That’s the sound of my newly inaugurated Hitchhiker Plotline Virtual Bell™, which I will ring when I’m ready to guess the episode’s general plot outline. From the information noted above, combined with my knowledge of the show, I’m guessing that this is where we’re going: Eric and the neglected Veronica will have or are having an affair. Hoffman finds out and, being played by Klaus Kinski and all, naturally decides to murder his rival (and perhaps his wife as well). Feeling secure after having committed the perfect crime, Hoffman will then reap a dire punishment at the, er, wiring of Eric’s ultra-sophisticated—indeed, for all practical purposes, sentient—stereo system.

I know that sounds retarded. That’s why I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track.

"I know," Veronica replies. "I’ve been watching you." (Ah, that means that their affair has yet to begin.) Meanwhile, Eric continues to elaborate. "It’s like a woman when she gives birth," he explains, although I’m guessing he doesn’t actually push the various component systems through his urethra. In any case, if you want to pick up chicks, I guess, a good line is to compare your work to a woman’s having a baby.

Meanwhile, Hoffman pulls his Rolls Royce over in order to berate a scruffy transient he finds strolling around the private residential development in which he lives, little guessing that he is rebuking…The Hitchhiker!

Hitchhiker Intro: "Kurt Hoffman thinks people exist for only one reason: to serve him. But even the mightiest sometimes see their subjects rebel, and the palace walls come tumbling down." Whaaa—oooo—aaaaa!! (Wow!)

Meanwhile, Veronica and Eric continue to chat as he packs his gear up. He admits that he doesn’t have another job lined up, and she admits that she’ll miss him "puttering around." He takes this as a signal, and moves in from behind to smooch at her neck. Startled, she slaps him, whereupon the lights on the Sound System flare up like the Krell Machine when it summons forth the Id Monster.

Veronica apologizes (?!) but he’s all pissy about it (!!!). They stoop to pick up the shards of the glass she dropped, and we cut outside to Hoffman arriving. Whaaa—oooo—aaaa! Meanwhile, Veronica cuts herself, and Eric takes her hand to examine her injury. It’s here where Hoffman enters, but he only has eyes for the Sound System.

Hoffman asks Eric how to run it, and Eric asks him to pick a number. Hoffman picks six, and Eric types in "Six-six-six [oh, bru-ther] and ‘V’ for Veronica," whereupon the message "Hello Eric!" appears on the computer monitor screen. Eric assures his employer that he will program the computer to respond to "Maestro," instead of "Eric". However, when Hoffman enters the same code sequence, the answer is an angry electronic blare and the message "Access Denied!" He tries it again, with the same result, except that the text message is now flashing at him for emphasis.

Hoffman angrily informs Eric that "If you expect to paid, you’d better perfect your performance before inviting an audience!"—see, that’s the kind of thing you’d expect an orchestra conductor to say—and stalks off. Meanwhile, Veronica, having bandaged her cut, returns to the room. Eric laughs when the computer instantly responds to Veronica typing at the keyboard. (Although it still answers "Hello Eric!" HAL and Demon Seed Computer must be sooo embarrassed.) "I guess my baby doesn’t like him," he chortles. Yes, yes, we got it.

At this point in the, er, narrative, we’ve got about twenty minutes of show left. This was a regular problem with the show, since most of their ‘stories’ could be told in about five minutes. Here we haven’t gotten to the point where the Maestro is ready to kill Veronica and Eric yet and then have justice wreaked upon him, so some filler is necessary. In this case, it consists of Hoffman dealing Veronica some small humiliations.

Love Sounds was the first episode of the second season (and the first ‘season’ was three episodes), and they haven’t yet fixed upon the eventually traditional oooou-wahhh-ooou sound effect for emphasis. Here it’s more of an ominous, echoing CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH! sound. On the other hand, they still employ it at times when you can’t quite figure out what they mean to emphasize, so they got that down pretty quickly. For instance, the Hoffmans are holding a dinner party the next night, and Kurt autocratically demands to see what his wife intends to wear. This triggers a CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH!, so apparently the sound effect is sometimes used to demarcate mildly boorish behavior:

or

You get the idea.

At the dinner, a guest asks about Hoffman’s new sound system. Hoffman sends Veronica off to make sure Eric is ready to demonstrate it. By the way, Eric’s mullet actually seems even larger now, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s his hair rather than his sound system that will avenge his death. But no. If that were the case, the episode would have been entitled "Follicular Homicide" or "Remember the Mane" or "The Lock Tress Monster" or something.

The two take a minute to commiserate, Veronica about life with her husband, a resentful Eric about being treated like a mere employee. (Which…he is. But anyway.) Meanwhile, Veronica has a strategically placed scrap of food on her face, so that Eric has an excuse to touch her, and romance begins to bloom blah blah.

At this point the Maestro enters with his toadying entourage, only to find that the sound system still refuses to acknowledge his keystroke command. He tries to keep his cool in front of his guests, but when he is denied twice (with the sound system providing a loud annoying buzzing sound and flashing the ‘access denied’ message for emphasis), he slaps at the keyboard, resulting in a shower of sparks that knocks him back.

