The Couch Potato Presents: Trollheart Falls Into "The Twilight Zone"

[Trollheart]

Without question one of the first shows to bring science fiction into the mainstream on television, The Twilight Zone is now recognised as one of the most popular and well-written anthology shows ever. Creator Rod Serling often used the stories - set in space, the future, alternate realities or sometimes just the plain old present - to moralise, teach, educate and even to warn. Some of the stories were so good they have passed into the general human consciousness, some were, well, not quite so good. The theme tune to the show has become a byword for whenever something spooky or weird happens, and the phrase has been referenced in songs by, among others, Iron Maiden and Golden Earring.

In this journal, I'm going to go through the series episode by episode, writing synopses and them discussing them in my usual way. I'll be asking which ones are the good ones, which the great, and which ones fail to measure up? I'll also be comparing the original 1950s series to its many reworkings, the last of which at the time of writing was  2020, and to my mind fell woefully short of the kind of quality we've come to expect from this show over nearly seventy years now. I'll also compare within series - was season one of the original better or worse than season five, and so on. Comments and debate as usual welcomed.



Original Series (1959-1964)


Title: "Where is Everybody?"
Original transmission date:October 2 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Robert Stevens
Starring:
Earl Holliman as Mike Ferris
James Gregory as General
Garry Walberg as Colonel
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Loneliness, isolation, insanity
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:


Serling's Opening Monologue

Every episode begins with a short comment by Rod Serling, either advising what is about to happen, giving clues to the plot or expounding on the theme in what may or may not be an abstract way. As this is the first ever episode, this opening monologue is missing, but from the next episode on, as far as I know without exception, each episode will have such a lead-in.

A man walks into a cafe where there is loud music blaring from a jukebox, but when he calls behind the counter for service nobody answers. He turns the music down but still nobody arrives to serve him, so after calling a few times he vaults over the counter and goes to see... nobody there. He looks back from the kitchen and sees a pot of coffee boiling, so he goes to take a cup and knocks down a watch, the glass of which shatters, the time stopped at 6:15, but whether this is AM or PM is not made clear. Talking to himself now, he admits he has a bit of a problem, in that he can't remember who he is, and on entering the cafe he had asked what the town was, but having received no response he is none the wiser.

Leaving the empty cafe he heads on down the road till he reaches the nameless town, but it is as deserted as the diner. Everything looks good and proper, all lawns mowed, no sign of any violence or disaster, but not a soul to be seen. A church bell peals, its lonely tones echoing across the roads, and he feels even more isolated, until he sees, finally, a figure, a person, a woman sitting in a car. He approaches her, careful not to spook her, but when he gets close enough he can see she is a mannequin, a dummy. Across the road, a telephone starts ringing but when he gets to the phone box the line is dead. So he tries calling the operator, but only gets a recording. When he tries to get out it seems he's locked in, but it's just that the door is one of those old concertina-type ones, and you have to kind of fold it to open it, whereas he's just pushing against and rattling it.

Once he finds his way out, he goes into the police station, which is as deserted as everywhere else, but here he does find a half-smoked (and still smoking) cigar, so he knows now that he is not alone. Somewhere in this crazy town, someone is watching him, playing with him, observing him, manipulating him. And he aims to find out who that is and what they're playing at, to use the parlance of the time. In one of the cells he finds running water and evidence someone has been shaving, or was in the middle of it when they suddenly left. He not unsurprisingly thinks he's dreaming and tries to force himself to wake up, but to no avail.

When night falls lights come on in the buildings, and he's drawn towards a cinema which is showing a movie about the US Air Force. This triggers something in his memory, and he remembers that he too is in the Air Force. It's not much but it's something, something to hang on to, something that might lead to his discovering his actual identity. The cinema is of course empty, but as he sits down a movie begins showing a B-29 flying, and realising that someone must be operating the projector (this is 1959 remember) he runs up to the booth, but there's nobody there. Running back down the stairs he crashes into a mirror, then, stunned, runs outside and just breaks down completely.

Now we see a group of people watching him from an office, all in military uniform. We can see that the picture they're watching shows a man hooked up to electrodes, and with a resigned look one of the men orders the release of "the subject". As these orders are carried out, the others debate the success or otherwise of the experiment. We see that this was all a test, an attempt to acclimatise a human being, a prospective astronaut, to the desperate loneliness of space, and that everything the pilot saw was manufactured by his own rambling brain. Eventually it became too much and he snapped. But they're getting closer. Soon, it will be for real.

Serling's closing monologue

Each episode also ends with Serling speaking a monologue, usually tied to and sometimes, though not always, offering an explanation of the story. His closing monologue usually ends with a direct reference to the show, such as "This could only happen in... The Twilight Zone."

The barrier of loneliness: The palpable, desperate need of the human animal to be with his fellow man. Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in The Twilight Zone.


The Resolution

Here's where I'll be commenting on whether the twist was good, whether the story concluded well, whether or not the resolution was believable and fit in with the story line. This first one dovetails nicely. Of course they could have gone with the obvious ending of the guy being in an asylum, or being studied by aliens, or even just having a dream. But I think Serling here tapped into the almost feverish sense of something great being on the horizon, with talk of the moon landings still a decade away but closer than before, man on the cusp of taking his first tentative steps out into space. Of course, back then he wouldn't have known that the moon missions would end up being mostly a colossal waste of time, money and resources, that we'd do nothing with the discoveries we made, and that in the end, our single satellite would turn out to be nothing more exciting than a big lump of dead rock.

But while authors had written and would continue to write about brave space adventurers plying the trackless depths of the interstellar deep, few if any would have grappled with the intrinsic problem of loneliness and isolation that comes with it. Serling had the foresight - he may not have been the only one but at least he was thinking about it - to consider the massive burden man would carry with him when he went up into space. Certainly, in reality it turned out that no single man ever went into space alone - it was always a crew, NASA being perhaps mindful indeed of the danger of depriving its astronauts of human companionship - but even with three or four men on the vessel, it could still be a struggle. Deprived of friends and family, loved ones and familiar people, who might not crack? In Serling's story, it's akin to being locked in solitary for - here the colonel says over 484 hours, that's roughly 20 days - a hell of a long time, and in addition being out in the unforgiving vast reaches of space. A very long way from home.

I'm sure NASA probably did conduct stress tests of this nature, or similar, with their astronauts before allowing them to blast off from the Earth and head out into the remote dark. It's a scary place out there, and you've got to be able to face it.

The Moral

Space can be a lonely place, so you had better be ready to spend a lot of time with yourself if you plan heading out there.

Questions and, sometimes, Answers


What about....?

The broken watch at the beginning? That was a clue; we see it right at the end, a gauge or clock in the booth in which the guy has been sealed. It's broken because he's banged his head against it in his frustration, and yes, it shows 6:15.

The telephone ringing? That's never explained, though you could imagine it's his desire for companionship, contact, the desperate need to know that there is at least one person out there besides him.

The cigar? Presumably the same; there is nobody else in the town, nobody watching him, and nobody running the film, because everything has been constructed inside his mind. It doesn't exist at all.

I do wonder why, when he hears the church bells (twice) he never thinks to go into it? If the bell is ringing, there's surely a half-decent chance there's a service on, so would be not be likely to find people there if anywhere? But he never goes near it.

The interrupted shaving? Hmm. Well it might be a metaphor in his mind for when he says "I never actually woke up this morning", finding himself instead on the road into the town created by his mind. Perhaps it's symbolic of something he knows he should have had to do, but could not remember having done.

Those clever little touches

When he runs down the stairs from the projection booth and runs into a mirror, the symbolism couldn't be clearer. He's crashing into his own self, the only thing that shares the booth with him, and his personality, his very sanity, is in danger of shattering with that glass. It also harks back to an earlier scene where, making an ice cream, he sees himself in a mirror and begins talking to himself, another indicator of his fracturing sanity.

In the shop, he finds a rack of books all titled The Last Man on Earth, 1959. This is especially clever, as it skews the viewer's thoughts in the direction that this may all be real, that he may in fact be the last man left living on the planet.

At the very end, he looks up to the moon and says "we'll be up there soon." That was 1959. Ten short years later Neil Armstrong was making his "one small step for man".


Themes

The main theme explored here is of course loneliness brought on by isolation, similar to a man being placed in solitary confinement, or living on a desert island alone for some time. The mind, desperate for company and rationality, begins to play tricks, inventing people and places, but often these constructs lack cohesion and so may not make much sense, such as empty cinemas, a cigar left in an ashtray when nobody is there, a mannequin sitting in a car, a jukebox playing in a deserted cafe. They're like badly-made cinema sets, liable to fall down at any moment and reveal the stark bare nothingness behind them.

The human animal needs companionship. This much is known, which is why imprisonment in solitary is one of the most feared of all punishments for the incarcerated. No matter how bad things are, there are others to talk to, listen to, argue with, laugh with, cry with or even fear. But being alone is one of the hardest things for any man or woman to contemplate. This may be why some people (myself included) tend to talk to themselves when alone, as if we're trying to make believe there's another person there with us.

In the episode, the pilot is desperate to find other living beings. Even just to sit with others and if not talk, just listen to them, but on his mission to the moon he will be utterly alone (as Serling saw it) and will have to be ready for that. His mounting terror and frustration, culminating in a nervous breakdown, shows that he is far from that place yet.

Insanity is the other theme. As it becomes increasingly apparent that he is alone, the pilot, trying to figure it out, slowly edges towards madness. This can't be happening, therefore the only possible explanation is that he has lost his mind. In the end, ironically, this is pretty much what happens.

[Trollheart]

Title: "One For the Angels"
Original transmission date: October 9 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Robert Parrish
Starring:
Ed Wynn as Lewis J. "Lew" Bookman
Murray Hamilton as Mr. Death
Dana Dillaway as Maggie Polanski
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Arrogance and sacrifice
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

Street scene: summer, the present. Man on the sidewalk named Lew Bookman, sixtyish, occupation: pitchman. Lew Bookman, a fixture of the summer, a rather minor component to a hot July; a nondescript, commonplace little man to whom life is a treadmill, built out of sidewalks. But in just a moment Lew Bookman will have to concern himself with survival, because as of three o'clock this hot July afternoon, he'll be stalked by Mr. Death.

