'Mork And Mindy' had a pretty troubled run, with many reshufflings and reschedulings coming down from the network and studios involved after an extremely successful first season. As a result, every season has a new settling in period to be dealt with, before getting into a new normal. The higher-ups just didn't understand why the show worked, and kept messing around with it in vain attempts to make this series about an alien living on Earth with a human flatmate fit into one of their templates!
'Mork Learns To See' is one of the most successful episodes of the second season, and features one of the most interesting uses of Mork (Robin Williams) and Mindy's (Pam Dawber) downstairs neighbour Mr Bickley, the legendary Tom Poston. Most of the time, Mr Bickley existed to complain and make snide remarks, but on this occasion, we got to see the most touching part of his history writ large, as he struggled to deal with a visit by his blind adult son, a pianist and musical performer, and decides to run off and let his neighbours deal with him instead.
There's a remarkable turn in this episode, once Mork and Mindy discover that their painting of Bickley as a villain for avoiding his son is not quite fair. It turns out that it's not nasty behaviour but rather crippling fear that is driving Bickley, and that he is effectively the wounded person in the relationship, after having given up so much to see his son end up an independent and valiant person. You have to think about it for a little while, but the extended sequence of Mork learning and living how Tom Bickley lives in perpetual darkness is really there to establish Bickley the younger as an independent person, while his fully sighted father is the weaker of the two. Oh, and it gives Williams a chance to emote freely, as was his gift. It seems that 'Mork And Mindy' was where Williams had the most control of his emotive energies, although that might have been the result of strong leadership inside the series.
'Mork And Mindy' was all about telling the truth, often when it wasn't the polite thing to do. Sometimes it went too far, or misfired, or had absolute disasters such as the season two premiere, which is the single worst hour of television that I've ever seen. Here, they hit it exactly right, with a great red herring of Mr Bickley as a rotter, before wheeling around and making it clear he is the self-punishing victim. Also, Tom Sullivan produces a very strong performance as Tom Bickley, portraying great inner strength before finally confessing that he misses the father he hasn't seen for more than a decade.
Very good. Not for the cynical.
O.
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