This was an interesting episode, one that held me from beginning to end. There were a couple of strikes against it, though, at least to my taste.

First, I\'ve never cared for Howard Da Silva, who seemed to give exactly the same performance in every show he was in (it doesn\'t help that he fails to even attempt an accent here, instead sounding glaringly American). And in terms of my own enjoyment, I actually found this script strangely tame, given the shocking gruesomeness of the Robert Louis Stevenson original--Stevenson\'s climax, in particular, is far more memorable than what RMT offers here. &nbsp; &nbsp;It\'s well worth reading (and it\'s not very long).

One of the interesting points in this adaptation is the fact that there is no romance, or romantic triangle, in Stevenson\'s story; Ian Martin appears to have built this up from an event which happens early on in the original, in which a woman of seemingly easy virtue named Jane Galbraith becomes a victim. Actually, by changing this around, Martin (certainly accidentally) made the RMT version resemble rather closely an episode of Rod Serling\'s NIGHT GALLERY called \"Deliveries in the Rear,\" which had been broadcast a couple of years before and which features the exact same kicker at the end. (Serling\'s script, by the way, though not credited as an adaptation of the Stevenson story, probably ought to be.) The Serling influence on RMT has been often discussed here, and I suspect that we have another, sort of back-door (or delivery in the rear?) example of it in this episode.

By the way, the Stevenson story had earlier been adapted, and very well indeed, as one of the better films of Boris Karloff, also called THE BODY SNATCHER (1945, directed by Robert Wise). This film is well worth searching out (it\'s on DVD). It does a tremendous job with Stevenon\'s ghastly, and very different, climax.

Not a bad episode at all, but this one could have been stronger in both acting and writing.<br>