Man's Best Friend

"Man's Best Friend" is a rather excellent third-season episode of The Hitchhiker, which was one of the greatest shows ever broadcast on cable, or in any other televised medium. Hosted, once again, by the hunkiest horror host this side of the Telecrypt, Page "Bodacious Butt-shot" Fletcher, it features a rather annoyingly smug and insufferably quirky 1986 yuppie, Richard (Michael O'Keefe), who works in a huge metropolitan area unspecified, in an office building that scrapes the sky. With Carl (Joel Polis), a fellow that is a good friend, or maybe? I don't know.

Anyway, his old lady, Eleanora (Jennifer Cooke), while he comes home one day (the start of the episode) explaining patiently how "the asshole factory was working on overtime today, and sending me their best" (not an exact quote, but close enough), throws a couple of suitcases downstairs and decides she's going to leave. Out of there, ya dig?

He's next seen in the next scene chewing some rather charred steak. He manages to adopt a stray dog that is rather intimidating (German Shepherd and Labrador mix, I'll wager), and then he goes to see his wife's hairdresser, Randi (Boyd Norman) or whatnot, another Eighties yuppenstein, and this one with pretensions of being a "tough guy." Okay.

So, this ego on legs smacks our man when he gets rough with him for convincing his wifey-poo to walk out the door. The nerve of some people! The next thing we/he knows, he's picking up a paper and seeing where the hair salon owner, who operated in furtherance of our man's separation from his wife (who has momentarily disappeared), has been "ripped apart by an animal." A wild beast. Not a sanguisuga, a "man beast," but definitely a "thing to be feared." (Forgive me for quoting Joseph, one of my own obscure novels from twenty years ago.)

Then we get a very unwoke visit to his wife's (implied) lesbian lover, Dr. Hazlitt (Margot Pinvidic of Meatballs infamy), a sex therapist or relationship counselor who flatly denies that she was having an affair with homeboy's wife, calling him delusional, which is most likely true, the viewer assumes.

He next chomps his way to a slight altercation with the guy friend, Carl, whose swanky abode he's borrowing while the old lady has him kicked to the curb. Having turned the place into a regular kennel, the friend erupts in horror at the general filth and degradation he sees around him. Keep in mind: anyone who crosses this guy, his enemies list, is immediately savaged by the slavering canine jaws of his new four-legged good buddy slash albino executioner.

So next up, he ends up in a confrontation with the ex-wife. Turns out, the phrase, "I'm my own worst enemy!" is really not so smart an idea to say when your own worst enemy is always dispatched by the Doggie of Death.

And the final scene features said doggie approaching him with dripping jaws, a happy killer look on his muzzle, and fur streaked with fresh blood. But was it all an illusion? Most likely, but the viewer will have to determine that for his or herself.

Spoiler ahead.

The Dog Whisperer of Weird plummets from a window to his death. This seems, to this author at least, strangely familiar (the author lives and dies by reading Tarot cards every day of his otherwise coldly calculated and humdrum existence).

In the Tarot, the trump card The Fool begins a new cycle, a new stretch of the journey, being unnumbered as "Zero" and seen to take his belongings, as Richard does (occupying Carl's seaside estate), and shove off, oblivious to the cliff he's about to walk off of, while being hounded (har-har) by a canine. A small white doggie.

With little fangs, we must assume.

Richard, alas, externalized his rage, having most certainly committed the murders himself, but projecting his guilt onto a convenient scapegoat.

Er, in this case, a scapedog.

The dog was never real. But the innocence of the dog is underscored by the white fur.

Streaked with blood.

Directed by Philip Noyce, incidentally, he went on to direct such films as The Bone Collector. It's a strange contrast between the world of 1985 and the world of today, when guilt is not so easily assuaged by dint of a remorseless psychological projection.

Perhaps we've all gone to the dogs.

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