Lew Bookman, as described above, a nobody who scratches a meagre living trying to sell knick knacks, cheap toys and items from a collapsible stall is interviewed by a man in a dark suit who seems very interested in him. Turns out he's Death, and our Mr. Bookman is due to shuffle off this mortal coil at midnight. Trying to forestall his "departure", as "Mister Death" - yeah, that's what he calls him, give me a break - refers to his imminent demise, Bookman tells him that he's always wanted to do the perfect pitch - one for the angels. Intrigued, Death agrees. But Bookman believes he has fooled Death, intending, having gained the stay of execution, as it were, never to pitch again, and so not have to die.

Death is not happy. He tells Bookman that there will be consequences, and indeed there are. Maggie, a little child who lives in his building, is run over, and Death shows Bookman that if he thinks he's so smart, trying to cheat him, he'll find he doesn't know who he's messing with. When it becomes clear that Maggie can see Death - and Death has informed him that only those who are to die can see him - Bookman realises what he has done. He tries to go back on the deal, offer himself in Maggie's stead, but that ship has sailed.

When he is told by Death that he has to be in Maggie's room at precisely midnight, Bookman delays him by, well, pitching for the angels. At the end of his pitch he offers himself as a servant to Death, and that's it really: he interests Death so much in his stock that the Reaper forgets about Maggie and misses his appointment. The girl will live, and Bookman is happy to go with Death in her place.

Serling's closing monologue

Lewis J. Bookman, age sixtyish, 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.

The Resolution

One word: ridiculous. How anyone could believe that the personification of death would be remotely interested in such mundane items as ties, ribbon and string, certainly to the extent that he would neglect his charge and forget the time, is unthinkable.

The Moral

The only one I can think of is when it's your time to go, it's your time to go. Oh, and don't drink seven bottles of Johnnie Walker Black before trying to write, Rod!

Those clever little touches

One of the first things we see - almost the first - on Bookman's tray is a toy Robbie the Robot, the movie that would go on to gain a cult following and be hailed as one of the most important science fiction films of all time, Forbidden Planet, having been released a mere three years previously.

Bookman asks Mr. Death (really? ) if he is a census taker? In a way, yes he is: the ultimate census taker.


Questions, and Sometimes, Answers

Only one really: how could a writer of Serling's calibre write such unadulterated crap? Also, considering he too was pitching his series, how could he expect that this could stand as a second episode, after the far superior pilot? And how did the series not get cancelled (thankfully) when the execs saw this? Okay that's three questions: wanna fight about it?

Themes

Although Bookman is seen as a fairly sympathetic, even pathetic man, we soon learn that he is devious and cunning, as he outwits Mr. Death by fooling him into allowing an extension to his intended date of death and then cites his intention to do all he can to avoid meeting the terms of the contract. It's pretty arrogant of him; he thinks he's really smart and clever, but Mr. Death has the last laugh when he then substitutes the young Maggie to go in his stead, and Bookman has to back down. By now though it is too late and so we see his skills as a pitchman (look, just let me get through this, okay? It's painful enough as it is) used to delay Mr. Death and cause him to miss his appointment to take Maggie, then sacrifice himself, which kind of is no real sacrifice as he was slated to go anyway. One would think that, with his failure to reap Maggie, the contract would have reverted back to Bookman? Maybe not, but I think it might have done.

Anyway, that's all the time I wish to spend on this blight on an otherwise superb series. Consign it to the trash bin of history, and let's move on.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Mr. Denton on Doomsday"
Original transmission date: October 16 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Allen Reisner
Starring:

Dan Duryea as Al Denton
Martin Landau as Dan Hotaling
Jeanne Cooper as Liz Smith
Doug McClure as Pete Grant
Malcolm Atterby as Henry J. Fate
Ken Lynch as Charlie
Bill Erwin as Man in Bar

Setting: Earth
Timeframe: The Old West, probably around late nineteenth century
Theme(s): Redemption, courage, pacifism, alcoholism
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:


Serling's opening monologue

Portrait of a town drunk, named Al Denton. This is a man who has begun his dying early: a long, agonising route through a maze of bottles. Al Denton, who would probably give an arm or a leg or a part of his soul to have another chance, to be able to rise up and shake the dirt from his body, and the bad dreams that infest his consciousness.  [The camera pans up to a figure standing before a stagecoach]  In the parlance of the times, this is a pedlar: a rather fanciful-looking little man in a black frock coat. [A revolver mysteriously appears on the ground next to Denton] And this is the third principal character of our story. Its function? Perhaps to give Mr. Al Denton his second chance.



Al Denton, town drunk and butt of all jokes, finds a gun on the street. He used to be a gunfighter, but now he's the favourite whipping boy of the local cowboy gang. When their leader jokingly challenges him to a draw, Denton easily beats him although he seems to have no idea what he's doing, as if the gun is firing by itself. Nevertheless, suddenly he's respected and more to the point, finds new respect for himself. His joy is short-lived though, as he remembers how, when he was a gunslinger, every hot shot in the territory wanted to prove they could beat him. All were killed, and now he knows it's only a matter of time before it all starts up again.

Sure enough, it's no time at all before a cowboy called Pete Clark issues a challenge, and seeing that he still can't shoot like he used to, Denton decides to skip town. As he does though he runs into the pedlar mentioned in the intro (whose name just happens to be Henry J. Fate!) who gives him a potion which, he says, will make him the greatest marksman ever - for ten seconds. Armed with this new weapon, Denton decides to stay and face his rival.

However, when the challenger arrives, and Denton drinks his elixir, Grant does, too, and they can both see now that they are evenly matched, and when they fire, each hits the hand of the other, rendering his opposite number no longer able to wield a gun. Having proven his courage, and skill, to the town, Denton no longer has to worry about young guns coming in to challenge him, as the word will go out that he is not able to answer any, but that he proved himself. He can now look forward to a long peaceful life, lived with honour.


Serling's closing monologue

Mr. Henry Fate, dealer in utensils and pots and pans, liniments and potions. A fanciful little man in a black frock coat who can help a man climbing out of a pit—or another man from falling into one. Because, you see, fate can work that way, in the Twilight Zone.


The Resolution

Very clever. Rather than just make Denton fast enough to put Grant down, Fate (yeah) gives both of them the liquid, matching them and therefore allowing each to cripple the hand of the other, at least temporarily, but ensuring neither will use a gun again. Denton gets his redemption, while at the same time Grant is given the chance not to make the same mistakes his opponent has.


The Moral

I guess there are two: there's always the possibility of a second chance, and you don't have to answer every argument with violence and death.


Those clever little touches

As they await the arrival of Pete Grant, the camera zooms in on the clock, heading towards 10 pm. It's very similar to what happens in the classic western, High Noon, though of course in that case it's midday the clock is counting down to.

The saloon is called The Dalton Saloon, presumably a tip of the hat to the Dalton Gang, one of the legendary cowboy outfits of the Old West.


And isn't that...?


This is the first, but by no means the last of the episodes to feature either the debut performances of, or cameos by future stars.


Martin Landau (1928-2017)

The leader of the cowboy gang who torment Denton at the beginning, and who is humiliated by the drunk as soon as he finds the gun. Landau has only really a small part in this, but would go on to become famous as Commander Koenig in Gerry Anderson's Space: 1999 and also star in Mission: Impossible, working alongside Cary Grant in the classic Hitchcock movie North by Northwest, as well as a host of other credits. He passed away in 2017.



Doug  McClure (1935-1995)

Famous for an assortment of B-movie credits as well as series such as The Virginian. This would have been one of his early roles, he only 24 at the time. McClure passed on in 1995, and was famously parodied as Troy McClure in The Simpsons.



Jeanne Cooper (1928-2013)

Famous (apparently) for her role as Katherine in the long-running American TV Soap The Young and the Restless, Cooper died in 2013.


Themes

Courage plays a large part here, initially in its absence, as Denton allows himself to be used by the cruel cowboy gang, the butt of their humour, and then later, when he prepares himself to face his death. Courage of a different sort is displayed by Grant, who rides into town in a cloud of youthful exuberance, eager to prove himself, but not so sure of himself that he doesn't take the help offered by Henry J. Fate.

Redemption of course looms large in the foreground, as Denton rediscovers his prowess with a gun but almost immediately finds it the curse it once was, yet is offered a way out by Fate and ends up being able to retain his honour and his life, and get a second chance, presumably with Liz. Then there's alcoholism, with Denton having sunk into the abyss of drunkenness thanks to his being responsible for so many deaths, one of which was a kid of sixteen. Every western town seemed to have a town drunk, and usually they were comedic figures, but here Serling paints Denton in shades of tragedy and pity; a man who once had it all has fallen so far he can't fall lower. It's notable that once he regains his gunfighting skills Denton no longer needs the bottle, nor does he want it.

And finally, there's pacifism. Odd, perhaps, in an episode set in the Wild West, but we learn that all Denton wants is to have a peaceful life. He has lived as a gunfighter and no longer wishes to, so when his hand is hurt and he can no longer hold a gun he is delighted, and so much more so for Grant, who, young and impressionable, would surely have gone on to make the mistakes Denton had made, or be killed young, had Fate not stepped in.

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine"
Original transmission date: October 23 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Mitchell Leisen
Starring:
Ida Lupino as Barbara Jane Trenton
Martin Balsam as Danny Weiss
Jerome Cowan as Jerry
Ted de Corsia as Marty Sall
Alice Frost as Sally

Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Isolation/seclusion; wishing for the past
Parodied? Yes, at the very least in the American Dad episode "A Star is Reborn"
Rating:


Serling's opening monologue

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.


A woman sits in a room alone watching films, films of herself. She is an actress, or was: her time has now long passed, her best years behind her, and she is reliving her past glories as bitterness twists her up inside. Barbara's becoming increasingly reclusive and retreating more from reality, trying to regain her past, unwilling to face the world. When Danny, her agent comes to try to coax her out of the room she is initially resistant, until he breaks the news that he has a part for her to play, and suddenly visions of her golden years come flooding back, and she is happy to leave the room.

However, it turns out that the part is not what she was expecting. She refuses to see that she has grown older, that the world has moved on and nobody wants her anymore. She can't "demand" the roles she wants, as she says herself, and anything she does get is going to be for the more mature woman. She refuses the part, rushes home, locks herself in again, wishing herself back in the 1930s. Danny tries to shake her into reality by having one of her co-stars call by, and at first she is excited, as she hasn't seen him in twenty years, but Gerry is older now, and she almost doesn't recognise him. Stupidly, when told he was coming, she had pictured him as he had been in the movies in which she starred with him. It's a big shock, but does the reverse of what Danny had hoped, and sends her scurrying back into her room, eager to avoid the present and the fact that she too has grown old.

