This season starts off with "The Circus," where a journalist stumbles upon a long-rumored traveling show that has a reputation of showing up in a different spot every night and vanishing as if it were never there. Finally able to see the show, the journalist confronts the twisted ringmaster (the appropriately creepy William Hickey) and gets a tour of the circus' more unusual creatures like a vampire, a werewolf, a re-animated corpse and mummy. As you would expect from the Darkside tale, not everything goes as well as he had hoped.
This season contains one of the more chilling episodes I remember from the show's original airing back when I was a kid. In "I Can't Help Saying Goodbye," a little girl (played by a very young Alison Sweeney known for her time on Days of our Lives and The Biggest Loser) suddenly gets the power to see when people around her are about to die. With this knowledge, she can't help but tell them farewell before their accident. When their mother ends up getting blown up in their kitchen, her older sister's fiance starts to get suspicious. As the accidents start happening more frequently, her whole family starts freaking out until the episode's inevitable and shocking conclusion.
Another creepy story involving a little girl is "The Geezenstacks" with a doll house. What is strange is that the games the girl plays with the fake-family start happening to the real one, and only her father notices. When events like the father-doll getting sick, or getting mad at his wife start happening to him, he starts paying close attention to his girl's playtime and gets really worried when talk of jumping out of a window starts coming up.
There are a couple "be careful what you wish for" episodes this season. In "The Serpent's Tooth," a mother gets the ability to command her children to do whatever she wants, while "The Milkman Cometh" deals with a neighborhood that gets whatever they want just by leaving a note for the milkman. Of course, in both of these tales, foolishness and greed make these gifts turn dark quickly. "The Serpent's Tooth" guest stars Renee Taylor, while "The Milkman Cometh" features Robert Foster and Chad Allen.
Tales from the Darkside: The Third Season also features a story that takes a slightly different bend. While most episodes have some strange, dark anomaly messing up otherwise normal peoples' lives, "Deliver Us From Goodness" goes the other direction by bestowing sainthood on a woman and her attempts to get rid of it because of the possible ill-effects it could have on her husband's political career.
I also enjoyed the episodes, "My Ghostwriter - The Vampire" and "Alud Acquaintances." In the "My Ghostwriter - The Vampire" episode, a struggling horror novelist strikes gold when a vampire gives him a business proposition - a place to stay for stories of his travels. When the first book is a success, the writer feels he doesn't need the ghoul's help anymore, which of course makes the 900 year-old creature a bit unhappy. The other episode has a similar feel to it, not because it involves vampires or writers. Instead, "Alud Acquaintances" features a pair of witches who meet up to exchange an ancient talisman and we learn of the strange series of events starting at the Salem Witch Hunts that led them to this arrangement.
Tales from the Darkside: The Third Season has quite a number of good episodes in it. In fact, there aren't any I would turn my nose at, since they are all enjoyable on some level. If you watched the series before (either live, or in syndication), then you will enjoy this collection of tales. If you've picked up the first two seasons of the show, then you won't want to miss this one, and if you haven't but I've peaked your interest, then grabbing the third season of this anthology series is no different from grabbing the first (as far as story continuity or general quality is concerned), so starting with this volume is just as good as any other.
