Main cast: Michael O’Keefe (Richard Shepard), Jennifer Cooke (Eleanor Shepard), Joel Polis (Carl), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Phillip Noyce
Cocky and confident Richard Shepard’s wife of six years, Eleanor, has just kicked him out of their house. Oh well, no matter, he decides to head over to his best friend Carl’s place—Carl is his BFF, despite them having seen one another only a few times after they graduated—and as luck would have it, Carl needs to head out to New York for a business trip. As long as Richard doesn’t mess around with the things in Carl’s place, Carl lets him stay there while he works things out with Eleanor.
On the first night in Carl’s place, Richard breaks a small statue—of course—and then finds what seems like a stray dog and brings it into the house. Boy, I hope Carl isn’t allergic to dogs, or the poor fellow will have more than broken things in his place to deal with!
Then again, who cares, as everything in this world universe revolves around Richard. So, as long as Richard is happy, who cares about anyone else, right? Hence, things become very unfortunate for those that make him angry, as his new canine buddy voluntarily seeks out these people and tear them to bits. This is made worse by the fact that he’s mad at people that he suspects, without proper evidence, that his wife is cheating on him with.
Yes, this is the mysterious killer dog episode that every genre anthology show tends to have.
Also, yay, gratuitous nudity is back! Not in a sexy context, however, as it’s more like a taking a shower before the psycho strikes thing. Still, people that for some reason watch this show for that kind of thing may be placated a little.
Man’s Best Friend is a predictable episode, but it’s an unexpectedly enjoyable one given how average to terrible the previous episodes of this season had been so far. This could be on me, though, as Big Boy, the dog, looks a lot like a canine family member that had passed on years ago, and I can’t be down on this episode because of this. The dog is really cute, even when covered in blood, and I spend the entire episode getting the feels because of my cherished memories with my own Big Boy.
The one weakness of this episode is how Richard escalates from jerk to pure psychopath in the blink of an eye. There is no indication that he’s like this at the start of the episode, so I am not sure what happened. Maybe an UFO kidnapped him and replaced him with a whackjob in a deleted scene?
Still, the dog is really cute, and Michael O’Keefe’s shirtless scenes aren’t too bad either. I like this episode, perhaps for far more subjective reasons than usual, so I’ll give this one three oogies just to be fair.
