June 7, 2023-numbers 23-24

Spoilers

“A World of Difference”

Lights. Camera. Action.

At least, in the Twilight Zone.

“You’re looking at a tableau of reality, things of substance, of physical material: a desk, a window, a light. These things exist and have dimension. Now this is Arthur Curtis, age thirty-six, who also is real. He has flesh and blood, muscle and mind. But in just a moment we will see how thin a line separates that which we assume to be real with that manufactured inside of a mind.”

Another winner of an episode as we peek behind the camera of a man’s life. Is he Arthur Curtis? Or instead is he actor Gerald Raigan?

This episode shows a man having a nervous breakdown, believing that he is, in truth, the character that he is playing in a movie. Or does that character really need a vacation from work because he has had some delusion. I do like the even balance the show gives us. Although it does feel as if Gerry is the true personality, there is enough uncertainty to warrant debate.

The episode featured David White, most well known as Larry Tate from Bewitched as Gerry’s agent/friend.

“Long Live Walter Jameson”

Walter Jameson is old. Really old.

He has fallen in love with a younger woman. However, her father has discovered the truth of Walter’s age. Walter was old enough to have been friends with Plato.

The idea of immortality is revisited here, and the idea that it would not make a person happy is brought back once again. We saw how things could go bad in the episode, “The Escape Clause” and here it takes a slightly different path, but reaches the same conclusion. That death is what makes life so valuable.

The ending of the episode was very well done as we see Walter, shot by a former wife, died slowly, but aging rapidly as he died. He wound up a pile of dust on the floor after we had seen him age from the man that we knew. It was a neat effect.

“Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end.“

June 5, 2023

Spoilers

“The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”

I loved this episode.

“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” was excellent from beginning to almost end. There was no much in this episode, clearly taking shots at the McCarthy hearing and how people were seeing Communists all over the place.

“Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 P.M. on Maple Street.“

“This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment –before the monsters came“

Something flew over Maple Street. The people who lived on this street thought it might have been a meteor. However, everything stopped working. No lights. No cars. No machinery of any kind. Nothing would start or turn on.

Why? No one was sure and they were nervous. When an imaginative child brought up an idea of the ‘meteor’ was in actuality a space ship and that the child had read a story about how monsters from outer space would infiltrate a community to set up for the landing.

The people dismissed the idea at first, but it got inside their minds and the paranoia of the situation started to rot their attitudes. They began blaming individuals on being guilty, with no evidence and even less reality.

It devolves into violence as one of the people is shot because they thought it was a monster coming out of the darkness.

The accidental death did not calm the tensions. In fact, it only triggered the people into chaos. I loved how this episode showed how human beings can react to rumors and innuendo, becoming mob-like.

Now, I am not sure I loved the very end of the episode where we see that this whole situation was being manipulated by aliens from a space ship, what had actually flown over the street. I would have preferred to have left that reveal a mystery. I don’t think that was necessary.

However, that did not take away from how much I loved this episode. It may be my current favorite episode of the series.

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices… to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill… and suspicion can destroy… and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone“

June 5, 2023- numbers 19, 20, 21

Spoilers

“The Purple Testament”

I did not expect much from this episode. It was a basic war story… that is, until it took that twist that you can only find in the Twilight Zone.

“Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Philippine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear—yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.”

Bewitched star Dick York appeared in this episode of The Twilight Zone as a main supporting character. I had seen this fact during my research, but I had forgotten about it so when I saw him, I was shocked. I thought he did a very good job.

Meanwhile, our lead character, William “Fitz” Fitzgerald, developed a strange and disturbing ability. Fitz was able to look at the face of other soldiers in his platoon and he would see a light indicating that they were going to die.

This power clearly upset Fitz, as you would expect. He did what he could to come to grips with his precognition.

I found this episode to be extremely well done. It had a tragic story that brought Fitz into a terrible state of mind. The ending was very powerful. It brought the idea of a failure to be able to prevent death even with foreknowledge is a very sad but relatable theme.

“Elegy”

Another example of a spaceship that leads to a breakdown, stranding the pilots somewhere familiar, yet foreign. Much of this episode was bizarre and mysterious. I do think that I was engaged with the story at the beginning. The seemingly frozen people in this location was odd and I was not sure what was going on.

When Jeremy Wickwire, the caretaker of the place, turned to the camera, I actually shouted. I did not expect that.

Unfortunately, the next ten to fifteen minutes or so of the show really felt weak. There was just a ton of enigmatic exposition as Wickwire tried to maintain the mystery of what was going on. The show lost me during this period. However, the ending was extremely dark and intriguing. I loved the final three minutes or so as Wickwire poisoned the three astronauts and set them up in their own “final wish”.

I found the tones of this episode to clash with each other. There was some serious and mysterious feeling early and Wickwire brought a more humorous tone that seemed to undercut what was going on. Then the show ended very darkly and with a great deal of irony and Wickwire showed his true feelings for the human race, and we did not see that prior at all.

It is a real mishmash for me.

“Mirror Image”

One of the more well known episodes (apparently it inspired Jordan Peele’s film Us), “Mirror Image” was one that I was looking forward to, but, though it was interesting, I do not think it quite reached the level that I was expecting.

“Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes: not given to undue anxiety, or fears, or for that matter even the most temporal flights of fantasy. Like most young career women, she has a generic classification as a, quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote. All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes’ shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes, who, in one minute, will wonder if she’s going mad.”

Strange things are happening for Millicent. People are telling her that she had been asking questions that she had not been. People said she had been places where she was not. She was starting to feel as if she were losing her grip on reality. Could she be delusional?

The arrival of the friendly gentleman, Paul Grinstead, brought her down a bit, but things ramped up again when she started speculating about evil doubles from parallel worlds.

Of course, that is what was going on and she would eventually spy her doppelganger on the bus that she intended to be on. I had a problem here. Why would she not go up and confront this doppelganger with Paul beside her? Instead, she just screamed and ran off, apparently passing out.

Paul called the police to take her for mental help and then he realizes that she wasn’t wrong as the same thing starts to happen to him.

I found this to be way overrated. I still enjoyed a lot the episode, but the fact is the conclusion felt rushed and made little sense. I did not like the way the characters reacted and the ending did not support what was a decent start.

June 5, 2023- numbers 15, 16, 17, 18

No Spoilers

I got four episodes watched this morning, and they were four dang good ones.

“I Shot an Arrow into the Air”

We kick off the four episode run with an outstanding episode about a failed space flight.

“I shot an arrow in the air; it landed I know not where,” said Langford, one of the heads of the mission that saw a crew on board a ship called The Arrow that had disappeared after takeoff.

That was a famous line from a Longfellow poem, but it had been changed by the character, and, looking back, I believe it was changed purposefully. Because the line actually said, ‘I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth i know not where.‘

That is exactly what the crew had done, crash landing back on earth in a mountainous desert range outside of Reno, Nevada. Of course, the three surviving crew members believed they had crashed on an asteroid and had no means to be rescued.

The baser instincts of humans took over, with the three men clashing over water, what to do with the injured and other ways to survive.

“Practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature and a combination of improbable events. Practical joke wearing the trappings of nightmare, of terror, of desperation. Small, human drama played out in a desert 97 miles from Reno, Nevada, U.S.A., continent of North America, the Earth and, of course, the Twilight Zone.“

This idea of crashing back on earth unbeknownst to the crew was used again by series writer Rod Serling when he worked on the 1960s classic Planet of the Apes, where his iconic shock ending made that film a sensation.

“The Hitch-Hiker”

“Her name is Nan Adams. She’s twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store. At present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California from Manhattan. Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania. Perhaps, to be filed away under “accidents you walk away from.” But from this moment on, Nan Adams’ companion on a trip to California will be terror. Her route: fear. Her destination: quite unknown.“

The next awesome episode was ‘The Hitch-Hiker’ where Nan Adams was driving across the country, only to be stalked by a mysterious hitch-hiker, whom she seemed to never be able to outrun.

I had an idea early in this episode what exactly had happened. After the guy who was helping Nan after she had the tire blow out said that she was lucky to be alive, I had an idea that maybe she wasn’t. That is another classic trope of sci-fi films where the person involved does not know she was dead. This is a classic example of that and probably an inspiration for many of them.

This is one of the most highly regarded episodes of the first season, with it appearing on a bunch of top 20 lists. It does create an air of mystery with some definite creepy moments involving this mysteriou shitch-hiker.

“The Fever”

The next episode was entitled “The Fever,” which I did not know what was being referenced. Even with the opening narration, I was not sure.

“Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights all expenses paid at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs’s knack with a phrase. But unbeknownst to either Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there’s a prize in their package, neither expected nor bargained for. In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce. A most inoperative, deadly life-shattering affliction known as the Fever.”

However, as the episode started, I realized that this was not going to be some terrible plague or disease passed through the air. Instead, it would be gambling fever that wound up grasping Franklin Gibbs.

The episode does a great job of setting up to show how easily it is for somebody, even someone opposed to gambling, to fall victim to the obsession of those ‘one-armed bandits.’ Franklin, who spent most of the beginning of the episode chastising Vegas and the people who brainlessly put coin after coin into the slot machines in the desperate hope to win. And yet, through fate, Franklin wound up glued to one of the machines himself.

Oh yeah, the machine was calling him by name. This, of course, was the way to illustrate the beacon call of those people cursed with a gambling addiction. This episode does a tremendous job showing how tragic this obsessive addiction can become, as Franklin fell to his death out a window.

“Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally his life to an inanimate, metal machine, variously described as a “one-armed bandit”, a “slot machine”, or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs’ words, a “monster with a will all of its own.” For our purposes, we’ll stick with the latter definition because we’re in the Twilight Zone.”

Apparently, this episode was inspired by a time when Rod Serling himself wound up enslaved by a slot machine on a trip to Vegas.

“The Last Flight”

Time travel is a classic sci-fi trope and we get an intriguing one in this episode where a pilot from World War I suddenly finds himself flying to an American military post in 1959.

There were many cool concepts in this film, including the way they pieced back together what actually happened to the pilot.

