Episode Analysis - S1E21 Effigy In Snow

Effigy in Snow (24 Mar. 1961)

Writer: Stirling Silliphant

Director: Alvin Ganzer

Director of Photography: Jack A. Marta

(Details from  http://www.imdb.com - click on the episode title above for more cast and crew)


This is a complex and disturbing episode, dealing with Armand Fontaine’s insanity. The theme itself is one that seems to crop up often on Route 66 – the now-adult child who has been damaged in some way by his parents – in this case by the infidelity of the main protagonist’s mother. The black and white filming lends itself very well to the sinister theme of madness and murder in the snow, although it could probably have been done in a rather less heavy handed way. The music is occasionally intrusive, and some of the techniques to show Armand’s madness are rather blunt – his visions of his mother in her wedding dress and the tight zooms on things that bother him. But a lot of this is part and parcel of the style of filming in this era, and are to be expected. It is a good episode, but not a happy one, and although there are some fun Buz and Tod moments, they don’t feature heavily in the story.

Screencaps are taken from the Shout Factory dvd release of the show.

Light, cheerful music and a glistening piste – we’re in ski country. Squaw Valley, California, to be exact. Who knew California could be so snowy? (Yes, I know about the Rockies…)

The skiing set seem to be a rich, hip bunch. Watching this makes me want to watch Help! and see the Beatles cavorting in the snow. The cool chicks and guys are worried about Shirley, who hasn’t returned from the slopes – but they decide that since she’s such an experienced skier they don’t need to worry.

Shirley looks like a hip cat too, nice and confident on the snow. (Not as hip as she would be if she were penniless and really digging life, but hip for a rich girl.)

Shirley in a sea of snow. This is beautiful in black and white.

But Shirley takes a gentle tumble and hurts her knee, and someone is watching from the hill above…

You can tell something’s not right about him. There’s something deeply unheimlich about this cosy balaclava. They must have gone to the unheimlich knitwear department.

I wonder if this shot is supposed to be as sexual as it turned out, with her legs splayed in the tight trousers and her breasts pointing upwards and mirroring the mountains. If I were going to get really Freudian I’d say there was something in that single upright pine above her on the hill. Whether it’s meant or not, she looks very vulnerable in this position, but the subtext implies the crime about to take place has a definite sexual element.

And she is still in this position when the masked skier arrives (Armand Fontaine, played by Scott Marlowe), significantly standing above her on the hill. Now the mountain peaks echo her body and the tree echoes his.

This is where we get the direct reflection of his madness as his gaze superimposes a woman in a wedding dress over the injured woman in the snow. Symbology abounds – the virgin snow and virgin dress, the helpless woman at his feet. He stands staring, and doesn’t say a word.

And then he strangles her, as she screams in the snow.

He has a kind of post-coital exhaustion and sad relief after he has killed her and strips his balaclava off and turns his face to the sky.

Angles, symbology. The slope with her prostrate body on it, the upright trees mirroring his stance.

And into this tainted paradise drive Tod and Buz, the car looking supremely sexy as it navigates those snow-fringed curves.

They pull up and park so they can admire the view and Buz can read from his guide book. They’ve acquired a set of skis from somewhere. Good going, boys.

Tod pops up like a meerkat from his seat to gaze out over the lake while Buz reads. (aka pretty screencap is pretty.)

So Buz starts to read the tale of a party stranded during the winter of 1846 who were forced to make camp by the lake by heavy snow that fell to a depth of 23 feet.

‘The few who did survive … did so … only by resorting to cannibalism,’ Buz reports. ‘Do you believe that?’ he asks Tod.

‘I don’t know. They say there’s an animal hidden in each one of us. An animal more savage than a sabre-toothed tiger, lurking, just behind the bars put up by society,’ Tod ponders, setting us up nicely to think about the murder that has just occurred out in the snow and the motivations of the man who did it. Is there really an animal hidden in each of us? Is there only a hairline between civilisation and savagery or madness?

