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.
Burgess Meredith returned to the Twilight Zone, bringing with him Don Rickles for this mostly comedic episode of The Twilight Zone.
I have to say that most of the time when The Twilight Zone dips into its comedic well for an episode, it does not work nearly as well. This was a ‘funny’ episode that was not very funny. Even with the iconic Don Rickles in tow.
Burgess Meredith is a fantastic actor and he carries himself well, but he just did not feel in place in this episode. He couldn’t even save what was a very disappointing episode.
There was so much slapstick involved in the show and it just was not very funny. The aliens who give Mr. Dingle the super strength are a boring design and make little sense. The aliens at the end that are the little kids were worse yet.
Definitely one of the lower episodes of the show which has failed as of yet to show me a really effective comedy episode.
Premonition. The feeling that something is not right. Twenty-Two is a Twilight Zone episode that looks at the phenomenon, even though we do not know that until the very end.
“This is Miss Liz Powell. She’s a professional dancer and she’s in the hospital as a result of overwork and nervous fatigue. And at this moment we have just finished walking with her in a nightmare. In a moment she’ll wake up and we’ll remain at her side. The problem here is that both Miss Powell and you will reach a point where it might be difficult to decide which is reality and which is nightmare, a problem uncommon perhaps but rather peculiar to the Twilight Zone.”
There was some really strong, subtle hints throughout this episode, especially when dealing with the character of Liz Powell. I enjoyed this character piece as she went through the creepy hospital and had to deal with her slimy agent. You’re never quite sure what is going on, much like a dream in actuality. I’m sure, just like I did, everyone thought that this dream was foretelling something tragic at the hospital itself. Liz’s insistence that it was not a dream, despite the evidence to the contrary, kept the audience wondering what was going on.
It was strange after she had left the hospital and was on her way on a plane because the hospital was not involved any longer. However, as things started happening in the waking world as they happened in Liz’s dream, I had the idea of what was happening.
The metaphor of the morgue being the doomed airplane and the sinister flight attendant with her line, “Room for one more, honey” representing death itself was more apparent once it was out of the hospital. I actually expected the plane to crash, but the explosion in mid-air did surprise me.
There was a surreal feel to the episode and the dream-like state worked very well.
“The Odyssey of Flight 22”
“Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue…“
That line is one of the best from 1980’s Airplane! and this episode of The Twilight Zone made me think about that. Mainly because the voice of actor, John Anderson, who was the pilot Captain Farver, sounded a lot like Robert Stack who appeared in that movie.
His voice and the setting aboard an airplane were the only connections I had to Airplane! though as this episode dealt with a much more sci-fi aspect than the parody/comedy of Airplane!.
The crew aboard the plane (which they called a ‘ship’ which I found funny) were very competent and were flying easily on their way to New York. Strange occurrences began to happen. Captain Farver noticed a feeling in the plane, something like picking up of speed. The radio could not contact anyone and other instruments were out of whack.
When they went through a bizarre light and what felt like terrible turbulence and they were not sure what was going on. The glance out of the window as they approached Manhattan Island revealed what had happened to the plane.
Time travel pokes its head back into another Twilight Zone episode and was another very effective use of it. The crew decided to try and go back through the light again, this time ending up in 1939.
A Global jet airliner, en route from London to New York on an uneventful afternoon in the year 1961, but now reported overdue and missing, and by now, searched for on land, sea, and air by anguished human beings, fearful of what they’ll find. But you and I know where she is. You and I know what’s happened. So if some moment, any moment, you hear the sound of jet engines flying atop the overcast—engines that sound searching and lost—engines that sound desperate—shoot up a flare or do something. That would be Global 33 trying to get home—from The Twilight Zone. “
I loved the idea of this plane just lost in time, flying around for as long as it could, trying desperately to find its way home. This episode was Airplane! crossed with a sprinkling of Quantum Leap.
“Mr. Hector B. Poole, resident of the Twilight Zone. Flip a coin and keep flipping it. What are the odds? Half the time it will come up heads, half the time tails. But in one freakish chance in a million, it’ll land on its edge. Mr. Hector B. Poole, a bright human coin – on his way to the bank.”
Dick York, eventual star of Bewitched as Darren Stevens, returned to the Twilight Zone as Hector Poole, a bank employee who, through a strange twist of fate and luck, gained the ability to hear the thoughts of other people.
This is a fairly light episode that takes this premise and shows that there might be a drawback to being able to read other people’s thoughts. The whole deal with the old man who was thinking about robbing the bank but never intending to do it is a good example.
The episode also showed us how superficial some people could be, saying one thing out loud while thinking something totally opposite on the inside. The episode does not speak well of the nature of humankind, even having our straight-laced protagonist, Hector, use his mind reading ability to blackmail his boss over a weekend tryst.
Still, “A Penny for your Thoughts” is fine. It is an enjoyable enough episode to watch and Dick York showed a skill for comedy, especially with his facial reactions that would become so important for him later on in his career as Bewitched.
One wonders if the creators of Jim Carrey’s movie Liar Liar was inspired by this episode.