When the maid comes to bring her coffee, she can't find her, and then looks up at the screen and screams. A while later Danny arrives, confirming that Barbara is nowhere to be found. Reluctantly, he turns on the projector, and is amazed to see Barbara on the screen, as she is now, talking to all her old friends (as they were then, and not as characters but as the actors and actresses they were). He calls to her and she responds, coming to the screen, smiles, blows him a kiss and turns away. The film ends. Danny picks up the scarf she threw to him, from the screen, which is now at his feet, and smiles.

Serling's closing monologue

To the wishes that come true, to the strange, mystic strength of the human animal, who can take a wishful dream and give it a dimension of its own. To Barbara Jean Trenton, movie queen of another era, who has changed the blank tomb of an empty projection screen into a private world. It can happen in the Twilight Zone.


The Resolution

Again, highly ridiculous. Barbara, unable to cope with her fading fame in the real world, simply "wishes" herself into the screen. It's absolute nonsense. At least if she had wished herself into one of her old movies, with no sign of her in the house and one of the old films perhaps betraying a wink or a smile not there originally, to hint at the possibility that she had somehow managed to transfer into the film, but here, she's shown in her own house but in the 1930s, surrounded by all her friends, actors who have passed on. It's, as Burt Reynolds once said on The Simpsons, garbage.

The Moral

A very poor one I feel. If you want to live in the past, and can't face the future, why then just wish really hard and you'll be back in the past for which you crave. Never mind cowboying up and facing reality!

Those clever little touches

I don't know if it's intentional, but when Danny talks of Barbara's room, he says it's "dark, damp and full of cobwebs". And she's sitting there, alone, in the dark, trying to relive the past or at least blot out the present. Reminds me of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

Iconic?

Although Serling's scripts are mostly original, there are one or two episodes which seem to draw from previous writings, either on television or on film, and of course it often goes the other way too, as later writers copied, used or built on his ideas. This isn't the same, of course, as parodying the episode or parts of it, which is why this is in its own section.

This episode draws heavily on two movies of the 1950s, one totally indeed iconic, Sunset Boulevard, and the other perhaps lesser so, Bette Davis's The Star.

And isn't that...?


Ida Lupino (1918-1995)

She plays the fading actress. Ida Lupino was a film maker in Hollywood at a time when the industry was almost completely male-dominated. She is acknowledged as one of the finest filmmakers of her age, and also starred in films and on television.


Martin Balsam (1919-1996)

How odd! Born one year after Lupino and died one year after her too! Balsam was a Hollywood actor who appeared in three iconic movies - Pyscho, Breakfast at Tiffany's and the original Cape Fear. He was also originally cast as the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey but was rejected by Kubrick for sounding "too American".

Themes

Basically we have two: the self-imposed seclusion by Barbara of herself from the rest of the world, living in her own darkened little picture house, unwilling to accept that she is older and that the world has changed. There's an almost admirable, Trumplike quality to Barbara's refusal to accept reality, and in the end, it seems, she gets her wish. There's a definite theme of loneliness here too, as Barbara cuts herself off from her old friends and co-stars, who are either dead or have grown too old (she does not see herself as old, but still as she appears on the screen in her old movies, and hates to be reminded of the passage of years) and becomes the sole inhabitant of her own world. Like a vampire hiding from the sun, she keeps the curtains drawn and the windows closed, living in a fantasy land where time never moves on, nothing changes, but in this world she is completely alone, and on some level she knows this, even though she resists it.

The other real theme is one of wishing for and living in the past. All Barbara wants is for it to be the 1930s again, when people were more sophisticated, kinder, more elegant. She abhors the "new rock and roll" and everything the fifties (verging into the sixties) brings with it. She's happy to live on - and literally in - past glories, rather than face the fact that the world has changed, and she needs to change with it.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Walking Distance"
Original transmission date: October 30 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Robert Stevens
Starring: Gig Young as Martin Sloan
Frank Overton as Robert Sloan
Irene Tedrow as Mrs. Sloan
Michael Montgomery as Tweenage Martin
Ron Howard as Wilcox Boy
Byron Foulger as Charlie
Sheridan Comerate as Gas Station Attendant
Joseph Corey as Soda Jerk
Buzz Martin as Boy with Car
Nan Peterson as Woman in Park
Pat O'Malley as Mr. Wilson

Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Childhood, innocence, longing for the past, pressure of modern life
Parodied? Oh I'm sure it has been, many times, but no clear example springs to mind.
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

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.

Leaving his car in for a service at a gas station, an executive realises he's stopped near the town he grew up in, and since the service is going to take about an hour, he decides to walk into town, to see how things have changed. Turns out they haven't. He can still get his favourite ice cream - at the price he used to pay as a kid - and the boss of the ice cream soda parlour or whatever the damn hell you Americans call those things - soda fountains? - well whatever - is still alive when he should be long dead (though the businessman does not see this; it happens after he leaves the shop). Heading into town, the executive, Martin Sloan, meets a kid, but he gets spooked when he tells him his name, saying he knows Marty Sloan and he (the executive) is not him.

Things take a weirder turn (I know; you and I know where this is going, but let's just run with it as if we don't, eh?) when he meets the so-called Martin Sloan, and recognises him as himself. Intrigued (but perhaps not quite getting it right away) he goes to his old house, and meets his mother and father, as they were when he was eleven years old. They of course don't recognise him, grown now into a man, and indeed think he's mad when he tries to tell them who he is, and slam the door in his face. After a second, similarly unsuccessful attempt to convince his parents of who he is, Sloan decides it's more important to use this god-given opportunity to right his past than to establish his identity here, which nobody will believe anyway.

He goes to talk to his younger self on the merry-go-round, but there's an accident when past Martin runs from future Martin and falls. Later, his father comes to see him, saying he has looked in his wallet and the evidence there seems to confirm that he is who he says he is. Even if the father does not understand how it's happened, it has. He tells future Martin he has to leave and he does. When he returns to the soda thing, it's all modernised (back to how it should be) and things cost 1959 prices. The old owner is indeed dead, and he's told the merry-go-round he just rode on was condemned and torn down twenty years ago. He heads back for New York, in a sober silence, carrying now the inherited limp he got when he caused himself to fall off the fairground ride.

Serling's closing monologue

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men, perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too, because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

There really isn't one. Sloan discovers that he doesn't belong here and kind of bogs off without doing anything, other than perhaps gaining a new perspective on adulthood. And a new limp.

The Moral

I expect it can be interpreted two ways: either "you can't go back home" or "be happy with what you have." Either way, I personally find it weak.

Iconic?

You'd have to say yes. I don't know if this was the first story wherein someone is magically transported back to their childhood (more than likely not) but it certainly set the template for a slew of science fiction adaptations, and would also crop up periodically in this series again and again. To some lesser degree, its themes tie in to time travel movies such as Back to the Future and series like Future Man.

And isn't that...?


Ron Howard (1954 - )
The small boy Sloan meets when he first enters Homewood is played by Howard (surely if not his first acting part, one of the first?) who came to fame as Richie Cunninham in the seminal series Happy Days, also the movie American Graffiti, and who went on to become a very successful movie producer.

Personal notes

I find it odd that this is rated so highly, ninth best episode of the series according to Time Magazine. For me, it's pretty empty; an episode that promises much and leads up to... nothing. Sloan does nothing while he's "back home" other than weakly call after his younger self to cherish these childish years (yeah, great advice pal); he changes nothing and contributes nothing. In fact, if you want to balance it on a scale of good to bad, he goes in the opposite direction, collecting for himself a dodgy leg along the way and scaring the **** out of everyone. In the end he kind of shrugs and heads off. Would not be one of my favourites, that's for sure. Even Serling himself admitted it showed up his inexperience as a writer, and I agree.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

You have to laugh at the innocence of the time though. Consider today, a man coming into a small town and sitting down beside a small boy to strike up a conversation. Or pursuing another young boy on the roundabout yelling "I'm not going to hurt you!" Seems to me he would be seeing the inside of a jail cell pretty damn quick!

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

Why did his father so readily accept the rather mind-blowing premise of his son having come back from the future? All he saw was some printed money and a licence that could have been manufactured in some joke shop. But this is all it takes to convince him that a near impossibility is in fact the truth?

Sloan talks about the roundabout. Don't Americans call them carousels?

Themes

One which will be retread often in this series is the idea of returning to or reliving your childhood, going back to the place you grew up in and somehow magically finding that nothing has changed, often meeting your  younger self. The theme of pressure is there too, pressure from a high-paid and stressful job, the enormous burden the "modern" world puts on those who want to make it, and what is sacrificed in attaining that goal. The innocence of youth is presented starkly contrasting with the reality of adulthood, and the idea of perhaps re-examining your life.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Escape Clause"
Original transmission date: November 6 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Mitchell Leisen
Starring: David Wayne as Walter Bedeker
Thomas Gomez as Mr. Cadwallader
Virginia Christine as Ethel Bedeker
Dick Wilson as insurance man #1 (Jack)
Joe Flynn as insurance man #2 (Steve)
Wendell Holmes as Bedeker's lawyer
Raymond Bailey as Bedeker's doctor

Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Greed and hubris; eternal life; the devil; trickery
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

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?

Walter Bedecker is a sick man. In his mind only. He thinks/wishes he is dying, but in reality he's perfectly healthy, as several - mostly unnecessary - visits from the doctor have shown. He's basically a hypochondriac who worries about every ache and pain, every sneeze and sniffle, and thinks he has everything from measles and whooping cough to bubonic plague. He is, in short, a pain in the arse. His is very rude to and unappreciative of his long-suffering wife, who leaves him to rest after a particularly snippy argument.

Suddenly, a man appears in the bedroom. He introduces himself as Cadwallader, and offers Bedecker a bargain: immortality and invulnerability  in exchange for his soul. Cadwallader is of course the Devil, and Bedecker realises this, but the deal is too sweet, and once he has made some adjustments (such as never ageing) Cadwallader shows him his escape clause, which allows him, if he ever gets tired of living, to call the Father of Lies to release him, whereupon, of course, his soul becomes the property of Hell. Happy with the contract, Bedecker signs.

