June 13, 2023- numbers 50 & 51

Spoilers

“The Whole Truth”

One wonders if the creators of Jim Carrey’s movie Liar Liar was inspired by this episode.

“This, as the banner already has proclaimed, is Mr. Harvey Hunnicut, an expert on commerce and con jobs, a brash, bright, and larceny-loaded wheeler and dealer who, when the good Lord passed out a conscience, must have gone for a beer and missed out. And these are a couple of other characters in our story: a little old man and a Model A car – but not just any old man and not just any Model A. There’s something very special about the both of them. As a matter of fact, in just a few moments, they’ll give Harvey Hunnicut something that he’s never experienced before. Through the good offices of a little magic, they will unload on Mr. Hunnicut the absolute necessity to tell the truth. Exactly where they come from is conjecture, but as to where they’re heading for, this we know, because all of them – and you – are on the threshold of the Twilight Zone.“

When Harvey Hunnicut bought the Model A car from the little old man, it seemed as if Hunnicut was ripping the man off. Oh how the tables turned.

As the little old man left the car salesman, he informed him that the car was haunted and that he would be haunted until he sold the car.

Little did Hunnicut know that it meant that he would be unable to tell a lie.

A used car salesman unable to lie? How could he sell anything? Especially when he had a lot full of lemons and clunkers. Hunnicut found that the truth was not a friend to him.

Overall, this episode was fairly light and, truthfully, kind of dull. He faced some initial consequences for his lies, especially form the wife on the phone, but he was able to get it sold without too much difficulty, passing the curse along to another person.

This lacked much of the Twilight zone’s usual oomph. The episode was not great.

“The Invaders”

And we went from a weak episode to one of the best of the series. The Invaders was totally original and featured a fantastic performance from Agnes Morehead (who would become Endora on Bewitched).

The dialogue of the episode was almost completely absent. It started off with the typical opening narration:

“This is one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas, a house untouched by progress. This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who’s been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror, which is even now coming at her from – the Twilight Zone.“

An isolated woman and a spaceship arriving in her home. However, the spaceship had miniature invaders-what appeared as robots, inside. The woman battled against the invaders, trying to protect herself and her home.

The old woman searched throughout her house, ending up capturing one of the invaders in a blanket, and beating it into unconsciousness. She then tossed it into the fire in the fireplace.

During this entire episode, we only hear the grunt and the screams of the woman. Never does she talk to the invaders or talk to herself during the horrifying time. It creates a great deal of tension and anxiety. The music from Jerry Goldsmith amplifies the atmosphere.

When she returned to the roof where the spaceship is located, she hears a message from the invaders back to their home planet saying to abandon this mission, do not strike a counterattack. There is a race of giant creatures here. The woman finishes off the ship and we see that it is from the US Air Force. The invaders were humans in suits, not miniature robots.

“These are the invaders, the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined. The invaders…who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag…and we have just seen it entered in a ledger that covers all the transactions in the universe…a bill stamped “Paid in Full” and to be found unfiled in the Twilight Zone”

This was an awesome ending to a tense and nerve-wracking episode. Agnes Morehead does an amazing job acting without any dialogue. She created a ton of sympathy for the old woman when you thought she was trying to save herself from some alien robots.

Top notch episode.