‘Well, if you’ve gotta lurk, might as well lurk at a bar, right?’ Buz asks, and the pair collapse into giggles. We know the hidden import of Tod’s words, but they have no idea.

Tod mentions ‘making your sitzmark,’ which bewilders Buz. This gives Tod the opportunity to rib Buz mercilessly over his lack of skiing knowledge in recompense for all Buz’s jazz knowledge (and to remind him of his privileged past, going to Vermont on spring vacations to ski), and to spout ski talk in a fun German accent.

At which point Buz replies, ‘Ja, coach,’ and growls pleasingly, and they both slide down into their seats.

The hip crowd are still milling around Squaw Valley as Tod and Buz arrive. Buz has that give-me-the-girls look that almost has him climbing out of the car. (Actually in this shot he looks like he’s ogling the guys, but I’m fine with that.)

‘Where are all the homely women in Squaw Valley?’ Buz asks.

Tod gives him shades.

‘Here. Take another look.’

And Buz does, and gets all excited, and goes on to relate a tale of his youth.

‘When I was a kid I used to go to these flicks on 42nd Street, you know, and I used to sit there, bug eyed, watching these pictures, you know, in the ski resorts. You know the ones, where the guy can’t pay the mortgage, you know, and all the waiters play musical instruments, you know, and the head waiter looks like maybe, er – ’

‘Nelson Riddle,’ Tod says.

‘Yeah, that’s it. You know, and they throw a big musical show and there’s a rich guy there that has a daughter, you see, and she ice skates, but she’s pretty. Real pretty, you know. And, you know, she gets him to pick up the tab on the mortgage, and then they both go away to, er, where was that word? Shush?’

‘You thought that was only in the movies?’ Tod asks incredulously.

‘Yeah,’ Buz says.

‘Oh, no,’ Tod says as if he is welcoming Buz to wonderland.

Notes about this speech: I like the reference to Nelson Riddle. Tod and Buz both look very pretty. Buz says ‘you know’ a lot.

Enter our heroine of the week, Penny Foster (played by Jeanne Bal, who also played Nancy Crater in the first aired Star Trek episode The Man Trap,) giving Tod and Buz the chance to ogle her as she walks by in her hot knitwear.

Meanwhile, one of the skiers is worrying about Shirley, who still hasn’t returned. The ski patrol guy Otto Wellers (Kurt Kreuger) isn’t too concerned. No one has been reported found on the slopes. He makes insinuations about her reputation. It sounds like she’s a bit of a goer, and perhaps she’s off in someone’s cabin rather than being lost on the slopes.

Tod and Buz arrive to listen to this tale of concern. Buz is playing with a snowball in his gloveless hands.

‘You’ve got to be a diplomat, a public relations expert, a father symbol, a ski instructor, Saint Bernard all rolled into one,’ Otto warns Tod when he asks him if he still wants the job.

‘You got my letter,’ Tod shrugs cheerfully. Evidently that said it all.

‘What about you?’ Otto asks of Buz, a little more suspiciously.

‘Oh, I carry the brandy,’ he says.

He makes no bones about the fact that he’s come to Squaw Valley for a little work and a little play. But there’s a job waiting for him in the ski shop, for $50 a week.

The place is all vanity and gaiety still. Penny is having to remind one of the women that you need to pick skis because they’re right for you, not because they match your stretch pants.

Armand, otherwise known as the balaclava strangler of Squaw Valley, is waiting in the shop, and we can see from Penny’s reaction that she isn’t altogether comfortable with him.

So we learn that Armand is looking for jumping skis. He’s going out to the 60 metre hill to try jumping. (I suppose this is in metres because the resort was built for the Winter Olympics only a year earlier in February 1960.)

‘They say the man who can better the 60 metre record is the man that takes you to the dance tonight,’ he says in a rather nervous way.

She doesn’t seem over-eager to go with him.

‘You haven’t been here very long,’ she says. ‘I don’t even know you.’

‘Well, look around the valley, Mrs Foster,’ he says. ‘Does anybody really know anybody or care about anybody?’

