Original Air Date: December 24, 1972
Starring: Leonard Nimoy, Lorraine Gary
Directed by: Gerald Perry Finnerman

Cat Out of the Bag Alert!  This review contains spoilers for this episode!

Synopsis: Henry Auden (Leonard Nimoy) is newly widowed, having lost his invalid wife, and is given the present of a cat by one of her closest friends, Barbara (Lorraine Gary).

Featured Feline: After Barbara tells Henry that she is giving him a cat, he scoffs.  But an orange tabby cat in a basket arrives anyway.  A tag explains the cat’s name is Jennet.

Henry tries calling Barbara to send Jennet back but she is out of town.   Jennet rubs against his legs while he is on the phone.

Henry seems unnerved by the cat who sits across from him on a sofa.

At one point Henry envisions Barbara’s eyes looking at him from the cat.

The cat is seen outside the bedroom of Henry’s late wife looking in at the little bell she used to ring to call him.

Henry awakens to find a dead rat on the sofa where the cat was.  After this the cat morphs into increasingly larger cats, such as a bobcat, a leopard and finally a tiger.  Henry is tortured by the roars of the big cats and slowly goes crazy.  It is brought up that he had affairs while his wife was incapacitated, but no connection between that and the cats is ever made clear.  In the end Henry goes upstairs, resigned to his fate of being killed by the big cat.  As Barbara enters the house looking for Henry and we see the orange tabby licking up his blood from the floor.

This is a strange episode which doesn’t seem to have a real point.  Does the cat represent Henry’s guilt?  Is Barbara giving him a cursed animal to get back at him for cheating on his wife?  Or is his wife’s spirit changing the cats as a way to enact revenge?  Nothing is ever fully explained.  And sadly Rod Serling’s introduction is a little disappointing as it maligns felines in general.  The painting, however, is intriguing.  Too bad the episode didn’t match the art.

Final Mewsings: Cats need motivation to be evil.

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