June 20, 2023-numbers 68,69,70

Spoilers

Season three started kind of meh, but then we got three really good episodes in a row.

“The Shelter”

Realistic episodes of The Twilight Zone are few and far between. Most of them have some bit of magical/mystical buts to them. However, every once in awhile we come across those that are grounded in reality.

“The Shelter” has no mysterious aliens, magical curses or unbelievable circumstances. It is about something that could have easily happened in the early days of the Cold War.

It is Dr. Bill Stockton’s birthday and a bunch of the neighborhood friends were over celebrating. When a message from the President comes across the television that there were incoming unidentified objects approaching the US and that people should take cover.

The people assumed that these were incoming nuclear weapons fired from an enemy. Bill, who had been constructing a bomb shelter beneath his home, got his wife and son to work, organizing food, water and essentials while the neighbors, who had teased and made fun of Bill for his choice, scattered back to their houses for their own families.

As Bill locked his family into the bomb shelter, the others came to him, begging Bill to let them inside the shelter too. Bill, saying that it was only built for three, refused. This sent the group into a rage, forming a mob mentality. They were in such a panic that they were even turning on each other, showing their anxieties and their natural bigotry.

Eventually, they constructed a battering ram and broke open the door to the bomb shelter. Just as they had burst through, the announcement that the objects were identified as satellites and were not bombs came through, leaving the mob shocked and dejected over their behaviors.

Honestly, if I were Dr. Bill Stockton, I would have immediately told these people to get the hell out of my house and to never come back. Perhaps he was filled with remorse over the decision to leave everyone outside the shelter, but there was little for him to do.

Watching these friends and neighbors turn on each other and become a hysterical mob was difficult and knowing that this is they nature of the human race is hard to swallow. It was a very compelling episode.

“The Passersby”

Civil War. North vs. South. Southerners vs. Yankees. There have been plenty of stories told about this tragic time of our country’s history.

Episode four of season three of the Twilight Zone heads into the past to the end of the Civil War for a specific ghost story.

A widowed Southern woman sits out front of her home as a wounded sergeant approaches asking for water. Other wounded soldiers walked on the street past the house. We have no idea where they are heading.

The woman told a story about her husband’s death and how she planned on killing the next Union soldier that passed by. The Sergeant told her that a Union soldier had saved his life and that he hoped that she would not do so. When a Union soldier stopped, silhouetted on his horse, and asked for water, she did shoot him, though the gun apparently did not hit him. With light from the Sergeant’s lantern, it was revealed that the soldier on the horse had a terrible injury to his eyes and face, and everyone realized that he was dead… and that they were dead too, the sergeant from the war and the woman from a fever she had.

This is where the episode should have ended. However, it went too far, feeling the need to explain everything going on with needless exposition. What was going on was obvious and then, with the arrival of Lincoln, who was also dead at this point, the episode took a bit of a turn.

“Incident on a dirt road during the month of April, the year 1865. As we’ve already pointed out, it’s a road that won’t be found on a map, but it’s one of many that lead in and out of the Twilight Zone.”

This was excellent until the last five minutes or so. The episode was still exceptional, but the need to explain everything weakened a very eerie episode.

“A Game of Pool”

Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters are actors known for some of their comedic performances, but this was a straight-forward dramatic turn for both and they deliver a compelling and thrilling episode, all around a game of pool.

“Jesse Cardiff, pool shark, the best on Randolph Street, who will soon learn that trying to be the best at anything carries its own special risks. In or out of the Twilight Zone.”

When Jesse Cardiff challenged the late, great Fats Brown to a pool match to determine who was the best pool player of all time, Jesse never expected the challenge to be answered Nor did he expect that he would be playing the game of pool for his life.

Jesse, who spent his entire life in the pool halls honing his game above everything else, placed his life on the line for this challenge.

There was a lot of tension built during the game as the two men argued and debated about their lives and the challenge before them. When Jesse won, Fats was not unhappy. This is because of the twist that Fats knew. As the best ever, Jesse had to replace Fats as the pool challenge and could not enjoy the afterlife.

A really good episode with a twist at the end that helped take the episode to another level. Two great performances too as Klugman and Winters worked extremely well together.

