Main cast: Carol Lynley (Dr Elizabeth Porter), Victor Raider-Wexler (Dr Robert Winston), Scott J Weir (Keith), and Kathleen McCall (Gina)
Director: Jeffrey Wolf
The third and final season of Monsters kicks off with Stressed Environment, the usual episode about how scientists that experiment on animals get what they deserve. It’s a pretty standard message espoused by people that never pause to think of how their medications were made in the first place, or how people came to understand diseases to come up with those treatments.
Perhaps realizing that the kids watching this show have likely entered puberty by now, this episode opens with Kathleen McCall obligingly stripping down to her pink panties, giving the audience a slow lingering look at her that clearly shows that she is not wearing a bra, as her character Gina changes while being ogled by lab assistant Keith.
Why these people are changing in the main research area, I have no idea, but then again, one can also ask why a lab assistant is not wearing a bra to work. Do the answers matter as long as the audience is happy?
Keith and Gina report to Dr Elizabeth Porter, who has had her lab set up to resemble a typical home, only the rats placed in there are constantly subjected to traps, poisons, et cetera. Dr Porter wants to see if this “stressed environment” could cause the rats to evolve into a new species, perhaps a much smarter one.
Well, when this episode opens, the rats seem to have vanished for a few months now. Dr Porter isn’t too pleased by this, not when Dr Robert Winston, whom she really wants to schmooze up to, drops by to inspect her lab and audit her work. Well, if she’s annoyed now, wait until she learns what the rats are up to…
Now, the rats look more like little reptilian monsters, but these stop motion puppets look so cute in their homicidal rage that one look is all it takes for me to want to adopt one for myself.
The rest of the episode, though, is as dumb as the changing area being placed right in the line of sight of people in the research area.
If placing traps could make rats evolve into smart little buggers in a little over a decade, we would all be ruled by our rat overlords by now.
More importantly, at the end of the day these are still rats. Due to the limited budget of this show, there are only a small handful of rats seen, so there’s nothing a pail and a scalpel can’t fix, and this is a lab where all kinds of chemicals and sharp implements should be in abundance.
As for Dr Porter, she’s an imbecile. She does the experiment just because, she rails about how she wants to be left alone to do her work without corporate oversight even as she still relies on corporate funding, and she thinks they would be able to communicate diplomatically with the smart rats that she spent a decade plus tormenting.
In the end, it’s way too easy to root for the rats, because the humans in this show are a hot mess of fried brain cells. Well, except Dr Winston, who is the only sane person here that points out what a moron Dr Porter is, so naturally he is portrayed as the cold and unfeeling pencil-pusher corporate type.
At the end of the day, this episode proves that smart humans evolve to do great things, while dumb ones write scripts for shows like this one.
