Main cast: Michael Gross (Professor Frank Ingram), Karen Elkin (Samantha Perry), Cary Lawrence (Jean Ingram), Ellen David (Diana), Stephen Mendel (The Cop), and Terence Stamp (The Host)
Director: Patricia Rozema
English professor Frank Ingram has an admirer: her student Samantha Perry. The fact that he has rejected her and told her that he is a happily married man doesn’t deter this lady.
Poor Frank’s problem begins when she starts calling him every day at 3 am, to coo about how much fun they’d had together and to remind him of all the sexy promises he’d made. He hasn’t done of these things, and he tells his suspicious wife so. Thing is, their phone number is unlisted—this is a time before cell phones, remember—so how did she get their number?
Clearly, Sam is probably schizophrenic, because she claims that he makes those promises and vows of love inside her head. Her fantasies of them are clearly a projection of him making eye contact with her as some kind of mutual attraction, so he gives her a number of a shrink.
Then she dies. Phew, crisis averted?
No, she keeps calling at 3 am every day. Wait, isn’t she dead?
But at My Back I Always Hear—a line from Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress, which also shows up in a fun Tales from the Crypt episode—is watchable mostly because of Michael Gross’s performance at this increasingly frustrated fellow that is flustered because everyone else, including his wife, believes that he must have done something to provoke Sam.
He tries at one point to tell his wife how hypocritical this is, as the same kind of reasoning would be considered victim shaming had he been a woman, but that doesn’t really go anywhere. This is because this episode seems far more intent on making Frank to be the victim that can never find any reprieve.
This is unsatisfying because, unlike most anthology shows, the poor fellow doesn’t do anything to deserve Sam being inflicted on him. He’s not a villain in need of a comeuppance. Sure, in real life crap can happen to people that may not deserve to suffer, but to translate that kind of thing to a TV show can be tricky. This episode would need more run time to do a decent job out of it, so in the end, the whole episode feels like just a smart part of a far longer show abruptly cut off toward the end.
Yes, Mr Gross is pretty easy on the eyes, and I can imagine why his students may develop a crush on him. Still, the episode doesn’t have a satisfying payoff, so watching it still feels like a waste of time.
