June 17, 2023- numbers 56, 57

Spoilers

“Static”

Oh, the good old days. Back when the TV wasn’t always on and the music was live on the radio.

This is the basis behind the twentieth episode of season two of The Twilight Zone.

“No one ever saw one quite like that, because that’s a very special sort of radio. In its day, circa 1935, its type was one of the most elegant consoles on the market. Now with its fabric-covered speakers, its peculiar yellow dial, its serrated knobs, it looks quaint and a little strange. Mr. Ed Lindsay is going to find out how strange very soon when he tunes in to the Twilight Zone.”

Ed Lindsay was a very unhappy man. He had grown older and would grumble about everything, especially the TV that was in the house. When he found an old time radio, which somehow seemed to be able to connect to radio stations from years past, Ed started to feel more alive.

This episode was more of a character piece with Ed and his one time love Vinnie Broun, a woman who still lived with him in the same boarding house. By this point, their love was gone. Vinnie, along with the professor, worried that Ed was losing his grasp on reality, and they give away the radio. Ed retrieves it and winds up back in the past for good.

I think this was intended to be a romantic story, a second chance for Ed and Vinnie, but I do not see it that way. This feels almost like an alcoholic whose family members try and remove all the liquor by pouring it down the drain. It never works because the pull is too strong.

It could also be a way to speak against the inclusion of television into the lives of people, which considering The Twilight Zone is a TV program, that would be pretty ironic. Ed certainly had grumblings about the TV while the rest of the borders were transfixed by it and implied that radio was more of an activity to foster creativity and imagination than the TV.

Not sure what was intended in this episode worked very well. The acting was fine, but I am not sure the youthful reunion at the episode’s end was what the writers of the episode wanted.

“The Prime Mover”

When the main protagonist of an episode of The Twilight Zone is as unlikeable as Ace Larson was, the episode is difficult to enjoy.

Buddy Epson was much more likable, relatable in this episode a Jimbo, a down-home fellow who has telekinetic powers. The character of Jimbo in “The Prime Move” reminded me very much of Big Ed Hurley from Twin Peaks, lovable, kind of slow witted.

When Ace discovered Jimbo’s power, he immediately started planning how to take advantage of it. He took Jimbo and his girlfriend Kitty to Vegas to have Jimbo use his TK to manipulate the system and rig it in his favor.

Although he made a ton of money, Ace was not happy, anxious to keep going. Only when Jimbo said that he was too tired to continue did Ace take a break. However, he got in a fight with Kitty, who stormed off, and then he ‘hired’ a Vegas cigarette girl to go out on the town with him.

He then taunted a Chicago gangster into a game of craps with him in his room. After winning all the money, Ace went all in on one more roll of the dice. However, Jimbo had lost his power and Ace lost everything. At the end, Ace was back in the diner where they worked and he proposed to Kitty.

I had a lot of issues with this episode, all centered around the character of Ace. I already mentioned how I did not like the character, which is a major drawback. I did not feel like the character that I had seen this whole episode would react to losing all the money in the manner in which he did. The show seemed to imply that it shocked him back to normal, but I saw no evidence of that. Then, when he proposed to Kitty at the end after going out on the town with the cigarette girl (who showed up during the craps game implying that they were going away together), I literally said out loud “no.” Ace is going to be the type who will turn on Kitty the second things get tough and be cheating on her with some other woman. I don’t want them together because there is no happy ending for Ace.