I found Umney's Last Case particularly unsettleing.


(SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to be describing the whole events of this episode, you really shouldn't read ahead unless you've already seen it.)

In Umney's Last Cast 1938 private eye Clyde Umney finds his world turned inside out when he meets his creator, 2005 author Sam Landry, who tells Clyde he is in fact a ficticious character living in a fictional world. As it turns out, Sam's young son drowned in a pool, and he was unable to comfert his grieving wife. Now he wants to switch places, so that he, Sam, will live in the ficticous 1938 and Clyde will live in the real-world 2005 with Sam's wife, Linda Landry. Sam believes Clyde can help Linda better than he ever could. Clyde is then transported by Sam to the real world at the Landry home. After Linda's initial shock of seeing Sam's character brought to life, she is happy and excited by the charming Clyde, and it seems things will be O.K. Then the smoking hot female pool cleaner in cut-off shorts comes to clean the pool. Clyde, as it turns out, is quite the playboy, and when Linda's back is turned for about two minutes, she finds them together frolicking together (not actually having sex or anything, but acting in a way that could seem inappropriate for a married man to behave with a woman other than his wife). Anyway, Linda has a meltdown and says she wanted to have a honeymoon with Clyde and have another child with him. Clyde tries to calm her but says he is the way he is, he is the way he was written, and that in fact he can never change. Linda, devistated, goes into the city and to the top of a building and throws herself off to her death.

Clyde, who's supposed to be a hero, is sent to our world to help a grieving woman, yet his unfaithful ways are what end up driving her to suicide. Although I do believe he never intended to hurt her, rather than helping her he is what ultimately drives her to her doom. This part of the story I found particularly disturbing.

Thoughts?

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Yeah, the whole second part of the programme was made up by 'someone' - not Stephen King. The short story ends just after they swap places - there's just a short epilogue after. That'll be why it's incoherent rubbish.
In the short story the author's wife has already committed suicide - his life had fallen apart, that's why he wanted to escape into Umney's world. Don't spend too long thinking about this clumsy hack job - just buy the book :o)

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yeah i didn't even recognize it while i was watching it, i had to take out the book and look up the story and even then the show wasn't matching up to what i remembered to have read. there were almost 2 totally different stories.

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IMHO, the short story Umney's Last Case was a lot more enjoyable than the episode that was "B-A-S-E-D" on it. It's common knowledge that most screen adaptations of novels and stories are not, as you say word for word, scene for scene, but there was a particularly noticable difference in this one, which made it much more difficult than the other episodes to recognize, even though artistic license was used on all of them to make them tv friendly.

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