Upsetting Day: The Beverly Hills Teens Hypnotism Episode

How did you celebrate Valentine’s Day? No doubt penning mind-control erotica and reading it to your lover’s prisoner by a fire. But what if all the sex were removed so the characters could be under 18, and the fires were the endlessly burning landscape of California? Then you’ve returned, at last, to the Beverly Hills Teen Club. Put away your sex-scarred genitals and take out your trauma-scarred amygdala! You’re watching Beverly Hills Non-Consensual Teens, ep. 37: “Look Deep Into My Eyes.”

The Beverly Hills Teens live in a Hell erected from 1980s America’s concentrated sins. Greed. Pride. Envy. Gluttony. Somehow failing to make Knight Rider exciting. It’s all here, but today’s episode is an eruption of vice that children’s entertainment has no language to describe: the kind of desire that makes you look at a woman and say, “She’d be mine if I could correct God’s error in granting her free will.” It's the lust that confuses free use with stolen goods, seduction with hypnotism, and hypnotism with kidnapping.

We open on a large-scale industrial kitchen that teen-genius Chester is using as his lab. Like an absolute idiot, he’s again sharing his miracles with nepo-brat Pierce Thorndyke III. Of course it’s Pierce. Long-time Hot Dog readers know everything Pierce does is proof that revolution can’t technically be murder because the 1% have abandoned their humanity. This time, it’s—oh no. A hypnotic marble.

Chester gives the worst person in the world a private showcase of a point-and-click gadget to enslave any living being. To demonstrate, he releases a fighting dog. Boy, the Teen Club research lab’s ethical guidelines must be the same printout as its financial projections. The best use case for this marble is “Riot cop accidentally aims it backwards,” but we won’t see that today. This thing’s maiden voyage will be specifically aimed at keeping maidens from voyaging anywhere. That’s right; your shoop du jour is sexual captivity!

The love potion is a blessedly vanishing trope from modern pop culture, but this episode aired in a decade when many shows devised a pheromone perfume or a magic necklace or a cybernetic patch that turned consent into prosent. It was a weird decade when comedies depicted spanish fly as a supply-chain problem more than a moral one, but only Beverly Hills Teens said “Let’s get the kids involved.”

The marble’s hypnotic spell breaks with a small splash of water. Maybe that’s why Chester promptly leaves the device unattended, or maybe Pierce doesn’t realize he’s part of a larger psychological study. This is Stanford Prison Experiment II: Into the Wild.

At the beach, the teens talk about how awesome Radley is right in front of him. Radley is humble because he is perfect. I fucking love Radley and you do too. Radley would never hypnotize you, as that would be most non-tubular. The teens agree to publicly vote Radley KING OF BEING SO RAD.

In a near-collision with self-awareness, Pierce says their future Teen Club King must be three synonyms for altruistic, half a breath before he spitefully mind-rapes his friends. I know what you’re thinking! But they had it coming because, you see, they laughed at him. It’s every man’s second-worst fear, just behind being hypnotized into subservience like a woman on a typical ’80s date.

This is still Act I! His first instinct was to turn a world-conquering weapon on his friends. He didn’t even think it over at lunch! The Road showed more faith in human nature than this cartoon for kids. His gaggle of drooling idiot slaves is the last argument left for mandating philosophy classes at Ivy League schools, but also the first one in favor of just firebombing their class reunions.

The rest of the A-plot we can skip because it’s not egregious. The only notable point is a French Dessert Droid who follows them around to calculate daily recommended sugar servings. “Bee-dee-boo-doo-BEEP! ’Ow may I…qu’est-ce que le mot…zerve monsieur?” is what he does not say in his French accent. There’s no need. This is a culture that has tireless serving bots yet it still felt the need to reinvent human bondage. The cruelty is the point with these powerful sons of bitches.

The real crime arrives in the mid-episode B-plot. (Hint: the B stands for penis.) For a spoiled teen boy given the power of mind control, there’s only one direction a story can go. Pierce commandeers Radley’s little black book and uses it as a trafficking catalog to pick out Celeste, Radley’s main squeeze, for himself.

The hubris of man! To sit on Radley’s shoulders and think himself a bodacious giant. And also I guess to believe he can own people. It’s presented so casually. But look around you. Normal cannot exist in Teen Club’s orbit. Every aspect of The Beverly Hills Teens’ world reveals itself to be baroque crime. Even a simple malt shoppe must, by rich-teen zoning law, be an opulent Versailles.

This is how Canadian animators see the U.S. We are the world’s Pierce Thorndyke. The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with teen blood.