He tells her that his father knew her husband, and her face lights up suddenly with the memory of him. A lot is said here in a few words and actions. Her husband is obviously not around any more – she is a widow – and she was in love with him and glows with the memory of him. He was a ski jumper of some renown, apparently.

‘It would be my pleasure to take his widow anywhere,’ Armand says, and then laughs nervously again, adding ironically, ‘and to save her from some of the men around here.’

This is the smallest hint that he is on some kind of a crusade, saving the purity of women.

We see some of the incredible mountains as people observe a ski jumper preparing to jump.

Obviously Not The Same Film – not least because the jumper has a different shade top to the one who just prepared to jump. He was in a lighter top, and wearing a bobble hat. I wonder if this is footage from the Olympics a year earlier? You can see crowds of people later in the jump, ranged along the edge watching. The film then cuts back to our original jumper, who fluffs the landing and fails to break Harve Foster’s record.

So Armand prepares to jump…

Again, not the same film or jumper, and you can see the crowd here too.

Armand makes an almost perfect jump on form and distance, landing without trouble – but still he doesn’t beat Mr Foster’s record. You can tell by the disharmonic music in the background that he’s a little crazy.

One of the watchers on the platform asks, ‘You don’t actually think he was trying to beat Harve’s record, do you?’

‘I got the feeling that he thought he could,’ the other guy says, leaving us with another hint (if the strangling weren’t enough) that Armand is driven and delusional.

Otto brings Tod and Buz into the shop, who must be a relief after crazy-as-f*ck guy. Buz seems mightily pleased at the prospect of working with Penny. He gets that girls light in his eyes and offers to start right away.

Buz wants so much to be alone with Penny that he hustles Tod out of the shop to ‘check in or something.’ We don’t get to see where they’re staying in this episode, but then I’m not sure that Tod even gets to sleep. He should get some money back for that.

This episode is good at conjuring creepy even when things are not really creepy. Otto lays his hand on Penny’s shoulder, making her jump, and tells her in his German accent, ‘No more excuses, Penny. I want to see you out and around now.’

This is all just genuine friendly concern, but because of the sinister atmosphere it’s hard not to hear it in a sinister light.

Buz is admiring Penny from all angles, when she tells him in a crisp but friendly way, ‘Otto neglected to tell you my last name. Foster. Mrs Foster.’

This is Buz’s ‘bugger, she’s married’ face.

‘I thought we ought to start out even,’ she says.

‘Even?’ he echoes. ‘Well, er, that’s not even. That’s three strikes and you’re out. But I can still work hard. Deal?’

So Buz is a good sort after all.

‘Deal,’ she replies, and they clasp hands on the bargain.

Standing in the doorway, Armand sees, and the discordant music starts up again as the camera focuses tightly first on his face and then on Buz and Penny’s hands.

Penny approaches him to ask if he beat the record.

‘Your husband must have run with eagles, Mrs Foster,’ Armand says, composing himself with difficulty. ‘I jumped my best jump but it wasn’t – it wasn’t good enough.’ He is stuttering as he tries to speak to her.

Penny is still looking after him with a rather mournful, transfixed look of concern as Buz comes back up to her to ask what he should do. He notices that she is completely distracted.

‘Walk me home,’ she asks him in a desolate voice, then seems to come back to herself and says more brightly, ‘Let’s just close up here and get out of here, huh?’ Then she enters her trance again and says, ‘I feel kinda – kinda cold…’

Armand is watching from the balcony as Buz and Penny walk out of the shop together.

We get fun moments as Buz and Penny fall over in the snow.

But Armand sees it with his creepy zoom feature he has built into his eyes/brain, and suddenly there’s a kind of echo of Shirley, the girl who was strangled, and her fall on the snow.

Through an exhale of smoke, Armand watches, and you can see his mind working as he sees Buz and Penny lying there and laughing.

The pair share a rather coquettish moment, before they both remember themselves and scramble to their feet. It’s all just fuel to Armand’s jealousy and purity complex. Buz persuades her to come for a drink instead of going home. Armand’s chest is heaving like a child about to sob.

