Bob Readick stars in a script he authored as a man named “Gordon Saunders.” He is tired of his daily life and seeks the solitude of a remote house in the northwest. His peace does not last long, however, as a neighbor is engaged in some very strange experiments. Saunders is lured into them with strange visions and illusions. They start with a white house with yellow shutters and a woman in a red dress in a rocking chair. The inhabitants are an odd man, Dr. Ederly, and his daughter Marilla. She turns out to be the woman in the red dress. It all seems real, but it’s not, or is it? Saunders senses that something is really different, where his sensation of physicality is different in the house. He gradually uncovers that Adderley is a reclusive philosopher-scientist who has invented a device that projects hyper-realistic, three-dimensional illusions, including their own house and Marilla herself. (In more modern terms it might be referred to as holographic imaging that creates “holograms.”). The experiments allow the operator to select longitude, latitude, and altitude of a particular place, and a person go there… except for one thing: it is their image that goes to that location, not their physical nature (that’s for Star Trek transporters to do in the future). When Saunders is sent to a place of his childhood, he finds his hand goes through a common farm implement. The story gets a bit bizarre and confusing, but in the end, it is clear that even the doctor and his daughter, and the house are not really with Saunders. They are somewhere else. Ederly has been working on adding the sensation of “touch” to the imaging, and asks Saunders to try it. Marilla kisses Saunders and he says that the touching of the lips seemed real, but the sensation was cold, like death.
These later Suspense shows may have been grasping for a different kind of modern relevance and differentiation from both television dramas. It may be different, but this episode is not particularly engaging.
The program was recorded on Thursday, April 26, 1962. The session’s start and ending times are not known.
The surviving recording appears to have a slightly clipped open. It is more complete, overall, than others that have been in the hobby for decades in that the original commercial is intact. Many prior recordings have had that edited out.
This is the only episode where Bob Readick and his wife Barbara appear in the same episode. It is her final Suspense appearance. “Kasarr” was her stage name, one among a few she used, a contraction of her last name “Kossower.”
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620506
THE CAST
Robert Readick (Gordon), Paul McGrath (Dr. Ederly), Barbara Kasarr (Marilla), Robert Dryden (The Farmer)
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