Mike, the Father, and Carol, the Brood-Mother, are the other adult figures in the show. Mike, a sternly resentful and ultimately impotent figure, stays mostly in his "den" (shades of Lot and his daughters!) but does occasionally ramble around, dispensing gruff common sense and justice at the behest of his befuddled and befuddling mate, the erstwhile Carol, here played to perfection by Florence Henderson, fresh from "Song of Norway" fame. She is here a spindly, sexless thing. When the twoof them are shown in bed, as is too often shown, and she reaches over her mate to turn off the light, one is always sure that Mike's hands do not wander away from his pre-ordained and sterile vassalage, clutching to his frightened and hairless chest his reading glasses rather than his mate, herself the personalization of desiccated pulchritude.
These "adults" bear scant resemblance to real people, and indeed this is the way the Master enlightens us. By showing these creatures instead of representations of perfection (or even mundane reality) he has shown us rather what not to become, leaving the final product if you will basically up to the neo-acolyte ... a veritable celebration of dogmatic free will!
These characters play well, opposite the children. There are six of these young ones; Greg and Marsha, the oldest of this "family," represent a guilt-ridden postwar American society, trying to recapture the golden innocence of isolationism with a rigid conformity of action and thought--as if by consciously assuming the attitudes and restrictions of a glamorized past, all that occurred, be it war, pestilence, famine or deep disillusionment with a corrupt and pompous government, is magically swept away on a fevered and dehumanizing wave of neo-patriotism.
