July 11, 2023- numbers 117,118,119

Spoilers

“The Incredible World of Horace Ford”

I swear that I thought this was a young Nick Nolte for the entire episode. When I saw the credits at the end of “The Incredible World of Horace Ford,” I realized that Horace Ford was not played by Nick Nolte, but by Pat Hingle (who would be Commissioner Gordon in the 1989 Batman movie).

“Mr. Horace Ford, who has a preoccupation with another time, a time of childhood, a time of growing up, a time of street games, stickball and hide-‘n-go-seek. He has a reluctance to check out a mirror and see the nature of his image: proof positive that the time he dwells in has already passed him by. But in a moment or two he’ll discover that mechanical toys and memories and daydreaming and wishful thinking and all manner of odd and special events can lead one into a special province, uncharted and unmapped, a country of both shadow and substance known as the Twilight Zone.”

I did not enjoy this episode much and the main reason was the way in which the character of Horace Ford was portrayed. He was loud, childish, and yelled all the time. He had very little rooting factor. Just a few minutes in, I wanted to be done with the character.

That should show what a saint Horace’s wife was. She showed amazing patience and love for this man-child.

The repeating moments on Randolph Street with Horace did not seem to be very important and certainly not vital enough to create such chaos in the lives of Horace’s family. The whole story was quite a mess overall.

“On Thursday We Leave for Home”

This is one of the best episodes for the fourth season, which has had its ups and downs.

“This is William Benteen, who officiates on a disintegrating outpost in space. The people are a remnant society who left the Earth looking for a millennium, a place without war, without jeopardy, without fear, and what they found was a lonely, barren place whose only industry was survival. And this is what they’ve done for three decades: survive; until the memory of the Earth they came from has become an indistinct and shadowed recollection of another time and another place. One month ago a signal from Earth announced that a ship would be coming to pick them up and take them home. In just a moment we’ll hear more of that ship, more of that home, and what it takes out of mind and body to reach it. This is the Twilight Zone.”

William Benteen, who is called Captain Benteen by his people, kept his people alive for 30 years. He kept them thriving on this barren planet and told them hyperbolic stories about the earth that many of them did not remember. He seemed to be a great guy.

However, when that ship arrived to return them to the earth after all these years, Benteen began to show some cracks in his motives. He did not want to give up his power, his control over this group of people and so he began to try to manipulate them into either staying together on earth or, when that did not work, staying on their planet.

Benteen was shown almost to the point of a cult leader, who sees himself as the god of his followers. James Whitmore brought a true panic to the performance of a man who was used to being everything to his people only to find that he was about to lose it all.

“Passage on the Lady Anne”

We now see Alfred from the Batman ’66 series. We recently had Catwoman as the devil one episode and a couple of episodes prior we have Batman ’89’s Jim Gordon. Lots of Bat-folks around the Twilight Zone.

“Portrait of a honeymoon couple getting ready for a journey – with a difference. These newlyweds have been married for six years, and they’re not taking this honeymoon to start their life but rather to save it, or so Eileen Ransome thinks. She doesn’t know why she insisted on a ship for this voyage, except that it would give them some time and she’d never been on one before – certainly never one like the Lady Anne. The tickets read ‘New York to Southampton,’ but this old liner is going somewhere else. Its destination – the Twilight Zone.”

The way to save a marriage, to rekindle your love is to get aboard a ghost ship. I guess that is the overall lesson of this episode. Perhaps the Lady Anne was not yet a ghost ship when the Ransomes get on board, but that was the destiny of the ship.

This episode was filled with romantic characters and those who have suffered losses. Meanwhile the Ransomes are going through plenty themselves while everyone else on the boat was trying to get them to get off.

There were a few holes in the story or things that happen that did not make sense. Eileen Ransome disappeared in the story and was missing for a good chunk of time only to show back up with little explanation. I assume this was done to make her husband Alan worry that something had happened to her and that he would miss her terribly if she had fallen over the side of the ship. This felt very overdramatic for no pay off.

This is another example of a story that had to be bloated out to fit the hour format that should have been in the original half hour one. Too much meat on this bone.

“The Lady Anne never reached port. After they were picked up by a cutter a few hours later, as Captain Protheroe had promised, the Ransomes searched the newspapers for news – but there wasn’t any news. The Lady Anne with all her crew and all her passengers vanished without a trace. But the Ransomes knew what had happened, they knew that the ship had sailed off to a better port – a place called the Twilight Zone.”

We are down to just one more episode of Season 4, which we will watch tomorrow morning.