June 19, 2023- numbers 66, 67

Spoilers

“Two”

Season three started off with two well known faces as the only two actors on the show: Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery.

“This is a jungle, a monument built by nature honoring disuse, commemorating a few years of nature being left to its own devices. But it’s another kind of jungle, the kind that comes in the aftermath of man’s battles against himself. Hardly an important battle, not a Gettysburg, or a Marne, or an Iwo Jima; more like one insignificant corner patch in the crazy quilt of combat. But it was enough to end the existence of this little city. It’s been five years since a human being walked these streets. This is the first day of the sixth year, as man used to measure time. The time: perhaps a hundred years from now, or sooner. Or perhaps it’s already happened two million years ago. The place: the signposts are in English so that we may read them more easily, but the place is the Twilight Zone.”

One of the issues of this show is that there is no real explanation for what was going on here and who these two people were. They had been on different sides as we see when they first interact (a great little fight scene between them) and the fact that they are wearing different uniforms.

I will say that this idea was interesting and I was curious about what was going on. However, as with many Twilight Zone episodes, it felt like the episode wrapped up too quickly and the ending felt forced. This would have been a story that required another twenty minutes or so to make things make more sense.

The final narration from Rod Serling indicated that this had been a love story, but none of that had come through even remotely and that is a major drawback to the episode. It was clearly a comment on the idea of the Cold War and the dangers of nuclear war.

“The Arrival”

The second episode of the season takes some big swings, but does not quite land the plane, if you forgive the horrible pun.

A mystery is set up in the episode.

“This object, should any of you have lived underground for the better parts of your lives and never had occasion to look toward the sky, is an airplane, its official designation a DC-3. We offer this rather obvious comment because this particular airplane, the one you’re looking at, is a freak. Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled. On rare occasions they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other. Now, yesterday morning this particular airplane ceased to be just a commercial carrier. As of its arrival it became an enigma, a seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing. In just a moment, we’re going to show you the tail end of its history. We’re going to give you ninety percent of the jigsaw pieces and you and Mr. Sheckly here of the Federal Aviation Agency will assume the problem of putting them together along with finding the missing pieces. This we offer as an evening’s hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime in the Twilight Zone.”

An airplane lands at the end of its voyage but nobody is on the flight. No passengers. No pilots. No stewardesses. No one.

What a cool idea for a story. I was fully into the mystery that the show was setting up for me. Speculating about what could possibly have happened was a lot of fun. The show dropped a few hints along the way that the viewers should be thinking about- such as why was there no relatives of the missing flight passengers calling looking for updates?

The resolution of the mystery was also intriguing as it turned out the plane was just an imagined thing. It kind of reminded me of the comic book Department of Truth by James Tynion IV, with how group delusions can become real.

However, this was not a group delusion as everyone else disappeared when Mr. Sheckly proved his idea. Turned out that this was all an illusion from his own mind because of guilt from his failure to solve this plane’s disappearance from 17 year prior.

While I like the overall concept of the episode, I do think the actual execution of the idea was lacking. Was there a triggering event that caused Sheckly to imagine this into existence? The beginning when Sheckly wasn’t yet here and the other employees (who were shown to be in Sheckly’s imagination too later) felt odd in retrospect.

I was in this episode from the beginning. I just feel as if the conclusion did not live up to the prologue.

June 18, 2023- numbers 63, 64, 65

Spoilers

“The Mind and the Matter”

“A brief if frenetic introduction to Mr. Archibald Beechcroft. A child of the 20th century, a product of the population explosion, and one of the inheritors of the legacy of progress. Mr. Beechcroft again, this time Act Two of his daily battle for survival, and in just a moment our hero will begin his personal one-man rebellion against the mechanics of his age, and to do so he will enlist certain aides available only in the Twilight Zone.”

Okay.

We have a new least favorite episode. Currently, this episode will replace “Mighty Casey” on my running list of The Twilight Zone episodes. It was another comedic episode that just did not work at all. Archibald Beechcroft is able to make everybody disappear just by concentrating on them? Or he could make everybody just like him?

The episode was dull.

It was totally unbelievable.

“Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”

Now this was much better.

There was a touch of comedic undertones in this episode, but it also had a mystery as well as a dark ending.

