the Fully Functional Phil ad meeting (pp. 882–883)

The pleasure-death tableau seen from the doorway by a child. The spot's climactic warning is that if Mum and Dad have been sitting motionless before the viewer "without speaking, without responding to stimuli," the functional kid must never "plunk himself passively down" to see what has them so silently, creepily engrossed — the one glance being the fatal one — but flee for a policeman who knows how to cut the power. It's the whole horror of the Entertainment framed as a stranger-danger PSA: the parents already gone, captured mid-viewing, and the only survival rule the refusal to look. The scene makes the lethal cartridge into the era's version of the hot stove, the thing children must be trained by rote never to be curious about, because curiosity here is death and the trap is baited with exactly what looks most worth watching.