“This, as the banner already has proclaimed, is Mr. Harvey Hunnicut, an expert on commerce and con jobs, a brash, bright, and larceny-loaded wheeler and dealer who, when the good Lord passed out a conscience, must have gone for a beer and missed out. And these are a couple of other characters in our story: a little old man and a Model A car – but not just any old man and not just any Model A. There’s something very special about the both of them. As a matter of fact, in just a few moments, they’ll give Harvey Hunnicut something that he’s never experienced before. Through the good offices of a little magic, they will unload on Mr. Hunnicut the absolute necessity to tell the truth. Exactly where they come from is conjecture, but as to where they’re heading for, this we know, because all of them – and you – are on the threshold of the Twilight Zone.“
When Harvey Hunnicut bought the Model A car from the little old man, it seemed as if Hunnicut was ripping the man off. Oh how the tables turned.
As the little old man left the car salesman, he informed him that the car was haunted and that he would be haunted until he sold the car.
Little did Hunnicut know that it meant that he would be unable to tell a lie.
A used car salesman unable to lie? How could he sell anything? Especially when he had a lot full of lemons and clunkers. Hunnicut found that the truth was not a friend to him.
Overall, this episode was fairly light and, truthfully, kind of dull. He faced some initial consequences for his lies, especially form the wife on the phone, but he was able to get it sold without too much difficulty, passing the curse along to another person.
This lacked much of the Twilight zone’s usual oomph. The episode was not great.
“The Invaders”
And we went from a weak episode to one of the best of the series. The Invaders was totally original and featured a fantastic performance from Agnes Morehead (who would become Endora on Bewitched).
The dialogue of the episode was almost completely absent. It started off with the typical opening narration:
“This is one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas, a house untouched by progress. This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who’s been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror, which is even now coming at her from – the Twilight Zone.“
An isolated woman and a spaceship arriving in her home. However, the spaceship had miniature invaders-what appeared as robots, inside. The woman battled against the invaders, trying to protect herself and her home.
The old woman searched throughout her house, ending up capturing one of the invaders in a blanket, and beating it into unconsciousness. She then tossed it into the fire in the fireplace.
During this entire episode, we only hear the grunt and the screams of the woman. Never does she talk to the invaders or talk to herself during the horrifying time. It creates a great deal of tension and anxiety. The music from Jerry Goldsmith amplifies the atmosphere.
When she returned to the roof where the spaceship is located, she hears a message from the invaders back to their home planet saying to abandon this mission, do not strike a counterattack. There is a race of giant creatures here. The woman finishes off the ship and we see that it is from the US Air Force. The invaders were humans in suits, not miniature robots.
“These are the invaders, the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined. The invaders…who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag…and we have just seen it entered in a ledger that covers all the transactions in the universe…a bill stamped “Paid in Full” and to be found unfiled in the Twilight Zone”
This was an awesome ending to a tense and nerve-wracking episode. Agnes Morehead does an amazing job acting without any dialogue. She created a ton of sympathy for the old woman when you thought she was trying to save herself from some alien robots.
“This is Mr. Henry Corwin, normally unemployed, who once a year takes the lead role in the uniquely popular American institution, that of the department-store Santa Claus in a road-company version of ‘The Night Before Christmas’. But in just a moment Mr. Henry Corwin, ersatz Santa Claus, will enter a strange kind of North Pole which is one part the wondrous spirit of Christmas and one part the magic that can only be found… in the Twilight Zone.“
We get the drunk Santa story that we have seen so many times since. Henry Corwin, after being fired from his Santa job at the mall for being drunk, found a Santa gift bag that allowed Corwin to pull out whatever the gift receiver wanted.
The police believed he had stolen the stuff, but they could not prove anything. He was able to show them that he could pull anything they asked for out of the bag.
He ran out of gifts and wound up getting in the sleigh and becoming the real Santa Claus.
This was an okay episode. We’ve seen this before, but I’m not sure they saw this at the time (1960).
“Dust”
We get another Western on The Twilight Zone. This one deals with a very dark issue and one of sadness.
“There was a village. Built of crumbling clay and rotting wood. And it squatted ugly under a broiling sun like a sick and mangy animal wanting to die. This village had a virus, shared by its people. It was the germ of squalor, of hopelessness, of a loss of faith. For the faithless, the hopeless, the misery-laden, there is time, ample time, to engage in one of the other pursuits of men. They began to destroy themselves.”
The episode started off with a terrible tragic event. We find out that Luis Gallegos, who is in jail and being prepared to be hanged, had been drunk and accidentally ran over a little girl with his wagon.
We get one of the worst characters I have seen on The Twilight Zone in the peddler Sykes. This guy was so horrible in this episode. He taunted Luis while he was in jail. He was snarky with the Sheriff. He was looking to make money off the pain of Luis’s father. This guy should have received the ironic ending of the episode. He did not though. He did see, apparently, the errors of his ways.
Sykes sold Luis’s father a bag full of dirt from the ground and pretended as if it were magic dust. Luis’s father showed up at the hanging and threw the dirt around hoping it would work.
Shockingly, the rope snapped, dropping Luis to the ground. The parents of the little girl decided that this was a sign and Luis should be left alive.
I liked this episode quite a bit, but I did want Sykes to pay for his cruelness. The ending did feel a little underwhelming.
“Back There”
The Professor winds up in a time travel episode.
“Witness a theoretical argument, Washington, D.C., the present. Four intelligent men talking about an improbable thing like going back in time. A friendly debate revolving around a simple issue: could a human being change what has happened before? Interesting and theoretical, because who ever heard of a man going back in time? Before tonight, that is, because this is—The Twilight Zone.”
