TVSquad

(S01E03) Writers are the most shameless, self-centered bastards in the world. We lie, we seduce, we'll steal your soul. Anything to look good on the page. -Sam Landry

I thought I had read every story from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and I might have, but nothing about "Umney's Last Case" was familiar when I read it just recently. Nevertheless, it's not a bad story, and it's also very "meta" as the college kids like to say.

In the story, as in the TV adaptation, we begin in the 1930s where a grizzled private eye named Clyde Umney is leading a storybook life that he'll soon learn is more "storybook" than he realizes. He wields snappy dialogue with the precision of a trapeze artist, and always knows just what to say to get what he wants, at one point managing to turn two women to jelly in his office one after the other.

(S02E05) Last night's episode of Wonder Showzen was incredibly surreal, even for Wonder Showzen. The show began with a science fair in which Sthugar reveals a propeller beanie powered by sadness, and Wordsworth creates a television which shows his dreams. Unfortunately, Wordsworth's deepest fears manifest themselves into an actual monster who escapes the TV and wreaks havoc on the town. Chauncey demands Wordsworth face his fear, but Wordsworth is too afraid. Therefore, Chauncey and Him use Him's shrink ray (which doesn't actually shrink an object but instead makes everything else bigger, giving the illusion of shrinkage) and journey into Wordsworth's brain in order to bypass his free will and make him fight the giant monster. The segments inside Wordsworth's brain included some great meta moments, especially when they find themselves inside his short term memory center and they become sensory echoes themselves, multiplying and repeating into infinity.