June 18, 2023- numbers 61,62

Spoilers

“The Silence”

Who could spend a year alone in a specially designed room, away from those you love, without talking…even saying a single word, for $500,000?

That is the premise of this episode of The Twilight Zone. And it is all because of a bet.

“The note that this man is carrying across a club room is in the form of a proposed wager, but it’s the kind of wager that comes without precedent. It stands alone in the annals of bet-making as the strangest game of chance ever offered by one man to another. In just a moment, we’ll see the terms of the wager and what young Mr. Tennyson does about it. And in the process, we’ll witness all parties spin a wheel of chance in a very bizarre casino called the Twilight Zone.”

This is the most realistic episode that I have seen of The Twilight Zone to this point in the series. Albeit the ending was shocking and unexpected, there was nothing that made it feel like it needed to be in the Twilight Zone to happen.

Still, the steps taken by Tennyson in order to win the bet is unbelievable and, once again, it felt cruel to then not have Colonel Archie Taylor have the money in the end.

Here’s hoping that Tennyson can have those nerves reattached to his vocal chords and sue the living crap out of Archie.

“Shadow Play”

There have been actors in The Twilight Zone that I do not recognize until after I research the episode. This is one of those cases as Dennis Weaver starred in this episode as Adam Grant, a defendant convicted of murder and sentenced to death via the electric chair. However, the twist is that Grant claims that this is all a dream and that he dreams this every night…and that everyone in the dream will be destroyed when he is electrocuted.

Grant desperately tries to convince everyone who comes to see him of his story. This time, he is able to convince reporter Paul Carson, who tries to convince D.A. Henry Ritchie.

This is another classic sci-fi trope, where everything comes out of the mind of one person. I know on LOST, one of the rumored solutions to what was going on was that this was all a dream by Hurley.

“We know that a dream can be real, but who ever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist, of course, but, but how, in what way? As we believe, as flesh-and-blood human beings, or are we simply parts of someone’s feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it, and then ask yourself, do you live here, in this country, in this world, or do you live, instead, – in The Twilight Zone?”

This was a clever episode that puts some good performances together with a well written script.