He immediately tries out his powers, and begins to use them for scamming every insurance company he can: jumping in front of trains, buses, running into burning buildings and claiming for damages. But soon it becomes apparent the novelty is wearing off. When you can't be hurt, can't die, where's the thrill in life? Even the least of us get the tiniest frisson from, say, walking down a deserted street at night or crossing against traffic. When the possibility, however remote, exists that you might hurt or even kill yourself, there's interest, there's danger, there's excitement.

There's fear.

But not for our Walter. Oh no. Everything bores him now, and once again he's moaning. But he's still the same selfish, heartless scumbag he was before the deal. When he accidentally knocks his wife off the roof of their apartment building and she falls to her death, he doesn't even try to save her, even though he could easily. He just shrugs, probably envies her the final rush, the terror, the disbelief as her young life comes to an end. Eventually he considers turning himself in, so that he can try out the electric chair, and so he does. Unfortunately for him, his guilty verdict does not bring in a sentence of death, but life imprisonment. And back in 1959, life meant life! With no option left, he calls up Cadwallader and exercises his escape clause, suffering and dying from a heart attack.

Serling's closing monologue

There's a saying, "Every man is put on Earth condemned to die, time and method of execution unknown." Perhaps this is as it should be. Case in point: Walter Bedeker, lately deceased. A little man with such a yen to live. Beaten by the devil, by his own boredom, and by the scheme of things in this, the Twilight Zone.


The Resolution

Clever. I like it. I couldn't see it myself, but yes, eternity spent behind bars would have been a fitting end for this loser. It's kind of a pity that the Devil didn't renege on the contract and leave him there, or maybe say the decision might be tied up in committee or appeals procedure for a few hundred years. But well handled, yes.

The Moral

No matter how clever you think you are, there's always someone cleverer, and you may think you have all the bases covered, but the Devil always finds a way to get his man.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

When the doctor leaves Bedecker's bedroom and his wife follows the doctor out, why does she leave Bedecker's bedroom door open, only for him to call after her and whine he's cold? Why not close it, knowing he was going to raise a fuss, and particularly if she believes - incorrectly - that her husband is sick?

Oops!

Being the nitpicker I am, here's where I'll point out any errors I find in episodes.

It's being a prick I know but who cares? The actor playing Bedecker, David Wayne, gets one line wrong when he compares man's life to that of the world. Instead of saying microscopic he says microscropic. There: I told you I was a bastard, didn't I?

I would also classify Cadwallader's contention that "five or ten thousand years is not much; the world will go on ad infinitum" as inaccurate and wrong. The world will not go on forever. In a matter of a few billion years the sun will cool and go out and die, and long before that the Earth will be a barren rock. Had he said "life will go on" or "man will go on", then maybe: Man may very well escape into space before his home planet dies, but that insignificant ball of mud spinning in the cosmos will not be spinning till the end of time, far from it.

You'd also have to point to the fact that, on Cadwallader's departure, the contract having been signed and stamped, Bedecker says "Everything seems to be in order" but does not bother to read the contract. How does he know everything is in order?


Personal notes

This is the first in what you might term "lighter" stories in the series. These were usually characterised by upbeat, whimsical music, pretty crazy scenarios, mad names and trippy endings. I imagine they were written, or chosen, to balance out the darker stories, of which there were certainly many. This could have been quite a dark episode - and in some ways, it is - but the gleeful malice exhibited by Bedeker, the cherubic smile of Cadwallader, and the casual disregard for such things as the death of the protagonist's wife all serve to make us take this one with a larger grainer of salt than is usually required.

Stories about deals with the Devil are hardly new. You can go back hundreds of years for tales of souls exchanged for money, power, women, or anything else, so even in 1959 the challenge would have been to put a twist on a very old story. Serling manages better than he doesn't, casting a fat, jolly old man in the role (which he will do again) and making him hardly scary, and even quite generous in the terms of the contract he offers Bedecker. Of course, as in all such stories, the moral is "if you're going to sup with the Devil use a long spoon", for his ways are wily and he knows all the tricks, and like stories of wishes granted by genii, they never turn out well.

It's a decent twist, as referred to above, and I also like when Bedecker asks Cadwallader how he got into his room the Devil replies that he has always been there, intimating that evil has been in the nasty hypochondriac's heart for a very long time, just waiting for the right time to show itself and make its move. I like, too, how Bedecker, thinking he is so smart and has covered all his bases, still gets tricked into giving up immortality, and after a very short time too. He could have used his power for good - going into burning buildings, for example, not for the insurance money but to save people - and he might have not had to put himself in the position he ended up in, but he didn't think along those lines.

It's also poetic justice how he isn't forced or tricked into jail. He smugly and arrogantly places himself in that position, believing nothing can harm him, but unaware that his under-appreciated lawyer is working hard to have his sentence commuted, the worst possible outcome for him. Of course, given that he is invulnerable, I suppose you could say he could punch his way out of the cell without damaging his hands, and just go on his way, but he would be a fugitive.

Forever.

Themes

On the face of it, a comedic episode but with a dark side (Bedecker's wife does after all die, an innocent) with a very serious and timeless message: no matter what you do, you can't outsmart the devil. Stories of immortality are as old as, well, the idea of immortality, and everyone in them thinks he can cheat the devil, or whoever is offering eternal life. They're always wrong. Just ask Dr. Faust. Greed is a recurring theme in many episodes as the series goes on; people trying to get all they can out of life regardless of what it costs them or others. And of course man;s hubris always leads him down a dark and slippery path, running faster and faster down those slick stairs till he loses his balance and falls.

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Lonely"
Original transmission date: November 13 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Jack Smight
Starring:Jack Warden as James A. Corry
Jean Marsh as Alicia
John Dehner as Allenby
Ted Knight as Adams
James Turley as Carstairs


Setting: Unnamed asteroid
Timeframe: Unknown, but the future, as there is space travel and also there are prisons in space
Theme(s): Loneliness, companionship, artificial intelligence, punishment for crime, isolation
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

Witness if you will, a dungeon, made out of mountains, salt flats, and sand that stretch to infinity. The dungeon has an inmate: James A. Corry. And this is his residence: a metal shack. An old touring car that squats in the sun and goes nowhere—for there is nowhere to go. For the record, let it be known that James A. Corry is a convicted criminal placed in solitary confinement. Confinement in this case stretches as far as the eye can see, because this particular dungeon is on an asteroid nine million miles from the Earth. Now witness, if you will, a man's mind and body shriveling in the sun, a man dying of loneliness.

A man has been sentenced to life imprisonment (as you can read above) on a lonely asteroid millions of miles from Earth, as a self-contained solitary confinement. His only companions are the crew of supply ships that visit him four times a year, so when he sees one land he's delighted. Human company! He's somewhat crestfallen though to find that they can only stay fifteen minutes, which is nothing when you're on your own for years. Captain Allenby, whom he has become friends with, tells him that back on Earth there's growing unrest about this kind of punishment, that people think the likes of him should be imprisoned back on Earth, that having to serve out his sentence out here in space all alone is cruel and unusual punishment, but so far nothing has been changed.

One of the other crew seems happy with the situation, crowing over Corry's dilemma, angry that he personally has to spend so much time in space doing these runs that his own kids sometimes don't know who he is when he gets home. Corry complains that he's going crazy out here, that it's unfair: he's not a murderer, he says. He killed in self-defence, and the Captain seems to believe him. He tells him he has brought him something special, in a big crate, but that nobody can know about it or he'll lose his job.

When the ship leaves, Corry goes out to open the crate. To his surprise it turns out to be a robot woman (yeah). Apparently she can feel and think and reason and talk and do everything a real woman can do, but he knows it's still a robot and is disgusted by it. He soon warms to it - her - though and in a short enough time is in love with Alicia. She makes his loneliness go away, gives him someone to talk to, to share things with, to pass the time. So when the ship arrives and he's given the great news that he's received a pardon, he's thrown onto the horns of a dilemma. The ship is full and there's only room for him, not Alicia as well. As he tries to save her, Allenby takes the initiative and shoots her. Now there's nothing to stop Corry getting on the ship and heading back to  Earth.

Serling''s closing monologue

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 Resolution

Poor. I really expected something else; either that Corry would choose to stay on the asteroid, having fallen in love with Alicia (though who would then supply them I guess) or that Alicia, seeing he wouldn't leave without her, would sacrifice herself by pretending to be just a machine. In the end, it's a clunky, awkward ending that leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

The Moral

Not sure. The selflessness (if such can be said of a robot) of Alicia in keeping Corry sane is not repaid, and she's cast aside in a rather hamfisted stab I guess at misogyny, but if you want a moral, maybe Futurama said it best: Don't date robots!

Iconic?

Again, the idea of robotic companions for lonely men (ooer) has been explored before in science fiction, however I think this might be the first time a female one was used in a television series. It would certainly lead to the idea being recycled right up to today, in series like Star Trek and Red Dwarf among others.

And isn't that...?

Jean Marsh (1934- )
Known for creating and starring in the English period dramas Upstairs, Downstairs and House of Elliot


Ted Knight (1923 - 1986)
The snarky crewman is played by a man who would go on to become another snarky favourite, untalented radio host Ted Baxter in the iconic Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Oops!

It's not necessarily wrong, but is annoying the way everyone on the episode refers to Alicia as a ro-but and not a ro-bot (though she does have a nice butt).

I think the idea of the ship having to take a particular orbital window from the asteroid to get back to Earth is just some technobabble; I don't believe there are any factors in a planet or indeed asteroid's rotation that could contribute to any flight plan, or could prevent a ship plotting a course for Earth. I think this was just written in in the hope - realised - that nobody would question it and would assume it was based on science.

Corry says he and Alicia have been on the asteroid for eleven months when the ship comes back, but Allenby when leaving the first time said "see you in three months." That would mean that they have been back twice before, and nobody has noticed or seen Alicia? They certainly act - all of them, including Allenby - surprised at the presence of the robot. I suppose he could have hidden her, or asked her to go off away from where they could see her, but still, on a flat asteroid which is all desert and has no cover, where was she going to go?