Peter Corrigan is involved with his friends in a discussion on time travel. As he was leaving the club, he finds himself transported to 1865, on the day that Abraham Lincoln was to be assassinated.
When Corrigan realized when he was, he tries going all over the place trying to stop the assassination. He winds up at the police station arrested. A man shows up and takes him out of the jail.
The man takes him to a room and drugs him. It was actually John Wilks Booth who took Corrigan so he would no longer be yelling about the assassination.
When Corrigan awoke, he discovered it was too late and that Lincoln was killed. He wound up back in the present and discovered that someone who had worked in the club before, now was a member because of things that happened when Corriganhad gone back in the past.
This was interesting. They took plenty of liberties here, especially with Booth. It’s great to see the Professor once again.
After three of the best episodes of the series so far in the last group of four, the enxt to are watchable and enjoyable, while not, perhaps, extraordinary.
“The Trouble with Templeton”
An aging theater actor, whose wife is openly cheating on him, reminisces back to his first wife who had since died.
“Pleased to present for your consideration, Mr. Booth Templeton; serious and successful star of over thirty Broadway plays, who is not quite all right today. Yesterday and its memories is what he wants, and yesterday is what he’ll get. Soon his years and his troubles will descend on him in an avalanche. In order not to be crushed Mr. Booth Templeton will escape from his theater and his world, and make his debut on another stage, in another world, that we call the Twilight Zone.”
Arriving late for his latest play, a hotshot new director chastised Templeton, causing the actor to flee from the theater. Before he knew it, Booth Templeton found himself back in the middle 1920s and was able to go to see his late wife Laura once again.
However, as is the case with most of The Twilight Zone episodes, Templeton did not expect what he found. His wife Laura was at a speakeasy having a lot of fun and was not overly pleased to see Templeton. She wanted to stay and dance whereas Templeton wanted to go be alone with his wife.
Templeton realized that his idyllic memories of Laura had been shaped by his loss and his loneliness and that his wife was not as perfect as he thought he remembered. He found a script in his pocket covering the very conversation he was having. He decided that the ghosts of the past were performing this play for him to bring him out of his funk.
When he returned to the present, Templeton faced the new director and, filled with new confidence, demanded the respect he deserved.
This was a solid episode with a nice use of the time travel trope.
“A Most Unusual Camera”
Chester and Paula Diedrich were a married couple who worked together as small time thieves, robbing antique shops. In their hotel room, they were going over their disappointing haul from that night’s robbery.
“A hotel suite that, in this instance, serves as a den of crime, the aftermath of a rather minor event to be noted on a police blotter, an insurance claim, perhaps a three-inch box on page twelve of the evening paper. Small addenda to be added to the list of the loot: a camera, a most unimposing addition to the flotsam and jetsam that it came with, hardly worth mentioning really, because cameras are cameras, some expensive, some purchasable at five-and-dime stores. But this camera, this one’s unusual because in just a moment we’ll watch it inject itself into the destinies of three people. It happens to be a fact that the pictures that it takes can only be developed in The Twilight Zone.“
Chester and Paula find a strange box camera among their loot and they wind up taking a picture with it. The picture showed Paula wearing a fur coat, that she did not own. A few minutes later, she found a fur coat among the objects that they had stolen and she put it on, striking the exact pose shown in the picture.
They took a second picture with the camera which showed Paula’s brother standing in the doorway. They knew that couldn’t happen because he was in prison. Yet, a few minutes later, her brother Woodward entered the room claiming to have escaped.
Chester realized that the camera was taking pictures that showed the very near future. Trying to find a way to take advantage of the camera, they went to the race track and made a ton of money taking pictures of the winner’s board before the races started and then betting on the winners shown in the pic.
The greed and selfishness of the trio came through later when a French bellhop decoded the camera indicating that they only are able to take 10 pictures. They argued over what to do with the final two and eventually led to Chester and Woodward falling out the window to their death.
That point would have made a dark and satisfying ending for the episode, but unfortunately, it kept going. For some reason, Paula took a picture of the dead bodies from her window with the camera. The French bell hop returned and stole the money, threatening to turn Paula in. He took the picture of the dead bodies and said that there were more than two.
Oddly, Paula went rushing to the window to look at the bodies and she tripped, flying out he window as well. Then the bellhop looked at the picture and saw four bodies and somehow fell out the window too.
That ending turned out to really cut into what was a decent episode. The cartoony ending, especially with Paula and the bellhop, tarnished what could have been a solid, though dark ending.
Overall the episode was fine, but it could have been so much more.
Season two has not been very strong so far. However, there were three exceptional episodes in a row with the fourth one being fine. This stretch of episodes really elevated the season.
“The Howling Man.”
Dutch angles for everyone!
What a great episode this one was. I enjoyed The Howling Man. Stumbling into the castle, David Ellington was lost and needed help. Just like Brad and Janet from Rocky Horror. Just like Bugs Bunny in several Looney Tunes shorts. Or Count Dracula’s castle. It never turns out well.
It was a unique opening as we started with David Ellington seemingly addressing the audience about the shocking horror that he had experienced. It felt for awhile that David would take the place of Rod Serling in the narrator chair, but Rod did eventually show up.
