Main cast: Patti D’Arbanville (Wendy), Peter Hudson (Jerry), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: George Mihalka

Hold it, hold it: there are two non-French cast members getting the main billing in Spinning Wheel.

What happened? Have all the ugly Americans died out in the Paris of this fifth season of the show? Perhaps, hmm, maybe this is an old, previously unaired episode that is only making an appearance now? I do wonder.

Wendy is an “artist”. She does things like rotating her hips while speaking out lines like “The mattress… ooh… putrid sweat! But I’m not scared!” to a dead-eyed band playing some kind of threnody-like music in the background. She has to be dragged out to an ambulance while she shrieks repeatedly, “I need to be abused!”

Clearly, I need to have a really high IQ to understand such art.

Our artistic dear is being her usual bratty self-absorbed self when she starts having dreams or visions of herself in white nightie wandering around hallways and getting chased by a fat brute. Then comes some weird body transference thing at the very last minute, and the episode ends with me wondering what the heck I have been subjected to.

Patti D’Arbanville acts like she had been injected full of tranquilizers prior to each scene, because she has all the range and emotion of a broken down toaster here. This episode has a lot of screaming, bad acting, and worse story, culminating in a “twist” that is more like the wringing of the last vestiges of dignity from this show.

Absurd and dumb from start to finish, this episode is like an acid trip of the spectacularly bad kind. Is it legal to subject innocent folks to episodes that are as putrid as this one?