“Witness Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, Royal Flying Corps, returning from a patrol somewhere over France. The year is 1917. The problem is that the lieutenant is hopelessly lost. Lieutenant Decker will soon discover that a man can be lost not only in terms of maps and miles, but also in time—and time in this case can be measured in eternities.“

At first, I was afraid that several of the awesome ideas brought up in the beginning of the episode was going to be swept under the rug because of the shortness of the episode, but I was very pleased with they way the episode concluded. The idea that Terry Decker had to fly his plane back through the mystical cloud and go back to save the pilot he had deserted is a fun way to bring the story around. The closing section of the show with the British Air Vice Marshal Mackaye, the very pilot that Terry had returned to save, realizing that something magical had occurred was great.

Just like all time travel shows, the mind reels about what happened and how it happened. When Terry was in 1959, he had thought that Mackaye was dead, but when the Americans told him that Mackaye was coming to that very base for an inspection, that meant he had survived. Would he have survived if Terry had not returned to save him? Terry was in 1959, but he had not saved his friend yet.

This is one of those time is a flat circle ideas. The events from 1959 happened and would always happened because Terry was always the person to save Mackaye. This way, time is not a straight line, as explained in Back to the Future. Its more like everything is happening at the same time and you can’t change things.

Time travel is always tough. This works pretty well and I really liked the character of Terry Decker.

Four very solid episodes right in a row during the inaugural season of The Twilight Zone.

June 4, 2023- numbers 13 & 14

Spoilers

“The Four of Us are Dying”

Shape shifting takes center stage in the Twilight Zone.

His name was Arch Hammer and he could change his face to look like someone else. He decided to use this ability to do some rotten things. He impersonated a deceased trumpet player to try and score with the woman the trumpet player loved. He made arrangements to run away with her. I didn’t know if he then intended to keep that face for the rest of time or if he was just messing with her and would dump her when he was tired of her. Either way, playing on her grief was a terrible thing to do.

Then he impersonated a gangster and threatened the head gangster that had had him killed. He was able to rip off a bunch of money.

Then, as he was being pursued, he switched to a random face he saw on a poster in an alleyway. He was a boxer. He avoided the thugs chasing him, but, coincidentally, he ran into the boxer’s father. The father was angry with his son and Hammer shoved him to the ground.

The old man would come back into play later when he shot Hammer dead outside of his hotel thinking it was his son.

“He was Arch Hammer, a cheap little man who just checked in. He was Johnny Foster, who played a trumpet and was loved beyond words. He was Virgil Sterig, with money in his pocket. He was Andy Marshak, who got some of his agony back on a sidewalk in front of a cheap hotel. Hammer, Foster, Sterig, Marshak—and all four of them were dying.“

This was very much of a noir episode, with the music from Jerry Goldsmith and all of those Dutch Angles. This episode was okay, at best.

“Third from the Sun”

This was a much different episode from the previous one. Here we had some government researchers/scientists involved in research on H-bombs and other weapons. Nuclear war was imminent.

“Quitting time at the plant. Time for supper now. Time for families. Time for a cool drink on a porch. Time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the Moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before storm. This is the eve of the end.”

The story featured Will Sturka and his family, along with his friend and co-worker Jerry Riden. They made a plan to steal an experimental spaceship and fly off the doomed planet and relocate to another planet that they discovered that also had people and was much like the planet they lived on.

One of their co-workers, Carling, was suspicious of them and he was hanging around, looking to cause trouble.

As they tried to get to their ship, Carling confronted them with a gun, hoping to take them to the police. They were able to overpower him and got to the ship.

As they were in the ship, they talked about the new planet they were heading towards… and it was called earth.

I liked the unexpected twist at the end of the episode with them heading TO earth instead of escaping from earth. There was some good tension built in the episode as the worry of nuclear war was a major worry that people of the time had to deal with.

June 4, 2023- number 12

Spoilers

“What You Need”

Who really knows the future? Well, in the Twilight Zone, it is apparently a little old man named Pedott. This is a talent that down-on-his-luck scoundrel, Mr. Fred Renard needed.

“You’re looking at Mr. Fred Renard, who carries on his shoulder a chip the size of the national debt. This is a sour man, a friendless man, a lonely man, a grasping, compulsive, nervous man. This is a man who has lived thirty-six undistinguished, meaningless, pointless, failure-laden years and who at this moment looks for an escape—any escape, any way, anything, anybody—to get out of the rut. And this little old man is just what Mr. Renard is waiting for.”

This was another main protagonist in an episode of The Twilight Zone that was really unlikable. Renard did not look to have much of a character arc either. He just wanted something to go right for him and when he realized that Pedott could tell him specifically what he needed, meaning he had a gift to see in the future, Renard was ready to cash in.

We got some nice inclusion of a story of a baseball player named Lefty whose arm was ruined. This was to show the ability of Pedott, and it looked as if the story was going to be a happy one. However, the use of Renard as a greedy creep who wanted to become Pedott’s partner guaranteed that this tale would take the typically ironic end.

This episode was fine. I was happy to see Renard get his comeuppance at the end of the episode. There is nothing here specifically deep or complex, unlike many other Twilight Zone episodes. It was a nice watch.