Episode Analysis - S2 E29 Between Hello and Goodbye

Between Hello and Goodbye (11 May 1962)

Writer: Stirling Silliphant

Director: David Lowell Rich

Director of Photography: Jack A. Marta

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

The first episode that George Maharis missed due to his hepatitis (he had recently filmed the very strenuous There I Am, There I Always Am.) But even without Buz, it’s a great episode, with wonderful writing from Stirling Silliphant. This is another story that deals with the fall out of a person’s parents’ failed relationship, in this case the damage done to Claire, a young woman who was split in two by her parents’ divorce. The location affords some lovely cinematography, from the bizarre beauty of the Pacific Ocean Park to an equally ostentatious and eerily empty Beverly Hills mansion. Susan Oliver is the star of the show, dramatically portraying two opposite characters, Claire and Chris. She was also in two other Route 66 episodes (Season One's Welcome to Amity and Season Three's Fifty Miles From Home), and played Vina in the first pilot of Star Trek, The Cage. All in all this episode is well worth watching.

Screencaps are from the Shout Factory version of the show until a certain point where the Shout Factory disc develops a fault and I swap to the Infinity one.

So, we start off with some kind of urgent car chase led by a police motorcycle, that leads us to what looks like a funfair… (It's the Pacific Ocean Park, Santa Monica.)

And Tod pelts off as if he knows just where he’s going, through the gate that says the park is closed, with jaunty fairground music playing. The music is such a contrast that it highlights the urgency of the chase. It’s that unheimlich feeling that this programme is so good at playing with.

Tod in action, running for all it’s worth!

There they go again, playing with that creepy unheimlich feeling. As the men run the camera focuses on strange statues and mask like features which should be fun but in this panicked context are just leering, mocking images. The fairground music plays all the while, with no dialogue to cut across it.

A couple of period images from the park. There are quite a few great colour picture on this website. It's nice to see the place in colour.

Finally something cuts through the music – the strange rustling of hundreds of paper flags, the sound of the sea, and Tod shouting out, ‘Chris!’ as he runs.

Chris (Susan Oliver in a wonderful role) is racing up the stairs above the churning sea.

She switches on the ride and climbs into a kind of cable car which draws her out over the sea. These swinging cars remind me of ceremonial orbs.

(This is the Ocean Skyway built by Von Roll – "bubble-shaped gondolas suspended 75 feet (23 m) above the surface of the ocean. Passengers were treated to a one-half mile (800 m) trip out to sea and back." Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Tod is helpless now she is in the car. He looks down at the waves crashing against the pier below, but there is nothing he can do.

She opens the door to the car, out over the sea, and this is where time freezes. We’re presented with a series of still images and absolute silence. Chris hanging over the sea. The police officer and another man racing up the steps…

Tod standing helpless and watching, frozen in time. Now Tod’s voiceover cuts into the silence.

‘I stand frozen, immobilised, unbelieving, within the eternity of one terrible second, caught between this moment and last week, remembering Wednesday night, what she said the first time I ever saw her…’

‘What is beauty without ugliness, she said. Yesterday without today. Hello without goodbye.’

And this is where we enter the episode, swept back to last week when this all started.
I’m never sure about flashback episodes. This one works largely because this is the only flashback, but I find the voiceover rather awkward. The stilled images and the silence are very effective, though.

We’re in some kind of jazz club. Aww, Buz would love this, but he’s struck down and in hospital. Maybe Tod will tell him about it on the phone later and Buz will mock him for not knowing what he’s talking about.

Poor Tod is alone at the bar, but not for long, as a platinum blonde approaches him and proposes with feeling, ‘Let’s go sack Troy.’

This mixture in a lady of puzzling directness and classical reference is just the way to attract Tod’s attention.

‘All out of wooden nickels?’ she asks him.

‘Horses,’ he replies. ‘You sack Troy with wooden horses, not wooden nickels.’

(The band in the background have ‘NRA’ on the drums – the jazz outpost of the National Rifle Association?)

‘It’s kind of a game,’ she replies. ‘You substitute one cliché for another. The unexpected for the expected. It helps.’

It helps. That’s an interesting two words, and a glimpse into the psyche of Chris/Claire who swaps between a mousy and downtrodden character and one without any limits.