Veronica herds the guests out of the room, whereupon an enraged Hoffman rounds on Eric. I guess the fact that the conductor is a ‘jerk’ is meant to cover for the fact that he has paid Eric a large amount of money to set up a stereo system that just quite nearly electrocuted him. In any case, the Maestro notes that he will be traveling to Boston the next day, and that when he returns, Eric better have the sound system, you know… working. CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH!

Man, this is agonizing. There’s still over sixteen minutes left, and we’re just sitting around waiting for Veronica and Eric to have sex, for Kurt to discover and kill them, and so on. I’ve sat through three hour movies that seemed to fly by faster than this thing.

Eric is working on the computer (wearing a hideous black wife beater T-shirt, one that along with his mullet and earlobe stud all but screams, "Tonight…on Cops…"), and decides the most efficient way to get it working is to sweet talk and softly caress it. "C’mon, baby," he coos as he *giggle* strokes its keyboard. Is this how he treats all his appliances? "Aw, Honey Pie. You know I don’t like my toast that dark. Yeah, do you like the way I tweak your browning knob? You do, don’t you?"

Sound System (might was well start treating it like a character) begins to respond to his touch—don’t ask—at which point Eric notices a bikini-clad Veronica heading out to the lakeside home’s private dock for a spell of sunbathing. At this point Sound System starts distortedly moaning (!) "Oh, Eric…I love you…" He takes this as his cue to run out and hit on Veronica again. As he leaves, Sound System plays bad love music and displays ‘animated’ colored graph bars on her deluxe 10" TRS-80 monitor screen. In a lot of other shows, Sound System would probably try to kill Veronica itself out of jealousy. However, the Hitchhiker template requires a human dickwad who gets his comeuppance, so here Sound System seems content to share her beau.

After a bit of low-grade and rather forced frolicking in the lake, we see Veronica throwing their clothes in a washing machine dryer. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt, while he comes in wearing a robe, so I think it’s time for the Obligatory Hitchhiker Softcore Sex Scene. (I know, it’s like I’m Nostradamus or something.) And…it is. Do not fear me, I only use my awesome powers for good. As the two begin to make out, Sound System plays a cheap knock-off of "Nadia’s Theme." Hey, it was the ‘80s.

The two strip, and then start going at it in that passionless "Cinemax at Night" fashion. This doesn’t go on as long as it could (although it seems to), a sign which the veteran Hitchhiker aficionado can immediately interpret: There will be a second sex ‘n’ boobie scene in a bit. (After all, there’s like 12 minutes of show left.) Meanwhile, the two exchange a lot of steamy but tender glances, there to alert us that this is LOVE. Well, OK, if that’s the case I can’t really fault someone for cheating on their… Oh, wait. Yes, apparently, I can. Mr. Judgmental, I guess, that’s me.

We waste some time watching the lovers talk about what they should do, blah blah. He wants her to leave Kurt, but she can’t pull the trigger, fearing him. After that is—at rather more length than strictly necessary—established, we cut to Eric finally getting Sound System to work for the freshly returned Kurt. "Hey Maestro!" the monitor finally greets.

Here they apparently noticed that there was ‘only’ ten minutes of show left, and they hurriedly attempt to move things along. Thus Eric immediately pauses to introduce Sound System’s long-range directional microphone, which we quickly deduce will play a large role in the remainder of the proceedings. "You said you wanted to make some nature recordings," Eric explains, in a rather lame attempt to justify the device’s abrupt introduction. That’s just poor scripting. Hoffman knows next to nothing about the system, and it doesn’t seem likely that the microphone would be the very first thing Eric would be explaining to him. But, you know, IITS.

Hoffman is so enrapt in his new toy that he brusquely dismisses Eric after handing over his paycheck (jerk!) and then Veronica in turn. The latter, unable to take her husband’s neglect any longer, runs out after her departing lover. She could just leave with him, of course, but the show requires another gander at her goodies, plus Kurt has to kill them, etc. So instead they duck into the boat house for a quickie. I think we all see where this is going.

She declares her intention to leave Hoffman, and the requisite Expression of Their Love commences. Inside the house, Sound Systems responds with audio joy to her creator’s happiness. Then we get an early example of Hitchhiker Faux Artiness as the music it plays presides over intercutting between Hoffman and the lovers doing, well, you know. Eventually, despite the fact that Hoffman is strenuously enrapt by the melody Sound System provides, the script requires him to start fiddling with the directional mike. He hears various tracks from Environmental cassettes, before just happening to point the mike at the boat house. Here the titular utterances (yuck!) are heard over the speakers—way to cover for the lovers, Sound System—and Hoffman predictably goes beee-zerk.

