Lew Feldman (Joe Bova) is on the phone, being a Hollywood agent, when Mr. Smith (Lenny von Dohlen) appears in his office. He tells him that he wants to speak to Gil Hurn (David Margulies) and wants the agent to find him. Feldman says that Hurn is a big writer now and doesn’t want to revisit one of his failures. Smith offers a $35,000 gold bar to find Smith and discuss his one-season-canceled show, Max Paradise.

Smith wants Hurn to write and direct six more episodes of the show, including the ending. He’s willing to pay him $2 million to make it happen, but Hurn is unsure, since he thinks the show was corny. Smith claims that fans are yearning to see how the story ends. To do that, they have to find the star, Van Conway (Darren McGavin), who has given up on acting and, well, life. Smith promises him money, and if he takes the pills he’s brought, he will feel healthy again, as he once did before he started drinking. He even rebuilds the studio where the show was set, with no expense spared, to ensure that a show nobody watched can come back.

Even when Conway walks away, Smith won’t give up, even removing his fear and need to drink. When asked why he’s doing all of this, he replies that he’s Conway’s greatest fan. Conway is amazed by Smith’s belief in him and wonders who the millions of people Smith refers to are who would watch a black-and-white show in modern times. All Smith can say as he watches the show being filmed is that it’s mythic.

It’s never said where Smith is from, but Hurn and Conway decide he’s from space, a place that saw the show years after everyone else and always wondered how it ended. As the Max Paradise theme plays and the cameras roll in that reconstructed void, Hurn and Conway realize they aren’t just filming a cancelled show; they are providing the “ending” for an entire civilization’s mythology. They find their own purpose by becoming the wanderers they once portrayed.

Directed by Bill Travers (his only directing job; he played Senator Boutwell in The Lincoln Conspiracy) and written by Theodore Gershuny (who was married to Mary Woronov) from a story by Andrew Weiner, this is one of my favorite episodes of the entire series. Max Paradise was based on Coronet Blue, which ran for only 11 episodes on CBS in the summer of 1967. Created by Larry Cohen, it was about an amnesia-suffering man (Frank Converse) chased by killers who only knew two words, which were the title of the show. It never returned after those episodes, and the mystery was never resolved.