Friday, December 25th, 2009
11.30 The Incredible Hulk
The Incredible Hulk. Season 2, Episode 1. "Married"
One of the very best episodes of The Incredible Hulk. Amazing stuff. David marries a woman called Carolyn (Mariette Hartley), they work together on their mutual medical afflictions (she's got a terminal disease and he tries to help her, while she devotes time to his unusual metamorphoses) and - in the end - she dies.
As a lifelong fan of The Incredible Hulk tv series I can say that this is one of my favourite episodes. I watched it when it was brand new, and I've seen it a few times in the years since. Reviewing it for the first time, for my blog and podcast, allows me to look at it from a different perspective. I appreciated it more, I think. Because when you look at it from outside the context of being a fan of the series, it really stands out as a remarkable achievement.
It's a two-hour movie, which aired as part of an action-drama series, which has no obvious action component. Certainly it has drama, but not the conflict-driven drama that dominates the majority of other episodes in the series. It's got no bad guys and not a lot happens. It's basically a two-hour movie about two people. Another departure when you look at contemporary shows from the late 1970s. Here you have a two-hour movie which is (almost) nothing but talking.
Yes, there's a party scene mid-way through and there's a kid on the beach (Meeno Peluce of Voyagers!) but apart from that you've got two solid hours devoted to the star of the series and a guest star. Structure-wise, that's very unusual.
Also, it's a romantic movie. A love story in a show that's most frequently about bad guys doing bad things?!
So, in every way, this is nothing like an episode of anything that was airing at the time, not just The Incredible Hulk! Imagine a Kojak or Columbo episode where no crime takes place, imagine how shocking/different that would be. That's what this is. It's two people in a house, in Hawaii talking a lot. Nothing else.
What breaks it up, of course, is the Hulk. He appears a few times. Mostly in hallucinations. Under hypnosis David Banner meets him a few times, and that's very cool. There's some iconic imagery on display here. Certain episodes of The Incredible Hulk create images that imprint themselves on you and stay with you forever. The sequence with the Hulk in the desert, and the sequence with the Hulk in the cage in the desert, is beyond cool.
But this movie isn't about The Hulk. It's about two people gradually fall in love. Bill Bixby and Mariette Hartley have fantastic chemistry. You believe that these two people are falling in love. You believe when they get married. When a show does an episode where one of the leads gets married suddenly, sometimes it's hard to take that leap. But with a script like this, and performances like these, the viewer has no problem accepting it. I certainly don't.
It seems so in character for a person like David Banner (who is so caring) to open up completely to this woman in her final weeks of life. And Kenneth Johnson crafts some scenes between them that can make the spine tingle.
As the best of times, The Incredible Hulk can bring a tear to the eye but this - in particular - is heartbreaking stuff. In the final minutes of the episode her health deteriorates, in the midst of a severe storm, and they try to get to the hospital but she's not able to make it. Her pain is so severe, she leaves the car and runs off into the storm to die. It's very moving stuff. Kenneth Johnson wrote it, produced it and directed it. This is his baby. And he nailed it. To perfection. Not only did I watch the movie, I watched it again with the commentary (and I rarely watch commentary, except Futurama) and you get a great insight into the movie, the show and the man who made it all happen.
Such a great episode. If you watch any episode of The Incredible Hulk, watch this episode of The Incredible Hulk.
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