Strung Along
In the 1950s, puppeteer Joseph Renfield (Donald O'Connor) and his beloved characters Koko the Clown and Cowboy Clyde were children's television superstars. In the present day, the ravages of time and a heart attack have rendered Joseph an elderly has-been who stays home and makes puppets all day, occasionally talking to Koko when he hears the little clown's voice in his head. His much younger wife Ellen (Patricia Charbonneau) has been attempting to find friends outside the house, but her attempts keep failing on account of Joseph's jealous streak. As such, her only real social outlet is a weekly acting class. One day, Joseph receives an invitation to participate in a tribute show dedicated to the Golden Age of television. This news gets him excited, thinking that it could potentially lead to a comeback. Ellen is supportive of Joseph's idea, but suggests that he take on a partner to lighten his workload, offering to ask around her acting class.
A young puppeteer named David (Zach Galligan) soon comes to visit Joseph. Though his experience is in animatronics rather than classic string-operated marionettes, Joseph agrees to teach David the finer points of puppetry after seeing his admiration of the craft. The two get along surprisingly well, with David suggesting updates to the material, but Ellen thinks that David's words of advice are an attempt to ruin her husband's act. At the same time, Joseph begins to suspect that Ellen has been cheating on him with someone named Rick, having overheard her on the phone and learning from David that she has been missing her acting class for months. Joseph overhears David accusing Ellen of the affair and finds a stash of love letters written by Rick, and flees to his workshop in despair, passing out after a bout of heavy drinking. Before he falls unconscious, Joseph hears Koko's voice in his head, telling him that he'll have to take matters into his own hands.
When Joseph awakens, he's horrified to find that Koko's strings have been cut and the clown himself is missing. Hearing Ellen screaming, he rushes to the bedroom to find Koko stabbing Ellen repeatedly with a knife. The shock causes Joseph to suffer another heart attack and collapse. Afterwards, David enters the room with a remote in hand. Ellen tells the dying Joseph that David is actually Rick, who she met in her acting class, and the pair staged the murder with an animatronic double of Koko to scare Joseph to death in a plot to gain his fortune. After Joseph dies and Ellen leaves the room to call an ambulance, the real Koko slashes Rick's throat with a knife under his own power. When Ellen returns, Rick's body has been strung up like a marionette, Koko's knife in one hand, and the clown manipulates him into killing Ellen as well. When the police arrive, called in by the paramedics Ellen called, they find both dead lovers strung up from the canopy bed. The strings are in Koko's hands, his face now resembling Joseph's, frozen in an ear-to-ear grin as he rests atop the canopy.
Tropes:
- The Ace: Joseph is said to be one of the best puppeteers to ever live, his show being a smash hit when it originally aired. It's for this reason that Ellen married him and Rick can't wait to work with him.
- Adaptational Name Change: Joseph's name in the comic was "Tony Zargono", while his wife was named "Nora".
- Ascended Fanboy: Ellen and Rick used to love watching Joseph's show when they were kids. As adults, Rick becomes Joseph's apprentice, and Ellen his Trophy Wife.
- Bait-and-Switch: At first, the episode appears to be goading the viewers into thinking that Koko is the villain, culminating in the scene where Joseph sees him stabbing Ellen to death. It then turns out that the real villains were Ellen and Rick, who deliberately induced a fatal heart attack to kill Joseph for his money, with Koko coming to life and killing them in return to avenge his creator.
- Beach Episode: Joseph and Rick are seen filming one for Koko's show during the latter's training.
- Bumbling Sidekick: Koko had one on his old show by the name of Cowboy Clyde. Thankfully, unlike Koko, Clyde doesn't come to life and is completely harmless.
- Chekhov's Gun: Once he comes to life, Koko uses the knife Joseph was using to sculpt a puppet head to kill Rick and Ellen.
- Chekhov's Skill: Ellen and Rick use the skills they learned in their acting class, where they first met, to convince Joseph that the former is cheating on him and ultimately scare him to death with an animatronic duplicate of Koko stabbing her.
