Answer Me
Aging and struggling actress Joan Matlin (Jean Marsh) has moved to New York in the hopes of finding work. While she tries to rest up for an audition, she grows annoyed by the incessant ringing of the telephone in the apartment next door, as well as furious banging sounds against the thin walls. When she tries to complain to the people inside, Joan discovers that the apartment is empty, and has been for sometime. Hearing that the last tenant of said apartment was an English woman who strangled herself with a telephone cord, Joan begins growing fearful and paranoid that she's answered the call of something unnatural.
Tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: The episode rides on not giving the viewers any straight answers. For example, is the phone actually sentient, or is it being possessed by the ghost of the tenant next door who committed suicide? And is Joan genuinely fighting for her life against said phone, or has she actually been the dead tenant all along, having strangled herself after one failure too many and haunting the apartment without even knowing it?
- Bottle Episode: One of the most minimalist episodes in the whole series, as we focus on a single character who deals with a haunted phone, and it takes place solely in her apartment and the boarded-up apartment next door.
- Dead All Along: A possible explanation for Joan's predicament. Given that the operator on the haunted phone has an English accent, and the fact that the previous tenant of the apartment was an English girl who strangled herself with a phone cord, it's possible that Joan is actually dead, having killed herself after multiple rejections and either haunting the building without knowing it, or in an Ironic Hell destined to re-experience her own death over and over for eternity.
- Deadpan Snarker: Joan is known to be quite snippy in her narration.
- Driven to Suicide: A possible explanation to the haunted phone is that it's the center of Joan's personal hell, as she likely strangled herself with its cord after one too many failed auditions.
- Downer Ending: Joan dies at the cord of the evil phone, and if the end of the episode is any indication, her ghost now possesses the phone in her apartment.
- Entertainingly Wrong: At first, Joan suspects the tenants next door are vampires, since they stay up all night talking on the phone to friends in Transylvania. In actuality, the phone itself is the cause of the commotion, ringing nonstop and hurling itself against the wall to try and break out of its room.
- Evil Phone: The sentient phone in the apartment next to Joan's. It's able to move on its own, speaks in the voice of a creepy phone operator, and kills Joan by strangling her with its cord. After doing so, the phone in Joan's apartment starts ringing, indicating that it has come alive via her ghost possessing it.
- Fourth Wall Psych: Although she spends the whole episode monologuing to herself, Joan's ranting about her supposed neighbors comes off as this, due to the overhead shot of her as she lays in bed staring at the ceiling, where the viewer is currently positioned.
- Genre Savvy: As she's basically narrating the entire episode, Joan is aware of how her situation is rapidly turning into some sort of horror movie setup. She begins praying to herself that the setup doesn't continue, yet she also describes how she's feeling inexplicably compelled to enter the room next door even when she's scared out of her mind.
- Hell Is That Noise: The ongoing ringing of the haunted phone starts to become agony for Joan, largely because it keeps her up all night.
- Idiot Hero: Joan becomes one as she keeps trying to get to the bottom of the mystery, so much so that she even lampshades how idiotic she's being, yet she just can't stop herself from going in deeper.
- Ineffectual Death Threats: After a certain point, Joan gets so fed up with the constant ringing of the haunted phone that she declares it to be "time for violence", promptly marching next door and demanding that the occupants unplug their phone "or die". Also, towards the end, she outright decides to try and beat whoever or whatever is causing the phone to ring to death with her bare hands. Given how she's a failing actress who gets strangled to death by the phone's cord at the end, it's clear none of these threats even hold weight.
- Loser Protagonist: Joan's a struggling actress who's only had a few bit parts and commercial roles in the past, and she ends up being killed solely by a phone. A haunted phone, but still.
- Narrating the Obvious: As she's the only character in the episode, Joan spends the entire runtime monologuing to herself about whatever it is she's doing, usually as she's in the middle of doing it.
- Riddle for the Ages: Is Joan a ghost stuck in her own hell/haunting her building? Or is she truly alive and plagued by an inexplicably evil and sentient phone? No answer is ever given as the truth.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Joan has had a history of only appearing in commercials and bit parts in movies, so she's heard playing herself up as a huge star while she pretends to be a casting director at her audition.
- Stealth Pun: Joan is seen reading The Call of the Wild in bed at one point, compounding the fact that something "wild" is indeed "calling" out to her.
- Too Dumb to Live: Joan's death comes about because she just can't leave well enough alone, and meets her death by the evil phone that's been annoying her all this time by trying to kill it with her bare hands. She even lampshades, notably as she's planning to open the abandoned apartment's bathroom door, how what she's doing is completely stupid and goes against her common sense, yet she just can't stop herself from moving the plot forward.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Joan initially assumes that the reason her neighbors' phone keeps ringing is because the neighbors are vampires talking to their friends in Transylvania all night long. Notice how at no point she assumed that the phone itself was alive? Or how she didn't think there weren't any neighbors next door?
