Miscellany...

A few quick notes:

1. Awake, NBC's upcoming drama about a detective (Jason Isaacs) living in two separate realities, is getting good advance buzz. Though the entire pilot episode can be viewed right now on NBC's website, I'm going to start recapping/discussing it here shortly after the official premiere on March 1st. I'm in desperate need of some meaty, interesting viewing, so let's hope it fits the bill. (Many thanks to our always-insightful frequent commenter Patrick for first suggesting this back in December.)

2. You know my analysis of Duran Duran's (awesome and zombie-filled) "Night Boat" video that I posted here last March? It's been republished over at Andy Taylor's official website. This kind of thing only strengthens my current pro-Andy stance. Especially since he even tweeted about it:


3. My new book, Bias Cut, just advanced into the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I'm feeling pretty good about this right now; I think it's the best thing I've ever written. It's gratifying to see a little positive movement on it.

That's it for now. Fingers crossed that Awake will bring us all Heroes-esque levels of discussion fodder; I've missed the raucous days of long, bizarre, hilarious comment threads around here.
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Duranalysis: The Making of Arena, Part Two

Continued from the previous post, let’s examine the second half of the “Making of Arena" featurette, a large chunk of which is devoted to footage of the dancers from Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys” video rehearsing their routines. While this section is a little short on Durans, I have no real complaints. Toned, pantsless men who do high kicks and front flips are always fun to watch.


This poor young dancer was caught on camera at this unfortunate midpoint of his makeup job:


The featurette goes into some detail on the robotics required to move the disembodied animatronic head in “Wild Boys.” Many of the visual effects in Arena haven’t fared well over time, but that head? Highly effective. Still creepy as hell.


If “The Making of Arena” has a flaw, it’s that it’s sadly short on footage of beautiful John Taylor, who doesn’t appear in any of the interview segments. We’ll have to content ourselves with his one big moment here: John, who has dialed his personal skeeze factor straight up to eleven, describes his upcoming “Wild Boys” scene to an unidentified woman standing off-camera: “I’m chained to that Mercedes, being flashed with images of naked women and other things I love in life.”


Naked women? Really, John? While that scene in “Wild Boys” where John writhes around in chains is seared into my memory, I sure don’t remember him being forced to look at images of naked women. Let’s take a quick look back at the video to confirm:


I think Russell Mulcahy pulled a fast one on you, John.

Hey, remember how Andy Taylor pretty much stole the whole show in the Sing Blue Silver tour documentary? Remember how bright-eyed and cheeky and full of personality he was back then?


Here’s Andy being interviewed for the “The Making of Arena”:


Rough year.

On the “Wild Boys” set, Andy gets strapped into a harness up in the scaffolding of the underground fortress. He rhapsodizes about the experience: “I wore jeans! I’ve never worn denims in my life in anything to do with Duran Duran. I think it’s one of the rules we made, you know, no one wears jeans.”


He seems pretty stoked about this relatively small event, but if you put it into the proper context, you can see this was kind of a big deal. Here’s their former manager Paul Berrow, as quoted in Steve Malins’s Duran Duran Notorious: The Unauthorised Biography, talking about Andy’s initial audition: "He was in jeans, more early 1970s rock I suppose, not the glam rock side of it. There were doubts, I think Andy knows that. Nick in particular was thinking, 'Oh, God.' He’s a bit of a snob when it comes to rock. Nick’s not rock at all and the wit was streaming out of him on the issue of what Andy was wearing." Combine that with this quote from Roger Taylor in a 2011 interview with Paper Magazine: "Although Andy did join the group with a pair of dungarees on, we soon dealt with that!"

Hey, Nick and Roger? I’m feeling kind of Team Andy on this one. Wearing jeans appears to be really, really important to him. Just look at how happy he seems, bound up there in the scaffolding. Maybe if you’d relaxed your fervent anti-denim stance a notch, Andy wouldn’t have quit the band, twice.

Speaking of Roger, here he is, talking about filming the part in “Wild Boys” where he dangles from his own little jet-powered hot-air balloon: “It felt quite dangerous when we were doing it, but I’m sure it was very safe. When I was first in the balloon thing, people kept reassuring me that it was actually very safe, it was sort of hanging from wires from the ceiling. On the other hand, as much as people assure you, you always sort of have those doubts.”