“The prostrate form of Mr. David Ellington, scholar, seeker of truth and, regrettably, finder of truth. A man who will shortly arise from his exhaustion to confront a problem that has tormented mankind since the beginning of time. A man who knocked on a door seeking sanctuary and found, instead, the outer edges of The Twilight Zone.”
Mr. Ellington was allowed to stay in the castle because he was sick and could not leave on his own. However, this was a bad thing for all as he came across a man locked away in the castle who claimed that the leader of this cult-like group, Brother Jerome, was crazy and had him locked up for no reason.
Brother Jerome was pretty sketchy too. Mr. Ellington wanted to understand, but Jerome did not want to tell him the full story. He knew the true story would make him sound like a loon.
Finally, Jerome broke down and explained to Mr. Ellington that the man he spoke to was no man at all… he was the devil. He told Mr. Ellington how the devil came to be locked in a room in their castle. Mr. Ellington pretended to believe him, and as soon as he could, he went and freed the man from the room.
Ellington was clearly blinded by his illness and his own foolishness because the questions he asked, which were good one about the lock on the door and why the man couldn’t just get himself out, were ignored.
Sure enough, the devil was freed and shapeshifted into his devilish form, horns and all. According to Rod’s narration, the devil was behind WWII, The Korean War, the weapons of war until Mr. Ellington had recaptured him.
We find out that, instead of narrating, he had been telling his own maid about the story to make sure that she never open that door. Which, of course, she promptly did.
This reminded me of the myth of Pandora’s Box. Pandora was a good person who did not intend on releasing the worst pain and anguish onto the world by opening the box and letting them out. Yet, that is what happened, just like Mr. Ellington opened the door and let out the great evil of the world. They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Looks like this episode agrees with that idiom.
“Eye of the Beholder”
A second consecutive awesome episode. Eye of the Beholder started out with the poor fate of Miss Janet Tyler, her ugly face completely covered in bandages, in a hospital for her last chance treatment.
“Suspended in time and space for a moment, your introduction to Miss Janet Tyler, who lives in a very private world of darkness. A universe whose dimensions are the size, thickness, length of the swath of bandages that cover her face. In a moment we will go back into this room, and also in a moment we will look under those bandages. Keeping in mind of course that we are not to be surprised by what we see, because this isn’t just a hospital, and this patient 307 is not just a woman. This happens to be the Twilight Zone, and Miss Janet Tyler, with you, is about to enter it.“
The nurse and the doctor were in to see Janet, but it was clear immediately that something weird was going on. We saw nobody’s faces. The doctor and the nurses were shot with specific camera angles or within shadows that kept the audience from seeing anyone’s face. Meanwhile we were told that Janet had one final chance to be able to be normal or she would need to be taken away to be with her kind of people.
Boy, are there some connections to this episode and the world we live in right now? As the episode continued, we were introduced slowly to several ideals of their current society. We even got to hear from their “Leader” on a closed circuit TV. The longer the episode went, the more bizarre the world seemed to be.
I thought the truth was fairly obvious early on in the episode. I had guessed that when they removed the bandages from Janet’s face, she would be revealed as being beautiful and, my thought was that everyone else would have blank faces. I was half right as the doctors and nurses were revealed to have ugly, pig-like faces.
The actual removal of the bandages was done wonderfully, building tension with every unwrapping. It took its time and it was a great payoff.
“Nick of Time”
William Shatner is in The Twilight Zone!
Before his iconic turn as Captain Kirk or his role in probably the most well-known Twilight Zone episode ever, William Shatner was here as the recently wed Don Carter.
“The hand belongs to Mr. Don S. Carter, male member of a honeymoon team en route across the Ohio countryside to New York City. In one moment, they will be subjected to a gift most humans never receive in a lifetime. For one penny, they will be able to look into the future. The time is now, the place is a little diner in Ridgeview, Ohio, and what this young couple doesn’t realize is that this town happens to lie on the outskirts of the Twilight Zone.“
Don and his new wife Pat have their car break down and they get stuck in Ridgeview, Ohio. While they were waiting for their car to be repaired, they went to a diner for food. At their booth, there was a little fortune teller napkin dispenser that you could put in a penny and ask a yes or no question and the machine would spit out an answer like a fortune cookie.
Problem was the answers seemed coincidentally accurate and Don, who was very superstitious, began to believe in the power of the machine. He slowly became obsessed with what the fortune teller was saying to them and was allowing the box to dictate their life.
At first, Don thought the machine had told him that something bad would happen if they left early. Don figured out that if they left before three, something bad would happen. So they stayed until 2:55. This drove me crazy. You waited this long, why not wait another five minutes. Why press fate?
Of course, right at 3, they nearly get hit by a car, which only cemented Don’s belief in the precognition of the machine. He took Pat back to the diner and began asking question after question.
Pat was able to bring Don back to reality with some common sense and they were able to get out of the diner and into their car to go wherever they wanted to go. However, another desperate looking couple came into the diner and sat down at the booth, pumping the fortune teller full of pennies and asking advise for their lives.
William Shatner was great here, really playing up the paranoia and the obsession of the superstitious man, and he showed the strength to escape from the pull of this belief.
“The Lateness of the Hour”
Robots everywhere.
