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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
The second shocking death (or at least that is what it seems) occurred on the third episode of Secret Invasion. Our main antagonist, Gravik, discovered G’iah was the traitor in his ranks and he shot her, leaving her Skrull corpse in the woods outside of the camp in Russia. I did not expect that to happen, as Emilia Clarke is one of the stars of the show and a vital connection to Talos. I am not sure that what we saw happened though as some of the promo material for Secret Invasion included scenes that featured Clarke. It would not be the first time that Marvel used images in a trailer that was not in the final show, but there seemed to be quite a bit.
This episode also dove deeper into the Talos/Nick Fury relationship, with Talos laying out their past history and how much he and his Skrull brethren had done for Fury over the years. Once again, seeing Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn acting opposite each other is a treat. Their banter was excellent and continued to show their character. It also placed Nick Fury in context over the years. It does seem as if Talos has Fury’s back.
However, who else in Fury’s orbit is loyal? His wife, Priscilla, who were know is a Skrull, called a voice on the phone and asked about Gravik. That voice was clearly implied to be Don Cheadle’s Rhodey. Does that mean that Rhodey is a Skrull? Is he and Priscilla working against Nick Fury?
We do learn that Fury knew that Priscilla is a Skrull. There is a flashback to their initial meeting in a coffee shop, at least a meeting where Priscilla has taken on a new face. There was speculation that Fury did not know that Priscilla was a Skrull, but that is laid to rest. Fury and Priscilla had a great scene together to as she talked about the time he was blipped and then returned only to run off to space.
This episode has a severe lack of Olivia Colman. She had one scene and, while I loved it, it was just not enough for me. Sonya Falsworth is my favorite character in this series. She did rename her owl statue ‘Nicholas Fury’ when she put an eye patch over the owl statue to cover the bug Fury had planted in episode one.
Gravik looks to be already a Super Skrull, the term that was actually uttered by Gravik to the Skrull Council. Gravik healed from the knife to the hand by Talos.
There are only three episodes left and there are so many things in the fire. So much so far has been tension being built between great actors in dialogue and big things feel like are happening.
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.”
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.
Ilsewas 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.
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.
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.
These bring a close to season three of The Twilight Zone.
“Young Man’s Fancy”
“Young Man’s Fancy” or “what a Mama’s Boy” is the next Twilight Zone episode. While I found this one interesting, I did think the ending was fairly predictable and one has to wonder what the wife was thinking by marrying this loser.
That may be too harsh.
“You’re looking at the house of the late Mrs. Henrietta Walker. This is Mrs. Walker herself, as she appeared twenty-five years ago. And this, except for isolated objects, is the living room of Mrs. Walker’s house, as it appeared in that same year. The other rooms upstairs and down are pretty much the same. The time, however, is not twenty-five years ago but now. The house of the late Mrs. Henrietta Walker is, you see, a house which belongs almost entirely to the past, a house which, like Mrs. Walker’s clock here, has ceased to recognize the passage of time. Only one element is missing now, one remaining item in the estate of the late Mrs. Walker: her son, Alex, thirty-four years of age and, up till twenty minutes ago, the so-called perennial bachelor. With him is his bride, the former Miss Virginia Lane. They’re returning from the city hall in order to get Mr. Walker’s clothes packed, make final arrangements for the sale of the house, lock it up and depart on their honeymoon. Not a complicated set of tasks, it would appear, and yet the newlywed Mrs. Walker is about to discover that the old adage ‘You can’t go home again’ has little meaning in the Twilight Zone”
I do believe this is one of the episodes that I had seen before because, although I was not sure of what was the main plot, I do remember something about that haunted grandfather’s clock.
Mrs. Walker also seemed to give up pretty quickly considering she had started it all with her comments to the mother before any of the haunting began. Something about ‘claws.’ Still, you would think that you would understand about the deep-seeded connection to his mother Alex held before she married him. Discovering this unhealthy aspect of his character before the honeymoon feels like a mistake on her part as much as his.