‘What am I drinking?’ she asks.

‘How about some liniment?’ he replies bizarrely, presumably trying to play her game. (Is there some correlation between Greeks and liniment, or horses and liniment? Liniment is not something that enters into my everyday life.)

Oops. A guy comes back with a packet of cigarettes and tells Chris, ‘When you send a guy to the cigarette machine, honey, you’re not sending him to Siberia. Like, he comes back, you know. She’s a kook, kid,’ he tells Tod, ‘but she’s my kook, and who wants to make trouble over a kook, right?’

‘Achilles, meet Hector,’ Chris tells Tod.

‘Achilles had a bad heel,’ Tod replies.

‘But he slew Hector, didn’t he?’ Chris asks meaningfully.

Tod just stares at her through the conversation. I think he’s deeply turned on by this cerebral discussion of Greek myth and liniment.

‘I tried to tell him nicely,’ Chris tells Tod. ‘I asked him, what’s beauty without ugliness? What’s yesterday without today. Hello without goodbye? Goodbye, Hector.’

Almost inevitably, there is a fight. I think these two are stuntmen now, and it’s hard to tell who’s who, who ends up crushed in that corner back there and who’s on top. I think it was probably a turnaround of Greek myth, with Achilles being beaten by Hector. Tod doesn’t have Buz to hold his corner. But anyway, I can’t imagine the experience was fun for either of them.

Watching the fight, Chris dissolves into hysterical laughter and the music starts to suggest that she is mad rather than just eccentric. She has no concern for either of the men. There is something missing from her social construct of the world. She is seeing men as playthings rather than people – perhaps dehumanising them helps her to deal with her image of her father as someone who failed her.

Turning up for work the next day, Tod looks more than a little sore. I’m inclined to think it was he on the bottom of the pile in the corner in the bar.

We hear the same kind of fairground music that we heard at the start of the episode, but it’s not sinister now, just illustrative of where Tod is working – the Pacific Ocean Park. (This place opened in 1958 in Santa Monica, and closed in 1967, and was finally demolished in 1974/5. Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Nice playing with expectations here. It’s an underwater scene, presumably a tank in the park. A shark glides by, and then the camera pans to a starfish moving lazily over a rock. The music is ominous strings, and something moves into the frame at the right, looking perhaps like a net…

And then you realise what looked like a net is Tod walking – yes, walking – through this underwater scene with a step ladder over his shoulder. It’s not underwater at all. The expected has been substituted with the unexpected, the music becomes jaunty, and you realise that this is all a man-made arena and the sharks and starfish are puppets.

Ah, how television makes fools of us all…

This is where Claire comes around to give Tod his pay cheque and to apologise about what happened last night. It’s pretty quickly obvious that she is at least being played by the same actor as Chris. She is a complete contrast to Chris, though, with short, unstyled dark hair, frumpy clothes, and extremely timid. She seems to be deep in some kind of depression.

It’s extraordinary how different she looks in this get up – not just the hair colour and lack of makeup (or relative lack of makeup), but that her eyes, which seem very often in Susan Oliver to glow with a kind of interior fire, look more washed out and dull.

She tells Tod that Chris is her sister, sounding like she’s about ready to cry the whole time. She’d told Chris that Tod would be at the bar, so she seems to feel responsible.

‘You can tell me,’ she says. ‘Was she – unspeakable?’

‘Well, let’s just say she dropped the garde off avant-garde,’ Tod tells her.

Claire says she’s given up trying to talk to her.

Claire stops on her rounds to throw some fish to the dolphins, but she looks bothered and slightly disgusted all the while.

‘Why shouldn’t you be out here throwing me fish? Who makes these decisions? Do you know?’ she asks them.

There is a little hint of Chris here – the wish to change the expected into the unexpected. She is trapped and has no way to break out, just as much as the dolphins.

Tod is in the shower. (There’s a nice cut here from the close up of a hose spraying water at the park to the shower head spraying water, but it would make for boring screencapping.)

Just one more wet-Tod shot. I’ve done a gif anyway, so I don’t need to fill up the screencapping with it ;-)

Okay, just one more. Tod has just stepped out of the shower when he hears the doorbell.

