July 9, 2023- number 113

Spoilers

“The Parallel”

The early days of the space race provided plenty of story ideas for a sci-fi show such as The Twilight Zone. Here was an episode that did a solid job of taking that idea and doing something new.

As I have stated before, some of the ideas from The Twilight Zone may seem well used to me, but when it was being made in the early 1960s, these concepts had to feel much more original. The idea of a parallel universe with minor differences has been used plenty of times such as Star Trek and Marvel & DC Comics, but it was not as common as it is today with all the use of multiverses in movies.

“In the vernacular of space, this is T minus one hour. Sixty minutes before a human being named Major Robert Gaines is lifted off from the Mother Earth and rocketed into the sky, farther and longer than any man ahead of him. Call this one of the first faltering steps of man to sever the umbilical cord of gravity and stretch out a fingertip toward an unknown. Shortly, we’ll join this astronaut named Gaines and embark on an adventure, because the environs overhead—the stars, the sky, the infinite space—are all part of a vast question mark known as the Twilight Zone.”

I did like much of this episode, but a lot of what was different was dealt with by talking about it and I think it would have been more effective by showing it on the screen. Like when Gaines’ daughter became upset when he had said that he never took sugar in his coffee, that little example is more effective than Gaines going through an encyclopedia and telling us what he found.

I have to say that I kept waiting for another twist at the end of the episode. When Gaines asked who the president of the US was, and they responded Kennedy, I kept waiting for them to say at some point that the president was Bobby Kennedy or something like that to show that Gaines was in yet another parallel universe. That never came and, instead, they had some communication with the other “Colonel” Gaines from the universe where “Major” Gaines had been living for the last week proving that he was not just having a breakdown. This was too pat of an ending for a Twilight Zone episode.

Overall it was an episode that had the potential to be sensational, but only was good.

July 8, 2023- number 112

Spoilers

“No Place Like the Past”

Time travel is always a little wonky.

“Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the twentieth century. He puts to a test a complicated theorem of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further, or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present, one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as the Twilight Zone.”

Paul uses his time machine to go back into the past in an attempt to stop some terrible tragedies of history: he tries to warn the people of Hiroshima, he tries to assassinate Hitler, and he tries to save the Lusitania from being sunk to start WWI. He failed at all of them.

This is where this episode went off the time travel rails.

He came back to the present to his friend and colleague Harvey. He told him that he failed at his attempts and Harvey then stated that time was unable to be changed. It made me think that this episode was going to go along the theory of LOST with the “Whatever Happened, happened” style of time travel.

However, almost immediately after stating that the past was immutable, when Harvey discovered Paul’s plan to go back to 1881 and take up residence in a small town in Homeville, Indiana, Harvey immediately warned him that he could cause terrible dangers by changing even one little thing. This was in direct opposition to the immutable comment that Harvey made barely a sentence before.

This type of contradiction derails the concept of time travel immediately. There may have been ways to build tension without hinting that Paul could change the past. The very idea that nothing could be changed would create a distinct problem for one who knows everything. Unfortunately, I could not get past the implication that Paul ‘could have’ changed the past.

When Paul is trying to Paul the school house from burning, he wound up causing the problem himself, which does follow the LOST philosophy of time travel. However, it was so dumb because Paul knew the fire was being caused by a runaway wagon ejecting a lantern to the school. Paul tried to unhitch the horses from the wagon to prevent it from being able to move, and I am sitting watching this supposedly smart man do such a stupid thing. Why not just casually remove the small lantern from the back of the wagon. It was just hanging there. Or just blow out the flame. Both of those would have been a much easier attempt than unhitching the wagon from the horses.

The first act of this episode was pretty decent, but it really went downhill after that.

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.