“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” was excellent from beginning to almost end. There was no much in this episode, clearly taking shots at the McCarthy hearing and how people were seeing Communists all over the place.
“Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 P.M. on Maple Street.“
“This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment –before the monsters came“
Something flew over Maple Street. The people who lived on this street thought it might have been a meteor. However, everything stopped working. No lights. No cars. No machinery of any kind. Nothing would start or turn on.
Why? No one was sure and they were nervous. When an imaginative child brought up an idea of the ‘meteor’ was in actuality a space ship and that the child had read a story about how monsters from outer space would infiltrate a community to set up for the landing.
The people dismissed the idea at first, but it got inside their minds and the paranoia of the situation started to rot their attitudes. They began blaming individuals on being guilty, with no evidence and even less reality.
It devolves into violence as one of the people is shot because they thought it was a monster coming out of the darkness.
The accidental death did not calm the tensions. In fact, it only triggered the people into chaos. I loved how this episode showed how human beings can react to rumors and innuendo, becoming mob-like.
Now, I am not sure I loved the very end of the episode where we see that this whole situation was being manipulated by aliens from a space ship, what had actually flown over the street. I would have preferred to have left that reveal a mystery. I don’t think that was necessary.
However, that did not take away from how much I loved this episode. It may be my current favorite episode of the series.
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices… to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill… and suspicion can destroy… and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone“
I did not expect much from this episode. It was a basic war story… that is, until it took that twist that you can only find in the Twilight Zone.
“Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Philippine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear—yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.”
Bewitched star Dick York appeared in this episode of The Twilight Zone as a main supporting character. I had seen this fact during my research, but I had forgotten about it so when I saw him, I was shocked. I thought he did a very good job.
Meanwhile, our lead character, William “Fitz” Fitzgerald, developed a strange and disturbing ability. Fitz was able to look at the face of other soldiers in his platoon and he would see a light indicating that they were going to die.
This power clearly upset Fitz, as you would expect. He did what he could to come to grips with his precognition.
I found this episode to be extremely well done. It had a tragic story that brought Fitz into a terrible state of mind. The ending was very powerful. It brought the idea of a failure to be able to prevent death even with foreknowledge is a very sad but relatable theme.
“Elegy”
Another example of a spaceship that leads to a breakdown, stranding the pilots somewhere familiar, yet foreign. Much of this episode was bizarre and mysterious. I do think that I was engaged with the story at the beginning. The seemingly frozen people in this location was odd and I was not sure what was going on.
When Jeremy Wickwire, the caretaker of the place, turned to the camera, I actually shouted. I did not expect that.
Unfortunately, the next ten to fifteen minutes or so of the show really felt weak. There was just a ton of enigmatic exposition as Wickwire tried to maintain the mystery of what was going on. The show lost me during this period. However, the ending was extremely dark and intriguing. I loved the final three minutes or so as Wickwire poisoned the three astronauts and set them up in their own “final wish”.
I found the tones of this episode to clash with each other. There was some serious and mysterious feeling early and Wickwire brought a more humorous tone that seemed to undercut what was going on. Then the show ended very darkly and with a great deal of irony and Wickwire showed his true feelings for the human race, and we did not see that prior at all.
It is a real mishmash for me.
“Mirror Image”
One of the more well known episodes (apparently it inspired Jordan Peele’s film Us), “Mirror Image” was one that I was looking forward to, but, though it was interesting, I do not think it quite reached the level that I was expecting.
“Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes: not given to undue anxiety, or fears, or for that matter even the most temporal flights of fantasy. Like most young career women, she has a generic classification as a, quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote. All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes’ shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes, who, in one minute, will wonder if she’s going mad.”
Strange things are happening for Millicent. People are telling her that she had been asking questions that she had not been. People said she had been places where she was not. She was starting to feel as if she were losing her grip on reality. Could she be delusional?
The arrival of the friendly gentleman, Paul Grinstead, brought her down a bit, but things ramped up again when she started speculating about evil doubles from parallel worlds.
