User Reviews

Based on a short-story by the English writer, John Collier, of whom there are more details available online (wiki). Some of his work dealt with the fantastical. I enjoyed this episode more than the one that followed it on Sky Arts (I Like It in Wilmington). It is a variant on the cuckoo in the nest & I think things are left deliberately ambiguous.. Are we seeing events through the eyes of a husband who is losing his grip on reality? I'm not familiar with the original story but would assume that much of it is seen through the husband's point of view (unreliable) and an increasing paranoid jealousy.

A cute parrot, family pet, lays an egg that hatches into a dark malevolent bird of prey, given the ironic nickname 'Handsome'. Is the bird meant to be a symbol of the malignant jealousy that consumes Jack the husband, or are his suspicions that he is being cuckolded indeed justified & finally confirmed? A mood of foreboding is built up in this episode until the obviously dark finale where things come home to roost.

I thought it was well-acted, a three-hander, Frank Converse plays an increasingly withdrawn Jack, Sondra Locke, his apparently good-natured wife Edna & Charles Hallahan is Charlie, the ebullient work colleague who sows discord between the couple in the same way that the mysterious egg is laid by the parrot.

You always have to be suspicious of parrots, for they can reveal what they know. So with that premise, this story casts a suspicious husband (Frank Converse) keeping a wary eye on his wife (Sondra Locke) and co-worker Charlie (Charles Hallahan), who always seems to be entertaining Edna when Jack comes home from work. Into this mix comes Tom, the couple's talking parrot who speaks of shifty eyes and destinations on the Orient Express. Only thing is, Tom is not a tom, but a female parrot that's attacked one evening, putting newly named Tomasina in a family way. Unfortunately Tomasina dies from the attack, but only after laying an unusually outsized egg, which hatches and grows into a rather large and unruly looking black bird. It doesn't take long before 'Handsome' spills the beans on Charlie after news of Edna having a baby is revealed to Jack. The ending to my mind didn't have to be so gruesome, but Jack after all, was the jealous type.

Another doozy in the TOTU series. This one's completely stupid with a nutty parrot that dies after laying a rather large egg. What were the actors thinking as they did the best with this crazy script. I notice that in many of these American production then name of the director is omitted, I wonder why?