And who should it be but Chris? Tod is in nothing but a towelling bathrobe. In a way she is echoing him, wrapped like that, but her clothes are nothing so homely.

Much less homely. ‘Border patrol,’ she announces herself. Border of what, I wonder? Borders between personalities? Between sanity and madness? Between acceptable behaviour and unacceptable?

Tod initially looks more than impressed, but he’s also wary. I like this camera angle here, reminding us of his height.

‘I may be a little wet behind the ears, but it’s nothing but a long hot summer won’t cure,’ Tod says drily, once he’s got over the first flush at having a glamorous woman turn up at his door. He lights up a cigarette, maybe to soothe his nerves? ;-)

‘Why me?’ he asks her.

‘Another moon, another partner,’ she says, taking his cigarette from him. That’s not a way to appease him.

‘Look again. Total eclipse,’ he says.

She calls him bitter, but he says he’s baffled.

When his clock chimes she smashes it with a golf club that he just happens to have on the table. This marks her as either impulsive or loopy, and marks Tod as a guy who travels with golfing equipment, just in case.

‘You see. The inside of a clock – outside now,’ she says. ‘You can study the pieces, all the little bits and parts. But now that you see them, do you know any more about the nature of time than you did before?’

And then she kisses him.

‘Or the nature of me?’ she asks.

This time it is the phone that rings. She picks it up and answers, ‘He’s booked,’ and cuts the caller off.

I suppose Tod should count himself lucky she didn’t smash that. She starts to do some strange shadow boxing just to prove she’s crazy.

When it rings again he manages to get to it first. And it’s Buz! Tod greets him with, ‘How you doing, tiger?’ (*squeal*)

We get Tod’s side of a nice little conversation. Buz has a virus and will be three weeks on his back.

He’s worried about the expense, but Tod is holding down Buz’s job and has his own job at an estate agent’s in Beverly Hills.

Oh, Buz. It’s only been one episode, but we miss you…

The odd thing about Chris is that she sounds poetically sane. It’s more her actions than her words than make her seem crazy.

‘It’s a package deal, my friend,’ she tells Tod. ‘It’s already been delivered, on your doorstep. One minute love, the next minute, a left hook. How long it lasts, who knows? All sailors pray for wind, but I found you, and I’ll hold onto you, until I’ve destroyed you or you’ve destroyed me.’

There’s something almost Shakespearian in this speech. I could image her in The Tempest.

Claire is at the psychiatrist’s office, staring into a fish tank. There’s something ironic about the fact that the fish where she works by the sea are models, whereas these fish are real, away from their habitat, in an office. She looks as if she’s trying to work out what reality is, like when she questioned why the dolphins weren’t throwing her fish.

She talks of the distortion mirrors in the park, of seeing herself in them. ‘And there I went. Skinny, fat, tall and short. A whole ballet company. And then I – I danced off stage and left them behind. A terrible thing happened. I – I was – I was still being reflected no matter where I looked. From walls, from gates, fences, and I was – I was so tall, so wide, so thick, I was immense, oh I was so immense, but so light, as if I’d swallowed helium. Then I began to drift away. And you know how frightened I am of height, the thought of being alone in mid-air. I guess that’s when I started to scream. That’s when I grabbed the gate and wouldn’t let go.’

Interesting. I get a feeling like that sometimes when I’m very stressed, when I close my eyes and I feel like I’m dwindling down to nothing and swelling up to a Michelin man and spinning in space.

The psychiatrist asks her where she would have gone if she’d floated away, but she becomes bothered and defensive.

‘Well, that’ll be all for today, Claire,’ he tells her, despite their having twelve minutes left. He seems strangely dismissive and distant, but later in the episode he appears to care a lot, so perhaps this is just part of his strategy for her treatment.

He tells her that he wants to see her sister, but Claire tells him how she has begged Chris to come in, but she won’t. She phones Chris to tell her, and apparently holds a full conversation with her as the doctor feeds his fish, pleading with her to agree to come in.

When the doctor asks to speak to her, apparently she has put the phone down.

‘She’s not easy,’ the doctor says. That much is true.

So Claire goes to leave. And, oh look, the psychiatrist has one of my favourite Modiglianis on his wall! And a rather splendid pig, too!