In his interview segments, Roger appears very sweet and sensible, posing in a clean, sunny room with flowers in the window, flashing his new wedding band while looking wholesome and sane. Within months of this, Roger would walk away from the madness and mayhem of Duran Duran to lead a quiet, reclusive life in the English countryside, where nobody would ever dangle him from a jet-powered hot-air balloon again.

Throughout Arena, Durand Durand hobbles precariously around an underground fortress on tall stilts connected to his legs and arms. And then someone jumps on his back. And then he gets set on fire. Both of these stunts go horribly, predictably wrong, leading to: a) injured stunt people, and b) total validation of Roger’s quiet doubts about the safety of all this.


Let's give Simon the last word:

“I wouldn’t say the project turned out as I had imagined it would turn out. What we’ve got is something very, very different… But it doesn’t mean that… (pause) I’m not… (pause) proud of it, because it’s something very special.”


He almost sounds like he means it.
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Duranalysis: The Making of Arena, Part One

For the past, oh, several months, I’ve been loosely planning on doing one of my Duranalysis thingymabobs on Arena (An Absurd Notion), Duran Duran’s 1984 Russell Mulcahy-directed science fiction-themed concert film. On the surface, it would seem tailor-made for a Duranalysis, due to all the Duran-centric weirdness flying about, but I’ve never quite managed to whip up the necessary enthusiasm.

Here’s Arena in a nutshell: Footage of the boys performing in concert is interspersed with a bizarre narrative in which Milo O’Shea gamely reprises his role as the band’s namesake, the evil intergalactic scientist Durand Durand from the 1968 cult classic Barbarella. In Arena, Durand Durand arrives on Earth and, with the aid of his requisite coterie of mutant dwarf minions, schemes to wreak terrible vengeance on the boys for stealing his name.


Amongst other nonsense, one of these aforementioned schemes involves capturing a cluster of lingerie-clad roller-derby dolls and dangling them over tanks filled with vicious mutant creatures.


Meanwhile, in a wholly unrelated plotline, a couple of cyborgs get it on in a pool of green goop.


Clearly there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. Please note: “interesting” is not a synonym for “good.” While sometimes awesome, Arena is also sometimes terrible, or incomprehensible, or tedious, or some combination of the above. Surely, though, I should be able to scrap together a Duranalysis from all of this.

Here’s the problem: In Arena the Durans themselves only* appear in the concert footage and in the extended version of the "Wild Boys" video, which leaves us with vast Duran-free stretches. At no point do the boys ever interact with Durand Durand or his minions (Durand’s nefarious plans are eventually thwarted by a spunky group of fans), and that’s no good for my purposes. Look, if I couldn’t be bothered to do a Duranalysis of the stylish, sexy video for “The Chauffer” due to its lack of Durans, why would I willingly wade into the murky waters of Arena?

*Notable exception: The exquisite John Taylor appears in one brief additional scene, in which he takes a mid-concert break to slurp down a Heineken and leer at a cute fan whilst looking sweaty and extra-smoldering. This is unquestionably Arena’s finest moment.


So here’s a compromise: This Duranalysis will focus on “The Making of Arena”, the hour-long featurette included as a bonus feature on the Arena DVD, which is comprised of a bunch of cool behind-the-scenes footage padded out with interviews with the boys. First up is this impossibly gorgeous, glamorous, ludicrous creature:


Hi, Nick Rhodes! You’re looking especially glossy and fabulous today. Hey, what’s in your glass? Lychees? Small boiled onions? Pickled baby heads? (Could be just ice cubes, I suppose, but since we’re talking about Nick, I prefer to imagine it’s something weird and exotic and vaguely off-putting.)

Nick launches into a lecture about the process of filming their performances during the Sing Blue Silver tour, which later became the backbone of Arena. Nick’s a sharp little cookie and he knows his stuff -- he manages to work “Louma Crane” seamlessly into a sentence, and you can’t say the same for just any pop star -- but no matter how many times I watch this, my attention drifts away from whatever he’s going on about. This is partly because of his languid, sleepy speaking voice (if you’ve never heard Nick speak, think “spoiled English schoolboy” and you’ll just about have it), and partly because… I mean, just look at him. He’s so shimmery. It’s hard to focus on anything else.


