The Unshakeables: Rob Petrie and The Walnuts from Space

 

A television show succeeds if it holds your attention for the time it’s on. But some episodes stay with you long after the credits roll. The emotions they generate do not dissipate for several minutes – sometimes several hours. And when you think about them months or even years later, you find the imprint they left on your mind remains as formidable as ever.

 

These are the “Unshakeables.”

 

You watch a comedy to laugh. And with our favorite classics we watch to spend some time in the company of familiar, likable characters, who can help us to relax and unwind after a hard day’s work.

 

But what happens when those characters stop acting like themselves – when they become something unsettling – even sinister?

 

That’s what happens in “It May Look Like a Walnut,” one of the most famous episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. 

 

 

Written by series creator Carl Reiner, it has been chosen by both Reiner and Van Dyke among their favorite shows, and was selected to TV Guide’s list of the 100 best situation comedy episodes. A newsletter published for series fans that lasted 20 years was titled “The Walnut Times,” another indication of that installment’s enduring fame.

 

Putting sitcom characters in scary situations was nothing new, but viewers were conditioned to expect only comical frights.  Episodes like “Monkee See, Monkee Do” (The Monkees) and “My Master, The Ghostbreaker” (I Dream of Jeannie) were no more frightening than the average Scooby Doo mystery.

 

The Dick Van Dyke Show offered another example of this trope with “The Ghost of A. Chantz,” in which Rob, Laura, Buddy and Sally spend the night in a remote rural cabin that is rumored to be haunted.

 

But “It May Look Like a Walnut” delivered something more potent. Whether by design or merely through the committed performances of a talented cast, they crafted an episode that kept its audience off-balance for most of its running time, before building to a crescendo that must have unsettled more than a few viewers in its day – especially younger ones.

 

I know this to be true because I was one of those viewers. I can’t say for sure how old I was when I first watched the episode in syndication on WGN TV in Chicago, but I still remember how disconcerting it was to my young psyche. As an adult I can applaud its cleverness and creativity – but when I was a kid its impact was so profound that I avoided watching it again for years.

 

The story opens in the Petrie bedroom, where Laura is cowering under the covers to avoid seeing and hearing the science fiction film her husband is watching. Rob is scared as well but can’t turn away as invaders from the planet Twilo replace human beings with pod-people replicants, and rob survivors of their imaginations and their thumbs. They do this to prevent mankind from developing more weapons of mass destruction.

 

 

Rob shows a surprising sadistic streak as he describes all the scary moments to Laura,  who was doing her best to avoid those details. So he’s not surprised the next morning when he finds walnuts strewn across the living room floor, as walnuts played a critical role in Twilo’s plan for world domination. He figures she is getting revenge for scaring her, and takes it in good humor.

 

But then Laura keeps going – to the point where Rob begins to wonder if she could really be so vindictive. He experiences the same odd behavior at the office from Buddy and Sally. Are they all working together to play an elaborate and cruel practical joke? Is he having a nightmare? Or is the Twilo invasion actually happening?

 

 

Panicked, he returns home and into the episode’s most famous scene – when Laura slides out of the hall closet on a mountain of walnuts. And from there Rob finds nowhere to turn as he is surrounded by those he once knew and loved, stalking toward him with expressions of maniacal malevolence, until at last, mercifully, he wakes up from his nightmare.

 

Even now, having watched this episode at least a dozen times over the past 40 years, I approach that climactic scene gingerly, as it revives memories of how it once creeped me out. That’s why the Halloween season seemed like the right time to pay tribute to what was, for me, the original unshakeable, because of how shook I was the first time I saw it.

 

Was I the only one? I hope not, cause that would be pretty embarrassing.