The discordant music continues as Armand staggers instead, obviously overcome. His eyes rest on a photograph of a woman in a wedding dress, just like the woman he saw superimposed on Shirley before he killed her. He picks up the photograph and hugs it to his chest.

‘Tell me I’m wrong about her. Please tell me she’s everything I want her to be,’ he pleads with the photograph like a child. But really, what does he want her to be? Approachable and pure at the same time? It’s impossible.

Then he begins to clutch at his head and moan as if there is something in there he can’t get out. He tries desperately to get a reservation on a plane to leave the resort, desperate to get himself away from here – but the planes are grounded because of snow and the roads are blocked. There’s an echo here of the story that Buz told at the start, of the party trapped by snow who resorted to cannibalism to survive. If there really is an animal hidden in each one of us, it is being trapped that will tease it forth.

He hurls the phone at the mirror in his room, smashing the trapped image of himself and the instrument that has told him he is trapped. At times like this it must be fun being an actor, pushing the boundaries of the things we are allowed to do in normal life.

Like a child clutching a teddy bear he holds the picture of the woman to his chest and moans, ‘Help me, mama,’ over and over.

Meanwhile, Otto is finally becoming worried about Shirley. He can’t get hold of her anywhere. He has a nice conversation on the phone in German with a man called Hans – a nice touch, since the actor really is German. He still thinks it’s likely that Shirley is somewhere with a man, though. Nice questions this episode raises about female promiscuity and how it is treated, especially by men.

A brief glimpse of the Olympic rings above the fireplace. I don’t know who thought of complimenting the Olympic summer games with winter ones, but they were a fecking genius.

And meanwhile meanwhile, this is what passes for entertainment in the early 60s. (I pretend to be scathing, but actually I bet it would be wonderful fun.) Snow outside, a roaring fire, lots of knitwear and a guy with a guitar, while everyone sings rousing choruses of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’

Buz is slapping his hand on his thigh and singing along with the rest of them, deep in the communal spirit, forgetting he’s not really one of them because he’s not wearing brightly patterned knitwear. But Armand wanders in and you can see that Penny has that cold feeling again as he looks at her. I won’t screencap it because you’ve probably seen enough lingering shots of Armand looking creepy and Penny looking troubled by now.

Actually, this one is worth capping, because there really is murder in Armand’s eyes now. He’s about as sane as a penguin wearing lipstick and calling itself George.

Buz hauls Penny home through the snow. I’m sure she’s used to managing to tramp through the snow alone, but it’s probably nice for her to have a handsome man helping her – especially one who thinks she is married and won’t make advances.

This makes me think of those questions about sexuality again – the assumption at this time that every unmarried woman is fair game, but that women who respond to too many men are promiscuous. There is no way to win. You’re either frigid or a whore.

Tod drives up in the Corvette. Hello Tod! You’ve been absent for too long!

Well, Penny thought she was safe from Buz. As she says goodbye and tries to shut the door he stops her and holds her up by asking what time he has to come to work tomorrow morning. ‘7.30,’ she says. Ugh! (This is a little foreshadowing, perhaps, of Armand’s actions later in the episode.)

But he is at least partly a gentleman. He has a brief look into her house (a lovely place, I suppose built for the Olympics, of huge glass windows and wood), and shrugs, ‘Well, I tried,’ before turning to go.

Two pleasing pieces of architecture, one natural, one man made.

You can tell that Tod is part of the skiing set because he has a thick woolly jumper – but that he’s not a skiing idiot, because his jumper is suave and monotone instead of looking like a television being tuned.

‘How did you find me?’ Buz asks.

‘Just asked for her address,’ Tod says smoothly. He knows Buz.

‘Ah well, she’s married,’ Buz says in a resigned tone.

‘Her husband died last year,’ Tod says meaningfully.

Buz is astounded at this news, and that she didn’t tell him despite the fact that Buz kept mentioning her husband. His change of expression is just enough to warrant another screencap without it being totally gratuitous.

‘How do you like that?’ Buz says. ‘It must be destiny or something. I always get involved with girls whose husbands – ’ He breaks off, then says, ‘I learned my lesson.’

