July 16, 2023- number 129, 139

Spoilers

Once again, Amazon Prime’s listing of season five is not in the accepted order for The Twilight Zone. On my source pages, “The Night Call” was S5 x E19, but Amazon Prime had it following the last episode, “Uncle Simon,” which is S5 x E8. Since that is the order I have on Amazon, I will be watching it in that order, but labeling it on the posts as the episode number the sources have it at.

With some investigation, I found out this fact on Wikipedia, “ ‘Probe 7, Over and Out’ was intended to air a week after the premiere of ‘Night Call,’ which was scheduled for Friday, November 22, 1963— the previous episode, ‘Uncle Simon,’ having aired a week earlier on November 15. Hours before ‘Night Call’ was to air though, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Thus it was rescheduled, as were all of the other network shows. As a result, ‘Probe 7, Over and Out’ immediately follows ‘Uncle Simon’ in original broadcast order. ‘Night Call’ was eventually broadcast on February 7, 1964.”

“Probe 7, Over and Out”

I was missing the fig leaf.

This whole episode felt familiar, and it is not because it became an origin story for Adam and Eve. It was because there were plenty of pieces from the episode that we had already seen on previous episodes of the series.

“One Colonel Cook, a traveler in space. He’s landed on a remote planet several million miles from his point of departure. He can make an inventory of his plight by just one 360-degree movement of head and eyes. Colonel Cook has been set adrift in an ocean of space in a metal lifeboat that has been scorched and destroyed and will never fly again. He survived the crash but his ordeal is yet to begin. Now he must give battle to loneliness. Now Colonel Cook must meet the unknown. It’s a small planet set deep in space, but for Colonel Cook, it’s the Twilight Zone.”

However, it turned out to be earth, early in its existence. We saw that already a couple of times. Colonel Cook revealed his first name to be Adam, and the woman he meets, in her own weird language, reveals herself to be named Norda… Eve Norda. They went off together at the end of the episode toward a more area with more green, flora, fruit trees… almost as if it were a garden.

Sadly, Cook’s original planet was being destroyed by a nuclear war as he is told by a transmission from a General on his planet. The Twilight Zone certainly used its stories to speak out against the dangers of nuclear weapons.

I didn’t hate the Adam and Eve twist reveal, but it sure came out of nowhere and most of this episode felt like a retread of past episodes such as “Two,” “The Lonely,” and “People Are Alike All Over,” and “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.”

“Night Call”

This one was really creepy. I loved it.

“Miss Elva Keene lives alone on the outskirts of London Flats, a tiny rural community in Maine. Up until now, the pattern of Miss Keene’s existence has been that of lying in her bed or sitting in her wheelchair, reading books, listening to a radio, eating, napping, taking medication—and waiting for something different to happen. Miss Keene doesn’t know it yet, but her period of waiting has just ended, for something different is about to happen to her, has in fact already begun to happen, via two most unaccountable telephone calls in the middle of a stormy night, telephone calls routed directly through—the Twilight Zone.”

A phone call in the middle of the night. At first, no sound. Eventually, a voice that is repeating the word, ‘Hello’ over and again.

The scene where Miss Keene received the call with the repeating ‘Hello’ on it was truly as frightening as this series has been. There was a real creepy factor to it.

Gladys Cooper played Miss Keene and does an amazing job conveying the fear and the confusion of the lonely old lady, confined to a wheelchair and spending each day just going through the motions. The fact that the phone company and her own housekeeper were little help in calming her down was even worse (though a horror trope for certain).

I also loved the twist of how the call was being made from a local cemetery and how the phone company just said that there was a phone wire down and Miss Keene could not be receiving any calls, even though we all knew that she was.

Taking a trip to the cemetery and discovering that the downed phone line was across the grave of her former fiancé, Brian Douglas, and that Miss Keene herself was responsible for his death, in the same accident where she was paralyzed. I loved this end.

I kept thinking to myself as the episode went on that this one was really nailing it, but it needed something at the end to bring it all home. There have been Twilight Zone episodes that have been great with the premise and the set up, but failed to deliver on the finale. I am happy to say that this one was not the case.

In fact, it may have been even more sad because Miss Keene had told the voice to leave her alone and when she found out who it was, she realized that he always did what she had said. This meant that she would no longer be able to talk to him and she would continue to be as lonely as she has been. A very ironic end to a very creepy and satisfying episode.