What I watched: The twelfth episode of the second season of Suspense, an anthology drama series. “The Third One” starred Margaret Phillips, Theodore Newton, Iris Mann, Martin Balsam and Henry Lascoe. It was directed by series creator Robert Stevens, and written by Arthur Heinemann. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, November 22, 1949, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: A bougie couple gets ready to go on vacation, with the wife of the household Grace (Philipps) proclaiming that the vacation is hopeless while her husband, Robert, stagily reassures her. Meanwhile, their daughter Janey (Mann) is playing hopscotch with other local kids, when they all get bitten by a weird-looking dog. Fortunately, there’s a cop (Balsam) there to ease the trauma by shooting the dog. (The animal always stays off-screen, presumably for budget reasons.) Not wanting to get in trouble, little Grace runs away. The cop patiently explains the dramatic crux of the episode: that if the kids don’t receive their rabies shot quickly, they’ll get very sick.
Janey is crying when she gets home, but denies everything to Grace when she comes in. The mother notices the cut on Janey’s wrist, which the girl swears is just a scratch. Back on the street, a doctor (who looks like a younger version of Jerry from The Bob Newhart Show) comes in to treat the boys, and stresses the importance of getting to Jane first. A police lieutenant (Lascoe) even starts a city-wide search for her, despite tripping over his lines at least once.
Back at home, the main argument is over whether the family will take the radio on vacation with them. This argument ends up with the radio broken. Grace is continually bothered by the ringing phone, apparently business calls. Robert urges them to all get out right away, before the phone rings again, because that’s how real people act. After the break, featuring the recycled “Marvin the Magician” ad, the lieutenant confirms that the dog was infected with rabies, and asks the press to put the story out.
On vacation, Grace and Robert read the newspaper story about the girl who was bit by the dog, but can’t put two and two together. Even while wrapping the wrist of an irritable Janey, they still remains oblivious. Robert comes back with a newly-purchased portable radio, just what the little girl has been asking her. But of course they turn it off and go outside to reflect on their marital problems.
Finally, Jane turns the radio back on and hears on a news bulletin that she is in danger of “a frightful death.” Even while crying, she refuses to talk about the dog bite. The parents finally put it together, and call the police. They proclaim that this is all their fault for scolding her too much. The episode ends, and I guess we’re supposed to assume that Janey doesn’t die in the end.
What I thought: For a hokey, half-hour genre show designed to sell mufflers and brake lights, Suspense was sometimes surprisingly ambitious. This episode… was not one of those times. Everything from the lack of an actual dog to the undistinguished actors suggests that “The Third One” was basically a cheap filler week. Indeed, the story is so threadbare that many minutes are spent with characters simply repeating the stakes of the plot and what’s happened so far. Hitchcock it ain’t.
The description for this story on IMDb is something about authorities desperately searching for an infected child under the care of self-centred parents. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed that the infection was just rabies and not zombie-ism or some other sci-fi pandemic. But the description of the parents as “self-absorbed” is also a little strange to me. Heinemann’s script may want us to believe that the parents’ flaws (and particularly the mother’s career) are to blame, but this is not really demonstrated in the plot. They both notice Janey’s injury immediately, and it’s only her fibbing and a series of coincidences which keeps them uninformed. As a result, nobody in the episode ends up having much of a personality, nor does the story have much weight as a moral parable.
The previous Suspense episode which “The Third One” is most like is “Dead Ernest”, which also features a terrifying real-life medical condition, is structured around a search for the sick one by a third party, and culminates in a series of improbable near-misses. (Margaret Phillips even appears in both.) But while “Dead Ernest” was able to take us right up to a man having his blood sucked out, “The Third One” is hamstrung by its basis in reality. By all accounts, rabies is one of the most unpleasant ways a human can die, but (as the script notes) its symptoms don’t begin until it’s too late to treat. So there’s no real opportunity for the kind of body horror that should come with this territory.
One key difference from “Dead Earnest” is that the investigation is helmed by the state, in the form of two police officers. In this, “The Third One” reflects a typical concern of virus thrillers: biopower. This concept, taken from Foucault and probably mangled by me, is the ability of the state to act upon the body of its citizens, often justified by the claims of medical science. Extreme actions like quarantine are obvious signs of biopower, but we can also see it in debates over whether parents should be allowed to refuse medical treatment or vaccines for their children.
In “The Third One”, biopower is unquestionably benevolent. The mandate of the state is to act against the agency of its citizens to resist contamination, with the alternative being the death of an innocent little girl. It is precisely their robust exercise of their freedoms — the father’s freedom of movement, the mother’s economic freedom — which puts the public health at risk.
The struggle of the rational government against the irrational public is a common theme of virus stories (just think about Matt Damon and the mob in Soderbergh’s Contagion.) Of course, in real life the question of when it’s acceptable to restrict liberty in the name of public health is a lot messier, especially given that said public health has been a justification for a lot of needless oppression over the years. “The Third One” ultimately does not shed much light on this dilemma.
Coming up next: The Lone Ranger tells us about “Six Gun’s Legacy” (wait, isn’t that a JoJo’s villain?)
The Eternal Couch Potato 