From Agnes - with Love

This is the story of a true nerd. He has the skills to run a huge computer (of the Univac era). He loves a young woman who works in his building, but he is so darned boring and clumsy, he strikes out over and over. Unfortunately, when he asks his big computer for some help, it spouts out useless, destructive advice. It is manipulating him! There is a sort of charm. It features Wally Cox (Underdog) who made a career of playing bookish little milquetoasts. He does develop a relationship in this episode, but it's not with the girl of his dreams. His frantic shortsightedness is what the episode features. It works to a point. The rest is terribly dated and sort of lacking.

The motto in Hollywood, almost from the beginning, is "Stolen -- fair and square!" Although, credited to someone else, this cybernetic version of Cyrano de Bergerac was lifted from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s "EPICAC" published in 1950.

Still, Wally Cox -- a man his good friend from childhood Marlon Brando described as a motorcycling fanatic and possessing the mind of an axe-murderer -- is his usual genius self portraying a feckless nebbish.

While many reviewers expressed disappointment that this tale lacked the typical sharpness of many of the series entries, it remains as one of the "change ups" that kept the show lively in delivering the unexpected.

The actress that plays Beaver's teacher Ms. Landers is the love interest in this episode. She looks like a hot naughty Rachel Maddow only better looking. She shakes her booty for 3 seconds toward the end and turns out to be a nerdy party girl. Wally Cox is his predicable self as the comedy protagonist and Mr. Drysdale plays the straight man sending programmers to be mentally destroyed by Agnes the jealous female who has more interesting things to study, model and predict than orbital velocities oddly enough poetically it is Venus that Agnes is assigned to study and it is venus that she is eternally preoccupied with studying.

Wow, this episode was a joke. Far from my favorite, far from how I think of the average Twilight episodes since by in large, I really enjoy the Twilight zone. But I did not enjoy this one, except for a few spots where I just laughed at the lunacy of those moments. Wally Cox here was like one of the biggest nerds I've ever seen in an older style show. He really looked like a nerd and he really acted like a nerd. He was that science geek type who worked at an electronics lab. His department was with a talking space data machine. He asks out Milly (Ann Randolf), a beauty who works at his company, and she actually said yes. On the date at his apartment with Milly, she wanted to dance and get romantic and that dork just sat there with his science book opened saying "I was wanted us to keep comparing notes on the neutron status data". I might have not quoted those last three words 100% correctly but who cares? This guy had a real cutie advancing on him and this was how he acts? Then when they start dancing he starts complaining about the sores on his feet? Then he opens the champaign bottle with the end of the bottle pointed three inches from Milly's face and doesn't expect the champaign to spray on her? I did not feel sorry for that nerd when Milly then stormed out, and then the next night reject Wally and shoo him away to spend the evening advancing herself onto a much cooler, more appealing guy. I really wondered what Milly saw in Wally in the first place. Maybe because she thought he'd be such an intelligent nerd, that if she went out with him, he'd make her a lot of money. As soon as she found out he wasn't so smart, look how fast she ditched him to be with a cooler, better looking guy. The rest of the episode delt with Wally talking to the machine asking it about all this technical space data and the machine just wanting to talk to Wally about his love life. An added little running joke about how Wally kept running into the same girl in the hallway giving her each of the things (candy, flowers, etc.) that were rejected from Milly when he tried giving them to her. Then the hallway girl would just shrug, form a weak smile, not say anything and keep walking. The end result in this episode with Wally and the machine was also quite ridiculous.

I usually start eye-rolling and lowering my expectations when a Twilight Zone episode commences with goofy music... The comical and excessively light-hearted ones are generally the least pleasing, but "From Agnes with Love" still more or less holds its head above water (unintentionally?) thanks to the topic of machines surpassing the intellect of their creators, manipulating the lives of human beings, and developing emotions. Some of the most haunting Sci-Fi flicks of the seventies have similar themes, like "Colossus: The Forbin Project" and "Demon Seed". Again, though, I sincerely doubt it was ever this little tale's intention to get disturbing, what with its plot of an über-nerd asking romantic advice about how to get noticed by his secretary to what is supposedly the world's most advanced super-computer. The machine - Agnes - deliberately gives the wrong tips because she wants the nerd for herself.

Cute but unmemorable TZ-installment, mainly fun and interesting to see what, back in the early sixties, the perception of a super-intelligent computer looked like: a full room stuffed with panels, buttons, flickering lights, and constantly printing receipts apparently!