User Reviews

I was pleasantly surprised by the Hitchcock episode Coyote Moon, as it's the second episode in a row of the fifth season to not feature a murder. Okay,--there's the spoiler--I just gave that much away. We first encounter Macdonald Carey, perfectly cast, as a college professor driving to California, and the coyote pup he's trying to get to a get some help for who up and leaves him when he's talking to a gas station attendant. This might appear to foreshadowing of what's to come, but it isn't, as the two legged critters the professor encounters, unlike the pup, overstay their welcome.

First, it's a young woman who claims to be pregnant, whom the good professor allows to persuade him to drive her to her boyfriend, fifty-three miles, no less, but then the setting is the far west and mostly desert, and the traffic is virtually non-existent. Before long our hero encounters a tramp of an old man whom the woman says is her father ("hiya pops!). He hops aboard. Before long the geezer is filching the professor's cigarettes by the pack. As is so often the case the good liberal is too kind for his own good, as he tolerates the snarky manipulating of these two desert rats for way too long.

The professor is not, one can see, naive. He may even be streetwise. But he's a stranger in a strange land with these two, and he's hoping to be able to drop them off at their stated destination. Alas, the plot thickens, as the boyfriend isn't there, though they do encounter him later, and as he's an imposing and strapping fellow, and drinking wine out of the bottle, the professor understandably allows him to jump inside as well. As it dawns on the good man that he's being robbed left and right by these three, he decides to call the police. He also takes the law into his own hands. Sort of. The ending is highly satisfying.

A college professor en route to a new position in California driving an old VW bus across the Texas desert picks up a young woman while stopped at a gas station, who wants to go to some town about an hour's drive away. But just as he gets started, she starts telling him to stop right there. When he does, she calls out to an old man by a tree, and we learn that her father is Petticoat Junction's Uncle Joe (Edgar Buchanan) I know, he's not yet Uncle Joe, that came later.

With the three riding together in the front, the old man, identified only as Pops, helps himself to a cigarette from a carton the "Professor" has on his dash, opening a brand new pack, then offering one to the prof. A few minutes later, Pops wants another cigarette and he opens another pack-he must be pocketing the pack for himself after smoking one in each pack. Before long, the Prof (no name was given) wants a cigarette and finds all packs are gone. Pops magnanimously offers him one from his pocket, and the Prof quietly takes it, but we can tell from this and other scenes that he now regrets picking up this pair.

When he gets to a gas station some miles ahead, he decides to get them out of his car and leave them-but he didn't notice the station was all shut down, out of business. Further complicating things is Pops' son, Harry is there, so he joins the party.

The prof is later able-cleverly-to separate himself from the group but because he's learned that they swiped most of his possessions from the back of his bus, wants revenge. Surprisingly, the revenge is not on the violent side-but that's the only "spoiler" I'm going to give you. He very shrewdly finds out a way to make them pay, while he goes on his merry way.

This was the 4th episode of Season 5 and I saw it right after viewing episode 4. The contrast couldn't be clearer. The only thing the two shows had in common was the body count. The previous one, "Appointment at Eleven" is almost universally panned as one of Hitchcock's worst episodes in his 9 years of hosting a TV series. This one that features a happy ending with a true "good guy" to root for, is one of the best. I'm even giving it a rare (for me) score of 10. It's that good.

I was wondering while watching this series in order, how long it would take for Edgar Buchanan to show up in one of the stories. He finally made it here in the fifth season, portraying the kind of smarmy, conniving con-man character he often did in various TV Westerns and anthology programs of the era. He has a way of overshadowing the principal player, in this case, MacDonald Carey, as a college professor en route to a new assignment. He picks up a hitchhiking pregnant woman (Collin Wilcox Paxton), her 'Pops' (Buchanan), and eventually a brother (Wesley Lau), who form a grifting trio preying on poor suckers in a desert locale on the way to California. After having virtually all his possessions stolen right out from under him, the Professor hits on a way to get his revenge at a gas stop in Scorpion Springs. It involved a little skullduggery of his own, but only for the briefest amount of time without causing any permanent harm. I found it a fitting resolution to a story that found a way to introduce a coyote pup at the outset so as to provide a title for the episode. Otherwise, what was the point of agonizing over a wounded stray that managed to escape anyway?