And a cameo in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, as one of the singing busts.
He’s the broken one.
This concerns an episode in the series Lewis (also called Inspector Lewis) a spinoff of the Inspector Morse series featuring Morse’s sidekick and whipping boy Robbie Lewis in his later career on the Oxford Police Force. Big spoilers, if anyone still cares.
The episode was “Falling Darkness,” episode 4 of season 4, first aired Sept. 26, 2010. The IMDB summary says tersely, “During a Halloween, one of Dr Hobson’s college roommates is found dead with a stake through her heart and a garlic bulb in her mouth.”
It’s a really good episode–very dark–and I’ve watched it (and the whole series) probably a dozen or more times. Too long to go into the whole story, but here’s the part I finally figured out.
Early in the episode, a group of kids wonders if the house they live in is haunted. They ask a psychic/medium to give it a once-over. [The psychic is played by Lynsey Baxter who had the notable role of Ernestina, Jeremy Irons’ jilted fiancee, in the equally notable 1981 movie The French Lieutenant’s Woman.] When the psychic gets to one of the bedrooms, she says that something violent did happen in that room, and she addresses the spirit who seems to be stuck there, telling them it’s okay to move on. I didn’t grok that that had anything to do with the rest of the episode.
Come to find out that Laura Hobson, the medical examiner (who later becomes Robbie Lewis’s girlfriend), lived in that house during her college days with two other women and two men. One of the women is the one who winds up dead with the stake & garlic, as described in the summary. Her murder launches the episode.
To jump to the salient part, it turns out that one of the male roommates raped the now-deceased female roommate back in their college days when they all lived there. She got pregnant and gave birth to twins, who were adopted, but to separate families. The guy never forgave himself for this act and took his own life long before the episode opens. The now-grown twins, who don’t know the details of their origin story, figure in the climax of this very grim episode.
After watching this episode a bazillion times, it finally dawned on me that the rape was the violent event that happened in that bedroom, and that was what the psychic picked up on. Clearly the flatmate who committed the rape is the troubled spirit who was still stuck in the room (even though he killed himself elsewhere years later). 
“2001: A Space Odyssey” has always been one of my favorite movies, and I have watched it numerous times. It took several viewings, but it finally occurred to me that something didn’t make sense.
If you have never seen the movie, an alien artifact is discovered on the moon, and immediately classified as Top Secret (because the public, as everyone knows, would panic out of control {/s}). To help keep the secret, a rumor is spread that the American moonbase is suffering a serious epidemic, and nobody can get in or out.
Eighteen months later, the spaceship Discovery is approaching Jupiter, and the real reason for the mission is revealed. The artifact sent a radio signal towards Jupiter when it was discovered, and Discovery is to make contact with the aliens who the signal was aimed at. Furthermore, the artifact, the signal, and the real purpose of the mission were still highly classified!
So, was the moonbase still sealed? Were the occupants still pretending to be suffering from an epidemic? What was the intention if the aliens were actually contacted around Jupiter?
Although I’d expect a mix of panic and religious cults springing up around Erich Van Daniken finally be proven right.
There’s some dissonance between early drafts of the Clarke novel, the final published version, and Kubrick’s film. The high security around the lunar artifact (the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly, or TMA1) was initially only until the transmission of the signal. Thereafter it was going to be an open expedition (see “The Lost Worlds of 2001”). I don’t have the text of the novel handy to check, but in the film version the Cold War paranoia was cranked up to 11.
“Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles has been back in the news lately due to MTV’s shutdown. (It was both the first and the last video MTV played.)
The song was released in 1977 and back in the eighties it seemed prescient for having predicted the rise of music videos.
But when I listen to it in 2026, I notice these lines:
They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine on new technology
And now I understand the problems you can see
So now the song seems prescient for predicting the rise of AI art generation.
My guess for an in-universe explanation is that the government got everyone in the Clavius moon base to sign NDAs. I think something like that was mentioned by Dr. Floyd in the meeting on the moon. And, out of universe, Kubrick decided we didn’t need that detail for the next section of the movie.
Nothing about that movie made sense.
Not sure this counts as obvious, but a couple of weeks back I learnt that Hans Zimmer played the keyboard on that. Yes, that Hans Zimmer.
That’s because Kubrick focused on producing a stunning piece of visual art rather than telling a story. For that you have to read the Clarke novel.
Good point. Many of us walked out after the film saying “beautiful film, but what did it mean?”
Not as I understand it. The Buggles were basically a two person band, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downs. Downs is obviously an accomplished keyboard player. Horn and Hans Zimmer were friends. Zimmer helped program the synthesizers on the album. It’s possible he added some of the playing but 99% at least was Geoff Downs. Zimmer is seen very briefly in the video.
Well that’s disappointing…the conductor at a recent Zimmer vs Williams concert I went to made the claim. Shame!
You do see him playing keyboards at the end of the video (that killed the radio star). Zimmer wasn’t credited on the album and later sued.
He’s at about 2:50. Geoff Downs also played in Yes and was a founding member of Asia.
Mrs. Howell was 64 (or thereabouts). As a child/teen, that was an immediate no. As a 55 yr old man…
Regardless of age, she was still noxious. And even if she weren’t, it’s tough to compete with Mary-Ann.
Interesting, thanks!
For decades I misheard a line in the The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby. I thought what he saw at the hiring time was a line on the corner bar. Finding out it was the line on the ‘color bar’ gives the song so much more weight. Makes much more sense, too.
I think that he was merely saying that appearances can be deceiving, especially after first meeting a person.
The woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. I’ve seen it a million times. I love it.
So much so I got my wife a jigsaw puzzle of it. As we were working on it I noticed that not only were there boats (!!!) in it, there were people in the boats! At first I thought it was a rip-off painting so I looked it up. Nope, Boats and people were in it all along. I never clocked them. Mind blown.
Reference: The Great Wave off Kanagawa - Wikipedia