Main cast: Marilyn Hassett (Jill McGinnis), Antony Hamilton (Jim Buckley), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Phillip Noyce

Man of Her Dreams opens with long, lingering shots of Jill McGinnis getting ready for her bubble bath, then getting into the bathtub, and then slowly run her hand along the inside of one thigh, and… uh, yes, she then does that.

Don’t worry, people, nothing naughty is seen, and everything is obscured or filmed from discreet angles, so this isn’t filth, alright. This is art. Indeed, The Hitchhiker has finally come to a full circle in this season. It started out being all about the suspense and the classy thriller stuff, but now we’re back to degeneracy, only this time we are doing it with some pretensions to classiness.

Outside of the bathtub, Jill is a loan officer that meets quite a number of boorish men that yell at her for not approving their loan applications. Her dates are with men that either bore her or creep her out. As a result, she constantly fantasizes romantic scenarios with guys that woo her with roses and then go down on her… oh wait, they sometimes strangle her too, not in a sexy way that get her off.

She also gets menacing calls from mysterious men, and the news reports of a serial killer in the neighborhood. Oh dear, is she getting phone calls from that killer? What is happening? Are her fantasies actually… premonitions of the serial killer’s future kills?

It’s hilarious. Jill is surrounded by many hot guys of all varieties here, and all she does is to pooh-pooh them all as unworthy of her affections. Not that I am saying that she should settle; instead, I wonder why she doesn’t just take a few of them on a test drive. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with having fun while looking for the right person, after all!

Then Jill meets the debonair Jim Buckley, and oh my god, if she didn’t immediately a drag that man, who looks just like the late Antony Hamilton that is also one of the hottest men ever to be on the small screen, I will personally come over and serial-kill her myself for being a disgrace to womankind. Is he the killer? Who cares. It’s Antony Hamilton. He can stick that thing into me anytime and make me die over and over, I will have no complaints whatsoever.

I will complain, however, about the overwrought acting by Marilyn Hassett and Mr Hamilton that makes this episode unintentionally hilarious in a bad way. They can’t seem to say their lines in the right tone and cadence needed for a particular scene, hence every scene in this episode feels off in some way.

Also, Mr Hamilton doesn’t have any love scene here that sees him baring it all, which makes this episode a crime against humanity for that alone. Why cast this obscenely pretty man, who admittedly couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, without exploiting his best assets for the audience’s enjoyment?

Finally, the very episode itself is like a car with a dying engine finally sputtering still by the last scene. The whole thing is pretty pointless, really, as there is no build up to anything and the final scene is just blah. The whole thing feels like a soft core porn script these folks had fished out of a reject bin, and due to the lack of time or something, they removed all the sex stuff and focused on the acting instead. That wouldn’t be so bad, of course, if the two lead cast members could act, but they… can’t.

While most episodes of this show tend to up the sleaze to the detriment of the story, this is one episode that should have upped its sleaze factor to compensate for its many, many inadequacies.