Themes

Again we have the overarching theme of loneliness, which, given the show's premise and its rather bleak opening credits and mournful music, is not surprising. This time though it's loneliness due to being marooned (intentionally, by the powers that be) on an asteroid, and how the slow and steady march of time slows to a slouching crawl when there's nobody else to share your days with. The first episode to deal with robots, and therefore artificial intelligence, it can be looked on as either a hope of companionship for a lonely man, or a deeply misogynistic story that envisions women as nothing more than helpmates for him. In fairness, it's Alicia's tears that move Corry, rather than have him envisioning a sex doll as it were (which might have been too much for the times) and he does fight to take her with him, but when she's shot it's as if he realises she was just a robot, and is content to leave her behind.

At its core though the episode also explores the notion of love between, as it were, different species, if you can consider a robot a species, though no mention is made or even hinted at of a sexual relationship (he does say he's fallen in love with her, but it could be seen as a platonic kind of love) and how love - and companionship - is one thing, perhaps the only thing, that can keep a man sane when he is left on his own.

The idea of crime and punishment is also tackled here for the first time in other than ways already known, and while the idea of banishing one man to his own asteroid, necessitating shuttles having to be sent every three months with supplies is pretty unlikely, not to mention hardly cost-effective, this kind of thing does reverberate through later science fiction, with penal colonies established on dead planets and asteroids, though these are normally manned and guarded, and invariably for more than one prisoner.

Mention is made of unrest at home, so we can see the government is not entirely popular, and given that the pardon is eventually forthcoming, we might also assume the authorities have been deposed or replaced, whether through elections, succession or even revolution we're not told. Serling's vision of the future is certainly a bleaker, but more practical and likely one than that of Gene Roddenberry.

Personal notes

This is the first ever episode set off-world, and indeed, in the future.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Time Enough At Last"
Original transmission date: November 20 1959
Written by: Rod Serling (from the short story by Lynn Venable)
Directed by: John Brahm
Starring: Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis
Jacqueline de Wit as Helen Bemis
Vaughn Taylor as Mr. Carsville
Lela Bliss as Mrs. Chester

Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time); possibly near future
Theme(s): Loneliness, suicide, nuclear war, societal intolerance
Parodied? Multiple times, by among others Futurama, Simpsons, Family Guy
Rating: 

Serling's opening monologue

Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself... without anyone.

Henry Bemis is more interested in reading books than paying attention to his job as a bank teller, constantly short-changing people and messing up, and his boss is having no more of it. He issues an ultimatum: either Bemis stops reading at work and devotes himself to his job, or he's fired. Fairly understandable really: you can skive off to the toilets and read if you're not busy at work, but it's a bit brazen to be reading at your desk. Bemis counters by explaining that his wife is totally against reading, and refuses to allow him do so at home. Mr. Carsville is not impressed and has no sympathy for the teller.

We see his wife's shrewishness in sour action when she vindictively defaces one of his poetry books, telling him he is a child and should devote more time to her and less to books. We also see he is quite the hen-pecked husband, she a stern, unforgiving, vinegary old tart who probably thinks she married beneath her, he the quiet,  submissive man just looking for a bit of peace and harmony, and willing to put up with her nasty ways.

The next day at work he takes his break as usual in the vault, snatching the opportunity to do some reading, and while down there he experiences a tremendous explosion. His fob watch face cracks and when he exits the vault he sees that some terrible disaster has struck and the world has been destroyed. Wandering out of the ruins of the bank and through the ruins of the city he sees he is alone. There is food enough to last him forever, but no human company. In the rubble he finds a gun, but just as he contemplates ending his torment he sees the ruins of the library, and suddenly is seized by a wild delight. All the books he could ever want to read, and all the time in the world, now, to read them!

The one thing that was weighing on his mind was the loneliness, having nothing to fill the empty hours, and now he has books. Books, books, books! Enough reading to occupy his mind until he dies.

And then, as he bends down to retrieve one book, his glasses slip off his face and crack. Unable to see without them, he is now surrounded by all the books he ever needed, and unable to read even a single one. As he says himself, it's not fair.

Serling's closing monologue

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.

The Resolution

It's a bit tough on the guy. The ending would have worked well enough had he been left there, sitting in the rubble of mankind's empire, reading to his heart's content. I feel it's an unnecessarily cruel ending, especially when he was such a mild-mannered man, though to be fair he did get a little on my tits. Still, it's kind of unexpected the first time you see it, and has provided fuel for so many parodies of this clever story.

The Moral

Not really sure. Initially it would seem to be a kind of version of the meek shall inherit the earth, but then it turns that on its head, so what lesson are we meant to learn from the ending?

And isn't that...?

Burgess Meredith (1907 - 1997)
A famous Hollywood actor, popular for his roles in, among others, the Rocky franchise and as The Penguin in the classic sixties Batman series.

Personal notes

Classic though this episode is, and deservedly regarded as one of the best in the series, I find the speech patterns used by Mr. Carsville odd: he says things like "I will tell you something and this is the route by which I will approach it" and "I give my reaction thus". It's stilted and surely intentional, but I'm not sure what it's meant to convey, other than to make the boss seem like the straight man in an Abbott and Costello movie or something.

Nasty and vindictive though it is for his wife to cross out all the poetry in his book, if you look at it from her side she could have been crueller. Considering Henry was hiding the book in his pocket, obviously intending to sneak off and read it later, would it not have made more of an impact upon him, and served her purposes better, had she not revealed her horrible deed beforehand? As it is, she goes out of character (which even he must suspect) and asks him to read to her. Yes, it raises his hopes but he can't be fooled, can he? And how much more crushing would it have been for him to have thought he had beaten her, only to find she was two steps ahead of him in petty malice?

I also think the author got it wrong with Bemis. While reading is a solitary occupation usually, it's not an antisocial one. We don't closet ourselves away and read and then do nothing about it. We want to tell everyone about what we have read, how good it was (or not) and while Bemis does try to force his character summaries on the bank customer who is not in the least interested, this isn't how it goes. You'll tell someone you read a great book and IF they show interest THEN you MAY go on to describe roughly what it's about. You will not give away character names, or plots, or twists, in case you convince that person to read the book themselves. And that is the biggest triumph any reader can hope for, that his or her love of a book will inspire others to try it.

Bemis though forces his appreciation of the books he reads on others, knowing (surely he must know) quite clearly they are not interested, and when someone tries desperately to get you into something or tell you about something for which you have not the slightest enthusiasm, you will actually resist their advances and think them rude to keep forcing them upon you. Obviously Bemis is never going to get his bitch wife to see the value in reading, nor his boss, who seems to consider such activities beneath him, so if he just shut up and read his book instead of drawing attention to what he's doing, he would get on a lot better.

In a way, you can't help but smirk at his fate, in the end, as he has become something of an annoying, opinionated, superior bastard and you're kind of glad that he is surrounded by books he can never now read. Sort of poetic justice for foisting his obsession on others.

Oops!

Classic this episode might be, but it is rife with errors and inconsistencies. For one thing, Bemis escapes the (supposedly) nuclear holocaust by virtue of being in a bank vault. While some vaults are indeed underground, and would afford some protection from a standard bomb, they're not by any means built to withstand a nuclear assault, so the bank vault should have been no safer than the rest of the bank.

Emerging into the shattered landscape, Bemis would have been walking into a highly toxic, radioactive atmosphere, yet he walks around, totally unaffected.

Similarly, the food he mentions that will last him forever would all also be contaminated, and unfit for human consumption.

The public library is knocked down but the books survive. Why? Surely fires raged through the place, which would have consumed the books and turned them to ash?

With his glasses broken, would it not have been possible for Bemis to find either replacements (from some unlucky corpse, of which there must have been many around) or even from an optician which might still be standing, as some of the buildings appear to be? At worst, he could surely rig up some sort of crude magnifying glass to enable him to read. He's not blind, just very shortsighted. In time, with enough effort, this could be overcome.

When the explosion rocks the building, the face of Bemis's watch cracks. Why, then, do not the lenses on his glasses?

Iconic?

Totally. This whole idea has become very popular in science fiction, mostly, as noted, through parodies, but also in other areas.

Themes

Again we're looking into loneliness. When the  Earth is destroyed, and Bemis wanders disconsolately through the ruins of his city, the isolation weighs heavily upon him, and he considers ending it all rather than face being alone for the rest of his life. America's strange intolerance for "readers", even this far back, comes up here, with Bemis considered odd and strange, a bookworm and, used pejoratively, a reader. Almost as if to read is an undesirable trait. But Bemis can also be accused of societal intolerance; all he wants to do is read his books, and badger others about how great they are, so in a way he's withdrawing from society in the same manner as Barbara in "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine", sinking into his own world and refusing to engage in the real one. A balance could be struck, but neither Bemis nor his harridan wife wish to consider a compromise.

The ever-present fear of nuclear war and MAD (Mutally Assured Destruction) that hung over America - and indeed, the world - during the worst years of the Cold War is clearly evident here. We're not told what happened to destroy the world, but Bemis is reading an article about how deadly the H-Bomb is just before the incident, so we can probably assume a nuclear strike.

Although written by Serling, this is the first episode where the idea was not his, where he adapted the story from the writing of another, in this case Lynn Venable, who wrote the short story. It also makes it the first input to the series by a female writer.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Perchance to Dream"
Original transmission date: November 27 1959
Written by: Charles Beaumont
Directed by: Robert Florey
Starring: Richard Conte as Edward Hall
John Larch as Dr. Eliot Rathmann
Suzanne Lloyd as Maya/Miss Thomas

Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Dreams, terror, supernatural
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:


Serling's opening monologue


Twelve o'clock noon. An ordinary scene, an ordinary city. Lunchtime for thousands of ordinary people. To most of them, this hour will be a rest, a pleasant break in a day's routine. To most, but not all. To Edward Hall, time is an enemy, and the hour to come is a matter of life and death.


Edward Hall, looking much the worse for wear, staggers into his doctor's office where he collapses on the couch. He tells the doctor he's been awake for 87 hours, that he can't afford to sleep, because if he does he will never wake up; he'll die in his sleep. He tells the psychiatrist that his imagination works to overpower him, that once he crashed because he thought there was someone in the back seat of his car. He also says that he "dreams in sequence", experiencing episodes each time, following on to each other.