Most of this featurette is devoted specifically to the making of the epic “Wild Boys” video, which is the clear showpiece of Arena. Simon Le Bon discusses the genesis of the idea for the video:

“I remember sitting on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean…” -- you know, probably a good 25% of Simon’s recollections start out this exact same way. “It occurred to us -- I don’t know if this was myself or Russell first -- that it’d be good if the band were seen in danger, in jeopardy, and also in pain, as a kind of metaphor to being in a band and forced to perform. So there’s somebody maybe, say, in bondage, but being forced to perform.”


Performing in bondage. Good start. I’m totally with you thus far, Simon.

Is that painting on the wall behind Simon awesome or ghastly? Discuss.

There’s a lot of footage of Simon on the set of “Wild Boys,” with particular attention paid to the sequence where he’s strapped to that ramshackle windmill, his head dunking into the lagoon upon every rotation. Even though the whole contraption looks rickety as hell, Simon is a trooper. He raises one cautionary flag -- “I’m worried about my feet coming off the bar. Could actually strangle myself” -- then cheerfully allows his head to be submerged in the water, again and again and again.


Ah, yes. Here we are. We’ve reached the whole hilarious drama with Nick’s “Wild Boys” costume, and yes, I’ve already linked to this segment twice before on this site, but that’s because it’s just the most awesome thing ever, that’s all. So Nick goes to check on his costume, and instead of a cool head-to-toe leather ensemble like the ones sported by his fellow Durans, he's presented with a ratty felt cape that looks like something the wolf barfed up after he ate Red Riding Hood.


This doesn’t go over terribly well with the glittery Crown Prince of Awesomeness. Being a chipper and resourceful little pixie, he plops himself down on the floor of the workroom and starts gluing a bunch of sparkly crap all over a leather jacket (“How many more jewels can one possibly fit on one collar?”), fashioning himself a new costume. Of his handiwork, he chirps happily, “It’s actually a camp Mad Max.” Only Nick could make that claim and: a) be deadly serious, b) be totally accurate, and c) intend it as the highest possible compliment.

There’s no clear shot of Nick’s modified ensemble in the finished “Wild Boys” video, so let’s take a look at a publicity photo to get the full effect:


Awesome. Nicely done, Mr. Rhodes. You’re the prettiest post-apocalyptic warrior of them all.

This is getting too lengthy for a single post, so Part Two will continue in the next section.
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Dragged into 2012, kicking and screaming.

Happy New Year, everyone! New material is right around the bend, maybe, probably, just as soon as I figure out what direction I want this blog to take this year. (I'm currently thinking Miami Vice recaps, because it's always 1984 inside my brain.)

I will be joining you all in 2012 momentarily. Until then, I recommend amusing yourselves by visiting this cool little Tumblr: WTF is Duran Duran wearing? It's visual poetry.
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Fun With Keywords: Awesome Taco Edition

I’m a couple episodes behind on Psych recaps, I know. That situation probably won’t change before the new year: I’m feeling a little down on Psych after a string of mediocre episodes, and ever since finishing up my new book last week, I’m also feeling a little burned out on writing. To buy time while I recharge my batteries, here’s a look at some of the search terms visitors used to find this site over the past few months:

sherilyn fenn lara flynn boyle mädchen amick in jeans
You're thinking of the Twin Peaks-themed cover of Rolling Stone, October 4, 1990.

awesome taco
This search makes me nostalgic. While I’ve had more good Mexican food in New York than I would have expected, I haven’t had a truly awesome taco since moving from Los Angeles.

michael rosenbaum needs a girlfriend
You sound pretty convinced of that. Might want to check with Rosenbaum first. Maybe he already has a girlfriend. Maybe he doesn’t want a girlfriend.

john taylor hair
"hair gel" duran "john taylor"
john taylor from duran duran and his killer cheekbones
john taylor photos beautiful
is john taylor anteater
I get a lot of people looking for information on Duran Duran’s John Taylor. These searchers can pretty much be broken down into three categories: People who think he has great hair, people who are dazzled by his beauty, and people who are intrigued by rumors about his purported prowess in the sack. Hence, anteater.

miami vice john taylor
Okay, four categories: There are also the people who want to see his awesomely trainwrecky Miami Vice cameo. This is from the excellent season two episode “Whatever Works,” in which Power Station is (inexplicably) playing a gig at a local watering hole. John has since claimed he was suffering from a very bad hangover during filming; I’m more inclined to think his hangover is still a few hours off, if you catch my drift. The best part might be Don Johnson’s look of withering contempt for the way the gorgeous, giddy English pop star with no sense of personal space is mucking up his show. (Andy Taylor appears in this clip, too, though apparently nobody trusted him to deliver dialogue.)


