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.

July 6, 2023-number 110

Spoilers

“Minatures”

We have come to another episode of The Twilight Zone that I remember watching as a younger person. I did not remember much about the episode, but I did remember the imagery of the man talking to the dolls in the dollhouse.

It was Robert Duvall playing Charley Parkes, a sad and isolated man who did not have a lot of social skills and who struggled with human interactions. He was a man who found the interaction he needed inside a dollhouse at a museau,

“To the average person, a museum is a place of knowledge, a place of beauty and truth and wonder. Some people come to study, others to contemplate, others to look for the sheer joy of looking. Charley Parkes has his own reasons. He comes to the museum to get away from the world. It isn’t really the sixty-cent cafeteria meal that has drawn him here every day, it’s the fact that here in these strange, cool halls he can be alone for a little while, really and truly alone. Anyway, that’s how it was before he got lost and wandered into the Twilight Zone.“

Robert Duvall does a wonderful job portraying this character. Without that subtle and compelling performance, this episode does not work at all.

Charley’s family, including his mother, try to help Charley with his shyness and withdrawn behavior by setting him up on a date and encouraging him to get a job. Charley had been let go of his most recent job because he did not fit in and it was implied that this had happened before.

Charley becomes obsessed with the wooden doll in the miniature dollhouse and spent all his time sitting and talking to it. More things begin to happen as another doll arrives and tries to push himself on the woman doll. This led to Charley breaking the glass on the case to try and stop him and ends up with Charley committed to a mental hospital.

Charley plays his doctor, convincing him that he was all better and that he realized that the doll was not real. Charley sneaked out from his mother’s apartment and went back to the museum. The doctor and Charley’s family went to the museum to confront him, but they never found him. Well, a security guard did see Charley…

“They never found Charley Parkes, because the guard didn’t tell them what he saw in the glass case. He knew what they’d say and he knew they’d be right too, because seeing is not always believing, especially if what you see happens to be an odd corner of the Twilight Zone“

Charley wound up in the dollhouse with the wooden doll, escaping the world he was uncomfortable in for one of fantasy where he was comfortable.

It is a great twist at the end and a good end to the story. We would probably place a character like Charley on the Autism Spectrum in today’s world and Duvall’s portrayal is top tier. Maybe the messaging of the episode is a bit off- you can escape your troubles by diving into your own fantasy, but there is no denying that this is a well acted and engaging tale.

July 5, 2023-number 109

Spoilers

“Jess-Belle”

Witches arrive in the Twilight Zone.

This one was my least favorite episode of season four so far. This is the first episode in season four that was hampered by the longer time of the episode.

The story bounced back and forth with Jess-Belle. At one point, she felt antagonistic. Another point she felt like our protagonist. Were we supposed to be cheering for her? Was she a villain in the episode? I believe she was both depending on what the show needed to happen, which is pretty poor writing.

Then, I nearly laughed when we see Jess-Belle turn into a leopard as a curse for her love potion she ‘bought’ from Witchy-poo. That was so ridiculous and, once that happened, I was fully off the train for this episode.

To be fair, I thought James Best (aka Roscoe P. Coltrane) did a pretty decent job as the love-blinded man. The acting of the episode was solid over all.

Another thing that I hated of this episode was the song that was used when the show came back from commercial breaks. It felt like it was a minstrel folk song that, once again, I found laughable.

This was a very disappointing episodes for me.

July 4, 2023-number 108

Spoilers

“Death Ship”

Jack Klugman has been in some excellent episodes of The Twilight Zone so far in the Daily Zone. So far we have seen the former Odd Couple star in “A Passage for Trumpet,” and “A Game of Pool.” He returns in this episode, “Death Ship” which is an eerie and moody sci-fi installment that keeps the audience guessing as much as it does the characters.

“Picture of the spaceship E-89, cruising above the 13th planet of star system 51, the year 1997. In a little while, supposedly, the ship will be landed and specimens taken: vegetable, mineral, and if any, animal. These will be brought back to overpopulated Earth, where technicians will evaluate them, and if everything is satisfactory, stamp their findings with the word ‘inhabitable’ and open up yet another planet for colonization. These are the things that are supposed to happen.

Picture of the crew of the spaceship E-89: Captain Ross, Lieutenant Mason, Lieutenant Carter. Three men who have just reached a place which is as far from home as they will ever be. Three men who in a matter of minutes will be plunged into the darkest nightmare reaches of the Twilight Zone.”