Of course, that is what was going on and she would eventually spy her doppelganger on the bus that she intended to be on. I had a problem here. Why would she not go up and confront this doppelganger with Paul beside her? Instead, she just screamed and ran off, apparently passing out.
Paul called the police to take her for mental help and then he realizes that she wasn’t wrong as the same thing starts to happen to him.
I found this to be way overrated. I still enjoyed a lot the episode, but the fact is the conclusion felt rushed and made little sense. I did not like the way the characters reacted and the ending did not support what was a decent start.
I got four episodes watched this morning, and they were four dang good ones.
“I Shot an Arrow into the Air”
We kick off the four episode run with an outstanding episode about a failed space flight.
“I shot an arrow in the air; it landed I know not where,” said Langford, one of the heads of the mission that saw a crew on board a ship called The Arrow that had disappeared after takeoff.
That was a famous line from a Longfellow poem, but it had been changed by the character, and, looking back, I believe it was changed purposefully. Because the line actually said, ‘I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth i know not where.‘
That is exactly what the crew had done, crash landing back on earth in a mountainous desert range outside of Reno, Nevada. Of course, the three surviving crew members believed they had crashed on an asteroid and had no means to be rescued.
The baser instincts of humans took over, with the three men clashing over water, what to do with the injured and other ways to survive.
“Practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature and a combination of improbable events. Practical joke wearing the trappings of nightmare, of terror, of desperation. Small, human drama played out in a desert 97 miles from Reno, Nevada, U.S.A., continent of North America, the Earth and, of course, the Twilight Zone.“
This idea of crashing back on earth unbeknownst to the crew was used again by series writer Rod Serling when he worked on the 1960s classic Planet of the Apes, where his iconic shock ending made that film a sensation.
“The Hitch-Hiker”
“Her name is Nan Adams. She’s twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store. At present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California from Manhattan. Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania. Perhaps, to be filed away under “accidents you walk away from.” But from this moment on, Nan Adams’ companion on a trip to California will be terror. Her route: fear. Her destination: quite unknown.“
The next awesome episode was ‘The Hitch-Hiker’ where Nan Adams was driving across the country, only to be stalked by a mysterious hitch-hiker, whom she seemed to never be able to outrun.
I had an idea early in this episode what exactly had happened. After the guy who was helping Nan after she had the tire blow out said that she was lucky to be alive, I had an idea that maybe she wasn’t. That is another classic trope of sci-fi films where the person involved does not know she was dead. This is a classic example of that and probably an inspiration for many of them.
This is one of the most highly regarded episodes of the first season, with it appearing on a bunch of top 20 lists. It does create an air of mystery with some definite creepy moments involving this mysteriou shitch-hiker.
“The Fever”
The next episode was entitled “The Fever,” which I did not know what was being referenced. Even with the opening narration, I was not sure.
“Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights all expenses paid at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs’s knack with a phrase. But unbeknownst to either Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there’s a prize in their package, neither expected nor bargained for. In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce. A most inoperative, deadly life-shattering affliction known as the Fever.”
However, as the episode started, I realized that this was not going to be some terrible plague or disease passed through the air. Instead, it would be gambling fever that wound up grasping Franklin Gibbs.
The episode does a great job of setting up to show how easily it is for somebody, even someone opposed to gambling, to fall victim to the obsession of those ‘one-armed bandits.’ Franklin, who spent most of the beginning of the episode chastising Vegas and the people who brainlessly put coin after coin into the slot machines in the desperate hope to win. And yet, through fate, Franklin wound up glued to one of the machines himself.
Oh yeah, the machine was calling him by name. This, of course, was the way to illustrate the beacon call of those people cursed with a gambling addiction. This episode does a tremendous job showing how tragic this obsessive addiction can become, as Franklin fell to his death out a window.
“Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally his life to an inanimate, metal machine, variously described as a “one-armed bandit”, a “slot machine”, or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs’ words, a “monster with a will all of its own.” For our purposes, we’ll stick with the latter definition because we’re in the Twilight Zone.”
Apparently, this episode was inspired by a time when Rod Serling himself wound up enslaved by a slot machine on a trip to Vegas.
“The Last Flight”
Time travel is a classic sci-fi trope and we get an intriguing one in this episode where a pilot from World War I suddenly finds himself flying to an American military post in 1959.
There were many cool concepts in this film, including the way they pieced back together what actually happened to the pilot.
“Witness Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, Royal Flying Corps, returning from a patrol somewhere over France. The year is 1917. The problem is that the lieutenant is hopelessly lost. Lieutenant Decker will soon discover that a man can be lost not only in terms of maps and miles, but also in time—and time in this case can be measured in eternities.“
At first, I was afraid that several of the awesome ideas brought up in the beginning of the episode was going to be swept under the rug because of the shortness of the episode, but I was very pleased with they way the episode concluded. The idea that Terry Decker had to fly his plane back through the mystical cloud and go back to save the pilot he had deserted is a fun way to bring the story around. The closing section of the show with the British Air Vice Marshal Mackaye, the very pilot that Terry had returned to save, realizing that something magical had occurred was great.
Just like all time travel shows, the mind reels about what happened and how it happened. When Terry was in 1959, he had thought that Mackaye was dead, but when the Americans told him that Mackaye was coming to that very base for an inspection, that meant he had survived. Would he have survived if Terry had not returned to save him? Terry was in 1959, but he had not saved his friend yet.
This is one of those time is a flat circle ideas. The events from 1959 happened and would always happened because Terry was always the person to save Mackaye. This way, time is not a straight line, as explained in Back to the Future. Its more like everything is happening at the same time and you can’t change things.
Time travel is always tough. This works pretty well and I really liked the character of Terry Decker.
Four very solid episodes right in a row during the inaugural season of The Twilight Zone.
Shape shifting takes center stage in the Twilight Zone.
His name was Arch Hammer and he could change his face to look like someone else. He decided to use this ability to do some rotten things. He impersonated a deceased trumpet player to try and score with the woman the trumpet player loved. He made arrangements to run away with her. I didn’t know if he then intended to keep that face for the rest of time or if he was just messing with her and would dump her when he was tired of her. Either way, playing on her grief was a terrible thing to do.
Then he impersonated a gangster and threatened the head gangster that had had him killed. He was able to rip off a bunch of money.
Then, as he was being pursued, he switched to a random face he saw on a poster in an alleyway. He was a boxer. He avoided the thugs chasing him, but, coincidentally, he ran into the boxer’s father. The father was angry with his son and Hammer shoved him to the ground.
The old man would come back into play later when he shot Hammer dead outside of his hotel thinking it was his son.
“He was Arch Hammer, a cheap little man who just checked in. He was Johnny Foster, who played a trumpet and was loved beyond words. He was Virgil Sterig, with money in his pocket. He was Andy Marshak, who got some of his agony back on a sidewalk in front of a cheap hotel. Hammer, Foster, Sterig, Marshak—and all four of them were dying.“
This was very much of a noir episode, with the music from Jerry Goldsmith and all of those Dutch Angles. This episode was okay, at best.
“Third from the Sun”
This was a much different episode from the previous one. Here we had some government researchers/scientists involved in research on H-bombs and other weapons. Nuclear war was imminent.
“Quitting time at the plant. Time for supper now. Time for families. Time for a cool drink on a porch. Time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the Moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before storm. This is the eve of the end.”
The story featured Will Sturka and his family, along with his friend and co-worker Jerry Riden. They made a plan to steal an experimental spaceship and fly off the doomed planet and relocate to another planet that they discovered that also had people and was much like the planet they lived on.
One of their co-workers, Carling, was suspicious of them and he was hanging around, looking to cause trouble.
