Hey all, we’ve got a pretty well rounded bunch of people on the SDMB, so I thought I’d ask for some help on a really obscure sort of question.
My Google-fu may be weak, but if anyone knows of an online, or even print, listing of episodes of the PBS series Mystery, I’d like to try and search from one that I’d only seen part of, and find out how it ends.
The episode in question dates back to when Vincent Price was introducing episodes. Basically, a nerdy soft-spoken guy (the sort who rides his scooter to the train station in the morning), takes the train back when some over excited guy gives him a tape he’s recorded at random, and it coincidentally has people plotting the nerd’s murder, by name. Then the voyeur is shown murdered, mutilated by the eyes (with Mr. Nerd too shy to pull the alarm cord, there’s a fine for that you know), and the tape gets the dialog about the nerd’s murder removed from the tape, and the police find him to be a nuisance, then part one ends with him going somewhere, and seeing his estranged ex-wife is there. And I never saw part two. But I often wonder, where the story went after that.
I’m going through theMystery! article on Wikipedia now to see if anything is what you’re describing. If I find it before I have to go grocery shopping, I’ll post a link; otherwise you might want to check it out yourself.
ETA: Did not see anything there that looked promising; now trying the official website.
I opened this thread on a whim, to see if it was the one old episode I remember watching way back when, and holy crap it was. hehe.
The episode is called “Armchair Thriller: Dying Day”. It was easy to search for, because I remembered the protagonist’s odd name, Antony Skipling.
As I recall the ending:
it turned out that a bunch of his friends and associates had pulled a massive hoax on him, possibly to drive him insane or to suicide. The final scenes that I remember are Skipling being led away, repeating “my name is Antony Skipling” over and over crazily, and a group of his friends laughing and mimicking the things they’d done (like the guy with the mutilated eyes; he put on the shattered glasses and the pained expression he’d assumed in the window, and everyone else laughed uproariously).
Apparently, Skipling was played by Ian McKellan. Awesome!
Edited to add: Even more awesome, here’s a YouTube clip!
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping someone on the SDMB would know the episode in question, but I was expecting it to be a little harder than that. And the guy was Ian McKellan? Wow. Thank you, Max Torque:, but I won’t be spoiling it for myself, I’ll instead try to track down a source and watch it. Especially since IMDb says the outcome neatly pulls the whole thing together. I can’t watch youtube from work, I must have borked flash here, or something, but I’ll look at home.