This episode is the last one on the 6-disc collection I bought and it had to be one of the worst. I can't review it without spoilers, so beware.
We begin with Pete on the phone inviting a couple to his home for supper "tomorrow night" and after hanging up, he explains that this man is head of a rival insurance company to his and Pete believes that if things go well tomorrow night, Pete will be invited to come work for this man as a company vice-president.
Gladys is happy to do all she can to help, being told that at this company, the impression a wife makes is huge on how the male executives fare. We quickly move on to Pete being upset that Gladys keeps breaking dental appointments because she has had a longtime fear of the pain one can get at the dentist's. He insists she keep an appointment he made with her for today.
She tries to, but in the waiting room, despite some well-worded encouragement from a friendly 10-year-old boy, she cannot discern sounds of a dentist office from construction work just outside the building, and fearing those noisy machines, she flees the office. Back at home, she blackmails her friend-of-the-week, Nancy into substituting for her, that is, going back to the dentist's office pretending to be Gladys, since Nancy reports that she had only visited a dentist once in her life and was told she has perfect teeth. She doesn't reveal when that visit was.
The next morning, Pete gets the phone call from the dentist, and learns that "Gladys" has three cavities and a tooth that needs to be removed. Now here is where the script turns dumb. Pete insists on Gladys getting treatment that very day-ignoring the vital career-important dinner she needs to make for their guests that very evening. Gladys tells him that those x-rays the dentist took were not her, but her friend, but Pete needs convincing so he goes with her to the dentist's office.
They meet the dentist who freely admits he never saw Gladys before-but that's because he is not the regular dentist-that man was called out of town on an emergency. Gladys is so panicked about this man that she literally runs away as he chases her around the office, then she slips out the window onto the ledge twelve floors above the street. She is coerced back in, on the promise that the Doc will just compare her teeth with the X-rays. He does and pronounces that unlike the X-rays, Gladys has perfect teeth.
The problem is, that to get her to look at her teeth, he gives Gladys two tranquilizers to relax her, then two more, making her so drowsy Pete practically has to carry her. She is left alone in the lobby for a couple of minutes and a dental assistant just sees her looking almost asleep, and decides, without consulting anyone or hearing one word from the sleepy Gladys, that she needs two tranquilizers, and pretty-much forces them down her throat. So Gladys has now had six "relaxing pills" in the span of about ten minutes.
It gets worse. At home, her friend literally throws more tranquilizers down her throat as her mouth is hanging open as she is trying to wake up. So she makes a lousy impression on the insurance exec when he and his wife come for supper. She can't even really stand up. The couple leave in haste and Pete doesn't get the big new job.
In this day or that one, I cannot imagine the dentist giving her four pills just to look at her mouth. He would have reasoned with her and insisted she open her mouth wide or else he wouldn't treat her at all. And the assistant assuming she needed to be relaxed when she was obviously too-relaxed at the time was stupid. The friend at home-even more so.
But it all started with the foolish insistence that Gladys see this dentist that very day she needed to prepare a special meal. In fact, based on the fact that when Pete brought her home, he stated they only had an hour before the guests were to arrive, the appointment must have been late afternoon-which had the dentist filled cavities and removed a tooth at that time as Pete expected, would have meant Gladys would be in pain and have so much of her mouth numbed from Novocain that she couldn't speak clearly at all when the guests arrived.
I'll mention that the dentist was played by Frank Cady, best known at the time as one of Ozzie Nelson's neighbors, Doc Williams, who was on 78 episodes of that series, before his biggest fame as Sam Drucker, owner, operator of the general store in Hooterville on a combined 310 episodes of Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.
I called Nancy Gladys's "friend-of-the-week" because this series seemed to have her with a new friend almost every other episode, with only one female friend listed in the credits for more than 9 episodes in the two-year run of the series.
The premise of an important dinner where someone makes a bad impression after taking too many pills was redone two years later on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, where a flashback episode showed a very nervous Laura worried about cooking dinner for her in-laws for the first time, so she takes some borrowed pills from her friend, Millie. As the afternoon wore on, she kept getting more nervous about other things and wound up taking a few more pills, making her appear drunk to Rob's parents. That had a lot more reason for her to feel nervous, and nobody else just threw pills down her throat mistaking a sleepyhead for someone who was nervous.
To me, the silliness of Gladys going onto the ledge, chomping hard on the doctor's finger when he tried to look at her, and being force-fed pills to relax her when she appeared very drowsy made this look like the worst episodes of I Love Lucy, a show on which this series was obviously trying to copy in the overall type of plots they mostly had. I hesitate to give it as much as a four.
