June 11, 2023- numbers 41, 42, 43

Spoilers

Season two has not been very strong so far. However, there were three exceptional episodes in a row with the fourth one being fine. This stretch of episodes really elevated the season.

“The Howling Man.”

Dutch angles for everyone!

What a great episode this one was. I enjoyed The Howling Man. Stumbling into the castle, David Ellington was lost and needed help. Just like Brad and Janet from Rocky Horror. Just like Bugs Bunny in several Looney Tunes shorts. Or Count Dracula’s castle. It never turns out well.

It was a unique opening as we started with David Ellington seemingly addressing the audience about the shocking horror that he had experienced. It felt for awhile that David would take the place of Rod Serling in the narrator chair, but Rod did eventually show up.

“The prostrate form of Mr. David Ellington, scholar, seeker of truth and, regrettably, finder of truth. A man who will shortly arise from his exhaustion to confront a problem that has tormented mankind since the beginning of time. A man who knocked on a door seeking sanctuary and found, instead, the outer edges of The Twilight Zone.”

Mr. Ellington was allowed to stay in the castle because he was sick and could not leave on his own. However, this was a bad thing for all as he came across a man locked away in the castle who claimed that the leader of this cult-like group, Brother Jerome, was crazy and had him locked up for no reason.

Brother Jerome was pretty sketchy too. Mr. Ellington wanted to understand, but Jerome did not want to tell him the full story. He knew the true story would make him sound like a loon.

Finally, Jerome broke down and explained to Mr. Ellington that the man he spoke to was no man at all… he was the devil. He told Mr. Ellington how the devil came to be locked in a room in their castle. Mr. Ellington pretended to believe him, and as soon as he could, he went and freed the man from the room.

Ellington was clearly blinded by his illness and his own foolishness because the questions he asked, which were good one about the lock on the door and why the man couldn’t just get himself out, were ignored.

Sure enough, the devil was freed and shapeshifted into his devilish form, horns and all. According to Rod’s narration, the devil was behind WWII, The Korean War, the weapons of war until Mr. Ellington had recaptured him.

We find out that, instead of narrating, he had been telling his own maid about the story to make sure that she never open that door. Which, of course, she promptly did.

This reminded me of the myth of Pandora’s Box. Pandora was a good person who did not intend on releasing the worst pain and anguish onto the world by opening the box and letting them out. Yet, that is what happened, just like Mr. Ellington opened the door and let out the great evil of the world. They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Looks like this episode agrees with that idiom.

“Eye of the Beholder”

A second consecutive awesome episode. Eye of the Beholder started out with the poor fate of Miss Janet Tyler, her ugly face completely covered in bandages, in a hospital for her last chance treatment.

“Suspended in time and space for a moment, your introduction to Miss Janet Tyler, who lives in a very private world of darkness. A universe whose dimensions are the size, thickness, length of the swath of bandages that cover her face. In a moment we will go back into this room, and also in a moment we will look under those bandages. Keeping in mind of course that we are not to be surprised by what we see, because this isn’t just a hospital, and this patient 307 is not just a woman. This happens to be the Twilight Zone, and Miss Janet Tyler, with you, is about to enter it.“

The nurse and the doctor were in to see Janet, but it was clear immediately that something weird was going on. We saw nobody’s faces. The doctor and the nurses were shot with specific camera angles or within shadows that kept the audience from seeing anyone’s face. Meanwhile we were told that Janet had one final chance to be able to be normal or she would need to be taken away to be with her kind of people.

Boy, are there some connections to this episode and the world we live in right now? As the episode continued, we were introduced slowly to several ideals of their current society. We even got to hear from their “Leader” on a closed circuit TV. The longer the episode went, the more bizarre the world seemed to be.

I thought the truth was fairly obvious early on in the episode. I had guessed that when they removed the bandages from Janet’s face, she would be revealed as being beautiful and, my thought was that everyone else would have blank faces. I was half right as the doctors and nurses were revealed to have ugly, pig-like faces.

The actual removal of the bandages was done wonderfully, building tension with every unwrapping. It took its time and it was a great payoff.

“Nick of Time”

William Shatner is in The Twilight Zone!

Before his iconic turn as Captain Kirk or his role in probably the most well-known Twilight Zone episode ever, William Shatner was here as the recently wed Don Carter.

“The hand belongs to Mr. Don S. Carter, male member of a honeymoon team en route across the Ohio countryside to New York City. In one moment, they will be subjected to a gift most humans never receive in a lifetime. For one penny, they will be able to look into the future. The time is now, the place is a little diner in Ridgeview, Ohio, and what this young couple doesn’t realize is that this town happens to lie on the outskirts of the Twilight Zone.“

Don and his new wife Pat have their car break down and they get stuck in Ridgeview, Ohio. While they were waiting for their car to be repaired, they went to a diner for food. At their booth, there was a little fortune teller napkin dispenser that you could put in a penny and ask a yes or no question and the machine would spit out an answer like a fortune cookie.

Problem was the answers seemed coincidentally accurate and Don, who was very superstitious, began to believe in the power of the machine. He slowly became obsessed with what the fortune teller was saying to them and was allowing the box to dictate their life.

At first, Don thought the machine had told him that something bad would happen if they left early. Don figured out that if they left before three, something bad would happen. So they stayed until 2:55. This drove me crazy. You waited this long, why not wait another five minutes. Why press fate?

Of course, right at 3, they nearly get hit by a car, which only cemented Don’s belief in the precognition of the machine. He took Pat back to the diner and began asking question after question.

Pat was able to bring Don back to reality with some common sense and they were able to get out of the diner and into their car to go wherever they wanted to go. However, another desperate looking couple came into the diner and sat down at the booth, pumping the fortune teller full of pennies and asking advise for their lives.

William Shatner was great here, really playing up the paranoia and the obsession of the superstitious man, and he showed the strength to escape from the pull of this belief.

“The Lateness of the Hour”

Robots everywhere.

“The residence of Dr. William Loren, which is in reality a menagerie for machines. We’re about to discover that sometimes the product of man’s talent and genius can walk amongst us untouched by the normal ravages of time. These are Dr. Loren’s robots, built to functional as well as artistic perfection. But in a moment Dr. William Loren, wife and daughter will discover that perfection is relative, that even robots have to be paid for, and very shortly will be shown exactly what is the bill.”

Dr. Loren’s daughter, Jana, was not a very likable character. She felt very selfish and most likely jealous of the robots and how much they did for her mother and father. She worried that these robots were keeping her parents from fully living their lives.

She did it in the most obnoxious way though, including throwing one of the robots down the stairs. She insisted that her father shut the robot staff down. He did not want to but he finally acquiesced when Jana said that either it was the robot staff shut down or she would leave and never come back.

I personally would have shown her the door, but there was a reason that was not going to happen. The twist of the episode, which again I had figured out early, was that Jana was also a robot. She flipped out when she discovered this truth, and her father had no other choice but to turn her into a maid instead.

“Let this be the postscript — Should you be worn out by the rigors of competing in a very competitive world, if you’re distraught from having to share your existence with the noises and neuroses of the twentieth century, if you crave serenity but want it full time and with no strings attached, get yourself a workroom in the basement, and then drop a note to Dr. and Mrs. William Loren. They’re a childless couple who made comfort a life’s work, and maybe there are a few do-it-yourself pamphlets still available… in the Twilight Zone”

While much of this episode irritated me because of Jana’s behavior, I loved the end of the episode. She absolutely deserved this ending.