As they tried to get to their ship, Carling confronted them with a gun, hoping to take them to the police. They were able to overpower him and got to the ship.
As they were in the ship, they talked about the new planet they were heading towards… and it was called earth.
I liked the unexpected twist at the end of the episode with them heading TO earth instead of escaping from earth. There was some good tension built in the episode as the worry of nuclear war was a major worry that people of the time had to deal with.
Who really knows the future? Well, in the Twilight Zone, it is apparently a little old man named Pedott. This is a talent that down-on-his-luck scoundrel, Mr. Fred Renard needed.
“You’re looking at Mr. Fred Renard, who carries on his shoulder a chip the size of the national debt. This is a sour man, a friendless man, a lonely man, a grasping, compulsive, nervous man. This is a man who has lived thirty-six undistinguished, meaningless, pointless, failure-laden years and who at this moment looks for an escape—any escape, any way, anything, anybody—to get out of the rut. And this little old man is just what Mr. Renard is waiting for.”
This was another main protagonist in an episode of The Twilight Zone that was really unlikable. Renard did not look to have much of a character arc either. He just wanted something to go right for him and when he realized that Pedott could tell him specifically what he needed, meaning he had a gift to see in the future, Renard was ready to cash in.
We got some nice inclusion of a story of a baseball player named Lefty whose arm was ruined. This was to show the ability of Pedott, and it looked as if the story was going to be a happy one. However, the use of Renard as a greedy creep who wanted to become Pedott’s partner guaranteed that this tale would take the typically ironic end.
This episode was fine. I was happy to see Renard get his comeuppance at the end of the episode. There is nothing here specifically deep or complex, unlike many other Twilight Zone episodes. It was a nice watch.
“Her name: X-20. Her type: an experimental interceptor. Recent history: a crash landing in the Mojave Desert after a thirty-one hour flight nine hundred miles into space. Incidental data: the ship, with the men who flew her, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four hours… But the shrouds that cover mysteries are not always made out of a tarpaulin, as this man will soon find out on the other side of a hospital door.”
The eleventh episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone was a great episode. Three military pilots flew an experimental spaceship called the X-20. After disappearing for a 24-hour period, they crashed in the desert.
Major William Gart had a broken leg and had to stay in the hospital. When we ick it up, we see Colonel Clegg Forbes came back to the hospital to see Gart, and he was in a panic. It seemed as if his best friend, Colonel Ed Harrington, the third man of the pilots, was missing and no one remembered him.
Forbes told Gart about the trip to the bar the night before when Harrington disappeared. The people in the bar, who had been interacting with Harrington moments before, were now confused by Forbes’ behavior.
Watching Forbes try to wrap his mind around the fact that his longtime friend had been figuratively erased from existence was fascinating and the mystery of what was going on had me glued to the screen.
As the other two pilots eventually disappeared without a trace as well, I realized that there would not be any answers forthcoming, and it did not bother me at all. I liked how the episode left us uncertain about what was happening. We, the audience, were just like the three pilots. We knew that they were there, but we did not know what happened to them.
“Her name is the S.S. Queen of Glasgow. Her registry: British. Gross tonnage: five thousand. Age: Indeterminate. At this moment she’s one day out of Liverpool, her destination New York. Duly recorded on the ship’s log is the sailing time, course to destination, weather conditions, temperature, longitude and latitude. But what is never recorded in a log is the fear that washes over a deck like fog and ocean spray. Fear like the throbbing strokes of engine pistons, each like a heartbeat, parceling out every hour into breathless minutes of watching, waiting and dreading… For the year is 1942, and this particular ship has lost its convoy. It travels alone like an aged blind thing groping through the unfriendly dark, stalked by unseen periscopes of steel killers. Yes, the Queen of Glasgow is a frightened ship, and she carries with her a premonition of death.”
This episode is a ghost story. It starts off as a mystery. How did Carl Lanser wind up on the S.S. Queen of Glasgow? Who is he? Why is he having a premonition of doom happening at 1:15 AM?