Who’s he talking about here? Christina from Fly Away Home? She wasn’t widowed when he first met her, but it’s the only person I can think of.

To take his mind off it, Tod wants to teach him how the ski people live at night.

‘How do ski people live at night?’ Buz asks.

Perhaps they get really hardcore and take those jumpers off, and bring out an accordion to go with the guitar, and sing songs by The Seekers. (Note: I like The Seekers, and they weren’t formed until 1962. Ach well…)

So, Buz settles into the car (he always slides himself down with a rigid back in the same way, leaning out a little toward the edge), and they drive off to discover the delights of skiing night life.

I’m not sure what happened to the big dance Tod promised, but it looks like the ski people live at night much as they live in the day time, only with more chatter and less jaunty Christian music.

But Otto comes in and asks members of the Ski Patrol to report to ‘KT.’ Tod is aghast at the thought of giving up his evening and his lovely girl.

He tries in vain to hide behind his girl. It’s no use, Tod, your monochrome jumper will give you away. There’s a reason for all those stripes. It’s like zebra on the plain.

It’s no use. He can’t hide.

‘Stiles. I warned you, remember,’ Otto says, ‘Twenty-four hour alert.’

Tod wonders how they can shoot an avalanche in the dark, but Otto obviously has something more serious on his mind and calls him away.

So Buz gets Tod’s drink, his warm evening in the lodge, and his girl, all in one fell swoop. Suddenly being one of the ski set doesn’t seem so nice, does it, Tod?

Otto tells him quietly that a hunter says he found a girl’s body up on Olympic Creek.

‘She’s sitting up in the snow, he said, with wildflowers in her hair,’ Otto tells him.

Yes, these glass and wood houses are lovely, but Penny suddenly seems terribly exposed, visible to the world.

Oh, charming. Armand has come to Penny’s house and is leaning on the doorframe looking troubled and insane.

He wants to come in, because he’s alone. Understandably, standing there in her nightdress at the door, she isn’t keen on letting him in, but he puts his hand on the door to stop her when she tries to close it.

Perhaps he’s cheered a bit by her propriety in not wanting to let him in while she’s alone and dressed like that. But he wants to show her his picture. He’s carrying it around under his jacket. She looks and tells him he’s a very lucky man and should have brought her with him, but he tells her that the woman is dead.

Now that’s a way to guarantee entry – show someone a picture of a dead woman and the sympathy starts flowing. She invites him in for coffee, and he tells her how that’s how he first noticed Penny – because she looks like the woman in the picture. Shirley Hughes looked like her too, ‘but in her case the resemblance was only physical,’ he says sinisterly. His speech, as always when he’s locked into this obsessive mood, is stuttering and hesitant.

‘But you not only have the same eyes and the same – the same cheekbones, the same kind of – purity, I guess. The same spirit.’

Penny brings the coffee and confesses that she envies Shirley a little.

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ Armand says, his voice rising in anger, throwing the picture down on the table. Penny is suddenly afraid, and I don’t blame her.

‘You only cheapen yourself when you say things like that,’ he says, calming down a little.

Penny confesses that she was scared of him earlier in the shop because he seemed taller and stronger, but right now he seems like a little boy. She has shown herself to be a pretty level-headed sort, but I’m not sure why now, late at night, when he’s almost tried to force his way into her house and has thrown his precious picture on the table and shouted at her, she feels less threatened by him. Perhaps the intimacy of the situation demands that she blinds herself to what could happen, or she really would be terrified. Perhaps it’s easier to see someone as a threat when there’s someone around to hear you scream.

‘That’s how we women trap ourselves,’ Penny admits as she gives Armand his coffee. ‘Mother instinct. We let ourselves help a boy, thinking to protect him, and – we end up loving him,’ she says, her voice becoming more wistful and reflective.
I suppose she has become trapped in an odd position – a young widow, older than most women looking for husbands, but young enough to want that kind of love.
‘When we do, the boy turns into a man and we have to ask him to help us.’