He relates a dream he had where he ended up in a nightmarish carnival, where he had a bad feeling about a girl, an exotic dancer called Maya. He fears she's trying to kill him, by causing his heart to speed up. From childhood, he had a weak heart and was advised by the doctors to avoid all shocks, and now he thinks this Maya is trying to give him a shock so as to kill him. She enticed him, he tells the doctor, onto the rollercoaster and then urged him to jump. He just managed to force himself to wake up before obeying her, and now he's terrified that if he goes back to sleep, resumes the dream that he will jump, and the shock will stop his heart and kill him in reality.

But then, he notes, if he stays awake the strain will kill him anyway. As he dejectedly goes to leave the surgery, he sees the doctor's receptionist, and recognises her as Maya, the woman who has been tormenting him. In despair, he hurls himself out the window to his death.

The doctor calls in his receptionist, asks her to confirm with him that Mr. Hall is dead. The receptionist is amazed, saying that Mr. Hall only just entered the surgery, and the doctor agrees, saying that within two seconds he was asleep, but he seems to have suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep.

Serling's closing monologue


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.


The Resolution

Decent; everything that has happened since he entered the surgery seems to have been in his mind, though this does lend itself to the question, if he was afraid of going back into the dream, where he would be on the rollercoaster with Maya, why did he then instead end up inside a different dream, where the reality was played out in a different way? Why did he imagine himself in the doctor's surgery, seeing Maya and taking a flying header out of the window? Shouldn't he just have ended up back on the rollercoaster, ready to jump?


The Moral

None that I can see. It's a pretty weird story.

Iconic?

No, not really. There have been thousands of stories about people dying, or thinking they have died or will die in dreams, and this one, while it's an interesting slant, really adds nothing all that new to that idea.

Those clever little touches

When Hall shoots at a target at the fairground, it's a spiral, one that would be used in later seasons of the show in the opening credits.

And isn't that...?

Richard Conte (1910 - 1975)

Hollywood actor, contemporary of Frank Sinatra, best known for his portrayal of Don Barzini in The Godfather.


Questions, and sometimes, Answers

The big one is, who is Maya and why was she trying to kill Hall? Was it really petty vindictiveness, as he walked off during her dance? And what link was there between her and the receptionist in the doctor's surgery? Did Hall somehow transplant her image onto the dream one after having been at the doctor? But that's impossible, as this was his first visit there and he already had his problem before going to the psychiatrist. Are we then to believe the face - eyes only seen - glimpsed in the back seat of his car are the ones belonging to Maya, that he has somehow invited a figment of his imagination - or some demon - into his dreams from the almost-waking world?

The doctor's query to Hall when he enters - "Mr. Hall, what's the matter? Are you ill?" - seems a bit superfluous. He's a fucking doctor! Does he think people come to see him because they're in the pink of health?? Yes okay he's a psychiatrist but still. Also, he mentions that "sometimes running away is the best solution". When? When is running away - presumably from your mental problems, given that he's a shrink - the best solution?

Personal notes

The first episode written without Serling's involvement, written entirely by Charles Beaumont, from his own short story of the same title. It shows a darker, edgier, more morose theme than previous episodes, providing a nightmarish ending.

Themes

It's always been claimed that if you die in your sleep you can die for real, but that has never been proven, no more than the idea that waking a sleepwalker will kill them has been shown to have any merit. This is a confusing one for me; the weakness of Hall's heart doesn't explain his wild imagination, and while he relates the story of staring at a picture till he believed it moved, it's all a little up in the air. It is, in my view, a badly written episode with a Huh? kind of ending, never properly explained (though this can be said of many episodes, which leave you to draw your own conclusions) but it does explore the nightmare world dreams can be, and the power over people they can have. It's also the first, I believe, to truly bring in supernatural elements rather than those usually found and used in science fiction. Well, other than "Escape Clause". But that was played in a much more light-hearted manner, so let's say, then, the first serious (deadly serious) episode to use supernatural themes.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Judgement Night"
Original transmission date: December 4 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: John Brahm
Starring: Nehemiah Persoff as Carl Lanser
Ben Wright as Captain Wilbur
Patrick Macnee as First Officer
James Franciscus as Lt. Mueller
Hugh Sanders as Potter
Leslie Bradley as Major Devereaux
Deirdre Owens as Miss Stanley
Kendrick Huxham as Bartender
Barry Bernard as Engineer
Richard Peel as 1st Steward
Donald Journeaux as 2nd Steward

Setting: Earth (North Atlantic Ocean)
Timeframe: Second World War, 1942
Theme(s): Punishment and retribution
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

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 of 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.

A supply ship which has become separated from the convoy steams through the fog of the North Atlantic during World War II, fearing attack from German U-Boats. Carl Lanser, standing out on deck, seems very disoriented and even surprised to find himself here. He seems to know a lot about U-Boats, as he discourses at the captain's table - not with the sense of someone imparting information he is glad or even arrogant to supply, but as someone who dreads every word that falls from his own mouth. When the captain jokingly remarks that Lanser knows so much about U-Boats he might be a captain of one, Lanser drops his coffee cup and gets very agitated. He hurriedly excuses himself and goes back out on deck.

While there, he talks to Miss Stanley, an officer who is on board, and confides to her that she looks familiar - indeed, they all do: Lanser has the uncomfortable feeling he has lived through all of this before. And it's not just deja vu - he can't remember how he got on board and there are other things he can't recall, or says he can't. He does confirm he is German, born in Frankfurt, but can't or won't say why he was in England, nor what he does for a living. He almost lets it slip, it seems, to Miss Stanley, but either forgets or stops himself revealing his secret.*

He's called up to the bridge where the captain questions him and asks him to provide his passport, but he says he must have left it in his cabin. While unpacking, the valet finds a German U-Boat captain's hat, which Lanser snatches off him, only to see his own name stitched into the lining. Up on the bridge, the captain of the ship asks his engineer to increase speed, but is told the engines need to rest. In the bar, Lanser says he can hear that the engines are not in the best, and that something terrible is going to happen at 1:15 AM. He doesn't know what, but there's only an hour to go.

When he sees a light out at sea he panics and runs around telling everyone it's the U-Boat and they must abandon ship, but the people appear and then disappear without a word. Taking the binoculars and looking at the U-Boat he sees... himself, looking back at him as the crew prepare the guns to attack. As the ship goes down he dives into the water and next thing we see is him on the U-Boat, exulting about sinking the British vessel, while his second agonises over killing unarmed men and women, and theorising that perhaps they are now damned, damned to sink the same ship every night, to experience the terror and death of the crew for all eternity. Perhaps, he says, there is a special Hell for people like us.

*(It's not much of a secret is it? He's obviously the captain of a U-Boat, one from which he has been mysteriously transported onto this ship, which is now going to be hunted down and sunk by his own crew)

Serling's closing monologue

The S.S. Queen of Glasgow, heading for New York, and the time is 1942. For one man it is always 1942—and this man will ride the ghost ship every night for eternity. This is what is meant by paying the fiddler. This is the comeuppance awaiting every man when the ledger of his life is opened and examined, the tally made, and then the reward or the penalty paid. And in the case of Carl Lanser, former Kapitan Lieutenant, Navy of the Third Reich, this is the penalty. This is the justice meted out. This is judgment night in the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

A little predictable, though back then probably quite fresh. Given the man's name and his admission to be German, or at least having been born there, it's relatively obvious that he's the U-Boat captain. If we needed any more confirmation, his almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the attack strategies of the wolf pack seals the deal. Sort of interesting that he's in both places at once; makes the ending a little more cerebral.

The Moral

Defenceless ships should not be legitimate targets, though you can bet that had the positions been reversed the Allies would have had no compunction about sinking German or Japanese supply ships. One of the conceits of war: it's always the enemy who's evil, never you. It was a cowardly tactic in the North Atlantic, even with the understanding that Hitler was attempting to starve Britain into submission - the idea of attacking unarmed ships is repugnant, and there doesn't seem to be much on record from the Kriegsmarine in the way of protests from their crews or captains at these tactics.

Oops!

The lady on board is referred to as Miss Stanley, yet she clearly displays a sergeant's stripes on her arm, so should she not be addressed as Sergeant Stanley? Is this not a male conceit, to kind of indicate that a woman officer is nothing more than a girl pretending at playing at being in the military? It's not only Lanser who refers to her as such, but her commanding officer too.

The U-Boat surfaces to shell the freighter, and Lanser has already said the target is usually a convoy. This is true, however I've seen in Das Boot that the subs would readily pursue a straggler, and would always take it down with a torpedo, only surfacing when the ship was done for. After all, you never know what might be in the area. So I think Serling's understanding of U-Boat tactics is flawed here.

Iconic?

Not really; it's just retreading in its own way the old ghost story of the Flying Dutchman, isn't it?

And isn't that...?

Patrick Macnee (1922 - 2015)

Famous British actor, best known for his role as the suave John Steed in the adventure/spy series The Avengers and its later spinoff The New Avengers.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

Why is it that Lanser does not fall immediately under suspicion? Yes, the captain has his doubts, but fails to act quickly upon them. This is 1942, the height of the Second World War and the Battle of the Atlantic. There's a German on his ship who can neither account for his reason for being there or what his role is. He seems confused and disoriented but knows a fuckload about U-Boats. Why are they not clapping him in irons right away? Yes, right, I know that technicallly he's a ghost, but then, he kind of isn't, is he, as he's clearly talking to Lanser, as is Sergeant/Miss Stanley and others. So I think my criticism stands.

Themes

The main one here is punishment; for having attacked a defenceless freighter the captain is condemned to relive the sinking of that ship - with him on board - throughout eternity. There is also a basic theme that while war itself may not necessarily be wrong, it should be conducted along certain inviolable principles, one of the most important of which should be that civilians should not be considered targets. There is of course a supernatural element to this too, and other than the church bells in "Where is Everybody?" and the vague half-reference at the end of "One For the Angels", I believe this is the first time God is specifically mentioned.

We've had the first episode set in the Old West, now we have another setting which will be used and re-used in the series, that of World War II. We'll also see the American Civil War, the gangster era and of course World War I, among others.

