June 4, 2023- numbers 13 & 14

Spoilers

“The Four of Us are Dying”

Shape shifting takes center stage in the Twilight Zone.

His name was Arch Hammer and he could change his face to look like someone else. He decided to use this ability to do some rotten things. He impersonated a deceased trumpet player to try and score with the woman the trumpet player loved. He made arrangements to run away with her. I didn’t know if he then intended to keep that face for the rest of time or if he was just messing with her and would dump her when he was tired of her. Either way, playing on her grief was a terrible thing to do.

Then he impersonated a gangster and threatened the head gangster that had had him killed. He was able to rip off a bunch of money.

Then, as he was being pursued, he switched to a random face he saw on a poster in an alleyway. He was a boxer. He avoided the thugs chasing him, but, coincidentally, he ran into the boxer’s father. The father was angry with his son and Hammer shoved him to the ground.

The old man would come back into play later when he shot Hammer dead outside of his hotel thinking it was his son.

“He was Arch Hammer, a cheap little man who just checked in. He was Johnny Foster, who played a trumpet and was loved beyond words. He was Virgil Sterig, with money in his pocket. He was Andy Marshak, who got some of his agony back on a sidewalk in front of a cheap hotel. Hammer, Foster, Sterig, Marshak—and all four of them were dying.“

This was very much of a noir episode, with the music from Jerry Goldsmith and all of those Dutch Angles. This episode was okay, at best.

“Third from the Sun”

This was a much different episode from the previous one. Here we had some government researchers/scientists involved in research on H-bombs and other weapons. Nuclear war was imminent.

“Quitting time at the plant. Time for supper now. Time for families. Time for a cool drink on a porch. Time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the Moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before storm. This is the eve of the end.”

The story featured Will Sturka and his family, along with his friend and co-worker Jerry Riden. They made a plan to steal an experimental spaceship and fly off the doomed planet and relocate to another planet that they discovered that also had people and was much like the planet they lived on.

One of their co-workers, Carling, was suspicious of them and he was hanging around, looking to cause trouble.

As they tried to get to their ship, Carling confronted them with a gun, hoping to take them to the police. They were able to overpower him and got to the ship.

As they were in the ship, they talked about the new planet they were heading towards… and it was called earth.

I liked the unexpected twist at the end of the episode with them heading TO earth instead of escaping from earth. There was some good tension built in the episode as the worry of nuclear war was a major worry that people of the time had to deal with.