MST3K: Episode 808 - The She-Creature

I'm watching all of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes in order. More about that here and here.

Episode 808: The She-Creature

First aired: Sci-Fi Channel on 5 April 1997
Availability: MST3KVideos.com fan copy

She is a creature.

A bad film. A wicked, bad, naughty film.

It stars an obviously female, obviously naked She-Creature.

Only, it's a creature. Them boobies? Creature boobies.

Sure, there are other boobies in this film, mostly on the women, but they're all clothed and such, as they should be. But the She-Creature? Not what I want to see.

The girl who gets hypnotized about 50 times? She's got boobies, all right. Covered with flimsy stuff, like they did in the 1950s. She's the conduit for the creature, so there is another connection.

Boston Blackie uses mind control on the girl to ruin her date with a rival.

Or something like that.

Let me try to explain.

Some sideshow psychic that looks a lot like Boston Blackie hypnotizes his assistant, who he loves but can't stand him, to get her to regress to an earlier life, and also somehow gets a lobster to walk upright with boobs and kill people who he doesn't like, but after a rich dude decides to back him, he's discovered to be not a fraud, but a genuine psychic, who actually does the things he claims he can do, but the hypnotized lady resists him and She-Creature kills him. The end.

See? It all makes sense. Or not.

She-Creature and the girl celebrate Ladies' Night or something.

Meanwhile, the season-long story arc of Pearl, Bobo, and Observer finally concludes the part about the Observers' planet. They decided to finally dissect Bobo and Pearl, but Pearl isn't too keen on the idea -- Bobo's fine with it, though -- so she asks M&tB for help. Mike gets the Nanites to lend a hand. One thing leads to another and the Observers' planet is destroyed, killing everybody.

Well, not Pearl, who escaped. Or Bobo, who escaped, apparently because Pearl needed a driver. Or one of the Observers (the Bill Corbett one), who Pearl used as hostage in her escape.

So, after 8 episodes, we finally have the crew that will finish out the series: Mike, Crow, Servo, & Gypsy on the Satellite of Love, with Pearl Forrester, Professor Bobo, and Observer as their nemeses who send them the bad movies. There doesn't seem to be an ongoing experiment. It seems that Pearl does it simply because she's mean.

Pearl's crew is finally set.

I don't like the whole story arc of Host Segments. For it to make any sense, you really need to watch them in order. The network did broadcast them in order. Initially. But the reruns weren't in order. And the video releases weren't in order. That's another reason why I didn't like the whole bit of spending several episodes setting things up. In the past, they'd make all the changes in one episode, and that would be that. But, there is more story arc to come, and if you don't watch them in order, they really don't make much sense. The previous seasons don't suffer this drawback. At least, not as much.

Remember how, in the first season, Joel would often recap the plot of the show? This season is where they could have done that. About 15-30 seconds of Mike summarizing what's going on would have been useful:

Hi, I'm Mike Nelson, along with Crow ("Hello") and Tom Servo ("Top o' the mornin' to ya"). I was sent into space to watch bad movies as part of an evil experiment, but that's over and now the evil Pearl Forrester is just sending them to me to be mean. She has a talking ape up she picked up along the way. We're orbiting a planet of Observers who use their brains to, well, I'm not sure what they do with them. Oh, someone's calling now. (Presses button.)

See how useful that would have been? They should have had me on staff.

This episode was okay. The movie was bad, but not hard-to-watch bad. Just, bad bad.

The riffing was funny, and the story arc of Pearl chasing M&tB across the universe finally got her posse in place.

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