why is miami vice so awesome
Here’s ten reasons.

a guy and a woman, they're driving in some european country and they get stopped at some sort of checkpoint, and they get through (i think he's a spy or something) and there are all these people getting killed at the checkpoint by soldiers
Sounds familiar (sounds a lot like Gotcha!, in fact, though I don’t remember anyone getting killed at the checkpoint), but I don’t know. Anyone have any ideas?

elle, an artist, finds an old canoe in woods behind her property. her neighbors consider it abandoned. elle cleans it, paints scenes on it depicting native american rituals, and displays it in her art gallery. flo, the canoe's original owner, claims it, but a court grants elle title. this is
This business again? After a year or so of silence, this search is cropping up once more, maybe a couple dozen times in the last few weeks. My best guess is that it’s maybe a question on a standardized test? It’s still a mystery.

"wild boys" video duran duran costumes
This gives me another excuse to link to that awesome/bizarre clip from the Making of Arena feature where Nick Rhodes, the weird little pixie, happily glues sparkly jewels all over his ruggedly post-apocalyptic leather costume for the “Wild Boys” video. Nick is a strange, dazzling, glorious creature.

battlestar galactica gaeta's gone crazy
Oh, yeah. Poor cute Gaeta went pretty much bonkers there toward the end.

chandra suresh age angela 1961 plothole
You mean the plothole that Erik Avari, who played Chandra Suresh in Heroes, was born in 1952 and Cristine Rose, who played Angela Petrelli, was born in 1951, and thus they would have been entirely the wrong ages in the (lousy) flashback episode “1961,” in which Angela was in her late teens and Chandra was already an adult geneticist? Fair enough, but seriously, man, that episode had much bigger problems than that.

spokane's ugliest building
My vote goes to the dauntingly ugly Sacajawea Middle School, though I’ve always been fond of that totem pole out front. Anyone else care to weigh in?

andy taylor's quotes about nick rhodes in his book wild boy
In terms of Andy's quotes about his acrimonious relationship with Nick in his autobiography, it's hard to top this one from page 266: "Fuck you, you Revlon-wearing tosser." Ouch.

how does duran duran feel about andys book
Good question. John offered up a blandly noncommittal assessment on Twitter a few months back; I can’t find the exact tweet, but the gist is that he thought it was okay. I don’t know if the others have weighed in on the subject or not. I’d be fascinated to know Nick’s reaction.

nick rhodes owns the name duran duran
According to no less of a source than Andy Warhol in his posthumously-published diaries, Nick is indeed the sole owner of the Duran Duran name.

cute mud girls
girls in bathing suits raised in the mud
ladies in mud
naked man getting straddled during massage
Blast it. My review of the “Girls On Film” video has opened the floodgates for massage- and mud wrestling-related search terms.

who does ioan gruffudd look like?
I’m going to go with… The Wire’s Dominic West, though your mileage may vary.


does ioan gruffudd speak in his native accent in the ringer?
Not quite. Andrew on Ringer is English, whereas Ioan Gruffudd is Welsh.

ioan gruffudd shows that men with big noses can be handsome
This is what’s known as a pitch-perfect backhanded compliment, folks.

mom wearing jeans outside
No reason she shouldn’t, is there?

nagel painting woman with sunglasses
Patrick Nagel did a whole slew of paintings of sexy sunglasses-wearing women, but I’m betting the one you’re looking for is this one, right? It’s titled, aptly, “Sunglasses.”



covert affairs jai's cologne
I’m far behind on my Covert Affairs viewing, so I don’t know if Jai’s cologne has been a focal point in recent episodes. I’ll speculate that his signature fragrance is something glamorous and expensive and wordly, with dark undertones and a faint yet lingering after-note of smugness.

sendhil amithab ramamurthy nude
I like the optimism of including the middle name: “Well, my search for ‘Sendhil Ramamurthy nude’ was a bust, but let’s throw in the ‘Amithab’ and see what comes up!”

who played nicky in death deceit & destiny aboard the orient express
That’d be the lovely Sendhil Amithab Ramamurthy.

why is jay wilcox in covert affairs black
Yeah, see, he’s… not. Jai Wilcox’s father is white and his mother is Indian. The Chicago-born actor who plays him, a certain Sendhil Amithab Ramamurthy, is of south Indian ancestry.

