The screw
Synopsis
The booth will not leave because one screw is missing from the panel under the deck. One. Four square metres, five minutes, two people and a cat.
Plot
A bottle episode, rewritten after the first attempt came out eerie instead of funny. The comedy of a confined episode comes from a trivial object, from each person having an urgent need of their own, and from every fix making it worse, not from atmosphere. His urgency: to be right about where it went. Hers: the side that is playing has eleven minutes left and she wants to hear the end of it, and every time he takes something apart the needle jumps. The cascade: he unscrews a panel to look behind it, which produces four more loose screws, and now nobody can tell which one is the one. By the end the whole booth is in pieces on the floor and there are sixty identical screws in a row sorted by size.
Tag
After the credits, a secondary character from this episode, later and somewhere else.
The cat, alone under the mixing desk in the dark, turns a small brass screw over between its front paws. It pushes it into the gap behind the bottom shelf, where a little pile of screws is already catching the light, backs out and sits down in exactly the middle of the booth floor.
Trivia and continuity
The payoff is the joke about the whole exercise: the cat has been sitting in the same place since the first scene, and it has been sitting on it, and it put it there. The first draft was Doctor Who's Midnight, with a figure outside the glass and a ceiling coming down. It was thrown out and rewritten as what it is: a man who has lost a screw.
Malios
Kenya
The cat