This is a great set up, with the crew of E-89 finding another ship, crashed on the planet that they had landed. Upon investigation, they find three crew members dead, three crew members who are duplicates of thmeselves.

What a cool concept, and filled with potential solutions that keep the audience guessing as much as the characters.

Captain Ross’s denials of what is right in front of him can be irritating, but he seems to be wanting to fight for his own life. The other two, Mason and Carter, are much more shocked and react to the situation in surprising ways.

We discover that this crash has already happened and that they were dead, but Ross is determined to find another answer. The episode seems to imply that because of Ross’s refusal to accept the idea that they are already dead, the three members of E-89 were destined to repeat the events over and over again, never able to come to their final rest.

Mason and Carter get flashes to their afterlife, seeing others who had passed on in what was played as hallucinations. The episode does a solid job of teasing what was going on until the final reveal at the end.

“Picture of a man who will not see anything he does not choose to see, including his own death. A man of such indomitable will that even the two men beneath his command are not allowed to see the truth; which truth is, that they are no longer among the living, that the movements they make and the words they speak have all been made and spoken countless times before, and will be made and spoken countless times again, perhaps even unto eternity. Picture of a latter-day Flying Dutchman, sailing into the Twilight Zone.”

July 3, 2023- numbers 106, 107

Spoilers

“He’s Alive”

The beginning of this episode felt like a Ron DeSantis speech.

“Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. That something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth. But in just a moment Peter Vollmer will ply his trade on another kind of corner, a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone.”

I found this episode very compelling and, at times, powerful. I do like that we get more of the character of Peter Vollmer than just another Führer wannabe. However, I do wonder why he chose this path. Especially since he apparently was raised by Ernst, the older Jewish man. I understand that they implied that Peter was weak and picked upon as a child by his father, but to take his trauma and turn it towards the minorities did not make much sense.

I loved the presentation of Curt Conway as the ghost of Adolf Hitler. Although it did feel fairly obvious where that was going, keeping him in the shadows as he manipulated Peter was very well done. I also thought the ending where Hitler’s shadow is all we see moving through the alley as Rod Serling spoke his ending narration was very effective of an image.

“Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare – Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.”

This feels very relevant in today’s world and I wish the insanity of hatred would be recognized by people who feel the need to spread it around. I think a few little tweaks and this could have been one of the very top level episodes of The Twilight Zone.

“Mute”

A group of people decide that they would begin to teach their children to communicate telepathically instead of verbally. So what happens when a family following this decision dies, leaving behind their sole surviving daughter?

“What you’re witnessing is the curtain-raiser to a most extraordinary play; to wit, the signing of a pact, the commencement of a project. The play itself will be performed almost entirely offstage. The final scenes are to be enacted a decade hence and with a different cast. The main character of these final scenes is Ilse, the daughter of Professor and Mrs. Nielsen, age two. At the moment she lies sleeping in her crib, unaware of the singular drama in which she is to be involved. Ten years from this moment, Ilse Nielsen is to know the desolating terror of living simultaneously in the world and in the Twilight Zone.”

Mute has some interesting ideas, but there are too many plot details that play in opposition to the ideas of the story.

Ilse was the little girl who found her way into the home of the sheriff and his wife. They did not know who to contact so they kept Ilse while they tried to figure out what to do.

The episode wanted there to be a close mother/daughter relationship forming between Ilse and Cora, the sheriff’s wife, but it is undercut by several things. First, we learn that Cora had a daughter who had drown, and it seemed as if she was using Ilse to replace that daughter. This is not a very healthy start to the relationship. Then when Cora was burning letters that were to be sent to friends of Ilse‘s parents, who lived in Europe, she was clearly doing what she wanted, not what was best for Ilse.

Another thing that I did not like in the plot of this episode was the inclusion of this teacher who was determined to make Ilse talk and would bring her up to the front of the room and try and get her to say her name. The teacher had a background with her own parents trying to get her to become a “medium” as she stated, but that plotline was never brought back or wrapped up.

I also did not understand the ending of the episode where Ilse finally spoke her name and we learn that she is better off with the sheriff and Cora because her parents only saw her as an experiment. This ending did not feel like it worked with the story they were trying to tell.

Mute did not work well for me and the storytelling felt confused with what it was trying to say.

July 2, 2023-numbers 104, 105

Spoilers

“Thirty-Fathom Grave”

The mixture of a submarine movie and a ghost story is what we get in “Thirty-Fathom Grave,” the second episode in the fourth season of The Twilight Zone.

