This Guy Is Full of Green Light: Bryant Burnette's Review of "Golden Years" Episode 7

This is the SEVENTH PART of an article by Bryant Burnette summarizing the Golden Years television show.  As Bryant pointed out in the first post, we should not confuse the television series with the 3 hour hashed movie.

This was originally posted at Burnette's blog, thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com

Episode 7 (airdate 08/22/1991)

The final episode of the series arrives, under the direction of Michael Gornick.

The teleplay is once again by Josef Anderson, from a story by King, but it's worth pointing out that there are two different versions of the episode: one which ends on a cliffhanger (complete with a "To Be Continued..." title card) and one which offers a resolution. The ending with the resolution was apparently aired in foreign markets, once it became apparent that the series would not be renewed by CBS.

I would speculate that the studio mandated that King and Anderson write and film an alternate ending that could be used to provide closure, and therefore make the project seem like a more attractive option for home video and for reairings on cable. We're not concerned with that alternate version much here; that'll be the subject of a later post that examines the differences between the original episodes and the home video version.

The episode begins with Terry and Crewes stealing a car, and then cuts to Moreland, who is still back at the airbase. He's in the cockpit, pretending to be a fighter pilot. This man -- this character -- is a grade-A buffoon; one of the worst characters in King's canon, without a doubt. In another scene, two more of the worst King characters ever meet: Toddhunter and Billy the janitor. Toddhunter is bereft of assistants, so he enlists Bill's annoying help. Both of these actors are still working, and have worked steadily in the last two decades; I suspect neither is particularly proud of the performances they gave on this series. Bad acting notwithstanding, Toddhunter's experiment is a success: he makes a clock run backward, and then disappear. Hooray...?

Francie knows a place where they can all hide; it's a house of hippies. One of the hippies goes by the moniker "Captain Trips," so any King fan worth his salt knows this fellow is probably no damn good. Sure enough, he turns out to be an informant, and he sells our heroes out. Before long, The Shop has set up shop on the street where the hippies live. Moreland, who was discovered at the airbase, has been brought along for the ride, and he's melting down big-time. He's quite concerned that the appropriate paperwork hasn't been done. Think of a slightly less obnoxious Craig Toomey (from The Langoliers) and you're on the right track.

Gina's been clutching her heart and looking pale a lot lately, so you figure something bad is going to happen there. Harlan seems to sense it, too, so he dances with his wife for a while, and when they wake up the next morning they have a final roll in the hay. Keith Szarabajka and Frances Sternhagen are good in these scenes; they have a dry sort of chemistry, and while it doesn't work as well as you sense everyone wants it to work, it works better than it probably has any right to have worked.

Moreland finally snaps, and runs outside to start shouting about how this whole operation is most irregular and can't be tolerated. Andrews shoots him dead, and before long the assault on the hippie-house is on. Gina has a heart attack, or something, and Harlan won't leave her; Terry -- who seems upset to an out-of-character degree -- and Crewes reluctantly abandon the "old" man, and make their escape (offscreen) through a big storm drain that the house somehow connects to. Harlan walks outside carrying Gina's body, and is tranked by Burton; he passes out cold, but not before he tries to bite Jude's ear off.

Terry and Crewes regroup, and for no real reason that seems all that plausible to me, decide to return to Falco Plains and try to rescue Harlan. Toddhunter, meanwhile, has visited his father's grave again, so that he can monologue a bit and dig up one of the watches he'd previously buried. As the episode ends, Harlan is in bed at Falco Plains, his eyes glowing green while he is under sedation.

To Be Continued...

This episode, like much of the series, is just not particularly good. There are occasional moments in which the plot almost begins to work, and some of the acting is good. However, all of the scenes involving Moreland are awful, and "Captain Trips" is a fairly lousy character as well.

One major issue I have has to do with the character of Francie. She was introduced in the previous episode, seemingly as someone who would be of major importance. She's in this episode, too, but disappears after a couple of scenes; she's headed for Wisconsin, where she knows someone who can get them all fake IDs and new lives. There is a scene in which Terry and Crewes are -- prior to the assault on the house -- trying to figure out their next move, and they mention going to meet up with Francie in Wisconsin, so it seems likely that if the series had continued, they'd have met up with Francie again eventually. However, given how adamant she was in the previous episode about going with her parents, I'm not sure it makes a bit of sense for her to take off for Wisconsin at the first available opportunity. This smells to me; specifically, it smells like someone was unable to figure out how to keep Francie alive during the assault on the house, but knew she would need to be alive for something later on in the story.

Sadly -- or not so sadly, depending on your perspective -- we never got the rest of that story. As I mentioned earlier, there is an alternate ending that offers at least some resolution, but it is clearly a rush-job, and does not seem like something King would have written naturally. Instead, it seems like an exercise; "alright," some studio executive says to King, "if you had a gun to your head and had to end the series definitively in two minutes, how would you do it?"

It doesn't work, either. The cliffhanger is unsatisfying, but it at least seems like a natural progression.

Everyone's mileage will vary on this subject, but for my tastes, I'd rather be left with an unfinished work than with an unfinished work that has a hastily-composed ending stapled onto it.

Alas, since the original episodes remain unavailable commercially, the stapled version is all that most King fans have. It may be that that is King's preferred version; he's had very little to say about Golden Years in the years since, so far as I can tell, and it would be foolish of me to assume that he isn't basically okay with the hoe-video cut of the film. Maybe he isn't; but then again, there's no proof to back it up.

My final take on this series is that it is mostly a mediocrity. The production values are slight, the acting occasionally bad, the structure of certain scenes ill-considered. However, the concept -- a man has a science-powered accident and begins aging in reverse, then has to go on the run with his elderly wife to keep them both from being killed -- is a solid one, and King managed to create a few good characters. It'll never happen, most likely, but I'd love for him to sit down and write the whole thing as a novel one of these days.

In a way, the other work within King's canon that Golden Years reminds me of the most is The Plant, that famously unfinished novel that King published online in several installments. The extant material is known as Book 1, "Zenith Rising," but there do not seem to be any particular plans to complete the story, and what we have is good, but does end in anything even vaguely resembling a satisfying, conclusive manner. Golden Years, in some ways, is a similar case: both stories represent Kingus Interruptus, and while it stands to reason that his career has seen a large number of works that withered and died on the vine, these are perhaps the only two cases in which they did so publicly.

As such, they both represent an intriguing insight into what a failed King story looks like. There are remarkably few of those; for the hardcore King fan, that, perversely, makes them rather compelling, in their own strange ways.

Or perhaps that's just the lack of sleep talking...