“The residence of Dr. William Loren, which is in reality a menagerie for machines. We’re about to discover that sometimes the product of man’s talent and genius can walk amongst us untouched by the normal ravages of time. These are Dr. Loren’s robots, built to functional as well as artistic perfection. But in a moment Dr. William Loren, wife and daughter will discover that perfection is relative, that even robots have to be paid for, and very shortly will be shown exactly what is the bill.”
Dr. Loren’s daughter, Jana, was not a very likable character. She felt very selfish and most likely jealous of the robots and how much they did for her mother and father. She worried that these robots were keeping her parents from fully living their lives.
She did it in the most obnoxious way though, including throwing one of the robots down the stairs. She insisted that her father shut the robot staff down. He did not want to but he finally acquiesced when Jana said that either it was the robot staff shut down or she would leave and never come back.
I personally would have shown her the door, but there was a reason that was not going to happen. The twist of the episode, which again I had figured out early, was that Jana was also a robot. She flipped out when she discovered this truth, and her father had no other choice but to turn her into a maid instead.
“Let this be the postscript — Should you be worn out by the rigors of competing in a very competitive world, if you’re distraught from having to share your existence with the noises and neuroses of the twentieth century, if you crave serenity but want it full time and with no strings attached, get yourself a workroom in the basement, and then drop a note to Dr. and Mrs. William Loren. They’re a childless couple who made comfort a life’s work, and maybe there are a few do-it-yourself pamphlets still available… in the Twilight Zone”
While much of this episode irritated me because of Jana’s behavior, I loved the end of the episode. She absolutely deserved this ending.
A whiny, nervous criminal is in a small, cheap hotel room when approached to do more than the petty, two-bit crimes he is used to committing.
“This is Mr. Jackie Rhoades, age thirty-four, and where some men leave a mark of their lives as a record of their fragmentary existence on Earth, this man leaves a blot, a dirty, discolored blemish to document a cheap and undistinguished sojourn amongst his betters. What you’re about to watch in this room is a strange mortal combat between a man and himself, for in just a moment, Mr. Jackie Rhoades, whose life has been given over to fighting adversaries, will find his most formidable opponent in a cheap hotel room that is in reality the outskirts of The Twilight Zone.“
Jackie was hoping George, the head crook, would give him something special tonight, and he was right. However, Jackie was not excited about it at all.
George gives Jackie a gun and instructs him to kill a little old man who was rebutting the gangster’s advances. George wanted him to be made am example of and George gave that job to Jackie because no one would expect such a whimpy loser to be a murderer.
Jackie may have been a criminal, but he had never killed anyone before so this assignment triggered a conflict of conscious within Jackie. And Jackie began having a discussion with the reflection of himself in the mirror.
After a dramatic confrontation with the mirror image, Jackie refused the job and beat up George, resigning from his employ.
I took this as an example of the character of Jackie dealing with a split personality. It seemed more than just an argument over a conscience. The reflection spoke about how Jackie could have taken dual paths and that he chose a poor one. This is clearly something that Jackie has dealt with in the past. And at the end of the episode, the alter personality, who called himself John, takes over the body from Jackie.
I did enjoy the psychological aspect of this episode. The argument with the reflection in the mirror is a well known trope of this style and I wonder if it had happened before the Twilight Zone.
“A Thing About Machines”
Get out of here, Finchley
Get out of here, Finchley
Get out of here, Finchley
“This is Mr. Bartlett Finchley, age forty-eight, a practicing sophisticate who writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He’s a bachelor and a recluse with few friends, only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He has no interests save whatever current annoyances he can put his mind to. He has no purpose to his life except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhors. In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley is a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century, and who, in just a moment, will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings. Next stop for Mr. Bartlett Finchley – The Twilight Zone.”
Mr. Bartlett Finchley was a pompous, stuck-up individual who blamed all the problems around him on the machines that filled up his home, and not on the blistering temper that seemed to overwhelm him at a drop of a hat.
Somehow, the machine began speaking to him and intentionally doing things to irritate and upset him.
The machines get the last laugh in a fit of personification as Finchley’s car chased him around the neighborhood and killed him in a pool.
The episode gave us no reason for the mysterious machines to come to life. It did hint at this being in Finchley’s head, but there was no evidence of that actually occurring. Though there were some ideas here, there were too many silly images included taking whatever tension the episode tried to build out. I knew what we were up for when the electric razor began coming down the steps on its own.
Finchley was unlikable, but lacked any real reason for the audience to see him drown in a pool by his own car.
Season two kicked off with a couple of new details. One, the well known Twilight Zone theme was in the opening, standing out. I’m not sure if it was included on the first season intros, but it definitely stood out more this season.
Secondly, Rod Serling, who always spoke the opening narration, appeared on screen to deliver the narration.
“This is Africa, 1943. War spits out its violence overhead, and the sandy graveyard swallows it up. Her name is King Nine, B-25, medium bomber, Twelfth Air Force. On a hot, still morning, she took off from Tunisia to bomb the southern tip of Italy. An errant piece of flak tore a hole in the wing tank and, like a wounded bird, this is where she landed, not to return on this day, or any other day.”
We see the downed airplane in the desert and then the camera sweeps around to see the unconscious body of Captain James Embry. When Embry awakens, he starts looking desperately for the remainder of his crew.
Failing to find them, Embry continued to get more disheveled. He gets to the place where he is seeing images of his crew, who are not actually there.