[Trollheart]

Title: "And When the Sky Was Opened"
Original transmission date: December 11 1959
Written by: Rod Serling (from the short story by Richard Matheson)
Directed by: Douglas Heyes
Starring: Rod Taylor as Lieutenant Colonel Clegg Forbes

Charles Aidman as Colonel Ed Harrington
Jim Hutton as Major William Gart
Maxine Cooper as Amy
Sue Randall as Nurse
Paul Bryar as Bartender
Joe Bassett as Medical officer
Gloria Pall as Girl in bar
Elizabeth Fielding as Blond Nurse


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: The near future (I tried to get a date from the newspaper but it's too blurred)
Theme(s): Alienation, fear, panic, paranoia, a sense of not belonging, cover-up/conspiracy
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:


Serling's opening monologue

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.


Having returned from an experimental flight into space, their aircraft crashed in the desert, one of the pilots visits the other in hospital, and he's agitated. He tries to explain to his friend that there were originally three of them, but nobody - including the man in the bed - remembers the third officer. Forbes, the guy trying to convince the other guy, Gart, remembers the third officer, Harrington, after they had hit a bar started feeling really strange and weak, and said he felt as if he didn't belong here anymore. When he goes to phone his parents, Harrington is shocked and scared to find that they don't seem to know him; they say they have no son. He advances the theory that maybe he wasn't supposed to come back. Maybe none of them were. Maybe it was... an error? Something that shouldn't have let them through slipped up and did?

Forbes goes to get him a drink but then picks up a newspaper from one of the tables. Instead of the headline he read earlier, proclaiming THREE SPACEMEN RETURN, now there are only two spoken of, like the paper he saw in the hospital room, the one Gart showed him. Turning around, he sees the phone booth Harrington was in now empty, and the barman can't remember him coming in with anyone, says he was alone. The drink Harrington dropped a moment ago, the smashed glass, is gone, the floor completely clean as if it has never happened. Angry and confused, Forbes runs out of the bar.

He goes back to his motel room and puts in a call to Anderson Air Force Base, and while he waits for the return call his wife arrives, but he can't convince her either; she seems never to have heard of Ed Harrington, as if the man never existed. As his desperation increases, the base rings back, but they never heard of any officer named Harrington. Running off again, Forbes goes back to the bar, thinking his pal is in there hiding, that it's all some elaborate joke, but of course he's nowhere to be seen.

That was yesterday, now he's back in the room with Gart, who still can't understand who he means when he talks of Harrington. Something Ed said comes to Forbes though, something about him not having been meant to be here. Suddenly terrified when he can no longer see his reflection in the mirror, he rushes out, and suddenly nobody knows who he is. He's vanished too, leaving only Gart, alone now in a one-bed room that had been three, then two. He picks up the paper, half-knowing and fully dreading what he'll see, and he sees it. The headline: LONE SPACEMAN RETURNS.

And then, he's gone too. The room is empty, and nobody remembers any of the three space pilots, their historic flight, or the craft they flew in. They've been erased from time.

Serling's closing monologue

Once upon a time, there was a man named Harrington, a man named Forbes, a man named Gart. They used to exist, but don't any longer. Someone – or something – took them somewhere. At least they are no longer a part of the memory of man. And as to the X-20 supposed to be housed here in this hangar, this, too, does not exist. And if any of you have any questions concerning an aircraft and three men who flew her, speak softly of them – and only in – The Twilight Zone

The  Resolution

Like a large percentage of episodes, there is no explanation for why the three space pilots vanish from existence. A vague, half-hearted theory is expounded by Harrington, essentially that God (though God is not mentioned) made a mistake letting them come back home, that they were never supposed to. But the lack of a logical reason for what happens does not lessen the impact; in ways, it only strengthens it. You can see the progression, as the newspaper headline changes from three spacemen to two to one, but it's still something of a shock when, at the end, the nurse opens the bedroom in which up to then three men had been recovering and tells the general that it is empty.

The Moral

None, other than sometimes things are not meant to be, or maybe even God slips up occasionally, but that time always rights itself one way or the other.

Personal notes

You have to give it to Forbes. When asked by a ravishing beauty at the bar what it was like up in space, he can only come up with "it was really... out there." Like something a hippy might say, even though they haven't been invented yet. Smooth!

I also find it interesting how the pilots are referred to as spacemen, a term usually describing aliens, but then, this is 1959, and the word "astronaut" had probably not been coined. Still, it does add to the whole sense of alienness about the men who are soon to no longer exist.

Iconic?

Well, as I mention below, the germ of an idea is presented here, that perhaps in some way the whole concept of the failure of the spaceflight is some sort of government cover-up, though exactly how the US government is able to erase people from time is a worrying and disturbing question. Still, it does parallel generally the plot of the later movie Capricorn One, where the survivor of an attempt at a moon landing is hunted down to prevent him giving away the secret that the whole thing was staged.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Weird to see two guys happily smoking in a hospital ward. Wouldn't even be able to smoke in the building these days!

Oops!

Forbes crashes right through the door of the bar, but doesn't seem to sustain any appreciable injuries. This seems unlikely. Not only that, no alarm goes off. Is there no security in a bar of all places, where there's expensive equipment, booze and maybe money?

Questions, and sometimes, Answers


How is it that of the three of them only Forbes remembers events before Harrington vanishes? He remembers Ed being there, remembers drinking with him, remembers the original headline and his own note for a telegram to his wife, telling her they were both at the motel, though when he gets the note and uses it to try to convince her he's not gone crazy, it has only his name on it. Gart does not remember Harrington at all, so why does Forbes? Is it because he spent so much of what would turn out to be the last moments of Harrington's existence with him, while Gart stayed behind in the hospital?

And if Gart does not remember Harrington, how is it that, moments before he too vanishes, he remembers Forbes existing when nobody else does? What happens to the newspaper headline? Does it no longer exist? Have the timelines realigned so that the mission never took place, or was the craft mysteriously (sorry) lost in space?

And isn't that...?


Rod Taylor (1930 - 2015)

Who needs to be told who this man is? Famous for, among other movies, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, worked with movie giants Rock Hudson  and James Dean, as well as his female namesake Elizabeth Taylor on Giant.


Jim Hutton (1934 - 1979)

Famed for, among other things, but mostly, his role as sleuth Ellery Queen in the TV series of the same name which was very popular in the 1970s.


Sue Randall (1935 - 1984)

Found fame as the teacher Miss Landers in the American sitcom Leave it to Beaver

Themes

Loss of self, mostly; usually a condition of the mind, where one finds oneself not belonging, alien, an outsider. In this episode the feeling is literal, as the contention is that none of these men should have come back, and now time is reasserting itself and "cleaning up the mistake" by erasing them from existence. In an odd way, there are echoes of George Orwell's seminal novel Nineteen Eighty-Four here, where the Ministry of Information constantly changes newspaper articles, editing out or changing the faces, names and deeds of people no longer considered loyal to the Party. Here though, the editor is unseen (presumed to be God) and the intent is not malicious revenge nor a desire to punish or obfuscate, but the natural realignment of the time line.

Paranoia and panic are evident here too, and why wouldn't they be, when everything you have taken to be true is suddenly turned upside-down, and you're the only one who seems to remember how things were? How do you maintain your sanity in the face of every other person telling you you're wrong, that it didn't happen that way, that your friend never existed? And how much more does that panic increase when you begin to literally fade away?

There could also be an oblique reference to military cover-ups here. When something doesn't go to plan, and there are those left who can expose the error, quite often (at least in fiction) they are tracked and hunted down and killed, so that any embarrassing evidence is erased. Forbes even suspects, wildly, everyone of being involved in some massive conspiracy to drive him mad, though he refers to it in the parlance of the time as a "gag".

[Trollheart]

Title: "What You Need"
Original transmission date: December 25 1959
Written by: Rod Serling, based on Lewis Padgett's short story
Directed by: Alvin Ganzer
Starring: Steve Cochran as Fred Renard
Ernest Truex as Pedott
Arline Sax as Girl in Bar
Read Morgan as Lefty

Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Greed, hubris, prediction of the future, intimidation
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:



Serling's opening monologue


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.


A little old man enters a bar selling things on a tray. He approaches a young girl, who off-handedly offers to buy some matches from him, but he tells her she doesn't need matches, and produces instead a bottle of cleaning fluid, guaranteed, he says, to remove any stain. He then heads to the bar where a man sits alone, but this man tells him the old guy doesn't have what he needs. He used to be a baseball pitcher, it seems, till he hurt his arm and now he just comes in and sits at the bar mourning his loss. After thinking about it, the old man hands him a bus ticket to Scranton, Pennsylvania, telling him this is what he needs.

Just then he gets a phone call, a job to coach a junior league team in... Scranton, Pa! Amazed, he asks the old man how he knew, but the little guy just shrugs. Lamenting the fact that the only jacket he has is stained, the ex-pitcher is further astonished when the girl at the table comes up with her stain remover to help, and suddenly romance is in the air. Watching all this, our protagonist accosts the old man outside the bar, demanding to know what it is he needs, but the old guy seems reluctant, afraid of the guy. He's quite pushy, and rough, and a lot bigger than the old man. After some thought, the old man hands him a pair of scissors. The guy is not impressed, but takes them anyway, and when he goes back to his hotel has good need of them, as his scarf gets caught in the lift doors as he goes up, and he has to cut it off in order to save himself from being choked to death.

Deciding that the old man has something, Renard goes to his rooms and waits for him, telling him he now has a partner, and they're - read, he's - going to make lots of money out of this talent the old guy has. When the old man protests Renard will hear none of it, even the warning that the gift must not be squandered; he demands to know what he needs, and is given a pen, which leaks ink onto a newspaper, onto the name of a horse running in a race the next day. Initially angry at being given the leaky old pen, Renard is ecstatic, and goes off to place the bet.

He wins, but it's not enough for him, and when he tries to work the same trick again on tomorrow's paper, no dice. The pen no longer leaks. Furious, he goes to find the old man again, who warns him every gift can only be given once. He tells Renard he can't give him what the guy most needs - peace, serenity, a sense of humour, patience - and Renard demands more, so he gives him a pair of shoes, but these shoes cause him to slip in the wet street and be run over by a car. Should have listened!


Serling's closing monologue


Street scene, night. Traffic accident. Victim named Fred Renard, gentleman with a sour face to whom contentment came with difficulty. Fred Renard, who took all that was needed—in The Twilight Zone.


The Resolution

Fairly obvious something nasty was going to happen to the nasty Mr. Renard, though when he takes the shoes you're not too sure. Nevertheless, when he mentions the soles are leather and cause him to slip, it's easy to guess what's coming.

