As we start a new year, it’s time to begin a new season of Tales from the Crypt. The sixth season premiered on HBO on October 31, 1984 — along with “Skin Deep” and “Whirlpool” — and was directed by Russell Mulcahy (The Hunger, Highlander and early innovations in music videos like Ultravox’s “Passing Strangers,” Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” numerous efforts for Duran Duran — “Rio,” “Save a Prayer,” “The Wild Boys,” “The Reflex” and so many more — and even the first video MTV played, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star) and written by Ron Finley, one of five episodes scribed by this author.

The Crypt Keeper starts the show by cackling, “”From overseas and underworld, it’s the Crypt Keeper Noose Network. Good evening, creeps. In the news tonight, wolfman bites dog, vampires say life sucks, mummy takes the wrap after years in “de Nile,” and illiterate zombies insist they’re better dead than read. This just in. And our top story tonight is a nasty little soundbite about an ambulance-chasing lawyer who is about to bleed in the toughest case of her life. I call it “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime.””

This starts a lot like Nothing But Trouble. As lawyer Geraldine Ferrett (Catherine O’Hara) passes through the small town of Stueksville, she’s pulled over for having a bad license plate—well, a vanity one that states SUE EM —and hauled in front of three judges (all played by Joseph Maher) and defended by a public defender who knows so much less than her, Austin Haggard (Peter MacNicol).

Perhaps if she wasn’t so busy handing out her business card to people in wheelchairs and bragging about her past cases, she might realize that this hamlet is filled with weirdness, like the anachronistic pictures of public hangings in the lobby.

Haggard lives up to his name, a poor lawyer who gets her sentenced to a dungeon and a hundred lashes. Again and again, she tells him,  “I’d rather be dead than you.” With each judge she meets, the punishments become harsher and the supernatural lifts up its head, as she’s visited by the ghosts of patients who died once she shut down a pacemaker company.

The true punishment is that she’s given community service and takes over Haggard’s role as he goes to the electric chair for his crimes, happy to be free of this town and what could have been decades of cases like this. He tells her, “I’d rather be dead than you,” as he gets zapped.

This has some more cute wordplay in it. Stueksville may be “the sticks,” but it’s also purgatory, a place where the river Styx could flow. The title comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado — “My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time. To let the punishment fit the crime.” — and explains the punishments of The Lord High Executioner, which are similar to the three judges in this episode.

The title of this episode, “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” is in name only when compared to the EC Comics story that appeared in Vault of Horror #33, written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Jack Davis. The tale is about a town wondering what the punishments for crimes will be as children parade coffins through the streets, inspiring the theme of justice and punishment in this episode.