“I Sing the Body Electric”
Mary Poppins meets A.I. in this sentimental episode of The Twilight Zone that just felt like there was something missing for me.
Larry Tate (er… I mean David White, the actor who played Larry on Bewitched) returned to the Twilight Zone as a busy widowed father with three kids that he has apparently been ignoring. They find an advertisement for an artificial intelligence that could be a nanny.
“They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone”
So it is Mary Poppins as a robot. They even go as far as having a kite scene. However, the movie Mary Poppins came out in 1964 while this episode was shown in 1962. Maybe this episode was inspired by the Mary Poppins book by P.L. Travers which was written in the later 30s.
There were some intriguing character moments here, especially with Anne, one of the little kids, but things resolve too quickly and wrap up so saccharine sweet that it did not feel like the Twilight Zone. Admittedly, the scene where the kids run around the Facsimile Ltd. factory picking out body parts for the robot was unbelievably creepy (which I do not think it was meant to be). Plus, robot, that they called Grandma- also creepy- did not have the hair that the boy picked out. What a rip off!
“Cavender is Coming”
You would think that an episode of The Twilight Zone featuring EYG Hall of Famer Carol Burnett would not be after three full seasons my least favorite episode of the series. But you would be wrong.
Another example of how comedy has been one of The Twilight Zone’s Achilles’ Heel, this episode is just features so many unfunny things and a story so bad that it can only be saved (somewhat) by the charm of Carol Burnett.
This is yet another homage to “It’s A Wonderful Life” as Cavender is a guardian angel trying to get his wings by helping out clumsy Carol. The slapstick does not work as the episode never fully commits to it, and when it does, it just does not hit. The Twilight Zone seems to insist on adding silly sound effects to their comedic episodes that just do not aid anything.
There is a nice message of the episode about not needing wealth to be happy, but the execution just is not there. The angels in heaven scenes are like a high school production they are so amateurish.
“A word to the wise now to any and all who might suddenly feel the presence of a cigar-smoking helpmate who takes bankbooks out of thin air. If you’re suddenly aware of any such celestial aids, it means that you’re under the beneficent care of one Harmon Cavender, guardian angel. And this message from the Twilight Zone: Lotsa luck!”
Season four is next. Only 18 episodes, but they expand to an hour long.
Once again, Prime’s playing of the Twilight Zone episodes are not in the same order as the listings for the series. This episode was the 34th of the season on Prime, but, in actuality, should be the 37th of season three. I am listing it as its actual number.
Spoilers
“The Changing of the Guard”
This episode felt a little more personal than some of the other episodes of The Twilight Zone for me.
“Professor Ellis Fowler, a gentle, bookish guide to the young, who is about to discover that life still has certain surprises, and that the campus of the Rock Spring School for Boys lies on a direct path to another institution, commonly referred to as the Twilight Zone.”
Getting on in age, Professor Ellis Fowler sends his latest class to Christmas break with his typical bravado and flair. However, he is unaware of what awaited him. His contract was not being renewed, he would be ‘terminated’ from his position because it was believed that a younger voice needed to be given the position.
Unsure what he would do next, Professor Fowler went home and retrieved a gun, with the implication that he had nothing left in life, that he wasted his time by teaching these kids nothing of value, and that he would kill himself. However, the stalwart teacher was visited by the ghosts of past students who had died and who spoke to him of the ways that he inspired them. Fowler decided against suicide and moved happily into retirement.
“The Changing of the Guard” is kind of a combination of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol” as this was also set during the Christmas holiday.
As a teacher, you some times do not understand how much you affect the lives of the students that you are working with. There are times that you may even feel as if you are doing no good for anyone. Just recently, I had a parent come over and talk to me at a baseball game letting me know how grateful she was for everything that I had done for her children over the years. Hearing that was a wonderfully kind thing and I was very appreciative. It goes to show how much of an impact teachers can have even if they feel unappreciated at times or that they have not been able to accomplish what they had hoped.
After the shocking end to last week’s Secret Invasion, you weren’t sure what was next for the six episode series.