- Companion Cube: Koko serves as one to Joseph, the old man talking to him when he hears his voice in his head.
- Consulting Mister Puppet: Ever since his glory days ended, Joseph spends his time in his workshop idly talking to Koko, whose voice he can hear in his head.
- Cool Old Guy: His depression and jealousy issues aside, Joseph is a fun and kindly old guy to be around, whether he's on TV entertaining children, or training his new apprentice how to properly work a marionette.
- Creepy Circus Music: Koko's Leitmotif is a jolly carnival/circus tune that gets repurposed with different instruments throughout the episode, depending on the mood of a scene. It gets truly creepy in the final shot of Rick and Ellen's stringed-up corpses as the Joseph-faced Koko looms over them, where the music is heard eerily slowed down.
- Deadpan Snarker: Koko is a pretty snarky clown most of the time, both on TV and inside Joseph's head.
- Demonic Possession: Joseph's spirit possesses Koko and makes him come to life, getting revenge on the young couple who caused his fatal heart attack.
- Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Koko (and Joseph, by extension) warn Rick not to touch Cowboy Clyde, since he doesn't know where he's been.
- Double Entendre: There are a few of them dropped in the ways that Joseph teaches Rick how to manipulate a marionette's strings.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Joseph throws back shot after shot after he finds Ellen's stash of love letters from Rick.
- Emerging from the Shadows: Joseph introduces Koko in this fashion when Rick first meets him. The clown steps out of the darkness with his Face Framed in Shadow, but he quickly gets playful with Rick.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: All three main characters end up murdered by the end of the episode.
- Evil Puppeteer: A rare case in which Joseph, the puppeteer in question, is actually rather sympathetic and plays the inversion completely straight. Joseph only turns evil after being wronged by the two unfaithful Asshole Victims he thought he could trust.
- Foreshadowing:
- After realizing that Ellen is cheating on him, Joseph takes to drink, asking Koko what he should do. Koko asks him "You mean if you were you, or you were me?"
- A comment Joseph makes to Rick during his training notes how the puppet and puppeteer can become one and the same.
- Friend to All Children: Like many presenters on 50's children's television, Joseph has a pretty big soft spot for children.
- Gold Digger: Ellen works with Rick, her lover, to kill the much older Joseph so they can get his money.
- Gone Horribly Right: Ellen and Rick were hoping to convince Joseph that Koko had come to life and become a Serial Killer. Joseph's spirit possesses Koko himself and makes their lie come true.
- Heartbeat Soundtrack: Joseph's heart is heard furiously pumping when Ellen snaps at him for letting Rick change his act, and does so again when he finds Ellen's stash of love letters from Rick.
- Hoist by His Own Petard:
- Joseph teaches Rick (under the alias "David") about his craft in marionettes. Rick uses the knowledge he gains from Joseph to his own advantage when he concocts the scheme that shocks the veteran puppeteer into a fatal heart attack.
- Joseph also lets Ellen join a weekly acting class, established to be her only regular source of social interaction. Unfortunately, she meets Rick in that class, and the pair become good enough actors that they manage to kill Joseph through his ailing heart.
- Rick and Ellen's scheme involves them cutting Koko's strings loose to make it appear that the little clown came to life. This comes back to bite the pair big time after Joseph drops dead, once Koko starts moving on his own.
- Homage: The episode is one to 1950s and '60s puppet shows like Howdy Doody, Beany and Cecil, and Topo Gigio, albeit with adultery, murder, and ghostly possession to be thrown around.
- Hypocrite: Joseph yells at Ellen for her making Rick leave before the big tribute show, tearing into her for making him lose his friend. Ellen promptly fires back that Joseph's jealousy made him push away every friend she had for the last eight years.
- Ignored Expert: When his voice is heard in Joseph's head, Koko can tell that Ellen is no good for his creator. When it becomes apparent that she's cheating on him, Joseph admits that his treasured clown was right all along.
- Instant Expert: It's downplayed, but Rick picks up on how to work a marionette pretty quickly, as Joseph tells Ellen that the young man learned in two weeks what he did in two years.