Apparently HBO kicked in with a significantly larger per-episode budget for the show’s first full season. Thus not only do they have a legitimate guest star in this episode (Kinski), but enough money to allow Hoffman to actually burn down the boat house, purportedly with the lovers inside. So he runs outside, splashes the structure with petrol from a nearby pump, and lights the building up. Exit an apparently immolated Eric and Veronica. Charming.

Hoffman returns to the house, and in a loooong and not very involving (or surprising, needless to say) sequence, vengeful Sound System starts playing really loud until Hoffman starts to bleed around the eyes and ears and then eventually—albeit off-camera—his head blows up real good. This is portrayed by shaking the camera and severely zooming in and out on Sound System’s various components, including a seemingly functionless little doodad that just happens to (sort of) look like a pair of eyes. Needless to say, this isn’t nearly as spooky as they obviously hoped it would seem.

Cut outside to… The Hitchhiker! (Wow, that was a lame segue.)

The Hitchhiker Wraps Things Up: "In time, it will be peaceful here again. So quiet. And someday, when this night has long been forgotten,* people will come here…and if they listen hard enough, will hear the sweet, pure sounds** that even a tyrant couldn’t silence."

[*I guess this would be after people have forgotten when two illicit lovers were burned to death in a boathouse while inside the nearby mansion a world famous symphony conductor was exploded all over the living room.]

[**The sweet, pure sounds…of a woman cuckolding her husband in their boathouse. Awwww!]

Immortal Dialogue:

Innovative Dialogue Theater Presents!
A plaintive Eric tries to talk Veronica into leaving Kurt: "Hey, what do you want? What do you want in your heart?!"

Gratuitous Naked Boobies? Yep.

Loads of ‘Adult’ Language? Not really.

Whatever Happened To…:

• I doubt many people who would visit a site like ours would not know of Klaus Kinski, the German actor perhaps best described as a combination of Peter Lorre and Richard Widmark.  (Well, that’s the best description I could think of, anyway.)  Mr. Kinski, during his 40 year film career appeared in nearly 150 films and played a wide range of parts, running the gamut from creeps to weirdoes to psychopaths.  Mostly psychopaths.  Along the way the actor forged a long-running love-hate-more hate relationship with arthouse director Werner Herzog, for whom he made numerous films and by whom he was once supposedly threatened with a gun (a story that Herzog now maintains is apocryphal to some degree or other); worked with other major directors such as Sergio Leone (as the Hunchback in For a Few Dollars More), David Lean (Doctor Zhivago), George Roy Hill and Jess Franco; starred in zillions of West German ‘krimi’ films and Italian Spaghetti Westerns, Euro spy and horror movies; had, according to his autobiography, sex with, shall we say, quite a few women; and fathered sexpot actress Nastassja Kinski.  By the time he appeared in The Hitchhiker, he was also doing a lot of work in the States and Canada.  Mr. Kinski passed away in 1991.

• Australian-born actress Belinda Bauer hit her career peak with a supporting role in the quintessentially ‘80s smash hit Flashdance.   Meanwhile, she had several genre credits on her résumé, including the gender-bending titular role in the 1983 TV movie The Sins of Dorian Gray, star turns in the TV film The Archer: Fugitive of the Empire (1981) and Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982, opposite a young  Fred Ward), in the 1984 pilot film for TV’s Airwolf, opposite Jan-Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine, 1990’s RoboCop 2, 1991’s The Servant of Darkness and 1994’s Necronomicon .  Her career went downhill from there, although she continued to appear in small roles in theatrical films and occasionally larger ones in TV movies.  In 1996 she played the mom threatened by teen slut Alyssa Milano in Poison Ivy II, and after that apparently decided to hang up her guns.

• Steve Shellen (Eric) unsurprisingly did a lot of TV work, especially in the ‘80s.  He appeared in small roles in numerous theatrical films, including the inevitable slasher film, American Gothic.  His biggest break came when he landed a fairly major supporting part in Robert Redford’s 1992 A River Runs Through It, and the next year counterintuitively played “Tom Winston, Best Actor Presenter” in Kevin Costner’s The Bodyguard.  That was his acting acme, however, and by 1995 he was playing a small role in Sean Young’s Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde, among other notable projects.  He continued to act until 2002, and then apparently retired, at least from what the IMDB indicates.

• Director David Wickes has written, produced and directed numerous episodes of various obscure TV series during his career.  The most impressive one might be the fondly remembered Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, which saw Powers Boothe playing Chandler’s oft-adapted detective.  Mr. Wickes was also responsible for a pair of Michael Caine TV movies; Jack the Ripper (1988) and Jekyll & Hyde (1990), as well as the billionth TV version of Frankenstein, starring Patrick Bergin and Randy Quaid.  He wrote all three, and in the latter introduced the, er, novel concept (stolen from The Corsican Brothers—or perhaps Sorceress) that Frankenstein and his Creation shared a psychic bond, so that when one experienced pain, so did the other.  Mr. Wickes apparently retired in the late ‘90s.   

My thanks, as always,
to Master Proofreader
Carl Fink
for his kind efforts to
make this article suck less.