The psychiatrist is thoughtful after she has left. Obviously there are things going through his mind…

Meanwhile, Tod is being taught how to give the prices of exorbitantly expensive Beverly Hills houses to clients as if it were a mere trifle. Tod’s probably thinking about how he grew up and laughing inside at the estate agent woman.

The estate agent, Mrs Thomas, has a rather amazing hat. The flowers have to be kept under a net because they’re dangerous. She’s played by Joan Tompkins, and reminds me strongly of Laura Linney. (Laura Linney’s father was called Romulus, which is awesome but irrelevant to this discussion of Route 66.)

Would you buy a house from this man, if he managed to say a hundred and a half thousand glibly enough?

Then he catches sight of Chris drawing up outside, and sexy music starts playing. Tod knows he’s in for trouble, but he still has that might-get-some expression, despite the dangers of the woman.

‘Something with fifteen rooms and at least three acres,’ she says when Mrs Thomas asks if she can help her. ‘I won’t pay less than two or more than three.’

She’s speaking to Mrs Thomas but she’s pretty much looking at Tod the whole time.

Can Tod’s resolve withstand this look?

Forgive me for drawing modern references into this, but Tod looks as Harry Potter might look when Dobby is hovering a pudding over the head of Aunt Petunia. He’s just waiting for something to explode.

‘Happy hunting,’ Mrs Thomas says as they leave.

‘Is there any other kind?’ Chris replies.

Tod has the look of a man who has decided that he might as well make the most of the unpredictable vixen that fate has handed him. I would have screencapped his raising of the eyebrows, but in a freeze frame it just looks silly.

Fifty three miles outside of LA, and Tod is being driven in a rather reckless way along dusty roads by Chris. It’s really good she didn’t decide to drive him off a cliff on a whim, because it would have been a disappointing end to the series.

Up in the mountains he asks her where she got that car.

‘A friend,’ she says. ‘Town jumps with friends. They’ve all got keys out for approval. A girl can open anything.’

It must be liberating to be Chris. She can bat her eyelids and get just about anything she wants.

‘Why way up here?’ he asks.

‘Why, these are the big rock candy mountains,’ she tells him. ‘Don’t you have a sweet tooth?’

It’s all a confection – a make-believe. Mountains are candy, cars can be conjured up. Nothing is real.

She tries to kiss Tod, but I don’t get the feeling he’s really into it.

Aside from the fact that her eyes look slightly insane, I like this shot.

Tod reminds her that the night before she quoted Faust as she left.

‘They’re not usually so smart. Faust, he knows,’ she shrugs.

‘Then to the passing moment would I cry, ‘linger a while. Thou are so fair’,’ Tod quotes. This reminds him of her ‘what’s hello without goodbye’ speech, which leads him to wonder if she wants the hello, the goodbye, or the in between. I think she wants it all, and she wants to orchestrate it all.

I’m wondering at this point why she’s attached herself to Tod. We know why – because he’s the guy who fixes things every week – but does she sense this in him? Is she reaching out to him for help, or is he just another man to destroy?

This bothers her enough to ask for a cigarette. She doesn’t seem used to people questioning her motives as deeply as Tod does.

‘I don’t mind getting hurt. That’s the price,’ Tod says. ‘I know you’ve launched a few thousand ships, but I’ve paid a few pipers too. I live in one rule. It has to be worth it.’

‘Dealer’s choice,’ she says.

I like this little hint of Faust again with the ‘launched a few thousand ships.’ Tod seems to be enjoying have someone to share these references with. Perhaps he thinks that this makes it worth it.

Claire is being mousy and wan again. She seems filled with hesitancy and dread.

Tod is washing windows when she finds him.

‘We’re all in aquariums, aren’t we?’ she asks him. ‘Now and then we bump our noses against the glass. Hurt, we dart away, hide somewhere on the bottom under a rock, to let our noses heal. All the time we’re hiding. It’s that feeling of terror. It was glass, wasn’t it? A boundary we couldn’t break through. Wasn’t that a face we saw, staring in, watching us? But whose face? Whose?’

Claire and Chris, both are behind glass, standing on either side of the divide, unable to find the middle ground.

‘You understand what I’m saying?’ she implores him.

‘No,’ he admits. He seems to understand Chris with all her literary and historical references, but can’t understand Claire with her psychological insights.

