Story – Chris’s intro story is funny. A kid is confronting the “monster under the bed” with a baseball bat and it turns out to be a cat. Shirley is afraid of “just about everything,” says Chris. Jake says that he isn’t afraid of anything. The intro lasts 3:20 (min:sec).
Luther the Mouse makes his first appearance in this episode. Shirley is afraid of him. “I don’t know why she doesn’t lock herself in the closet all the time.” She is even afraid of Mr. Whittaker when he wears his big black overcoat. Whit talks about good and bad fears. Whit asks what happens when you turn on a light in a room.
“I stop shaking.”
Shirley
Whit helps Shirley overcome her fear of mice. When she holds him she gets bitten and drops him. Luther runs away. She goes home so that her mother, who’s a nurse, can look at her hand. Jake says he’s got a plan to get Shirley to face all her fear. Shirley dreams that a giant version of Luther is knocking at her window. He talks to her saying he’ll swallow her whole. Her mom comes in and she wakes up.
Jake and Danny go to the corner table to discuss how to teach Shirley a lesson about being afraid. Danny doesn’t like it. Jake tells him to keep Connie busy while Shirley and Jake go down into the rigged basement of Whit’s End. Jake calls Danny “thick.”
“This is gonna scare her so bad that all the other little things that used to scare her won’t scare her anymore.”
Jake
Jake gets Shirley to come down into the basement by saying that Whit told him to tell her to come down. She says she doesn’t like basements because they’re creepy when they’re down. He turns on a clown that waves its hands and laughs. He then talks about rats in the basement. The pipes start making noises. He says that they are “probably” water pipes. The lights go off. Shirley starts crying. Jake trips over his booby trap and boxes fall down on him.
He twisted his ankle and dropped the flashlight when the boxes fall on him. Shirley yells for help but no one can hear them because Danny is running the trains upstairs like Jake told him to. Jake tells her that she has to go back for help. She leaves. The pipes make noises again, and she is afraid. She prays. Whit opens the door and Shirley tells him to hurry because Jake hurt his leg. Whit’s meeting was cancelled because Mayor Perkins was away. Jake tore his ligament.
“His father said he’d be grounded til he’s 25”
Whit
She says that the experience was good for her and she isn’t afraid anymore. Connie brings in a bug and Shirley screams. Whit and Connie laugh, which I thought was strange.
Sound design – The sound designers deserve a hundred percent on that dream, especially considering that this was before the time of digital audio editing and they only had eight tracks (They might have had more by this point, correct me if I’m wrong. But I think that they still had just eight).
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