The report of a UFO crashing brought out a couple of state troopers to investigate during a snowstorm. They found a footprints leading to a local diner where a bus had stopped for a break.

When questioned, the bus driver said that he had six people on the bus, but there were seven people in the diner. He could not identify who was or was not on the bus.

Light flickered. Juke box played on its own. Strange things kept happening.

Everybody was distrustful of each other, even the married couples.

Finally the phone rang and the bridge, which had been keeping the bus driver from heading out, was reported as being fine and passable. The bus went on.

One of the passengers Ross (who was complaining about missing a meeting in Boston) returned to the diner with news that the bridge was not passable after all and the troopers and the bus had fallen through into the river and no one escaped.

Except him… the Martian (who showed off his three arms), who had been sent ahead to scout the place for a potential colony. Haley the cook at the diner told Ross that his colonizers had been intercepted by his own people… from Venus.

I enjoyed this episode and I was never sure who the alien was going to turn out to be. Jack Ely played the crazy old man and he was definitely a red herring, but a hoot to watch.

“The Obsolete Man”

Burgess Meredith returned for the third time to The Twilight Zone, this time as Romney Wordsworth, a librarian in a Fascist society that does not consider him important.

“You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He’s a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he’s built out of flesh and because he has a mind.  Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.”

A great episode to bring season two to an end. Burgess Meredith is awesome as the librarian who out smarted the state.

Convicted as obsolete and sentenced to be ‘liquidated’ Mr. Wordsworth came up with a plan. He asked to have an audience for his death and for only himself and the executioner to know how it was going to happen.

He then invited the Chancellor to come visit him a half hour before the sentence was to be carried out.

Wordsworth, pointing out the camera that had been installed, told the Chancellor that they were being broadcast as they spoke. He also revealed that he had told the executioner to set a bomb to blow up the apartment. When the Chancellor went to leave, he realized that the door was locked and that Wordsworth had trapped him too.

There was more here though. Earlier during Wordsworth’s hearing, the Chancellor stated that there was no God and Wordsworth disagreed. So as the clock ticked away before the explosion, Wordsworth read from the Bible.

With a minute remaining, the Chancellor shouted out “in God’s name” and Wordsworth agreed in God’s name, he would let him go, sparing his life form the bomb, which exploded seconds after. When the Chancellor returned to the court, he discovered he had been replaced and had been declared obsolete himself.

This episode played off the idea of a personal religion (faith in one God) vs. buying into a autonomous state government. The episode did imply that the state was bad as it referenced Hitler and Stalin.

Burgess Meredith and Fritz Weaver (who was the Chancellor) were fantastic in these roles and their work together in Wordsworth’s room was some of the best interplay of the season.

Tomorrow, I will be starting Season Three.

June 18, 2023- numbers 61,62

Spoilers

“The Silence”

Who could spend a year alone in a specially designed room, away from those you love, without talking…even saying a single word, for $500,000?

That is the premise of this episode of The Twilight Zone. And it is all because of a bet.

“The note that this man is carrying across a club room is in the form of a proposed wager, but it’s the kind of wager that comes without precedent. It stands alone in the annals of bet-making as the strangest game of chance ever offered by one man to another. In just a moment, we’ll see the terms of the wager and what young Mr. Tennyson does about it. And in the process, we’ll witness all parties spin a wheel of chance in a very bizarre casino called the Twilight Zone.”

This is the most realistic episode that I have seen of The Twilight Zone to this point in the series. Albeit the ending was shocking and unexpected, there was nothing that made it feel like it needed to be in the Twilight Zone to happen.

Still, the steps taken by Tennyson in order to win the bet is unbelievable and, once again, it felt cruel to then not have Colonel Archie Taylor have the money in the end.

Here’s hoping that Tennyson can have those nerves reattached to his vocal chords and sue the living crap out of Archie.

“Shadow Play”

There have been actors in The Twilight Zone that I do not recognize until after I research the episode. This is one of those cases as Dennis Weaver starred in this episode as Adam Grant, a defendant convicted of murder and sentenced to death via the electric chair. However, the twist is that Grant claims that this is all a dream and that he dreams this every night…and that everyone in the dream will be destroyed when he is electrocuted.

Grant desperately tries to convince everyone who comes to see him of his story. This time, he is able to convince reporter Paul Carson, who tries to convince D.A. Henry Ritchie.

