Main cast: Susan Blakely (Melody), David Dukes (Ted Miller), Alberta Watson (Jill Friedlander), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Christopher Leitch
The best thing to look at in Remembering Melody is the jiggling of Page Fletcher’s denim-wrapped butt cheeks in the first few seconds of opening credits, as he walks along the road looking for a vehicle to do that give me a ride gesture at. And given that one can see that in any episode, there isn’t any reason to watch this one at all.
Unless you’re into looking at David Dukes and Susan Blakely in various states of nudity and in steamy soft-porn level love scenes, I suppose.
While based on George RR Martin’s story of the same name, this episode ends up being a meandering mess of boring nudity and even more boring fake scares. Basically, Ted Miller is a work-obsessed, self-absorbed lawyer whose life and relationship with his boss Jill are tested when an old friend and lover Melody shows up at his doorstep with nowhere else to go. These two soon get into bed, or rather, the shower stall and the bath tub and then the bed if we want to be accurate, but they also clash over values. You see, Melody still clings on to her dipstick capitalism-is-bad shtick, which probably explains why at her age she still doesn’t have money or a steady job but hey, that’s totally the fault of capitalism, and she accuses Ted for being a sell-out. Apparently she fed and supported him and other buddies of theirs and, when they left college, they all grew up while she is still drifting around and dreaming of the day when Bernie Sanders becomes the President of the USA, and hence, drama.
The tail end of the episode is hokey horror with a twist that can be seen coming from a mile away, even when I haven’t read the story it is based on, so the whole thing is just a boring waste of time. Characters talk in a stilted, melodramatic manner that never rings real, and the main cast isn’t sexy enough to make the tedious nudity appealing. The take-home message – capitalism is bad, and if you don’t agree, you’re get shagged and then dragged by the creepy embodiment of socialism – is pure rubbish too as, come on, this episode debuted in HBO, and that’s as capitalistic as can be.
When the best things about this episode are the crotch and ass of the dude who shows up in the opening and ending bookend scenes…