With Maria Hill’s death, it was clear that the show was filled with strife and stakes. That continued this week.
The writing on this show has been tremendous so far. It is not afraid to allow its superstars to provide the drama through their words even as it is throwing in some excellent action.
Samuel L. Jackson is getting an opportunity to flex his acting chops as well as to dive into the character of Nick Fury, something that we have not had a chance to see before.
One of my favorite scenes in the episode was the sit down discussion between Samuel Jackson and Don Cheadle, Nick Fury and James Rhodes respectfully. The depth of character really shone through with two remarkable actors who have played these parts for years.
Olivia Colman. I absolutely love her. Her few scenes that we have gotten so far has been tremendous. She is such a joy, and watching her torture a Skrull was just strangely appealing. Colman is an amazing talent and she brought a freshness to the horrible moment, even when she was cutting off fingers. I want more of Oliva Colman in the MCU.
This villain, Gravik, has been presented as a force. Kingsley Ben-Adir has been outstanding so far and brought his mission the right amount of menace. I loved how the show shot Gravik while he was in the passenger seat of the car being driven by Emilia Clarke’s G’iah. The angle of his head and the lighting made him look very Skrull-like even though he was in his human shape. This group of Skrulls led by Gravik feels very much like the way the Flagsmashers should have felt during The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I enjoyed that show, but there was no doubt that the Flagsmashers part was the weakest of the series. This feels like it is working on every level.
Another awesome scene was between Nick Fury and Talos on a train. Once again, it is a talking scene, but it is as compelling as anything we’ve gotten before. Plus, Talos dropped some info in the “tell me something I don’t know” game that knocked Fury over. Over a million Skrulls were on earth. Whoa.
The episode also ended with a surprise. Hey, Nick, are you married to a Skrull?
Secret Invasion episode 2 was a wonderful balance and it continues to wonder exactly whom you can trust.
Ventriloquist dummies can be creepy. And that is even before they start talking and moving on their own.
“You’re watching a ventriloquist named Jerry Etherson, a voice-thrower par excellence. His alter ego, sitting atop his lap, is a brash stick of kindling with the sobriquet ‘Willy.’ In a moment, Mr. Etherson and his knotty-pine partner will be booked in one of the out-of-the-way bistros, that small, dark, intimate place known as the Twilight Zone.”
I really enjoyed this episode. I liked how there is still some question about whether Willy was real or whether Jerry was simply hearing voices and was out of his mind. Even with the bizarre ending of switching places, I can see how this could be dealing with mental illness on the part of Jerry.
“What’s known in the parlance of the times as the old switcheroo, from boss to blockhead in a few uneasy lessons. And if you’re given to nightclubbing on occasion, check this act. It’s called Willy and Jerry, and they generally are booked into some of the clubs along the ‘Gray Night Way’ known as the Twilight Zone”
Cliff Robertson, Uncle Ben from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, was our lead actor here and he does a wonderful job of showcasing the anxiety, the fear and uncertainty of this situation.
Paranoia is a major feel in The Dummy as Jerry is never 100% sure what was happening. The way Willy would move ever so slightly as it sat in the dressing room emphasized this to the audience.
Am awesome episode. One of the best of season three so far.
So when two men land their spaceship on this planet, they discover a bizarre surprise.
“The time is the space age, the place is a barren landscape of a rock-walled canyon that lies millions of miles from the planet Earth. The cast of characters? You’ve met them: William Fletcher, commander of the spaceship; his copilot, Peter Craig. The other characters who inhabit this place you may never see, but they’re there, as these two gentlemen will soon find out. Because they’re about to partake in a little exploration into that gray, shaded area in space and time that’s known as the Twilight Zone.”
The land where they landed contained natives who were tiny, Lilliputian-type people. And Peter Craig found his gigantic size a major advantage. So much so that he started to consider himself a god to these people, going as far as to crushing these people’s homes with his foot.
When the ship was repaired, Fletcher tried to get Peter to come with him, but he would refuse, pulling a gun and demanding that Fletcher leave him alone. Peter had convinced the little people to build a statue in his honor.