This is another classic sci-fi trope, where everything comes out of the mind of one person. I know on LOST, one of the rumored solutions to what was going on was that this was all a dream by Hurley.

“We know that a dream can be real, but who ever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist, of course, but, but how, in what way? As we believe, as flesh-and-blood human beings, or are we simply parts of someone’s feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it, and then ask yourself, do you live here, in this country, in this world, or do you live, instead, – in The Twilight Zone?”

This was a clever episode that puts some good performances together with a well written script.

June 18, 2023-numbers 58,59,60

There are three straight really good episodes in this post, following one of the worst of the series last time.

Spoilers

“Long Distance Call”

It is Billy’s sixth birthday. And he was excited. So was his Grandma. She and the young boy had a special relationship, but she knew something he did not. She did not have long left in this world. Instead, she would take up residence … in the Twilight Zone.

Grandma gave a birthday gift to Billy, a toy telephone that would allow him to speak to her at any time. Little did anyone know that she truly meant that.

After she died, Billy continued to talk to his grandma on the phone and she would tell him how lonely she was and she tried to convince him to come to be with her. After an attempt to kill himself in the pool, his father spoke on the toy phone to his mother, begging her to let Billy go.

He survived, but clearly had years of therapy bills to pay.

This was one of the darkest episodes of the show that we have gotten yet. Dealing with the topic of death is not uncommon for the show, but the idea of a five-year old trying to commit suicide (first by running out in front of a car and then by drowning himself) is absolutely dark.

There were some excellent performances in this episode, especially Phillip Abbott, who played Chris, Billy’s father. His monologue on the phone begging his mother to let his son live was very powerful and spoke to the idea of faith. Grandma was played by Lili Darvas and she gave a very creepy, almost magical performance as a woman on the brink of death who had suffered loss in her life and did not want to be alone.

This was one of my favorite episodes of the series so far.

“A Hundred Yards over the Rim”

“The year is 1847, the place is the territory of New Mexico, the people are a tiny handful of men and women with a dream. Eleven months ago, they started out from Ohio and headed west. Someone told them about a place called California, about a warm sun and a blue sky, about rich land and fresh air, and at this moment, almost a year later, they’ve seen nothing but cold, heat, exhaustion, hunger, and sickness. This man’s name is Christian Horn. He has a dying eight-year-old son and a heartsick wife, and he’s the only one remaining who has even a fragment of the dream left. Mr. Chris Horn, who’s going over the top of a rim to look for water and sustenance and in a moment will move into the Twilight Zone.”

Hey, it is Uncle Ben! Cliff Robertson, who played Ben Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, starred in this episode of The Twilight Zone. I did not recognize him immediately. However, Gomez Adams, aka John Astin, I did recognize right away as Chris’s friend and co-pioneer.

Christian stumbled from his small caravan, containing his son who was desperately sick and apparently dying, from 1847 into the future. He comes across a station/diner where he is helped by a friendly couple. They were surprised to see him carrying such an antique, but new looking, rifle.

Chris learned several things, including that he was now in 1961, that they had medicine that could help his son, and that his son would grow up and become a famous doctor who was credited in doing great work to help children’s diseases.

Stealing the penicillin, Chris ran back to the rim where he had done his time travel and he found his way back to the past and saved his son.

This was an early example of the predestination paradox, which, according to Wikipedia, “is a theoretical proposition, wherein by means of either retrocausality or time travel, an event (an action, information, object, or person) is among the causes of another event, which is in turn among the causes of the first-mentioned event.” The idea of this, also called Causal Loop became a well-used trope in science fiction and showed how ahead of the times Rod Serling was.

“The Rip Van Winkle Caper”

Four gold thieves execute a weird plan to escape from the ‘heat’ after robbing a train of its gold shipment coming from Fort Knox.

“Introducing, four experts in the questionable art of crime: Mr. Farwell, expert on noxious gases, former professor, with a doctorate in both chemistry and physics; Mr. Erbie, expert in mechanical engineering; Mr. Brooks, expert in the use of firearms and other weaponry; and Mr. De Cruz, expert in demolition and various forms of destruction. The time is now, and the place is a mountain cave in Death Valley, U.S.A. In just a moment, these four men will utilize the services of a truck placed in cosmoline, loaded with a hot heist cooled off by a century of sleep, and then take a drive into The Twilight Zone.”