I have to say that what was happening on this episode was confusing and was not clear. However, I will admit the episode cleared up the mystery rather quickly. Everything wrapped up with a nice little bow.
I did not love this episode. It was fine, but it all felt so rushed. This felt like an episode that could have benefited from a longer run time.
It had some pretty decent ideas in it and I liked the eventual reveal, but it just did not work in the overall.
This episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone was adapted from a short story by author Lynn Venable and starred Burgess Meredith as poor Henry Bemis, a put upon man who just wanted some time to read the newspaper or some classic literature. His boss and his wife reacted negatively to his wish, going to dramatic steps to stop him from engaging in his hobby.
I related to Henry Bemis immediately. All he wanted was to be able to read and, as a reading teacher, I wish more people would be so motivated.
However, Bemis’s tale took a drastic switch as he was hidden away at the bank that he worked at inside a vault when an H-bomb exploded, destroying evrerything around him, killing all of the people of his city. I was happy that he did not have to deal with his horrible wife any longer. Henry was upset and lonely, unsure of what his life was going to be until he found the reminensce of the public library. Books, books, books everywhere and nothing but time to read them.
I was happy for him until the show pulled one of the crueler tricks that it has done as Henry’s glasses fell and broke, leaving him in a constant blurry world.
The hatred shown by several characters in this episode really relates to the current day as many books are being banned around the country. It really is sad that Henry was denied his one major love, something that had saved him from his near suicide earlier in the episode.
“The best-laid plans of mice and men…and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone.“
“Perchance to Dream”
Episode nine of The Twilight Zone was the first episode of the series not written by Rod Serling. This episode, “Purchance to Dream” was written by Charles Beaumont.
Edward Hall needed help and he went to psychiatrist Dr. Eliot Rathmann looking for it. Edward had not slept for several days because of a dream that he was having. Dr. Rathmann had Edward lay down on his couch to rest, but Edward bolted up, afraid to succumb to sleep.
He told the psychiatrist that he had a bad heart condition and could not handle stressful situations or being startled. He then told the doctor that he had been having a dream of a carnival and a Cat Girl named Maya and he was sure that his heart could not handle the dream.
He told about the terrors at the carnival and the stress of the roller coaster. He said that he was sure that Maya was trying to scare him to death and that if he fell back asleep, she would succeed.
When he was leaving the office, he noticed that Rathmann’s receptionist resembled Maya. Frightened by this, Edward ran back into the office and leapt through the window, falling to his death.
However, we discover that he had not done any of this and that he was still on the psychiatrist’ couch, having never awakened. Dr. Rathmann checked Edward’s pulse, realizing that he had died in hi sleep, ironically stating that “At least he died peacefully…”
“They say a dream takes only a second or so, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime. He can suffer and die, and who’s to say which is the greater reality: the one we know or the one in dreams, between heaven, the sky, the earth – in the Twilight Zone.“
This was a very intriguing episode and ending was extremely satisfying. When we come out of the dream where Edward had killed himself was very surreal. This felt very appropriate for The Twilight Zone.
The seventh episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone was called “The Lonely” and it dealt with a sci-fi prison for a man convicted of a crime.
Convicted but innocent, James Corry was stranded on an isolated and deserted asteroid for the duration of his long prison sentence. Supplies would be brought to him every three months, but otherwise, he is completely alone.
Feeling bad for him, Captain Allenby, the pilot of the supply vessel, brought him a special, secret surprise. It was a robot that was in the shape of a woman. The robot’s name was Alicia and she was very feminine. While Corry rejected the robot at first, he became close with her eventually as time passed.
When Corry and Alicia had become a couple, Captain Allenby returned with great news: Corry had received a pardon. Allenby and his crew were collecting other former prisoners and they were there to pick up Corry. They had space only for Corry and a few of his belongings. Corry rejected the idea, insisting that Alicia was more than robot… that she was a real woman and that she had to go with him.
