July 3, 2023- numbers 106, 107

Spoilers

“He’s Alive”

The beginning of this episode felt like a Ron DeSantis speech.

“Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. That something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth. But in just a moment Peter Vollmer will ply his trade on another kind of corner, a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone.”

I found this episode very compelling and, at times, powerful. I do like that we get more of the character of Peter Vollmer than just another Führer wannabe. However, I do wonder why he chose this path. Especially since he apparently was raised by Ernst, the older Jewish man. I understand that they implied that Peter was weak and picked upon as a child by his father, but to take his trauma and turn it towards the minorities did not make much sense.

I loved the presentation of Curt Conway as the ghost of Adolf Hitler. Although it did feel fairly obvious where that was going, keeping him in the shadows as he manipulated Peter was very well done. I also thought the ending where Hitler’s shadow is all we see moving through the alley as Rod Serling spoke his ending narration was very effective of an image.

“Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare – Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.”

This feels very relevant in today’s world and I wish the insanity of hatred would be recognized by people who feel the need to spread it around. I think a few little tweaks and this could have been one of the very top level episodes of The Twilight Zone.

“Mute”

A group of people decide that they would begin to teach their children to communicate telepathically instead of verbally. So what happens when a family following this decision dies, leaving behind their sole surviving daughter?

“What you’re witnessing is the curtain-raiser to a most extraordinary play; to wit, the signing of a pact, the commencement of a project. The play itself will be performed almost entirely offstage. The final scenes are to be enacted a decade hence and with a different cast. The main character of these final scenes is Ilse, the daughter of Professor and Mrs. Nielsen, age two. At the moment she lies sleeping in her crib, unaware of the singular drama in which she is to be involved. Ten years from this moment, Ilse Nielsen is to know the desolating terror of living simultaneously in the world and in the Twilight Zone.”

Mute has some interesting ideas, but there are too many plot details that play in opposition to the ideas of the story.

Ilse was the little girl who found her way into the home of the sheriff and his wife. They did not know who to contact so they kept Ilse while they tried to figure out what to do.

The episode wanted there to be a close mother/daughter relationship forming between Ilse and Cora, the sheriff’s wife, but it is undercut by several things. First, we learn that Cora had a daughter who had drown, and it seemed as if she was using Ilse to replace that daughter. This is not a very healthy start to the relationship. Then when Cora was burning letters that were to be sent to friends of Ilse‘s parents, who lived in Europe, she was clearly doing what she wanted, not what was best for Ilse.

Another thing that I did not like in the plot of this episode was the inclusion of this teacher who was determined to make Ilse talk and would bring her up to the front of the room and try and get her to say her name. The teacher had a background with her own parents trying to get her to become a “medium” as she stated, but that plotline was never brought back or wrapped up.

I also did not understand the ending of the episode where Ilse finally spoke her name and we learn that she is better off with the sheriff and Cora because her parents only saw her as an experiment. This ending did not feel like it worked with the story they were trying to tell.

Mute did not work well for me and the storytelling felt confused with what it was trying to say.