They decided to put themselves into suspended animation for 100 years, knowing that they would no longer be sought after and they could spend their riches how they’d like.

Things did not go exactly to plan.

I enjoyed the fates of these criminals as they each wound up facing justice in their own way. Mr. De Cruz was a horrible person and one wonders why the others in this little group put up with him. I especially enjoyed his own, well-deserved fate.

Even more ironic was that in this future, gold was no longer valuable, and their plan would not have worked even if they hadn’t all died along the way.

This was a very entertaining episode with watching these four people get their comeuppance, but there were a ton of plot holes or things that someone with common sense would have thought about. That pulled this episode down a bit, but it is still an enjoyable watch.

June 17, 2023- numbers 56, 57

Spoilers

“Static”

Oh, the good old days. Back when the TV wasn’t always on and the music was live on the radio.

This is the basis behind the twentieth episode of season two of The Twilight Zone.

“No one ever saw one quite like that, because that’s a very special sort of radio. In its day, circa 1935, its type was one of the most elegant consoles on the market. Now with its fabric-covered speakers, its peculiar yellow dial, its serrated knobs, it looks quaint and a little strange. Mr. Ed Lindsay is going to find out how strange very soon when he tunes in to the Twilight Zone.”

Ed Lindsay was a very unhappy man. He had grown older and would grumble about everything, especially the TV that was in the house. When he found an old time radio, which somehow seemed to be able to connect to radio stations from years past, Ed started to feel more alive.

This episode was more of a character piece with Ed and his one time love Vinnie Broun, a woman who still lived with him in the same boarding house. By this point, their love was gone. Vinnie, along with the professor, worried that Ed was losing his grasp on reality, and they give away the radio. Ed retrieves it and winds up back in the past for good.

I think this was intended to be a romantic story, a second chance for Ed and Vinnie, but I do not see it that way. This feels almost like an alcoholic whose family members try and remove all the liquor by pouring it down the drain. It never works because the pull is too strong.

It could also be a way to speak against the inclusion of television into the lives of people, which considering The Twilight Zone is a TV program, that would be pretty ironic. Ed certainly had grumblings about the TV while the rest of the borders were transfixed by it and implied that radio was more of an activity to foster creativity and imagination than the TV.

Not sure what was intended in this episode worked very well. The acting was fine, but I am not sure the youthful reunion at the episode’s end was what the writers of the episode wanted.

“The Prime Mover”

When the main protagonist of an episode of The Twilight Zone is as unlikeable as Ace Larson was, the episode is difficult to enjoy.

Buddy Epson was much more likable, relatable in this episode a Jimbo, a down-home fellow who has telekinetic powers. The character of Jimbo in “The Prime Move” reminded me very much of Big Ed Hurley from Twin Peaks, lovable, kind of slow witted.

When Ace discovered Jimbo’s power, he immediately started planning how to take advantage of it. He took Jimbo and his girlfriend Kitty to Vegas to have Jimbo use his TK to manipulate the system and rig it in his favor.

Although he made a ton of money, Ace was not happy, anxious to keep going. Only when Jimbo said that he was too tired to continue did Ace take a break. However, he got in a fight with Kitty, who stormed off, and then he ‘hired’ a Vegas cigarette girl to go out on the town with him.

He then taunted a Chicago gangster into a game of craps with him in his room. After winning all the money, Ace went all in on one more roll of the dice. However, Jimbo had lost his power and Ace lost everything. At the end, Ace was back in the diner where they worked and he proposed to Kitty.

I had a lot of issues with this episode, all centered around the character of Ace. I already mentioned how I did not like the character, which is a major drawback. I did not feel like the character that I had seen this whole episode would react to losing all the money in the manner in which he did. The show seemed to imply that it shocked him back to normal, but I saw no evidence of that. Then, when he proposed to Kitty at the end after going out on the town with the cigarette girl (who showed up during the craps game implying that they were going away together), I literally said out loud “no.” Ace is going to be the type who will turn on Kitty the second things get tough and be cheating on her with some other woman. I don’t want them together because there is no happy ending for Ace.