Allenby ended up shooting Alicia in the face, revealing the robotic materials inside her, bringing Corry to his senses.
This was a strange story. It started out interesting as we looked at the relationship that could develop when someone is isolated. There have been plenty of examples in sci-fi of characters falling for machines/robots/androids etc.
However, the story between Corry and Alicia came to such a sudden and dramatic conclusion that it felt like there were some aspects of the tale missing. It needed another 20 minutes or so I think to be effective in telling the story. Otherwise the relationship, which needed to be at the center of this story, rang hollow and empty.
“On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man’s life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines he used. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that act upon them. All of Mr. Corry’s machines, including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete—in The Twilight Zone.“
The sixth episode of The Twilight Zone in the first season was another episode that took the storytelling into a new direction. This was the first time where the protagonist of the tale was someone you did not want to root for.
“You’re about to meet a hypochondriac. Witness Mr. Walter Bedeker, age forty-four. Afraid of the following: death, disease, other people, germs, draft, and everything else. He has one interest in life and that’s Walter Bedeker. One preoccupation: the life and well-being of Walter Bedeker. One abiding concern about society: that if Walter Bedeker should die, how will it survive without him?“
Bedeker was absolutely nothing more than a whining loser who was putting his wife through all kinds of troubles with his made-up symptoms and annoying complaints. When a mysterious man named Cadwallader appeared in his apartment with a shocking offer, Bedeker was intrigued. Even when he figured out that Cadwallader was, in fact, the Devil, Bedeker was not turned away.
Cadwallader offered him a long life span, something Bekeder had been worrying about. He also made him invincible, Nothing could hurt him. But he gave Bedeker an escape clause in case he wanted to get out of the forever life.
Bekeder, with his new power, became even more obnoxious. He discovered that the thrill of danger was now gone and he started doing things that were designed to hurt himself to see if any of them would interest him. He was such a jerk about it all.
His wife winds up being killed and he takes responsibility for the act, looking for the electric chair.
Bekeder was so unlikable that when he wound up getting life in prison instead of the chair, I cheered at the irony. Of course, he took Cadwallader up on the escape clause, which led to his heart attack in his prison cell.
Bekeder had everything you could possibly want but yet he was constantly unhappy. When he was normal, he was always complaining he was sick. When he could no longer be hurt or killed, he was bored. Just a rotten human being and seeing him pay the piper was extremely satisfying.
This was another solid episode in the first season of The Twilight Zone. This featured a little time travel and a nostalgic look back that becomes too real.
“Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Occupation: vice-president, ad agency, in charge of media. This is not just a Sunday drive for Martin Sloan. He perhaps doesn’t know it at the time, but it’s an exodus. Somewhere up the road he’s looking for sanity. And somewhere up the road, he’ll find something else.”
Martin Sloan finds himself back in his hometown called Homewood and he was amazed at how nothing seemed to change. The ice cream soda was still a dime, the businesses were just as he remembered, the park was the same.
So when he spotted a young him carving his name into a bandstand, something he remembered doing as a child, the bizarre situation began to formulate before his eyes. When he found his childhood home was still being lived in my his mother and father, Martin was becoming more unstable.
This is an interesting take on the time travel as we see the older Martin trying to talk to the younger Martin, chasing him across a carousel, causing the boy to fall and badly injure his leg… something that the older Martin now felt. Some time travel shows go by the idea that the past could not be changed. What happened, happened. This was like LOST. Some time travel shows/films think you can affect the future by what you do in the past, such as Back to the Future. This feels like a combination of the two ideas since the injured leg now is a problem for the older Martin, but his mother and father find out who he is and that does not seem to affect the future at all.
We see very young Ron Howard, pre-Opie from the Andy Griffith Show, as a boy that older Martin comes across and spooks him by claiming to be someone that the boy knew he could not be.
This is the first time I have done a post for The Daily Zone for more than one individual episode. I am linking episodes 3 and 4 together on this post.
