Night of the Puppeteer” a frightening classic.
Rating: **** (out of 5)
