June 11, 2023- numbers 39 & 40

Spoilers

“Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room”

A whiny, nervous criminal is in a small, cheap hotel room when approached to do more than the petty, two-bit crimes he is used to committing.

“This is Mr. Jackie Rhoades, age thirty-four, and where some men leave a mark of their lives as a record of their fragmentary existence on Earth, this man leaves a blot, a dirty, discolored blemish to document a cheap and undistinguished sojourn amongst his betters. What you’re about to watch in this room is a strange mortal combat between a man and himself, for in just a moment, Mr. Jackie Rhoades, whose life has been given over to fighting adversaries, will find his most formidable opponent in a cheap hotel room that is in reality the outskirts of The Twilight Zone.“

Jackie was hoping George, the head crook, would give him something special tonight, and he was right. However, Jackie was not excited about it at all.

George gives Jackie a gun and instructs him to kill a little old man who was rebutting the gangster’s advances. George wanted him to be made am example of and George gave that job to Jackie because no one would expect such a whimpy loser to be a murderer.

Jackie may have been a criminal, but he had never killed anyone before so this assignment triggered a conflict of conscious within Jackie. And Jackie began having a discussion with the reflection of himself in the mirror.

After a dramatic confrontation with the mirror image, Jackie refused the job and beat up George, resigning from his employ.

I took this as an example of the character of Jackie dealing with a split personality. It seemed more than just an argument over a conscience. The reflection spoke about how Jackie could have taken dual paths and that he chose a poor one. This is clearly something that Jackie has dealt with in the past. And at the end of the episode, the alter personality, who called himself John, takes over the body from Jackie.

I did enjoy the psychological aspect of this episode. The argument with the reflection in the mirror is a well known trope of this style and I wonder if it had happened before the Twilight Zone.

“A Thing About Machines”

Get out of here, Finchley

Get out of here, Finchley

Get out of here, Finchley

“This is Mr. Bartlett Finchley, age forty-eight, a practicing sophisticate who writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He’s a bachelor and a recluse with few friends, only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He has no interests save whatever current annoyances he can put his mind to. He has no purpose to his life except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhors. In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley is a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century, and who, in just a moment, will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings. Next stop for Mr. Bartlett Finchley – The Twilight Zone.”

Mr. Bartlett Finchley was a pompous, stuck-up individual who blamed all the problems around him on the machines that filled up his home, and not on the blistering temper that seemed to overwhelm him at a drop of a hat.

Somehow, the machine began speaking to him and intentionally doing things to irritate and upset him.

The machines get the last laugh in a fit of personification as Finchley’s car chased him around the neighborhood and killed him in a pool.

The episode gave us no reason for the mysterious machines to come to life. It did hint at this being in Finchley’s head, but there was no evidence of that actually occurring. Though there were some ideas here, there were too many silly images included taking whatever tension the episode tried to build out. I knew what we were up for when the electric razor began coming down the steps on its own.

Finchley was unlikable, but lacked any real reason for the audience to see him drown in a pool by his own car.