June 18, 2023-numbers 58,59,60

There are three straight really good episodes in this post, following one of the worst of the series last time.

Spoilers

“Long Distance Call”

It is Billy’s sixth birthday. And he was excited. So was his Grandma. She and the young boy had a special relationship, but she knew something he did not. She did not have long left in this world. Instead, she would take up residence … in the Twilight Zone.

Grandma gave a birthday gift to Billy, a toy telephone that would allow him to speak to her at any time. Little did anyone know that she truly meant that.

After she died, Billy continued to talk to his grandma on the phone and she would tell him how lonely she was and she tried to convince him to come to be with her. After an attempt to kill himself in the pool, his father spoke on the toy phone to his mother, begging her to let Billy go.

He survived, but clearly had years of therapy bills to pay.

This was one of the darkest episodes of the show that we have gotten yet. Dealing with the topic of death is not uncommon for the show, but the idea of a five-year old trying to commit suicide (first by running out in front of a car and then by drowning himself) is absolutely dark.

There were some excellent performances in this episode, especially Phillip Abbott, who played Chris, Billy’s father. His monologue on the phone begging his mother to let his son live was very powerful and spoke to the idea of faith. Grandma was played by Lili Darvas and she gave a very creepy, almost magical performance as a woman on the brink of death who had suffered loss in her life and did not want to be alone.

This was one of my favorite episodes of the series so far.

“A Hundred Yards over the Rim”

“The year is 1847, the place is the territory of New Mexico, the people are a tiny handful of men and women with a dream. Eleven months ago, they started out from Ohio and headed west. Someone told them about a place called California, about a warm sun and a blue sky, about rich land and fresh air, and at this moment, almost a year later, they’ve seen nothing but cold, heat, exhaustion, hunger, and sickness. This man’s name is Christian Horn. He has a dying eight-year-old son and a heartsick wife, and he’s the only one remaining who has even a fragment of the dream left. Mr. Chris Horn, who’s going over the top of a rim to look for water and sustenance and in a moment will move into the Twilight Zone.”

Hey, it is Uncle Ben! Cliff Robertson, who played Ben Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, starred in this episode of The Twilight Zone. I did not recognize him immediately. However, Gomez Adams, aka John Astin, I did recognize right away as Chris’s friend and co-pioneer.

Christian stumbled from his small caravan, containing his son who was desperately sick and apparently dying, from 1847 into the future. He comes across a station/diner where he is helped by a friendly couple. They were surprised to see him carrying such an antique, but new looking, rifle.

Chris learned several things, including that he was now in 1961, that they had medicine that could help his son, and that his son would grow up and become a famous doctor who was credited in doing great work to help children’s diseases.

Stealing the penicillin, Chris ran back to the rim where he had done his time travel and he found his way back to the past and saved his son.

This was an early example of the predestination paradox, which, according to Wikipedia, “is a theoretical proposition, wherein by means of either retrocausality or time travel, an event (an action, information, object, or person) is among the causes of another event, which is in turn among the causes of the first-mentioned event.” The idea of this, also called Causal Loop became a well-used trope in science fiction and showed how ahead of the times Rod Serling was.

“The Rip Van Winkle Caper”

Four gold thieves execute a weird plan to escape from the ‘heat’ after robbing a train of its gold shipment coming from Fort Knox.

“Introducing, four experts in the questionable art of crime: Mr. Farwell, expert on noxious gases, former professor, with a doctorate in both chemistry and physics; Mr. Erbie, expert in mechanical engineering; Mr. Brooks, expert in the use of firearms and other weaponry; and Mr. De Cruz, expert in demolition and various forms of destruction. The time is now, and the place is a mountain cave in Death Valley, U.S.A. In just a moment, these four men will utilize the services of a truck placed in cosmoline, loaded with a hot heist cooled off by a century of sleep, and then take a drive into The Twilight Zone.”

They decided to put themselves into suspended animation for 100 years, knowing that they would no longer be sought after and they could spend their riches how they’d like.

Things did not go exactly to plan.

I enjoyed the fates of these criminals as they each wound up facing justice in their own way. Mr. De Cruz was a horrible person and one wonders why the others in this little group put up with him. I especially enjoyed his own, well-deserved fate.

Even more ironic was that in this future, gold was no longer valuable, and their plan would not have worked even if they hadn’t all died along the way.

This was a very entertaining episode with watching these four people get their comeuppance, but there were a ton of plot holes or things that someone with common sense would have thought about. That pulled this episode down a bit, but it is still an enjoyable watch.