However, the power would be fleeting as another ship landed on the rock and this was a race of people who were much large than Peter. In fact, they grabbed Peter and crushed him in their hands. When they left, the little people pulled down the statue upon the dead body of Peter.
“The case of navigator Peter Craig, a victim of a delusion. In this case, the dream dies a little harder than the man. A small exercise in space psychology that you can try on for size in the Twilight Zone.”
“Four O’Clock”
One of the straight up villains of The Twilight Zone, Oliver Crangle was played by Theodore Bikel with a glorious zeal unlike we have seen to this point.
“That’s Oliver Crangle, a dealer in petulance and poison. He’s rather arbitrarily chosen four o’clock as his personal Götterdämmerung, and we are about to watch the metamorphosis of a twisted fanatic, poisoned by the gangrene of prejudice, to the status of an avenging angel, upright and omniscient, dedicated and fearsome. Whatever your clocks say, it’s four o’clock, and wherever you are it happens to be the Twilight Zone.”
Oliver Crangle is like the Q of our time. Going out of his way to do his battle with those he perceived as ‘evil’ in the world. He did not see himself as evil though, as most great villains do. They see themselves as the hero of their story.
Crangle was certainly a bit crazy. His overall plan to make all people he deemed evil two-feet tall is super-villain plots at the best. I also enjoyed the twist ending with Cringle becoming two-feet tall himself, revealing that he was, in truth, evil.
How did this happen? That is never mentioned. Could there have been more depth to this character? Sure. Still, I found the performance of Theodore Bikel to be over-the-top goodness.
“Hocus-Pocus and Frisby”
Hey, there was Floyd, from Mayberry!
Mr. Frisby is the ultimate liar. That might be too unfair. He is certainly a ‘tall tale’ teller.
“The reluctant gentleman with the sizable mouth is Mr. Frisby. He has all the drive of a broken camshaft and the aggressive vinegar of a corpse. As you’ve no doubt gathered, his big stock in trade is the tall tale. Now, what he doesn’t know is that the visitors out front are a very special breed, destined to change his life beyond anything even his fertile imagination could manufacture. The place is Pitchville Flats, the time is the present. But Mr. Frisby’s on the first leg of a rather fanciful journey into the place we call the Twilight Zone.”
With the theme of ‘boy who cried wolf’, Mr. Frisby, who has a tale to tell about his exploits that are, at best, inaccurate, was abducted by aliens because the aliens were looking for specimens that were the most impressive and knowledgeable of their kinds and they did not understand the idea of lying. So, obviously, with Mr. Frisby’s continued hyperbole and outright fibs, they thought they found the best human going.
Mr. Frisby is able to escape by playing his harmonica, which was a sound that was dangerous to the aliens, and, ironically, when Mr. Frisby was telling the story that was actually true to his friends at his store, they did not beleive him.
This was fine, but a little bit of Mr. Frisby went a long way. It did become somewhat annoying after awhile.
“The Trade-Ins”
“Mr. and Mrs. John Holt, aging people who slowly and with trembling fingers turn the last pages of a book of life and hope against logic and the preordained that some magic printing press will add to this book another limited edition. But these two senior citizens happen to live in a time of the future where nothing is impossible, even the trading of old bodies for new. Mr. and Mrs. John Holt, in their twilight years, who are about to find that there happens to be a zone with the same name.”
This story was a love story featuring the couple of Mr. and Mrs. John Holt, who had been married for fifty years, but whose bodies were feeling the stress of age. Fortunately, there was a technology that allowed them to switch from their old bodies and trade them in for younger versions.
Unfortunately for the Holts, the process cost $10,000 dollars, and they only had half of that. This created the conflict in the episode as Mr. Holt tried to go about finding the extra money, but failing to make it in a high stakes poker game.
In the end, Mr. Holt had the process done, but decided to take up the return policy because he could not see himself living the life of a young man without the love of his life.
Sweet and romantic. It was a decent episode with a message that showed the positive side of humans, which we do not see as often in The Twilight Zone.
