July 2, 2023-numbers 104, 105

Spoilers

“Thirty-Fathom Grave”

The mixture of a submarine movie and a ghost story is what we get in “Thirty-Fathom Grave,” the second episode in the fourth season of The Twilight Zone.

This was a solid episode with an intriguing plot dealing with a sunken submarine discovered by a ship because there sounded as if there were a metallic tapping echoing through the water.

Meanwhile, one of the crew members, Chief Bell, begins to have a nervous breakdown despite a long and successful career in the Navy.

There did seem to be too much episode for the story being told here. There were a bunch of scenes that were repeated (not sure how many times we needed to see the diver going down to the stranded submarine or how many scenes of moving the ship) that could have been edited out to make the episode tighter. Unlike the first episode of the season, this did feel like it was hurt by the expansion from 30 minutes to an hour.

Still, the overall episode was very good, with a great performance from Mike Kellin, playing Chief Bell, and displaying his combination of survivor’s guilt and PTSD.

One of the members of the crew was played by Bill Bixby, another future star that I recognized in Twilight Zone episodes.

“Valley of the Shadow”

The Twilight Zone’s third episode of season four was called “Valley of the Shadows” and it made me think a lot about a comic series from the last few years called “Stillwater,” by Chip Zdarsky.

Stillwater was the story of a small town whose residents could not die and did not age. It was a secret that the leaders of Stillwater kept hidden from the outside world and they prevented people from leaving their town. This is very much similar to Valley of the Shadows, where there was technology that allowed these people to have basically anything that they wanted, but who had to stay isolated in fear of what the outside world may do with that tech.

When the reporter Phillip Redfield is lost and drives into Peaceful Valley by accident, he realizes that things are weird. Actually, it was because of his dog, who wound up chasing a cat and a little girl made the dog disappear with a handheld machine.

When Redfield demands answers from the council, they decide that he needed to be held captive to protect the town’s secrets.

There was an argument in the episode about whether these secrets should be shared with the world. How there were people dying from hunger every day of the year and how this could help people. The council believed that this machine that could do about anything would be used for bad things by the outside world. It was an interesting debate and one that I am not sure of which side I would come down upon.

“You’ve seen them. Little towns, tucked away far from the main roads. You’ve seen them, but have you thought about them? Have you wondered what the people do in such places, why they stay? Philip Redfield thinks about them now and he wonders, but only very late at night, when he’s between wakefulness and sleep in the Twilight Zone.”

Stillwater was an excellent series from Image Comics. You could give it a try.