‘It’s Chris. Her face. Laughing.’

She’s trying to warn Tod about her, but Tod tells her to stay out of it. She must be warning him off for her own good as much as for his.

‘She’s like a broken hourglass. Her sands run fast.’ (Can a broken hourglass run fast? You’d think the sands would just run out.) ‘Married at seventeen, divorced at eighteen. Married eleven days later, divorced again at twenty. That’s when she told me, From now on, men are butterflies to be pinned in a velvet case.’

You have to wonder if this history is true or if it is a constructed memory to wrap around the framework of a trauma of divorce.

‘My eyes are wide open,’ Tod tells her.

Oh, Tod, I don’t think they are.

‘They’re full of sand,’ she tells him.

‘We have no secrets. Everything’s out front,’ Tod says. We know that’s not true, though. What makes him think he can trust her, just because she is an exhibitionist? Exhibitionists probably hold the deepest secrets of them all.

‘What do you know about her? About our family or what happened?’ Claire insists.

Here we learn that Claire’s father left his wife for ‘a dancer. Long blonde hair below her shoulders. Not a brain in her head. He left us for her.’

So, what does that make Chris, with her blonde hair and glamour? She doesn’t try to be brainless, though.

Tod suggests that the three of them meet over dinner (that shows how much he knows about Chris.) But Claire responds that she hates her, and wishes she were dead. A foreshadowing of the end/beginning of the episode.

Dr Reisman, the psychiatrist (Herschel Bernardi), comes in to see Tod at the estate agents’. Tod is eager to help what he thinks is a client, but actually he has come to see him about Claire.

‘I think of real estate as something to dig graves in,’ the doctor says. Everyone is a philosopher.

He tells Tod that he’s concerned about Claire. I wonder if this goes beyond professional ethics? But he seems a lot more human and compassionate now than he did with Claire. I wonder why?

‘Tell me about Chris,’ the doctor says.

This bemuses Tod, since Claire is his patient, not Chris.

‘I wanna check on an image I’ve been forming, okay?’ the doctor asks.

So Tod lights up the cigarette the doctor gives him, and talks.

‘Well, I guess Chris and I have what you’d call a doomed relationship, but, er, then so has a meteor. See, doctor, she has me talking the same way. She’s the sort of girl men dream about, you know.’

The doctor asks him to be less general. ‘She ever talk about me?’ he asks.

‘Yeah. She calls you the high priest of psychic vivisection.’

Tod tells him that last night she caught him looking at his wristwatch, ‘so she slipped it off and dropped it into her purse. She said, let’s you and I talk as though there were ten centuries of rain on the roof. Another time she said, I’m an eye – an enormous eye. Everything I see is unspeakably magnified.’

This interests the doctor. ‘When did she say that?’ he asks.

‘I don’t really remember,’ Tod says.

The doctor asks about the father – and Tod says how it’s funny that Chris seems ‘flipped’ over him, whereas Claire sees him as a monster.

The doctor seems to have got what he came for. He offers to shoot pool with Tod if he ever gets tense, and then leaves.

Tod is showing a house in Beverly Hills. Chris, relentless and manipulative, finds him. You can tell the kind of people he is showing the house to, because they have a car with a chauffeur outside.

Tod seems right at home here, selling this place to the lady with great enthusiasm. The place has just been redecorated and has an Olympic sized swimming pool. When do I move in?

I wonder how Buz would manage at this? And then I wonder if this script was written with Buz and Tod in mind (I mean, Tod is trying to cover two jobs) – and what that script would have been like? I’d love to see some early drafts of Route 66 scripts.

Unbeknownst to them, the party has gained an extra guest…

She walks up looking as if she were drunk, but knowing her you know she’s probably not drunk, just intoxicated with her own charade. Tod looks momentarily worried, but he puts his best smile on and introduces her as ‘Crystal St Clair’ to the couple who are viewing the house.

So Claire is ‘Claire St Clair,’ inseparable from her father’s name even if she relinquishes the surname. And ‘Claire’ is ‘from the Latin "clarus", meaning "pure, renowned, illustrious."’ (thanks, Wikipedia), while ‘Crystal’ essentially has the same meaning. But crystals can split and refract light, make it colourful and out of the ordinary. Good name choices, Mr Silliphant.