At this point, Embry is breaking down in frustration and desperation. The scene shifts from the desert to a hospital where Embry is being taken care of after going into shock when seeing a newspaper with a headline about the King Nine being discovered after crashing during the war years ago. Embry was supposed to go on the mission, but backed out at the last instance and did not die as the rest of the crew did.
Embry wakes up and believes that he had dreamt the whole thing. However, the sand in his shoes implied that there was more real about the events he encountered than suspected.
This certainly deals with the idea of survivor’s guilt, which is a horribly insidious trauma.
Season two kicked off with a decent episode. The performance of Bob Cummings as Embry was very strong as the entire premise of the episode depended on his skills.
“The Man in the Bottle”
When I started the Daily Zone, I knew I had seen some episodes, although I have not seen near as many as I thought as only one was familiar in season one. However, there was one episode that I knew I had seen. I did not remember the overall concept behind it, but I knew it had to do with an older couple and a little shop. I also remembered something about the man becoming Adolf Hitler. Well, this is that episode.
The Man in the Bottle is, of course, a genie. When a struggling older couple with their antique shop come in possession of a bottle, it falls to the ground and opens. A genie appears offering 4 wishes.
Arthur and Edna Castle are unsure what to do. Edna was very anxious about making the wishes, saying that she did not like the look of the genie. When Arthur used the first wish to fix a broken glass on the display case, they saw that this was true and that they could do anything.
They wished for a million dollars. The genie provided and the Castles were extremely happy. They gave away $60,000 dollars to the people of the neighborhood only to find out that the IRS wanted their part. The tax turned out to be a HUGE piece of it. After taxes and the money they gave away, they had $5 dollars left.
Then Arthur tried to become the leader of a country and the genie turned him into Hitler at the end of WWII in the bunker. Arthur had to use the final wish to fix things and return to normal.
Poor Arthur, who was a kind man, did not deserve being messed with as the genie did. Arthur was kind, helping out an old lady at the beginning, giving her a dollar even though he could not pay his own bills. They showed him giving out money to people in a kind-hearted way. Yet, he was screwed over.
Obviously, the episode’s theme was ‘be careful what you wish for…’ but treating this kind old couple the way the show did, felt more cruel than just teaching a lesson. Even at the end, the Castles were able to just laugh off their experiences.
After a very strong season of episodes, I am afraid that season 1 ended with a couple of clunkers for me.
Spoilers
“The Mighty Casey”
A terrible baseball team from New Jersey holds try outs and they wind up with a new pitcher. Casey is a left handed master who was as dominant as he could be. There was only one problem.
Casey was a robot.
When the league found out about the truth, they insisted that Casey was suspended. However, Casey’s creator, Dr. Stillman, said he could give Casey a heart, thus making him human. The surgery was a success, meaning that Casey could continue to pitch. Unfortunately, Casey’s new heart turned him into a pitcher who could not get anyone out.
Jack Warden played manager “Mouth” McGarry.
I found this episode to be my least favorite episode of the season so far. It was a silly premise and the execution was worse yet. When Casey was pitching, they added stupid sound effects to his fastball, slowball and curve ball. The whole episode was just a joke and was a huge step down from anything that I had seen before.
“A World of his Own”
I had always thought that I had seen my share of the episodes of The Twilight Zone, but as I have watched the first season, I did not recognize or was familiar with any of them. That is, until this episode. I remembered parts of this episode as I was watching it so this is the first of the Twilight Zone episodes that I had seen before. It would have been decades ago though.
This was also not a favorite of mine, though better than the baseball one I just watched.
Gregory was a writer who had the power to bring to life characters that he created. All he had to do was speak into his tape recorder and the characters would come to life.
This led to a conflict with his wife Victoria, who came upon Gregory snuggling up with a blonde woman (called Mary). When Gregory explained that she was just a creation of his, Victoria was ready to have him committed.
Gregory could take the tape, cut it out with his scissors and toss it into the fire, which caused the person to disappear.
The end of the episode did help save it a bit. Victoria was shown to be a creation as well and she, not believing it, tossed her own tape into the fire. She disappeared. That was fairly obvious as it was happening. The best part was when Rod Serling appeared in the room to narrate the events and Gregory tossed his tape into the fire too, cause Rod to disappear. That was the best part of the episode.
“Leaving Mr. Gregory West—still shy, quiet, very happy… and apparently in complete control of The Twilight Zone.”
This ends the first season of The Twilight Zone. The Daily Zone will be continuing into the second season soon.
Jack Klugman stars in the thirty-second episode of The Twilight Zone and he carries the episode on his back. Klugman is very strong here, delivering several monologues and playing off other actors that can not or will not respond to him.
“Joey Crown, musician with an odd, intense face, whose life is a quest for impossible things like flowers in concrete or like trying to pluck a note of music out of the air and put it under glass to treasure. Joey Crown, musician with an odd, intense face, who, in a moment, will try to leave the Earth and discover the middle ground – the place we call The Twilight Zone.”
Joey Crown is a depressed trumpet player with an alcohol problem. Life was getting him so down that he decided to commit suicide by stepping in front of a speeding truck. That was when things got weird.
Joey found himself walking around the area, but unable to interact with anyone. Everyone he came across reacted as if they could not see Joey. Joey made the reasonable assumption that he was dead… that he was a ghost.