- Intergenerational Rivalry: Inverted at first, then played straight. Joseph, the old man who sticks to string-operated marionettes, and Rick, the young apprentice who specializes in animatronics, get along pretty well when they first meet, the former even teaching the latter about his method of puppetry. When Joseph finds evidence that Ellen's been unfaithful to him and the latter comes up with new material for the act, tensions between the pair soon flare up.
- I Want My Mommy!: The sketch that Rick and Joseph work on for the tribute show discusses the use of the trope:Koko: Oh, and by the way, Clyde, when you get up on the board, you're supposed to yell "Cowabunga!", not "Help me, mommy!".Clyde: Oh, thanks, Koko! And what do I yell when the board gets on top of me?Koko: That's when you yell "Help me, mommy!".
- Large Ham: Ellen and Rick get pretty hammy at times. It's justified since they met in the weekly acting class Ellen attends, and it's also where they gain the skills needed to fool Joseph into suffering a heart attack.
- Mal Mariée: Ellen finds new love through Rick when her relationship with Joseph, who's very much older than her, hits a rut. Worse yet, Ellen's attempts at socialization outside the house are often met with Joseph's furious jealousy, with her weekly acting class being the sole exception.
- Marionette Motion: Rick's dead body moves this way when it's under Koko's control.
- May–December Romance: Ellen, Joseph's wife, looks to be several decades younger than him. Koko even lampshades just how easy it is for a young and beautiful woman like her to cheat on a tired old man like him.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: Rick and Ellen's scheme is to scare Joseph enough that he suffers a fatal heart attack. It works, but it allows Koko to get revenge on his creator's behalf.
- Offscreen Teleportation: Koko suddenly appears sitting on Joseph and Ellen's bed when Rick looks for him, where the clown slashes his throat.
- Perverse Puppet / Monster Clown: Koko turns out to be one. Not only does he mentally communicate with Joseph, he comes to life after his creator dies to kill Rick, and manipulates Rick's dead body to kill Ellen as well.
- Playing with Puppets: Koko had apparently been doing this with Rick and Ellen's corpses before the police arrived.
- Properly Paranoid: Joseph has a pretty strong jealous streak towards Ellen's friends, and feels the need to make sure she isn't seeing any other guys. When it's revealed that Ellen has indeed been having an affair, his paranoia is justified.
- Proscenium Reveal: The episode begins with an In-Universe episode of the old Koko the Clown Show, which is revealed to be being watched by a depressed and elderly Joseph.
- Pun: Koko was known to crack many a pun on his old show, to the amusement of the child audience. The episode shown in the opening scene has him pointing out to Clyde that his dog got taken away because he left him in a "No Barking Zone".
- Retired Badass: Joseph returns to puppetry, albeit with a new apprentice, in the hopes of having his characters featured on a tribute to the Golden Age of Television, which could potentially result in a comeback. His training session with Rick shows that even after decades of being off air, he and his old characters still have talent.
- Shout-Out: Koko the Clown shares his name with another character that was popular to audiences of children.
- Show Within a Show: The Koko the Clown Show. Judging by the amount of posters, awards, and voiceovers heard in Joseph's workshop, it was a worldwide sensation when it was on the air.
- The Shut-In: Joseph became an elderly shut-in after his first heart attack, usually staying in his workshop and talking to Koko.
- Signing Off Catchphrase: The end of the old Koko the Clown Show episode we see at the beginning has Joseph giving one to the kids in the audience.Joseph: Hope you had a good time, kids! And remember: "Wherever you may go, whatever you may seek, we'll all get together, same time next week!"
- Totally Radical: Rick helps Joseph update the jokes of his puppet routine (like the aforementioned use of "Cowabunga"), but his suggestions are met with (pretend) chagrin from Ellen.
- Trophy Wife: The gold-digging Ellen reveals herself to be one to her aging husband, just before he dies.
- Wham Shot: The ending, where we see that Koko's face has transformed into Joseph's.