‘Why don’t you just take a gun and shoot him?’ Crystal asks the bemused lady.

‘What’s he asking for the place?’ she asks bitterly. ‘How he can hate you on three different levels, in two dozen different rooms, from the deep end of the Olympic sized pool, no doubt heated, possibly even scented.’

Is her vitriol reserved for the man or the lady, or perhaps both of them in confused and equal measure? This place has obviously sparked off too many associations for her – associations she has deliberately sought out in coming here.

The lady asks her husband, ‘Take me out of here.’

‘Nobody’s leaving but you,’ Tod says to Chris, so she slaps him.

‘Come near me and I’ll tear your eyes out,’ she says.

Not the kind of thing the couple were hoping to see when they arranged to view the house.

Tod tries to bluff his way through it by saying she has a ‘great little sense of humour.’ It’s not working, Tod.

Chris continues in this violent streak by grabbing the lady and thrusting her over towards Tod.

‘Women like you are responsible for women like me. You push your men into two hundred thousand dollar tubes. Why? Monuments to your importance. So make him buy it for you, honey. Go ahead and martyr him. Give him a good excuse to hate you. Let him hate the seven hundred dollar lamps and the two hundred dollar ashtrays and the silver service and the Spode and the servants with the fancy olives, super, giant size. Make him grumble, but make him pay. Then he’ll begin to compensate. Oh, how he will compensate. He’ll pour his sad, sad story into some perfumed ear – like this one, honey. And then what’ll you do with your Spode and your fancy olives and your seven hundred dollar lamps?’

Wow. So, again, who is her anger really directed at? The father who cheated or the mother who she perceives as failing her husband.

And she grabs hold of the frankly unattractive husband and kisses him, then thrusts him away across the room and starts to laugh hysterically. Oh, such mixed up motives. The love/hate for the father figure, the daughter/mistress attitude. She doesn’t know what she is.

The couple flee the house as her laughter echoes around the empty reception. She looks like she has taken ownership of the place.

This kind of psychological breakdown is way beyond Tod’s ability to manage, as we have seen before in this series.

Concerned, understated-acting-Milner-Tod. I think Buz would have slapped her back by now.

‘Hi. You’ve worked enough for today, honey,’ Chris says seductively, as if she’s obliviously to what she’s just done. ‘Wait till you see the new bar I’ve discovered, just this side of Santa Barbara.’

Tod sweeps her off her feet and into his arms, and for a moment you’re wondering if he’s decided to ditch the responsible, two-jobs, paying-for-my-buddy-in-hospital persona and take her up to one of the empty rooms and bed her on one of the packing cases.

This shot is mostly just to show the impressive metalwork they have as banisters on the stairs.

And this is to show how Tod carries her serenely upstairs as if she weighs nothing. She is acting as if she is drunk, or so far gone she is detached from reality.

But Tod is not taking upstairs to ravish her. He puts her down near the packing cases that could have acted as a bed, and swiftly runs out of the room, locking the door behind him.

‘Tod, please! You don’t know what you’re doing! I can’t stand being shut in!’ she cries at the door.

But Tod is running down the stairs (and here my Shout Factory disc develops a fault and doesn’t want to play. Thank God I also have the Infinity one.)

Chris runs around the room in panic, screaming to be let out. The empty room with its tiled en suite and echoing walls seems somehow more claustrophobic than a furnished room would be.

Here at her packing case chair and table she looks like someone in a prison, or like a drama student rehearsing a scene – all the more so when she starts acting out a delusion that she is at dinner with her parents.

‘No potatoes, Martha, thank you.  … Please, mommy, please don’t make me. I can’t eat. Daddy I told you I didn’t want to come down for dinner tonight. I don’t want to say why. But you know why. You both know why. Don’t lie to me any more. I heard you on the phone. The men will be here in the morning as soon as John drives me to school, won’t they, daddy? I saw the list. All the things divided up. Everything in the library, in the game room, goes in one van – your van. The living room, the furniture here in this room, and all the bedroom things, my own four poster, my dolls, my clothes, go in another van – your van. But what do you think I feel? How can you both sit there and eat. Well, I don’t wanna be divided. Do you hear me? I don’t wanna be divided!’