However, he comes across a man playing the trumpet that lets him know that is not the case. In fact, he says that Joey was in a limbo state and he could choose to go back or remain in the land of shadows. Joey goes back and things get much better.
Klugman was the reason to enjoy this episode. Joey did not seem to mind being in limbo so his choice to return to a world where he tried to leave by suicide did not make much sense. Still, the acting was strong and the message of stick with life is a good one.
“Mr. Bevis”
…with Butthead nowhere to be seen.
This was a second episode in a row that depended on the lead performance of the actor. This was Orson Bean and his semi-comedic role as Mr. James B.W. Bevis was excellent stuck into an episode that was strange and that had a message that did not feel very well done.
“In the parlance of the twentieth century, this is an oddball. His name is James B. W. Bevis, and his tastes lean toward stuffed animals, zither music, professional football, Charles Dickens, moose heads, carnivals, dogs, children, and young ladies. Mr. Bevis is accident prone, a little vague, a little discombooberated [sic], with a life that possesses all the security of a floating crap game. But this can be said of our Mr. Bevis: without him, without his warmth, without his kindness, the world would be a considerably poorer place, albeit perhaps a little saner.”
Loved the word ‘discombooberated.’
Mr. Bevis is a carefree, kind-hearted, fun-spirited man who could not hold a job because of his idiosyncrasies. We see him go through a day where he loses his job, has his car ruined and ends up in a bar getting drunk.
He is approached by his guardian angel, J. Hardy Hempstead, who has been guardian angelling Mr. Bevis’s family for years.
He told Mr. Bevis that he could redo the day and everything would turn out differently, but he would have to change the way he lived. No more funny suits, no more weird car, no more sliding down the bannister, no more playing on the street with the kids.
When he went through this day with the new way of acting, Mr. Bevis realized that he did not want to have a life where he could not do those things, even if it meant he would not be successful.
So I guess the message is that it is best to be yourself, but get used to failing if you do. The only way to success is by being something you are not, suppressing your true nature. That does not seem like a very positive message.
This was clearly inspired by “It’s A Wonderful Life” but it fails to reach that level of entertainment. Orson Bean does everything he can with what he is given and nearly pulls it off. Unfortunately a disappointing message and a lackluster story derailed this performance.
“The After Hours”
This is probably the most frightening episode of The Twilight Zone to date. There were some really anxiety creating shots as poor Marshal White struggled to remember what was going on.
“Express elevator to the ninth floor of a department store, carrying Miss Marsha White on a most prosaic, ordinary, run-of-the-mill errand.
Miss Marsha White on the ninth floor, specialties department, looking for a gold thimble. The odds are that she’ll find it—but there are even better odds that she’ll find something else, because this isn’t just a department store. This happens to be The Twilight Zone.”
I immediately spotted that there was no 9th floor on the elevator that Marsha White got on and I knew something was going on. What happened from here on out was weird.
Marsha White was here to buy a gold thimble for her mother (which at the end is strange considering the twist). After purchasing the thimble, she realized that it was scratched and dented and tried to return it, but the manager told her there was no 9th floor in the store.
This started Marsha’s psychological problems, afraid of what she saw… especially when she saw the woman who sold her the thimble… as a mannequin.
The twist at the end I did see coming, but that did not make everything around it less creepy. The strong performance by Anne Francis made up for any problems that might have been in the episode and the twist, the fact that Marsha was a mannequin too, was creative and probably very effective for the time.
Strange when you think about it, this whole episode happened because someone needed to use the phone.
“Mr. Roger Shackelforth. Age: youthful twenties. Occupation: being in love. Not just in love, but madly, passionately, illogically, miserably, all-consumingly in love – with a young woman named Leila, who has a vague recollection of his face and even less than a passing interest. In a moment, you’ll see a switch, because Mr. Roger Shackelforth, the young gentleman so much in love, will take a short, but very meaningful journey into the Twilight Zone.”
Roger Shackleforth was desperately in love with Leila. She couldn’t be bothered. Roger was in the phone booth, trying to get Lelia to answer. To get him out of the booth, a man offered him the card of a man whom would be able to fix everything for him. That would make the man desperate to make a phone call the inciting incident. Weird writing.
The man whose card was given to Roger was for a man named “A. Daemon,” a professor who was reading and working in what appeared to be a library. The professor tried to get Roger to buy “glove cleaner” but eventually offered him a love potion to help with his troubles. He warned Roger that this potion would make Leila fall hopelessly in love with Roger, and she would dote over him forever.
Roger went to see Leila and immediately gave her the potion in some champagne and, sure enough, she became breathlessly taken with him.
They would marry and she would do everything for him, constantly gazing upon him, back rubs, anything for him. And he was becoming tired of the mindless obsession.
He tried to return to the professor and he purchased the “glove cleaner” to “take care” of the problem. However, Roger could not bring himself to give Leila that potion and he committed to live his life in this way.
I was not a fan of this episode. Leila was quite annoying, but Roger’s use of the love potion is the same as forcing someone to do something that they did not want to do. The idea that he would then murder her to get away from her is a horrible thought.
This was Rod Serling’s favorite episode from the first season of The Twilight Zone, and I can definitely see why.
An ad exec Gart Williams was struggling at his job, getting more stressed and anxious over everything.