Celeste immediately recognizes Pierce as an unforgettable douchebag and leaves before Dessert Droid can take their drink order. Sound judgment! Unfortunately, this is now a horror movie.

He “invites” her to kiss him. She immediately orgasms. It’s not okay! They aired this in our lifetimes, aimed at pre-teens!

In defense of this script, it’s depicting Pierce as a monster for doing this. But on the indictment side, also as boys being boys? Everyone’s going to forgive him tomorrow like this isn’t sexual assault. Like its biggest concern is that he just wouldn’t be able to land this redhead normally, not that he shouldn’t resort to any means neces—you know what, this is getting really dark.

As their lips touch, a thunderclap strikes! God’s judgment, some say. Others dismiss it as random physics, knowing God has abandoned this creation in horror. Unless…are these people gods? Is Pierce their Loki, incapable of expulsion for his crimes? No, impossible. The only rule of gods is they can’t overwrite free will. You’d have to be a demon to do th—GASP.

Pierce races the rain to the park, where his peons are building him a throne! He can’t let them get wet, or they’ll come to their senses and ask why he double-booked a date against a picnic in his honor. It’s the inconsideration that stings.

I don’t know how many days it’s been since the hypnotic violation but nobody has showered, or even washed their hands after using the bathroom. Have they even peed, or would drinking water snap the spell? Gee, the human rights violations are baked right into this marble.

Nothing epitomizes these kids’ world like a convertible stretch limo with an umbrella instead of a roof. Everything is the least functional, most demonstrative show of wealth. This is exactly what the Beverly Hillbillies would do, except it’s not depicted as idiocy here because the teens weren’t poor once. When you’re a billionaire, ad hoc living is a coxcomb to advertise your supremacy.

Pierce sequesters/imprisons his friends at his house, turning them into domestic slaves with nothing to do but pick lint from his clothes. This is the future our Bezoses want!

He returns to the date, but Dessert Droid immediately brings him a gold-plated videophone. Adults exist in Beverly Hills after all, and it’s Pierce’s mother, Margaret Thatcher. Everything makes sense now. Everything.

So it’s straight back to the house to order his mental-chain gang to stay out of the pool. This guy is working twice as hard with a private squad of zombies than he ever did just underpaying immigrants. It’s a farcical rush to keep two separate batches of teen slaves brain-washed and body-filthy. It never occurs to him to bring Celeste.

Radley, to nobody’s surprise, comes closest to breaking the spell. Even in a hellish sub-thinking state, the teens cannot stop talking about how gnarly Radley is. That surf rebel shuns the pool to take a most chill bath with a rubber ducky. It’s a very Ernie decision nobody can criticize. Even in his bondage, he steals his overlord’s bathrobe. This guy, I tell ya.

Pierce stops him, but what you’re really wondering is—what about that nice young woman he’s keeping prisoner?

Jesus Christ, Celeste is still at the restaurant. Pierce has left and returned twice, driving a limo through LA traffic, so this has to be, what? Eight months?

He finds her sitting next to a haphazard pile of cream pies, left by Dessert Droid, either out of pity or programming. I think she just lives here, wearing the single outfit, turning down water refills on pain of hypnotic anguish.

Pierce spills water on her lap, and she storms out after a classic pie to the face. Not the creampie he wanted, but neither the one he truly deserves, which is napalm, flung by the proletariat. You know, this date is more or less a recreation of what turned Rome from a tyranny into a republic.

It’s election night at Teen Club! Nobody has bathed! Just sunscreen and sweat, that’s what this party smells like. Pierce celebrates his victory with a magnum of Un-Champagne, explicitly telling child audiences it’s Perrier to get past Standards & Practices. But these are rich kids. We all know what’s up.

A recently decapitated French noble could tell you this is a provocatively stupid decision for a kleptocrat with six pratfalls under his belt in a single episode, but the clumsy idiot wrestles with the compressed water anyway.

Chester emerges from God’s domain to rebuke Pierce for abusing the marble. It’s stern hypocrisy from a boy seen programming a gynoid for love in the opening credits, but his argument is sound in a vacuum. And nothing is more vacuous than the Beverly Hills Teen Club culture.

The marble accidentally hypnotizes Pierce in his final tumble of the day. His former friends close in on him. Now it is he who will labor for their sinister wishes…“At least until it rains.” Somewhere, a sound producer checks her budget to see if this episode can license Albert Hammond, but all the money has been spent on French AI to bring us ice cream and sexual favors. It never rains in southern California but man, it pours only on the poors. In the Hell of Beverly Hills, where all our wishes come true, everything goes dark.

Brendan’s on Spoutible if that’s a thing we’re doing as a society now. Otherwise, please enjoy this dumb tweet.

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