"morgan richter nude"
Huh. Well. I suppose I should just be thankful that this site is the first result for that particular search.

the best movie with thomas gibson
By a huge margin: Love and Human Remains.

what does i'm cereal mean, love and human remains
It’s mid-nineties jaded Canadian hipster-speak for “I’m serious.”

psycho beach party thomas gibson academy awards
Sadly, Gibson’s fine work as a domination-craving surfer in Psycho Beach Party went unrecognized by the Academy. He discusses this grievous oversight here.

voltron lassiter
lassiter voltron
You’re looking for my friend Alex Albrecht’s cool short film, which stars Timothy Omundson -- Psych’s Lassiter -- as a Voltron pilot.

jeanetta arnette shoe size
Sadly, not all information -- like, say, Jeannetta Arnette’s shoe size -- is available on the internet.

swinging married couples -- a good thing?
shirtless sailors drunk with black socks on
a childhood friend comes to spent time with now married friend and gets horny
only blind lady photos who are sitting in truck
adorable turkish guy sit on the stairs
haha im using the shaving creams
I’m throwing all of these searches onto the “unanswerable” pile, too.
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Psych: In For a Penny

A crew of masked men break into Lompoc and help a legendary safecracker named Jimmy Fitz escape. This, combined with a number of high-profile thefts of safecracking equipment, lead the Santa Barbara Police Department to believe someone’s planning a huge robbery.

Meanwhile, Juliet’s thirtieth birthday is fast approaching. Shawn and Gus secretly invite her estranged con-artist father Frank to her party. And it’s William Shatner! You know what Psych does better than any other television show? Awesome stunt casting. Shawn’s parents are, of course, played by Corbin Bernsen and Cybill Shepherd, Gus’s folks are played by Phylicia Rashad and Ernie Hudson, and now we’ve got Shatner. I mean, come on. That’s awesome. Anyway, Frank and Shawn immediately hit it off and form a mutual admiration society, while Juliet steams and fumes that Shawn went behind her back to seek out her father, whom she hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

Jimmy Fitz teams up with a ne’er-do-well named Chad Emigh, who used to be one of Frank’s old cohorts. Against Juliet’s explicit wishes, Frank tags along with Shawn and Gus and the SBPD to find out what mischief Jimmy and Chad are plotting.

Shawn figures they’re going to strike at the upcoming Santa Barbara Coin Expo, at which a 1943 bronze penny worth two million bucks will be on display. With Frank’s help, they figure out that a newly-hired electrician, Kevin, has been supplying Jimmy and Chad with information about the layout of the Expo.

While the SBPD is occupied with staking out the Expo, the penny gets stolen from a safe-deposit box across town. Shawn looks at surveillance photos from the robbery and recognizes one of the culprits as a friend of Frank’s. Realizing that Frank conned them all and stole the penny himself, Shawn and Gus confront him and give him until the next morning to return the penny. Sure enough, an anonymous tip the next day leads to the arrest of Chad Emigh and the retrieval of the penny. Even though Chad refuses to give up the names of his criminal associates, it dawns on Juliet that her father was responsible for the theft.

So Juliet has it out with Frank, and Frank reveals that even though he was mostly absent during her childhood he’s been secretly keeping an eye on her through all the important events in her life, and I swear, this scene takes about forty-eight minutes or something. Really, it’s long. And dull.

Chad gets released from custody due to the circumstantial nature of the evidence against him (I mean, they found the stolen penny on the bedside table in his hotel room, right next to his sleeping head, but apparently in Santa Barbara that’s not enough to hold him). Concert tickets found in Chad’s hotel room suggest to Shawn that Chad’s been staking out the Santa Barbara Bowl, probably for another big heist. So Juliet and Lassiter, plus Shawn and Gus and Frank, arrive at the Bowl and, with Frank’s invaluable help, arrest Chad and his crew.

And it all ends with a surprise birthday party for Juliet at the Psych offices, complete with a bouncy castle. Frank and Juliet repair their relationship somewhat, and Gus and Shawn convince Frank to return the valuable penny, which, it turns out, he’s stolen again.