“This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’ protection fell away from him, and left him a naked target. He’s been cannonaded this afternoon by all the enemies of his life. His insecurity has shelled him, his sensitivity has straddled him with humiliation, his deep-rooted disquiet about his own worth has zeroed in on him, landed on target, and blown him apart. Mr. Gart Williams, ad agency exec, who in just a moment, will move into the Twilight Zone—in a desperate search for survival“
While heading home on a train after a particularly problematic day, Mr. Williams fell asleep and dreamed of a long ago town called Willoughby. A town where everything was peaceful and tranquil, Boys went fishing. Carriages were pulled by horses. Everything seemed to go slower.
Mr. Williams could not get Willoughby out of his mind and, a second time he had the dream on the train, he nearly got off, only to be awakened by the jolt of the train.
His wife had little empathy for him. His boss kept on his back to “PUSH, PUSH, PUSH.” Everything was flying past him. He made the decision to get off the train the next time he dreamed of Willoughby.
And that is exactly what he did. Everything seemed to be peaceful and lovely.
However, this is The Twilight Zone so we were going to get a twist. It seemed that, in reality, Gart Williams, when he thought the train was stopped at Willoughby, in reality, jumped off the moving train, killing himself.
The mortuary company of Willoughby and Son picked up the body.
Great ending to this episode. I expected something magical to happen. Kind of like the Apple TV + series Schmigadoon. Instead, we get a sudden switch to tragedy and we take a sharp turn to the dark. Or is Mr. Williams still there in Willoughby, happy as he could be?
Wonderful episode.
“Willoughby? Maybe it’s wishful thinking nestled in a hidden part of a man’s mind, or maybe it’s the last stop in the vast design of things—or perhaps, for a man like Mr. Gart Williams, who climbed on a world that went by too fast, it’s a place around the bend where he could jump off. Willoughby? Whatever it is, it comes with sunlight and serenity, and is a part of The Twilight Zone.”
“In this corner of the universe, a prizefighter named Bolie Jackson, 183 pounds and an hour and a half away from a comeback at St. Nick’s Arena. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who, by the standards of his profession is an aging, over-the-hill relic of what was, and who now sees a reflection of a man who has left too many pieces of his youth in too many stadiums for too many years before too many screaming people. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who might do well to look for some gentle magic in the hard-surfaced glass that stares back at him.”
Aging boxer Bolie Jackson looked to get his career back on track against some younger fighters. He was encouraged by a young boy who lives in the same building as he did. They were close and the boy told Bolie that he would wish for him to be able to win.
Things looked badly for Bolie, as he lay on the mat, staring up at the lights, the ref counting to 10. However, the little boy’s wish made everything right, flipping the script.
And all Bolie had to do was believe in magic.
Similar to some ideas found in Peter Pan, magic required that Bolie believed in it, but he couldn’t do it. This sent everything back to the way it was supposed to be.
This was a straight-forward episode that told a basic story. However, the all-black cast was anything but basic at the time of broadcast.
“A Nice Place to Visit”
“Rocky” Valentine was a thief. During a robbery, he wound up in a shoot out with the police and was shot. He awakes with a man who called himself Pip standing over him. Pip insisted that he was there to help him do anything he wanted, and gave him $700 dollars from his pocket.
Pip took Rocky to a hotel room, helped him win at gambling and brought him some beautiful women. Rocky realized that he had been shot to death by the cops and he guessed that he was in heaven and Pip was a guardian angel.
After awhile of never losing at gambling or never failing with the women, Rocky became bored and pressed Pip to find out how he could change things up. Rocky even said that he did not want to be in heaven any longer and wanted to go to the other place. Pip laughed and told Rocky that he was not in heaven, but was already in the other place.
Be careful what you wish for because you might get it feels like the moral of this story.
“A scared, angry little man who never got a break. Now he has everything he’s ever wanted – And he’s going to have to live with it for eternity – In The Twilight Zone.”
I found Rocky extremely annoying and he was difficult to watch. I figured the twist very early as if was obvious that Rocky wasn’t going to heaven. Heck, even Rocky wondered how he was in heaven.
Pip was definitely the highlight of the episode, but I found myself more irritated with the character and even the ironic ending did not rewcue that for me.
“Nightmare as a Child”
So this was the best of the three I watched for this post. I loved the psychological aspect of this episode.
“Month of November, hot chocolate, and a small cameo of a child’s face, imperfect only in its solemnity. And these are the improbable ingredients to a human emotion, an emotion, say, like—fear. But in a moment this woman, Helen Foley, will realize fear. She will understand what are the properties of terror. A little girl will lead her by the hand and walk with her into a nightmare”
When Helen met Markie, things felt odd. Little did we know that Markie was just a figment of her imagination. Something there to help Helen Foley remember the traumatic event of her mother’s murder.
Everything was triggered when she had seen the killer (off screen) by her school where she worked. This led to Markie and those memories returning.
Mr. Seldon, who was the killer, came by her apartment to see what she was remembering. He knew that she was the loose end, the person who witnessed his murder.
I really liked the fact that they did not make something supernatural or magical about this. Instead, they played the little girl as a psychological symptom.
Mr. Seldon did fall into the villain who just explains his plans trope. The audience did not have to have it laid out as such. At least, I figured that he was the killer. I could have had a better wrap up of the episode, but overall, this was decent.