There is no sound but her voice and the crackling of the fire.

‘You’re the first person I’ve been alone with here in this house since – since I lost Harve,’ she says. ‘Somehow – somehow with you it seems all right.’

Whatever instincts she may have, they’re not working well tonight.

Armand’s reaction is muted and not positive. He watches as she lights up a cigarette. She must be a hideous confusion to his mind. She reminds him of his perfect woman, but for her to stay perfect she must stay chaste and aloof. But by his very act of approaching her and eliciting her sympathy he also exposes her wants and needs – the very wants and needs that he abhors. Her allowing him into her house, dressed as she is, is simultaneously a show of innocence and corruption. The cigarette she lights seems to show that in her vulnerability she is letting him further in, but it is a soft sign of immorality (in a woman, at least.) He is exposing her to an impossible test. There is no way for her to win.

‘What’s the matter? Do I shock you?’ she asks, laughing, and he nods reluctantly.
‘You’re even more of a puritan than I’m supposed to be.’

Her look here, laughing and transformed by the smoke, reminds me of Tod’s hallucinations of Red in the Season 2 episode The Thin White Line. The woman who appeared to be kind suddenly appearing diabolic, laughing and partaking of drugs (alcohol in that case, nicotine in this), the image of her distorted by the madman’s mind.

And the discordant music starts again, fading in and out behind romantic strings.

She continues her confessions to him, how lonely she is and how she doesn’t go to the dances because ‘here in Squaw Valley I’m still Mrs Foster. Nobody seems to want to let me forget that, least of all myself.’

It’s obvious to us, but somehow not to her, that she has disappointed him. This is not what he wanted her to be.

‘This afternoon, listening to a boy sing, reminded me of the world I’m missing,’ she says. ‘You know why I don’t go to any of the other parties? I’m frightened. I’m afraid the protective reflexes are going to fall off and show me for what I really am. Just another lonely widow, reaching out like all the rest – like the ones who are divorced, the ones who wished they were divorced – they’re all the same. We’ve all got our arms out. She was lucky, Mr Fontaine,’ she says, referring to the photo. ‘She wasn’t left behind.’

‘Do you think if you were to try, I would let you kiss me?’ she asks him.

‘You don’t even know me,’ he says in a tone of disappointment.

‘That’s why it’s possible,’ she insists eagerly. ‘That’s why it can happen. Because it doesn’t matter. Because nobody will remember. No one will be hurt.’

Poor Penny, so isolated by her widowhood that she will reach out to someone like Armand. Why does she reach out to him when there are so many men who seem to want to court her? Perhaps it’s because he is making no sexual advances towards in her. Perhaps it’s because she wants to mother him, because in being deprived of a husband she has also been deprived of a child.

And suddenly he kisses her, violently, with his hands about her neck as if he is testing how it would feel to squeeze. She doesn’t seem to notice anything but that finally, after so long, she is being kissed. But the discordant music strikes up again and he pulls away and moans.

Taking his picture he flees the house, leaving her wistful and alone.

The next morning, a snowplough is clearing the way for a police car to come up the road to the Squaw Valley. In the car is Mr Fontaine, Armand’s father.

‘It’s really been too swift a week, sheriff and the most enduring nightmare of my life,’ Mr Fontaine says.

He’s been phoning round every ski resort, looking for his son. The sheriff is confident that Armand couldn’t have left, with such heavy snowfall.

But, ‘I taught him to ski, sheriff,’ Mr Fontaine says with a kind of pride that has infused his speech since he got out of the car. ‘And to climb. Before most boys can walk he was crawling over the boulders of Fontainebleau. For his ninth year he would follow me up the rock needles above the meadows round ?Blautz?. For his sixteenth birthday he came with me up the north face of Timor Grande, Switzerland. To my boy, sheriff, snow is no obstacle. It’s a high road. It calls him.’

‘Well, there’s no real harm done, otherwise we’d have had an alarm by now,’ the sheriff says. Oh dear…

(Apart from Fontainebleau I know these place names aren’t correct, but I can’t work out what they are.)

