31- Monkey Dreams

The first half of this is a lame segment about a gambler whose luck runs out and tries to make a killing on contacting extraterrestrials. He fails, but in an unusual way. This character was in the even worse episode "Memory Overload" and he finally dies here. I'm not sure what made the creative team think he was so compelling a character that he needed another episode. He was in one scene in the previous show and he was upstaged by a desk.

The second half seems to be a really clumsy, heavy-handed anti-animal experimentation polemic (by and large, that's all it is), and I was ready to dismiss it. But then there's a tragic twist ending that almost brought a tear to my eye. It's unusual for an episode of this show to be so touching, but it really hit me hard.