‘Earth’s alright for a visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.’
Rewatching ‘The Arrival,’ the first episode of “My Favourite Martian” :’) And
two collected favourite appreciations of Ray Walston below!
One more Uncle Martin appreciation haha: Even if “My Favourite Martian”
wasn’t cancelled due to low ratings for its weaker, final season, it
probably wouldn’t have escaped TV’s rural purge in the coming years. But
like the other fluffy supernatural sitcoms of its time, this
‘unobjectionable’ program still had a subversive, expansive twinkle,
promoting acceptance of the Other, whatever they looked like. In
‘Russians “R” in Season,’ Uncle Martin must tell the truth about
who/what he is, and no-one / not even the most untrusting agents - can
possibly believe him or his ‘foreignness.’ “I’m a Martian. I was born in
a sleepy little celestial orbit. As a child, my father - who was a
glink salesman with territories on Venus, Jupiter, and other surrounding
asteroids - used to take me on long weekend trips to Phobos, which is
the nearer of our two moons. Ah, what fun! Just Dad and I, shooting
through the silent red nights, cutting through the canals with a spray
making gigantic pink rainbows, listening to Dad’s funny stories. He used
to tell the one about the poor Venusian who put a down payment on a
summer asteroid but... But it only circled every two light years! ...
Ah... Sometimes, sometimes I get so lonely because I can’t get home
again.” The electro-theremin and beautiful wooing humming spacey music
is put to brilliant use here in a kind of descending high point of the
episode, at once surprisingly ethereal and also melancholy, a humming in
the universe longing to return home (but thank goodness for friends
like Tim)
One more :’) ‘We don’t have love at first sight on Mars. Either it was too
silly to bother with, or it was something we discarded in our Dusk Ages.’ ‘You
mean the Dark Ages?’ ‘We were never that primitive...’ Love the sweetly innocent,
pre-Star Trek inventiveness of the early episodes, with the wonderfully
charismatic Ray Walston as the supernatural Martian, an expert on Earth and as
Other as he is charmingly relatable, comfortably settled into Tim’s home as
family, discovering 1963 LA as an observant outsider while still able to make
quietly wise-cracking Spock-style comments on the strange and wonderful ways of
Modern Life Xo
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