What Will the Neighbors Think?

This episode makes so little sense I'm not even sure what to write. Every single character is irritating and awful, with outrageous anger and zero explanation of why they hate everyone, including themselves. The writers obviously hate the viewer, but that's also unexplained. The ending is equally as absurd as the rest of the almost aimless plot, so I guess it at least has consistency.

Not all of these age well (I'm writing in June 2021), but this was really terrible. Irritating. I almost didn't finish it.

A rather plain female hypochondriac confines herself to an unnecessary wheelchair. She is obviously agoraphobic and lives her days in an aging apartment building with her long- suffering husband. The building is up for sale and the tenants, a pack of wolves and lowlifes, are resisting the sale openly (though in their thoughts they are thinking about a payday). The central figure attempts to find something to make the building unattractive to a buyer, hoping to stay there at infinitum. While in the basement laundry room with a radon detector, she hides from a couple of tenants who are having sex (they each have significant others in the building). While this is going on, she falls into some wiring and receives a shock. Upon recovering her senses, she develops the ability to hear the thoughts of the others in the building. After coming to terms with this, she attempts to use the secret knowledge to set neighbor against neighbor. But she forgets how vulnerable she is herself. She is widely resented, seen as a weak worthless demanding creature with her petty ailments. The bad thing about this episode is that it is utterly confusing. It's really hard to see the motivations of the characters and when she begins her plot, it is so outrageous that it shouldn't even remotely work. Also, as people slide in an out of their open and conscious thoughts it becomes so jumbled. Not a very good episode in my estimation.

I for one think this was one of the best Season 5 episodes ever.

The plot concerns a married woman named Mona (Jane Adams) who wishes not to move out of her apartment building that's about to be sold by a company. One day, while secretly watching two people having sex in the laundry room, she gets herself electrocuted and soon discovered that she can read people's thoughts with her mind and soon uses that ability to blackmail her neighbors.

The plot was wonderful and the acting from the episode's cast members was incredible. This episode was also considered a favorite by the actors that worked on this episode, even director Helen Shaver considered it her personal favorite out of a handful of episodes of the series she directed.