July 15, 2023-numbers 127,128

Spoilers

“The Old Man in the Cave”

We are back to the futuristic apocalyptic world of The Twilight Zone. Oddly enough, they once again call this 1974, ten years after the official release of the episode. Not sure why they believe that 1974 is the year for all of these events, but it is fine for me.

“What you’re looking at is a legacy that man left to himself. A decade previous he pushed his buttons and a nightmarish moment later woke up to find that he had set the clock back a thousand years. His engines, his medicines, his science were buried in a mass tomb, covered over by the biggest gravedigger of them all—a bomb. And this is the earth 10 years later, a fragment of what was once a whole, a remnant of what was once a race. The year is 1974 and this is The Twilight Zone.”

A small group of military men, led by James Coburn’s Major French arrived in a small town where the population followed the instructions of an unseen old man who lived in a cave and only communicated with a man named Goldsmith, played by John Anderson.

This is very much of a parable for the belief in religion and faith in something that you could not see. The Old Man in the Cave supposedly gave the settlers information that has helped them keep alive since the nuclear war back in 1964. Goldsmith was determined that they would follow every proclamation from the Old Man. Major French arrived as the skeptic and began throwing everything back in Goldsmith’s face.

When it was revealed that the Old Man was nothing more than a computer, the faith of all of the settlers was broken and they were happy to have followed Major French’s ‘do-whatever-you-want’ attitude. Of course, it led to them all dying, except for Goldsmith, whose faith was unaltered.

I was not a big fan of the end of this episode. It felt pretty heavy-handed and it could have done without the monologue at the end.

“Uncle Simon”

Hey, is that Robby the Robot?

Danger, Uncle Simon, Danger!

This one is a mean-spirited episode with a fairly lack of a solid story.

“Dramatis personae: Mr. Simon Polk, a gentleman who has lived out his life in a gleeful rage; and the young lady who’s just beat the hasty retreat is Mr. Polk’s niece, Barbara. She has lived her life as if during each ensuing hour she had a dentist appointment. There is yet a third member of the company soon to be seen. He now resides in the laboratory and he is the kind of character to be found only in the Twilight Zone.”

Poor Barbara. She is tormented for 25 years by this rotten old man, and then gets taunted and tormented by Robby the Robot for the foreseeable future, demanding hot chocolate.

I was behind Barbara so much that her pushing the robot down the stairs, or letting her Uncle Simon lay at the foot of the stairs with a broken back until he died seemed reasonable behavior to me.

I’m not sure if we were supposed to feel for Uncle Simon, because I did not. I am not sure if we were supposed to think Barbara was a cold-hearted, money-grubbing woman, because I felt that there was a reasonable reason for that behavior. I’m not sure why poor Barbara was made to suffer as much as she did in this episode.

This one was not one of my favorite episodes. I did not understand the meaning behind the episode or the theme that The Twilight Zone almost always has.