Eh. Kind of a dull episode, honestly, despite the not-to-be-underrated appearance from Shatner. I don’t have cable at this time, and they’re not showing the latest episodes online for free anywhere, so I’ve been shelling out two bucks per episode to watch them on Amazon On Demand this season. I’m not altogether sure I got my money’s worth from this one; for anyone in a similar situation, I’d recommend you skip it and instead just listen to Shatner’s totally awesome cover (with support from Joe Jackson) of Pulp’s “Common People." You’ll be glad you did.

Gus’s Fake Name:
Ingle Woodz

Awesome Eighties Reference:
(Frank claims he’s giving up his criminal ways.)
Shawn: Do you honestly think we were born on the fourth of July?
Gus: Or yesterday?
Shawn: Or to run?
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Psych: Shawn Interrupted

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bernie Bethel is arrested for murdering his assistant. Lassiter, who single-handedly cracked the case, throws himself a victory party, complete with a crepe station and festive crime-scene photos hung above the punchbowl. His victory is short-lived, as Bernie is soon found not guilty by reason of insanity and is sent to a posh mental hospital instead of prison. Lassiter offers to go undercover as a mental patient (“I’ll grow a beard and wear nothing but tweed!”) to prove that Bernie is faking his condition. Henry decides to send Shawn in his stead, as Shawn could believably pass as someone in need of institutionalization (Shawn: “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Gus: “I wouldn’t”).

Shawn quickly makes himself at home in the luxurious hospital (“Dude, they have electronic bidets!”). Posing as an orderly, Gus goes undercover as well. He soon strikes up a highly inappropriate relationship with an attractive patient, Vivian (Julianna Guill), who is afflicted with multiple personality disorder. The hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Abel Elliott (Gerard Plunkett), is the only outsider aware of Shawn’s and Gus’s true identities.

Shawn befriends Bernie, who does indeed seem legitimately insane. This is because Bernie is played by Brad Dourif, who always seems insane. This is an overwhelmingly awesome bit of casting. Dourif has been in too many films to list here -- if you don’t know him from the Chucky films, you surely know him from Lord of the Rings -- but for the purposes of this episode, the most relevant gig on his résumé would be his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Fun fact: Brad Dourif also starred in Toto’s “Stranger in Town” video.

Awesome bit of casting #2: The hospital is run by the brusque and no-nonsense Nurse Lavender McElroy, who is played by Molly Ringwald. Molly Ringwald! Molly is squandered a bit in this role, actually, but it’s still awfully good to see her.

Shawn grows to believe Bernie is legitimately insane. More, he realizes Bernie’s degenerative arthritis means he couldn’t have strangled his assistant. He theorizes that Dr. Elliott keeps deliberately mixing up Bernie’s anti-psychotic medications to keep him incoherent, at the behest of an unidentified third party. Shawn’s theory is burst when he finds Elliott dead, hit over the head by an unknown assailant. Gus, meanwhile, has been fired for hanky-panky with Vivian. With Elliott dead, no one at the institution realizes that Shawn is only pretending to be insane…

…Y’all can see where this is going, right? Before you know it, Shawn finds himself strapped down to a gurney, bellowing at the top of his lungs to a couple of bemused psychiatrists about how he’s really a psychic detective working undercover for the Santa Barbara Police Department. Hey, I totally saw this episode of 21 Jump Street! It guest-starred Christina Applegate at the height of her Married: With Children fame. 21 Jump Street is one of those shows that really doesn’t hold up over time, but man, I loved it while I was growing up.

Anyway, with Gus’s help, Shawn manages to break Bernie out of the asylum. They confront the real culprit: Nurse McElroy, who, under the orders of Bernie’s devious younger brother Daniel, has been altering Bernie’s medication to keep him delirious. Daniel had tricked his mentally-ill brother into giving him control of his massive fortune; after Bernie’s assistant found out about this, he murdered her and framed Bernie. When Dr. Elliott uncovered this plot, he murdered him as well.

A gun-toting Daniel arrives at Nurse McElroy’s place and threatens to murder Shawn, Gus and Bernie to cover his tracks. Bernie’s diagnosed phobias include a severe fear of saxophone music, so Shawn slips a Kenny G. album on the CD player and blasts “Songbird.” Bernie freaks out and overpowers his brother.

And all ends well. Not one of the stronger episodes, actually -- is it me, or have we had a disappointingly high ratio of clunkers to good episodes this season? -- but I’ll give it a few brownie points for the casting of Dourif and Ringwald and call it even.
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