This was a solid episode with an intriguing plot dealing with a sunken submarine discovered by a ship because there sounded as if there were a metallic tapping echoing through the water.

Meanwhile, one of the crew members, Chief Bell, begins to have a nervous breakdown despite a long and successful career in the Navy.

There did seem to be too much episode for the story being told here. There were a bunch of scenes that were repeated (not sure how many times we needed to see the diver going down to the stranded submarine or how many scenes of moving the ship) that could have been edited out to make the episode tighter. Unlike the first episode of the season, this did feel like it was hurt by the expansion from 30 minutes to an hour.

Still, the overall episode was very good, with a great performance from Mike Kellin, playing Chief Bell, and displaying his combination of survivor’s guilt and PTSD.

One of the members of the crew was played by Bill Bixby, another future star that I recognized in Twilight Zone episodes.

“Valley of the Shadow”

The Twilight Zone’s third episode of season four was called “Valley of the Shadows” and it made me think a lot about a comic series from the last few years called “Stillwater,” by Chip Zdarsky.

Stillwater was the story of a small town whose residents could not die and did not age. It was a secret that the leaders of Stillwater kept hidden from the outside world and they prevented people from leaving their town. This is very much similar to Valley of the Shadows, where there was technology that allowed these people to have basically anything that they wanted, but who had to stay isolated in fear of what the outside world may do with that tech.

When the reporter Phillip Redfield is lost and drives into Peaceful Valley by accident, he realizes that things are weird. Actually, it was because of his dog, who wound up chasing a cat and a little girl made the dog disappear with a handheld machine.

When Redfield demands answers from the council, they decide that he needed to be held captive to protect the town’s secrets.

There was an argument in the episode about whether these secrets should be shared with the world. How there were people dying from hunger every day of the year and how this could help people. The council believed that this machine that could do about anything would be used for bad things by the outside world. It was an interesting debate and one that I am not sure of which side I would come down upon.

“You’ve seen them. Little towns, tucked away far from the main roads. You’ve seen them, but have you thought about them? Have you wondered what the people do in such places, why they stay? Philip Redfield thinks about them now and he wonders, but only very late at night, when he’s between wakefulness and sleep in the Twilight Zone.”

Stillwater was an excellent series from Image Comics. You could give it a try.

July 1, 2023-number 103

Spoilers

“In His Image”

Season four kicked off with a big change in format for The Twilight Zone. This season, there are only 18 episodes, but these were an hour in length. It will be a curious season to dive into since the half and hour format had been so successful. I do think there were a few episodes from season 1-3 that could have benefitted from being a tad longer so we’ll have to see if the writers take advantage of the extra time to develop characters and the story in a greater detail. If the first episode is an example, then this season will have some solid stroytelling.

The episode started with a scene that was a fascinating intro, but does not really work with the remainder of the episode. When Alan tossed that lady into the oncoming train, there was not much of a trigger. I assume that it was just meant to show how dangerous Alan was.

Alan went to his fiancé, Jessica, and they were preparing to go to Alan’s childhood hometown to meet his aunt. There is no references to the murder in the opening scene. Alan and Jessica seem very content. However, when he arrived in the town, things were different and his aunt’s house was owned by someone else.

Alan was having all kinds of troubles and made Jessica leave him alone when he started to hear the same sounds that he heard when he had killed the woman in the subway. After she leaves, Alan gets hit by a car and he discovered that he had a mechanical arm.

Alan is able to trace himself back to Walter Ryder, the man who created Alan in his own image, in an attempt to create the perfect man. Walter showed Alan his laboratory and the previous attempts at creating “Alan.” With the violence being a design flaw, Alan flipped out and attacked Walter, who fought back.

We see Walter showing up at Jessica’s door, pretending to be Alan, as Alan the robot was laying destroyed in the lab.

“In a way, it can be said that Walter Ryder succeeded in his life’s ambition, even though the man he created was, after all, himself. There may be easier ways to self-improvement, but sometimes it happens that the shortest distance between two points is a crooked line – through the Twilight Zone.”

The ending was kind of creepy as Walter seemingly is replacing Alan in his relationship with Jessica, which kind of takes her choice out of the matter.

I did enjoy the longer episode as it was able to give more background for Alan. I am not sure about a couple of details from the graveyard, specifically, but the story is a twist on the Frankenstein story and it worked fairly well.