July 7, 2023- Number 111

Spoilers

“Printer’s Devil”

Burgess Meredith returned for his fourth and final episode of The Twilight Zone. He has appeared in “Time Enough at Last,” “The Obsolete Man,” and “Mr. Dingle, the Strong.”
He is always excellent, even if the episode is not up to par. However, “Printer’s Devil” is a very solid episode and much of that is due to the great performance of Meredith as Mr. Smith, the Devil.

“Take away a man’s dream, fill him with whiskey and despair, send him to a lonely bridge, let him stand there all by himself looking down at the black water, and try to imagine the thoughts that are in his mind. You can’t, I can’t. But there’s someone who can—and that someone is seated next to Douglas Winter right now. The car is headed back toward town, but its real destination is the Twilight Zone”

Douglas Winter was ready to kill himself because his newspaper was faltering. However, he is intercepted by Mr. Smith, who talks him back to the world and begins to manipulate him.

We learn early that Mr. Smith is not necessarily in it for the benefit of Doug and that he had some specific power (lighting his own cigar with his finger is fairly strong hint). The story, itself, was one that is fairly well-used over the years as the Devil brings success to the person and eventual tries to get the person to sell his soul.

Burgess Meredith brought a lot of character to the Devil with the mannerisms he gave him and the way he presented his dialogue and his facial expressions. Meredith was excellent in this episode.

I did like the ending. It was one that I thought about during the story and I was pleased to see that they had gone that way. Some might think that it was too anticlimactic or that it wrapped everything up to neatly, but I liked it anyway.