Up in Squaw Valley, Armand seeks out Penny and tells her she needs to see the other side of KT22, one of the peaks.

‘Not on the first or on the seventh day of creation was the world any more beautiful,’ he tells her. The world before the fall of Eve, the evils of woman.

He apologises for acting badly yesterday, and for running away. He wants to start again, but she isn’t sure. He tempts her to come out on her skis to see, ‘a brand new world with a two way view. Ten thousand light years if you want, as far as your eyes can see. Or right at your feet there’s another kind of universe, with lichens and snow flowers, stoneflies.’ He makes it sound very romantic. ‘Up there are secret places – yes. And there are mirrors in the snow. You can find truth, and you can find a – a pure reflection.’

So he has lured her, and she goes to get her skis. He is intent on showing her a brand new world, but not the kind that she thinks.

In the shop, Buz is trying out the ski gear when Mr Fontaine and the sheriff walk in.

‘The Olympic kit. King of the dry run – that’s me,’ he says. ‘I should have figured. You don’t ski around here, you get arrested.’

Gratuitous shot of Buz with ski poles. When Buz tells them Penny and Armand are up on the hill, the sheriff goes to phone the ski patrol.

‘Oh, they’re not there,’ Buz tells him. ‘They haven’t come back yet.’

‘Back?’ the sheriff asks. ‘Back from where?’

(Ignore the serious circumstances for a moment and admire Buz in his scarf.)

‘Oh, er, some girl up at, er, Olympic Creek,’ Buz says. ‘Dead. They went up there last night.’ (He starts to falter a little at the two men’s reactions.) ‘But I guess with the snow they, er – they haven’t come back.’

‘I’ll find him, sheriff,’ Mr Fontaine says. ‘I’ve always found him.’

‘This time you’re too late,’ the sheriff says flatly.

‘But – what makes you think this dead girl is his dead girl?’ Fontaine asks. (What a wonderful line!)

‘The look on your face tells me you think so,’ the sheriff replies.

Buz asks if Armand is dangerous, and is told he escaped from an asylum back east. Mr Fontaine denies that he is insane – just angry. Because denial always helps these kind of situations…

Buz away! But because Buz is powerless on snow, it’s only to find ski boots for Mr Fontaine.

Hoist above the snow, Super Buz is safe. But he’s back in his trusty coat as he rides the ski lift up the mountain with Mr Fontaine. I wish I’d seen Buz on skis.

Buz sees Mr Fontaine off the lift. (Really this is an excuse for another screencap of Buz, to balance out all the shots of Armand you’ve had to sit through.)

Mr Fontaine skis a short distance and then stops, to see the ski patrol returning with a body on a sled.

Buz sees too, and moves closer in a concerned but cautious way, because he’s on snow, and snow saps all of his superpowers.

Buz continues to look prettily concerned but careful on the snow. You think he’d be more used to it, being from New York.

Another view of the ski patrol, because they look so nice against the background. They look better while they’re moving.

Buz can’t ski, but he can be useful and hold skis for Tod. I wonder if these are Shirley’s skis? If they are, why not just lash them to the sled with the body, unless it’s a visual way of signifying her deadness by her abandoned skis?

‘It’s been a night,’ Tod says.

‘I know,’ Buz replies.

‘Somebody killed her,’ Tod says.

‘I know that too,’ Buz replies, and he explains about Armand, and how he is out there with Penny.

I just noticed Buz’s leather gloves. Oh my.

Otto tells Tod that the ski patrol has to go out again to look for Penny, but he suggests that Tod stays behind because he’s tired due to being unused to the activity. Tod insists he will come.

Armand and Penny are skiing out in the pristine and pure wilderness that Armand values so much.

Penny is full of joy at the beauty of the world. She seems like another person out here.

‘It’s a lovely world, isn’t it?’ she says.

‘From up here it is,’ Armand says meaningfully. He too seems altered by the height, and being away from it all.

‘I used to ask Harve why he liked to climb,’ Penny says. ‘He used to say, it’s a way to measure yourself, to test your limits, to exceed them if you can. He was a perfectionist. Most mountain people are. I think you are too.’

