This was a fantastic episode that left me going with three options to figure out the plot's ending. Very innovative for 1974. 5 stars. Just one note of minor criticism; Mystery Theater frequently cast older actors and actresses for younger parts. In this episode, the young wife sounded older than her husband's mom. Still, this was radio, and this episode was very powerful.

"The Bride That Wasn't" is another winner. The story seems to begin as yet another TWILIGHT ZONE-ish entry, with the listener suspecting that the would-be bride is caught in a time warp or another dimension-- but it quickly turns into an episode which resembles nothing so much as Himan Brown's earlier series, INNER SANCTUM, which generally featured apparently inexplicable events that would always be "logically" explained. Once Florence's true murderous nature becomes apparent, the story really takes off. For me, the entire thing is more funny than frightening, but then that was always true of INNER SANCTUM as well. The dialogue helps the humorous effect enormously. Some of it is deliberately comic, as here: JACK: Give me the ax, Florence! FLORENCE: I'm tempted to ask where you'd like it. ...Whereas some of it features the kind of over-explaining that was common to bad radio writing, as when Jack and Amy are confronted by Florence and Amy says: "Your wife--standing in the doorway--an ax in her hand!" (Think about it. Would anybody actually say this unless Jack was blind?) Or, even better, this exchange: AMY: Joe, she's got a gun! JOE: I can see that, Amy. Good radio writers knew that they had to be more subtle in making the dialogue create the picture in listeners' heads. But that's not to take away from "The Bride That Wasn't," which is sheer fun all the way through. Its one slight fault, a standard one for RMT, is that it simply runs a bit too long. Brother Joe is a completely superfluous character, obviously introduced simply to fill air time; he does nothing that Jack and Amy couldn't have done themselves in a tighter script. Two things played in my mind while I was listening. One was the wonderfully campy horror films of William Castle, director of such "fright" fests as HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (the original), 13 GHOSTS, and--the one I kept thinking of here--STRAIT-JACKET, which featured a seemingly homicidal Joan Crawford. (For a certain kind of masochist there may be no more alluring vision on earth than that of Joan Crawford with an ax in her hand.) The other, not relevant at all but I'll put it here anyway, was the title of an early Pink Floyd song: "Careful With That Ax, Eugene." Given the nature of this story, the episode might have been titled "Careful With that Ax, Florence." Or, given the nickname she says her husband had for her, maybe it should have been "Careful With that Ax, Stupid." A very enjoyable episode, and I'll go ahead and post this early, so that no one comments on the sound of crickets chirping here on the board.

Thanks to Psycho, in the first act, I kept expecting it to be the mother who was crazy. Then again, they had at least a day to escape and nebbish Jack didn't whack Florence, grab Mom and make a run for it? Okay, can Amy be any more stupid? But I guess she's perfect for Jack, since they were Mr. & Mrs. Stupid! "Oh, honey, let's name our daughter after the axe-murderess who tried to kill us all." And, of course, Amy gave up her career to marry a man she knew for two weeks who lied about having a wife/former wife who killed his father and was in an asylum. I guess they needed Joe because they were such idiots! I see Bernie Barrow did this the year before he began playing Johnny Ryan on "Ryan's Hope." I didn't realize he was playing Jack until the end. Interesting when you know/don't know what the actors look like and it affects your imagining of the story. I had a totally different image of Jack in my mind than BB.