“Crazy Diamond” is episode four of season one of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams and is based on the short story Sales Pitch.
This episode opens with a lighthouse and a woman talking about how the universe is dying and everything decays. She tells a man, Ed, that it only takes two, and then there is no death, no decay. She says that there’s only her, and that she’s running out of time, and she rapidly ages. Ed is actually asleep, dreaming. He’s on a sailing ship tied up to a dock.
When Ed wakes up he returns home. His wife, Sally, says that they have a visitor who wants to talk to them about life insurance. The woman, Jill, turns around, and it’s the woman from Ed’s dream. The episode then goes back seven days.
Ed and his wife live in an unusual house on top of a cliff, one of several similar ones. Houses are being subject to coastal erosion and falling into the sea. Ed says they will be long gone by then, as they will be sailing (which may be more dangerous than it sounds). The world is futuristic, and food literally goes off once it reaches the expiration date. There are sentient beings around, Chimeras (some of whom do not even look human), Jacks and Jills, quantum consciousnesses – QCs – implanted into organic bodies, which gives the bodies a spark and makes them alive. This is where Ed appears to work – and where he encounters Jill (is the name a coincidence?) for the first time. She asks some odd questions and starts hanging around Ed. She is apparently a Jill and that she’s failing – eventually the QC spark seems to run out, and without a new one she will not exactly be alive. Jill seems fascinated by Ed for some reason.
What Ed wants to do with the sailing ship sounds like it might actually be illegal to some degree. Sally wants them to just move up the coast to where it’s more stable. Food is also expiring more and more rapidly and it appears that you aren’t really supposed to grow your own. Not that this is really possible. The whole society seems rather structured and confining. Ed is spending more and more time with Jill. She wants something from him, something that could also change his life – because it’s worth a lot of money to the right people. Or perhaps the wrong ones. Ed has second thoughts though. Sally is also getting concerned about her husband. Jill still wants Ed’s help.
Perhaps a bit of a morality tale and certainly not the most cheerful of episodes.