SPOILERS
“Mr. Denton on Doomsday“
This episode is a Western and my favorite episode so far. We get the drunken Al Denton, at one point the fasted draw around until he killed a teenager who was wanting to take the title of the best shooter. Al lost himself in the drink more and more to hide from the pain of his reputation.
Mr. Henry J. Fate arrived in town, bringing his magical potions with him, giving Al more belief in himself.
Dan Duryea played Al Denton and he was amazing in this role. You could feel the uncertainty, the anguish over the siren call of the gun. When he was aided magically by Henry Fate, Al set himself on the course of gunslinger once more.
This episode was filled with themes of redemption, fate as well as dealing with alcoholism and the price of fame (or being infamous). It also included a performance by Martin Landau as a bully cowboy who taunted the drunken Al Denton before his discovery of the magical firearm.
I really enjoyed this episode.
Episode 4
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine”
“Picture of a woman looking at a picture. Movie great of another time, once-brilliant star in a firmament no longer a part of the sky, eclipsed by the movement of earth and time. Barbara Jean Trenton, whose world is a projection room, whose dreams are made out of celluloid. Barbara Jean Trenton, struck down by hit-and-run years and lying on the unhappy pavement, trying desperately to get the license number of fleeting fame.”
Ida Lupino starred in the fourth episode of The Twilight Zone as an aging actress named Barbara Jean Trenton, who has become a bit of a recluse, isolating herself in a room with a movie projector, playing her old films. She was in deep denial of the change she was having because she was getting older.
This episode certainly looks at something that Hollywood has had a reputation for doing to actresses as they age. There is a scene where Barbara Jean was offered a bit part in a film as a mother and she flipped out, insulted. Hollywood was known for treating aging actresses poorly and this spoke to that very detail.
It also felt like it dealt with mental illness in a way. Barbara Jean could not accept the changes that comes with age and how it caused her to become depressed and take an extreme step.
There was a sadness to this episode, including a strong performance by Martin Balsam as Barbara Jean’s friend and confidant Danny Weiss.
“Louis J. Bookman. Age 60ish. Occupation: pitchman. Formerly a fixture of the summer. Formerly a rather minor component to a hot July, but throughout his life, a man beloved by the children, and therefore a most important man. Couldn’t happen you say? Probably not in most places, but it did happen…in the Twilight Zone.“
Episode two of the first season of The Twilight Zone featured that tag above from Rod Serling, the narrator of the series, about a pitchman who was in the business of trying to cheat death.
Mr. Bookman, played by well-known comedic actor Ed Wynn, was approached by a mysterious man, played by Murray Hamilton. That man turned out to be Mr. Death, and Mr. Bookman tried to weasel his way out of his fate. Told he was destined to die in his sleep at midnight, Mr. Bookman took advantage of a loophole to be granted a stay.
However, Mr. Death was forced into making new arrangements and, instead of Mr. Bookman, he was prepared to take young girl Maggie (Dana Dillaway) in his place.
Bookman had been friends with the children in the area and Maggie was especially close, so he was determined to prevent Mr. Death from taking the 8-year old.
“One for the Angels” was another character piece focusing in on Louis Bookman. A man who was used to getting by in his life with his voice, making pitches to everyone around him. However, he was a good man and could not stand the idea that the little girl would be a collateral victim of his avoidance of death. He set out on with his plan to sacrifice himself to save the girl the same way he lived his life… through a pitch for the angels.
This episode was sweet and enjoyable. Having the little girl’s life in the balance gave Lou Bookman a chance to show how wonderful of a man he was, and, despite his enthrallment of Mr. Death by his pitch was a tad weird (I mean, wouldn’t Death be able to already find the best ties available?), things like that happen in the Twilight Zone.
I thought at first that this would devolve into something very dark, as I had read in the graphic novel The Twilight Man, that many episodes of the show were considered dark, this one wound up in an almost heroic manner. Ed Wynn was the heartbeat of the episode and does a great job of creating a man that was ultimately likeable and full of caring.