We begin with Pete on the phone inviting a couple to his home for supper "tomorrow night" and after hanging up, he explains that this man is head of a rival insurance company to his and Pete believes that if things go well tomorrow night, Pete will be invited to come work for this man as a company vice-president.
Gladys is happy to do all she can to help, being told that at this company, the impression a wife makes is huge on how the male executives fare. We quickly move on to Pete being upset that Gladys keeps breaking dental appointments because she has had a longtime fear of the pain one can get at the dentist's. He insists she keep an appointment he made with her for today.
She tries to, but in the waiting room, despite some well-worded encouragement from a friendly 10-year-old boy, she cannot discern sounds of a dentist office from construction work just outside the building, and fearing those noisy machines, she flees the office. Back at home, she blackmails her friend-of-the-week, Nancy into substituting for her, that is, going back to the dentist's office pretending to be Gladys, since Nancy reports that she had only visited a dentist once in her life and was told she has perfect teeth. She doesn't reveal when that visit was.
The next morning, Pete gets the phone call from the dentist, and learns that "Gladys" has three cavities and a tooth that needs to be removed. Now here is where the script turns dumb. Pete insists on Gladys getting treatment that very day-ignoring the vital career-important dinner she needs to make for their guests that very evening. Gladys tells him that those x-rays the dentist took were not her, but her friend, but Pete needs convincing so he goes with her to the dentist's office.
They meet the dentist who freely admits he never saw Gladys before-but that's because he is not the regular dentist-that man was called out of town on an emergency. Gladys is so panicked about this man that she literally runs away as he chases her around the office, then she slips out the window onto the ledge twelve floors above the street. She is coerced back in, on the promise that the Doc will just compare her teeth with the X-rays. He does and pronounces that unlike the X-rays, Gladys has perfect teeth.
The problem is, that to get her to look at her teeth, he gives Gladys two tranquilizers to relax her, then two more, making her so drowsy Pete practically has to carry her. She is left alone in the lobby for a couple of minutes and a dental assistant just sees her looking almost asleep, and decides, without consulting anyone or hearing one word from the sleepy Gladys, that she needs two tranquilizers, and pretty-much forces them down her throat. So Gladys has now had six "relaxing pills" in the span of about ten minutes.
It gets worse. At home, her friend literally throws more tranquilizers down her throat as her mouth is hanging open as she is trying to wake up. So she makes a lousy impression on the insurance exec when he and his wife come for supper. She can't even really stand up. The couple leave in haste and Pete doesn't get the big new job.
In this day or that one, I cannot imagine the dentist giving her four pills just to look at her mouth. He would have reasoned with her and insisted she open her mouth wide or else he wouldn't treat her at all. And the assistant assuming she needed to be relaxed when she was obviously too-relaxed at the time was stupid. The friend at home-even more so.
But it all started with the foolish insistence that Gladys see this dentist that very day she needed to prepare a special meal. In fact, based on the fact that when Pete brought her home, he stated they only had an hour before the guests were to arrive, the appointment must have been late afternoon-which had the dentist filled cavities and removed a tooth at that time as Pete expected, would have meant Gladys would be in pain and have so much of her mouth numbed from Novocain that she couldn't speak clearly at all when the guests arrived.
I'll mention that the dentist was played by Frank Cady, best known at the time as one of Ozzie Nelson's neighbors, Doc Williams, who was on 78 episodes of that series, before his biggest fame as Sam Drucker, owner, operator of the general store in Hooterville on a combined 310 episodes of Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.
I called Nancy Gladys's "friend-of-the-week" because this series seemed to have her with a new friend almost every other episode, with only one female friend listed in the credits for more than 9 episodes in the two-year run of the series.
The premise of an important dinner where someone makes a bad impression after taking too many pills was redone two years later on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, where a flashback episode showed a very nervous Laura worried about cooking dinner for her in-laws for the first time, so she takes some borrowed pills from her friend, Millie. As the afternoon wore on, she kept getting more nervous about other things and wound up taking a few more pills, making her appear drunk to Rob's parents. That had a lot more reason for her to feel nervous, and nobody else just threw pills down her throat mistaking a sleepyhead for someone who was nervous.
To me, the silliness of Gladys going onto the ledge, chomping hard on the doctor's finger when he tried to look at her, and being force-fed pills to relax her when she appeared very drowsy made this look like the worst episodes of I Love Lucy, a show on which this series was obviously trying to copy in the overall type of plots they mostly had. I hesitate to give it as much as a four.