Agreed. Particularly that moment when he realized there was a sleeping child in the house and called off the search. His conscientiousness was unsettling. Definitely a Hans Landa moment.

Fair points. If like Eric, you were looking for the suspense to come from the literal action of the story (Will Rachel and the old man escape? Will the old man make a Golem in time? Will the Golem be able to kill the Nazis?) then the story probably felt padded and ultimately unsatisfying. If like Tim and I, you found suspense in the moral or spiritual choices made by the characters (Will the woodsman jeopardize his family to do what he believes is right? Will the wife compromise her spiritual convictions to save her husband and child? Will the summoning of the Golem embolden Rachel and the old man to fight the Nazis?) then the story was riveting. I think both are very valid responses.

When E.G. Marshall hints at multiple interpretations of the ending, I assumed he was impugning the reliability of the narrator (I guess in this case himself) and suggesting that perhaps the ending didn’t happen just how we heard it. The Golem attack was just one interpretation of what happened to the Nazi soldiers. It was definitely a case of trying to have your ambiguous cake, eating it, and then trying to say maybe you didn’t eat it after all. I forgave it though because it’s E.G. Marshall!

Oh, just one more thing: Next episode is from “Obsession”? Isn’t that Joshua’s brother’s podcast? 🙂

Also, regarding the use or non-use of foreign accents: I agree that the Nazi was much more frightening with an American accent than he would have been with a mock-German one. If a story features foreign characters in a setting where everyone is supposed to be speaking English, so we’re hearing everything exactly as it supposedly happens, then it makes sense for the foreign characters to have foreign accents. But if a story has a foreign setting and the characters are supposedly speaking a foreign language, and we’re just *hearing* it in English, then there’s really no logical reason why they would need to have foreign accents. We’re not hearing an exact presentation of the words as they are supposedly speaking them; we’re hearing a translation of them. It’s no less realistic for their accents to be “translated” along with their words. There might be some cases where using different accents would be preferable (such as if the accents are necessary to distinguish between different characters from different countries, all of whom we hear in English). But in other cases, such as this one, it can be more effective not to use accents.

This episode wasn’t *terrible* — it didn’t have an annoyingly lame cop-out ending like “The Thing in the Cave”, or a twist reveal that just made the story seem stupider and just underlined how the mysterious incidents didn’t make any sense instead of explaining them, like “A Holiday Visit”. (I never got around to writing my rant about everything I disliked about that one — if I had started, I would probably just be finishing it about now.) I just didn’t think this one was very suspenseful, and the climax was way too brief and too “offstage” after forty minutes of buildup.

And the attempt in the closing narration to make the ending ambiguous didn’t make any sense whatsoever, because we had just heard the characters describing the golem as they watched it come to life and attack the Nazis (and we hear the sound effects of its heavy footsteps as it stomps through the cave). So how could this be ambiguous? Did the golem really come to life, but just coincidentally, an Allied bomb wiped out the Nazis just as the golem emerged from the cave? Or the golem was really an atomic bomb — because there must have been U-235 in that clay that the old man used — but it was an atomic bomb in a humanoid shape that came to life, stomped through the cave, and then detonated with enough force to destroy the Nazis and itself, but not enough force to injure the people observing it from a short distance away? Yes, that’s a *much* more rational, real-world explanation than a supernatural golem.

Having ranted about that, I will say that I thought this episode was really well-acted (with the possible exception of the wife, who really wasn’t bad, but as Eric pointed out, she seemed to be performing in a more melodramatic, theatrical style, when contrasted with Robert Lansing’s lower-key, more naturalistic performance). And for the most part, I enjoyed this more than some of the other CBSRMTs. It’s just that the ending didn’t live up to what led up to it.

And as always with CBSRMT, E.G. Marshall’s performance as the narrator was excellent. He was really a top-notch host for a suspense/horror program. It’s just too bad that they couldn’t have given him better stories to host.