Welcome to the first post under the new initiative of EYG for the summer, The Daily Zone, which will take a deep dive into the episodes of the EYG Hall of Fame TV series, The Twilight Zone, from the creative mind of writer Rod Serling.
I will be talking about the episodes in detail, so expect that there will be spoilers involved in these posts. If you are mad about a spoiler from a 1959 TV series, then you have been warned.
I will be watching these daily episodes on Amazon Prime where all five seasons of the original series as well as the 2019-20 remake by Jordan Peele exist.
First episode up is episode 1 from 1959, entitled “Where is Everybody.”
The episode kicks off with Earl Holliman’s character walking into a town where there are no people anywhere to be found and the man has no idea who he is. Amnesia, he assumes as he tries actively to find someone who could help him with his plight. With each passing failure at the diner, the police station, movie theater and such, the man becomes increasingly frustrated and agitated.
Eventually the man realized that he had been a part of the Air Force and that lead to the audience having the curtain pulled aside and revealed the truth of what was happening to the man. He ended up desperately pressing a button which was revealed as a ‘panic button’ signaling to the Air Force that the man, who turned out to be Sgt. Mike Ferris, who had spent 484 hours in an isolation chamber in preparation for a trip to the moon.
Ferris’s mind had created the delusion of the empty town where he seemed to be the last man alive as a way to deal with the loneliness and the isolation he was experiencing. The hallucination was brought about by sensory deprivation.
To be honest, this episode did not include much science fiction. It was more of a psychological study, dealing with the effects of loneliness and isolation on the mind of human beings. The idea of space travel was the little bit of sci-fi in the episode and that came at the very end. The end was sudden and felt almost tacked on. Watching Earl Holliman decent into anxiety over the lack of human contact and his desperation to find anyone to interact with was interesting. Admittedly, the ending was not as interesting as what preceded it.
“You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!
You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ‘The Twilight Zone’.” -ROD SERLING
Welcome to The Daily Zone. This is one of the summer’s big initiatives at EYG, along with the second annual June Swoon. This will fall under the TV G[eek] category and it will be a deep dive into the episodes of the EYG Hall of Fame member, the TV show The Twilight Zone.
This idea formed after I completed reading a graphic novel that I had recently purchased b Koren Shadmi entitled The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television. It was a fascinating read about the life and times of the creator of the classic TV series that ran from 1959-1964.
The Twilight Zone was an anthology series where every episode dealt with a new story and different characters. It was a science fiction series despite Rod Serling not being an expert in the genre. According to The Twilight Man graphic novel, Serling decided on science fiction because much of what he was trying to do was being censored because it was too current and controversial. Being able to set the story in a sci-fi world, he found he could get away with the concepts without the censorship that he fought against for much of his career.
With summer vacation approaching, I knew I had some time available for something new. Even with the June Swoon 2 already planned, I figured that there would still be plenty of time to start up what I called The Daily Zone.
Every day, starting today, I will watch at least one episode of the original Twilight Zone and do a write up on them. There may be several episodes on each post, to save writing. During the summer months, I anticipate watching several episodes in a single day. There were five seasons and 156 episodes of the series, which ran about a half hour each. All of the seasons are currently available on Amazon Prime. There is also a 2019-2020 series from producer Jordan Peele which I may include in the Daily Zone when I work my way through the original series from Rod Serling.
I am not sure if I am setting a time frame for completion of this project. I would ideally be done before school resumes in mid-August, but I have not sat down and planned that out.
I have seen a few episodes of the series but I have not seen very many. The graphic novel made me intrigued to see the work of Rod Serling.
I may yet revisit this summer the 1983 film, Twilight Zone: The Movie in the Doc Classic Movies Reviewed section of the site. I know some of the sections of that film were remakes of the series. I have seen that film, but it has been a very long time.
The Twilight Zone is a member of the EYG Hall of Fame, being inducted in the Class of 2010.
The rankings of each episode will fall into the following five categories.