She just has no idea of what kind of perfection Armand is actually seeking.

He looks at her with a kind of meaningful disgust.

‘There is so little perfection in this world today,’ he says. ‘With ordinary people what difference does it make? But with one so nearly perfect a blemish – a blemish is intolerable.’

He tells her to stay there while he goes to gather her flowers. It’s all like part of a ritual. He’s taken her to the purest place possible and tells her to think good thoughts.

So off he skis to find her some flowers, leaving her at the top of the hill.

On goes the balaclava of doom again. It really is quite a freaky bit of kit.

But she doesn’t wait for him – instead she skis down the hill towards him. Briefly she falls, and he sees her. Just another echo of what happened to Shirley before she died.

Picking herself up, she carries on.

‘Come on, I’ll race you home,’ she says brightly, and pushes off down the mountain.

There follows a chase down the mountain which she thinks is in fun. For him it is deadly serious.

But then he sees the ski patrol lined out along the slope… His psychic serial killer sense tells him something is wrong.

So he changes direction and quickly heads for an avalanche supply dump…

The ski patrol come after him… (I included this image primarily because it’s pretty.)

Armand gets dynamite out of the avalanche supplies. He’s desperate.

Penny sees what he’s doing…

‘Go away!’ he screams, with the dynamite fuse burning in his hand… ‘All right, I warned you!’ he yells, even though he hasn’t really given them time to react, and prepares to toss the dynamite.

‘Hit the ground!’ Tod yells. He has to have something to do.

Boom! Explosion in the snow. (I suppose they must have had to be pretty careful not to set off an avalanche themselves.) I like the way the ski patrol fall like dominoes.

But then Armand’s father steps forward and calls his name, and it’s as if he has been riveted. Suddenly he’s a little boy again.

‘Oh father, please make them go away…’ he pleads.

Here’s a shot of Tod again, because he features so little in this episode, and even when he does he’s so covered up with ski garb that it’s hard to make him out.

‘We must go, Armand, not they. You and I,’ his father tells him. ‘We must go home.’

(There’s something wonderful about the ‘Rescue’ sign behind him, as his father tries to talk him down.)

Armand wants Penny. He promises he won’t hurt her, ‘not like you hurt mother.’

It seems that in his delusions he thinks his father killed his mother when he discovered her having an affair, by smothering her with a white pillow. He thinks his mother had laughed at him and laughed at his father, and that she was killed for her infidelity. But she is not dead. It is a scenario he has made up in his own mind to cope with her unfaithfulness.

‘We punished her. We made her perfect again,’ Armand sobs. He has been ‘killing her over and over again in [his] mind.’

This incident from his history, where essentially the blame for everything comes from the mother, seems to be an idea that recurs in Route 66 – that the failed mother or wife is to blame for a series of troubles. Perhaps there should be an essay, The Closeted Misogyny of Route 66.

Mr Fontaine decides to go to his son, despite the danger that he might kill him. It must be hard having endured the infidelity of his wife and then the spiralling repercussions on his son’s mental health.

Tod, snowy and watching as Mr Fontaine approaches his son.

As Mr Fontaine walks toward Armand he sees the image of his mother blotting out the father, rather oddly on skis.

Armand falls to his knees in the snow.

‘Oh, mama, you’ve come back. Turn around. Tell them you’ve come back, mother. Oh please, mama, turn around and tell them.’

Tod and Penny both bow their heads with the kind of sad reverence one shows around the truly insane. Tod looks like a little boy in his bobble hat.

And so we leave the tableau with Armand on his knees in the snow, sobbing. It’s a downbeat ending. No chirpy Tod and Buz quips. Just the weeping figure of the insane in a total collapse due to the actions of his mother so long ago.

And what does the future hold for Penny? Well, she will resurface in a few centuries time as a woman called Nancy Crater, one of Dr McCoy’s old flames, then sadly be killed by a salt-sucking creature who takes her form in Star Trek, The Man Trap. Such is life.