This empty house must remind her of her emptied childhood home.

And she runs about the room, miming throwing things, and then collapses in tears on the packing case. I like this scene, but I feel that it’s a bit self-conscious – the touches to make sure we know it was a home like this house must have been, with servants and a four poster for the little girl, and lots of dolls. I suppose it’s the difficulty of having to do something as a monologue that would really work better as thoughts inside her mind. I think Susan Oliver is a very good actor, but she doesn’t quite pull this scene off.

As she lies on the packing crate the camera angle is lovely – with hardly any frame of reference you feel disoriented, as if you’re swinging upside down.

‘Oh daddy, why do you have to love someone else?’ she cries. ‘Wasn’t mommy enough? Wasn’t I enough?’

So there it is – the latent blame for her mother and herself, that somehow they were at fault for not being enough for the father/husband.

The camera angle is still off kilter, and there’s that lovely use of the mirror that she runs towards, reminding the viewer of Claire’s speech to the psychiatrist about walking past the distortion mirrors.

Mirrors everywhere, splitting her into different people. As she opens the bathroom cabinet you fear that she is going to harm herself – but the cabinet is empty, and she only mimes taking out pills and swallowing them.

She is writhing in her delusion at whatever non-existent medicine she drank when Tod gets back with the psychiatrist.

They obviously have no idea what she might do. Well, I imagine the psychiatrist might have some idea, but Tod doesn’t.

What neither of them expect is that she will have the presence of mind to make a dash for the door and lock them in the room that Tod locked her into.

Luckily the hinges are designed so that they can be lifted easily out of the sockets. Tod to the rescue!

And this is where the chase begins – the chase that we joined at the start of the episode.

Go, Tod! You hunt down that crazy woman in your nippy sports car!

I’m not convinced this is Susan Oliver driving. I’m not sure why she wouldn’t, but that is definitely not her hair. If they were going to use a stunt driver, couldn’t they have given them a better wig?

Tod and the doctor almost crash as they turn the wrong way into a one way street, and take off in a cloud of dust.

They pick up a traffic cop due to this flagrant neglect of the rules of the road, but this is a good thing. With much gesticulation and unheard speech they obviously explain that they’re chasing a madwoman.

And this is essentially where we came in to the episode, with the police motorcycle escort, chasing a car through the streets towards the Pacific Ocean Park. I could screencap all this, but you might as well just go back and look at the first 15 images ;-) That’s not to say it doesn’t work – the fact that this is identical to the start works very well. It’s even more eerie in some ways the second time around, and serves to remind us of the split in Chris/Claire. Two identical people, two identical chases.

The traffic cop looks like this is out of his league, but he has the presence of mind to turn off the ride. Tod is yelling, ‘Chris!’ but the doctor calls out, ‘Claire!’

Tod looks like he’s only just worked out that they are one and the same person. Perhaps it just goes to show that you only see what you expect to see. But the doctor shouts, ‘Listen to me, Claire! You can’t kill Chris! Do you hear me, Claire? There is no such girl as Crystal St Clair! You wanted me to find out. That’s why you handed me the phone. There was no answer on the line. No Chris. Just ringing. No Chris.’

Tense moments as Chris/Claire stands frozen, poised to leap into the water…

And then she suddenly seems to realise how high she is and that the water below is a terrifying danger, not a blessed release. The doctor promises that they will talk about it, ‘just you and I, Claire. Just you and I now, not Chris any more.’

The only thing that she throws into the sea in the end is the wig, the platinum blonde symbol of all that Chris is.

There is relief all round, and the doctor signals for the policeman to pull the cars back in.

She holds out her hand for Tod to help her from the car, but he tells her, ‘You can make it.’

And she steps out alone, looking relieved and tearful…

Tod and the doctor are relieved too. I wonder what Tod is thinking, now he knows that Chris was Claire all along? I got the feeling that in some way he despised Claire a little.

So the doctor and Claire walk away together. I just hope it isn’t so that the doctor can section her and lock her away in a 60s mental institution. I hope she’s got past that desperate point and can start to recover.

And Tod is still relieved, and looking a little tired. He’s probably wondering when Buz will be back to take some of the workload of two jobs and a crazy girl off his shoulders.