The Moral

If someone helps you, be happy and don't push for more. Some gifts were meant to be bestowed sparingly, and only to those who need them. Don't try to monetise Fate.

Personal notes

The barman is less than sympathetic to the ex-pitcher, laughing at his misfortune. It's hardly the accepted thing for barmen to do, is it? Keep the customer happy, commiserate with him if necessary, but don't mock him!

Interestingly, given that the story more or less concerns miracles, this episode was broadcast first on Christmas Day 1959. You would think, though, that they might have been able to come up with a more cheerful and uplifting episode for the festive season! This would also make it the final episode broadcast in 1959.


Questions, and sometimes, Answers

When Renard's scarf gets caught in the lift doors, why doesn't he just take it off? That would be the natural thing to do, but he just keeps pulling at it. It's not like there's no way to wind it off his neck.

If the little old guy knew Renard was going to kill him, why did he let things progress to the point where he got the shoes? Was it necessary for Renard to choose the manner of his own death? Or did the pedlar hope his tormentor would somehow realise and manage to change his own fate? Was he giving him a chance?

We assume the ex-pitcher and the girl hook up, but it's never shown. They don't leave together, or if they do, we don't see it. Guess we're just supposed to come to the obvious conclusion?

Themes

Greed and hubris stand large on this episode; not happy that his life has been saved (when he didn't even know it would be in danger) Renard sees the old man's ability as a moneymaking scheme, and if he can't persuade him to take him on as a partner, he'll threaten him to do so. His hubris becomes his undoing, as he puts on the slippery shoes and brings about his own end.

The theme of predicting the future is nothing new, but the series would use that again and again; the idea of concentrating such a potentially world-shattering power in one so small and inoffensive, and the power being used for the smallest, most personal things, shows perhaps that the old guy realises what damage could be done if his power was used for darker purposes.

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Four of Us Are Dying"
Original transmission date: January 1 1960
Written by: Rod Serling, from the short story by George Clayton Johnson
Directed by: John Brahm
Starring: Harry Townes as Arch Hammer
Ross Martin as Johnny Foster
Phillip Pine as Virgil Sterig
Don Gordon as Andy Marshak
Peter Brocco as Mr. Marshak
Milton Frome as Detective
Beverly Garland as Maggie


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Hubris, dishonesty, greed, crime
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:


Serling's opening monologue

His name is Arch Hammer, he's 36 years old. He's been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie, and a part-time bartender. This is a cheap man, a nickel-and-dime man, with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt; a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste, a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience, and a dark-room squint at a world whose sunlight has never gotten through to him. But Mr. Hammer has a talent, discovered at a very early age. This much he does have. He can make his face change. He can twitch a muscle, move a jaw, concentrate on the cast of his eyes, and he can change his face. He can change it into anything he wants. Mr. Archie Hammer, jack-of-all-trades, has just checked in at three-eighty a night, with two bags, some newspaper clippings, a most odd talent, and a master plan to destroy some lives.


A man able to change his appearance at will (see above) enters a hotel and scopes out a woman playing piano at the bar. He is wearing the face of a dead musician, Johnny Foster. The woman, Maggie, is shocked to see him, believing him dead. They were in love, and now he convinces her to run away with him, which she is all too happy to do. He tells her he staged his own death, to get away from the fame, and that with her he will start a new life. When one of his ex bandmembers recognises him though, he quickly changes his face so as not to have to answer any awkward questions.

Back at his hotel room, he changes his appearance again, this time taking on the face of a dead gangster. Armed with this new identity, he goes to see the partner who double-crossed him, who looks, not surprisingly, as if he has seen a ghost. Chased by the guy's henchmen after he has taken all the money, Hammer runs down a blind alley, and desperate to change his face again takes inspiration from a poster of a boxer on the wall. The goons, seeing they have the wrong guy, leave.

He then runs into an old man, who turns out to be the father of the man whose face he has just assumed, though of course he doesn't recognise him. Turns out this guy was a bad one, left his girl, broke his mother's heart, and the father is angry and bitter. Back at his hotel, and wearing his own face again, he is arrested by a cop, but as they go through the revolving doors he changes back into the boxer, smugly giving the cop the slip. However the father of this man is waiting for him, ready to extract revenge. He shoots him before he can concentrate his power to change, and that's the end of him.

Serling's closing monologue

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.

The Resolution

Well handled. Everyone has their past, and Hammer was just unlucky enough to choose to use the identity of one who had used everyone around him - rather like himself - and paid the price.

The Moral

I guess, no matter who you are or where you try to hide, your sins will eventually find you out.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

This whole story is fraught with one major error: while Hammer can take the appearance of anyone he chooses, how is it that he also gets their voice, along with any inside knowledge they may have had? Sure, he's read up on the musician Johnny Foster, but the gangster? He knows who his partner was, he knows what the deal was, he knows intimate details of the killing... these are things only the real hood would know, and yet he seems to have them in his mind. Does he, in addition to getting the face, get the memories and thoughts and mannerisms and voice too? Seems unlikely. And if it is the case, how did he not recognise "his" father? Shouldn't he have had the memories of the boxer too?

Why, when Hammer is shot, does the cop, who was arresting him and is only inside the lobby of the hotel, not come rushing out? He's surely heard the shot, and he's a cop after all.

Wasn't Hammer taking a major risk when impersonating Foster? What if Maggie had asked him to play - one more, you know, for the road?

Themes

You'd have to say cowardice and greed are the two main ones here. Hammer has the ability to change his face (like many Twilight Zone stories, this power is neither explained nor challenged, it simply is - if you want to watch this show, you're going to have to take some things on faith) but instead of using his talent for good he uses it to enrich himself. Witness the confrontation with the girl when he "is" Johnny Foster - he could have just run away with her - she was ready and willing to go. But no, he has to have money, so shakes down a gangster to ensure he can live the high life, and it's the escape from here that precipitates his meeting with a man he has never met, wearing the face of a man he has never been, and leads to his death.

He's a greedy man, somewhat in the same vein as our Mr. Bedeker in "Escape Clause", and indeed the one in the previous episode too, men who want to wring everything they can out of life, even if by so doing they wring all the joy and love and goodness out of it too. It's surely cowardice to - if you have the power - keep changing your face, your identity. Isn't this the purest form of insecurity there is? And what of the people who see him "wearing" this face, like Johnny Foster's bandmate, who believed the trumpeter dead? He doesn't care how the sudden reappearance of Foster affects this guy; he shakes him off angrily. He doesn't figure in his plans.

It's a dishonest way of behaving, abrogating any responsibility whatever. If things go wrong, if you can't face a situation, as Tom Waits once sarcastically wrote, "Change your face, change your life" - which is exactly what Hammer does. But in the end a life of (one must surely assume) petty crime and using other people catch up with him, and he dies because he just chose the wrong face, as Fate laughs in the shadows.

Note: So far, this is the first (I don't know if only but certainly the first) episode in which nowhere, not in the intro nor the outro, does Serling mention the Twilight Zone. It's also the very first episode of 1960, literally broadcast on January 1.

[Trollheart]

Three classics, one after the other...

Title: "Third From the Sun"
Original transmission date: January 8 1960
Written by: Rod Serling, based on the story by Richard Matheson
Directed by: Richard L. Bare
Starring: Fritz Weaver as Will Sturka
Edward Andrews as Carling
Joe Maross as Jerry Riden
Denise Alexander as Jody Sturka
Lori March as Eve Sturka
Jeanne Evans as Ann Riden


Setting: Unknown
Timeframe: Unknown
Theme(s): War, survival, escape
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

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.


End of the world? Two fiercely opposed factions are preparing for war, the first - and most decisive and deadly - strikes being prepared for launch. Will Sturka, one of the factory workers, is increasingly worried about the imminent attack and he can see that his daughter is too, but he tries to make light of it. He has invited his friend Jerry Riden over for a card game, but unbeknownst to his family the two men have another task in mind: the theft of a top-secret craft Riden has been test-flying, with which they hope to escape the doomed planet. Riden and Sturka have to be very careful, as there are spies everywhere, and indeed one is watching his movements. Spurred by what he called "defeatist talk"  - simply a comment by Sturka that the coming war is pointless and will serve no end - from earlier outside the factory, another worker, Carling, has his suspicions and is watching the house.

As they make their plans over the card game everything is tense. Sturka has let his wife in on the secret, and Riden's wife already knows, but the daughter does not as she can't be trusted to keep it to herself. Riden is telling Sturka about their destination, a planet quite like their own with a similar language and technology, about eighteen million miles distant, when  Carling arrives and interrupts the game. Obsequious and smarmy, he looks like a fat little nondescript man, the kind you find out too late works for the Gestapo. Carling tries to find out what's going on - he knows something is afoot - but the two families keep their nerve. When Sturka gets a call saying he's needed at work he knows it's time to run, and so they do.

There's a scare when Carlin catches them, but they overpower him and make for the craft. Once they make it into space Riden points out the planet they're heading to, where there are people just like them, where they can be safe. Third planet from the sun. Earth.

Serling's closing monologue

Behind a tiny ship heading into space is a doomed planet on the verge of suicide. Ahead lies a place called Earth, the third planet from the Sun. And for William Sturka and the men and women with him, it's the eve of the beginning—in the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

The first time you see it, knocked out. Because the people and indeed the planet mirror so closely our own we all assume it's Earth they're escaping from, and it's a real twist to find that it is in fact an alien planet, and they are fleeing to Earth.

The Moral

Several I guess. Sometimes the safest thing to do is run. Sometimes you can't stop the madness so don't try, just leave it behind. Maybe it's best to know when you're beaten and take the only alternative open to you. There's also a clever if slightly heavy-handed moral lesson for us in terms of the Cold War. This episode shows a planet which has tipped over that point into outright war, and will destroy itself. Will we do the same?

Oops!

Although this is from a science fiction story, and written by someone who surely knows his stuff, I wonder if Serling adapted it and used his own measurements, because the distance from the planet the Sturka and Riden families are fleeing from to Earth is said to be eighteen million miles. That would put it closer to Earth than Mars or Venus, and as we know there are no planets between those two and Earth, so where is the planet meant to be?

Iconic?

Not the story, which I don't recall being used again, but in the spaceship there's a sound used which would become famous, synonymous with Star Trek, which would air eight years later. Have a listen to it. I feel it may also have been used on the iconic science fiction movie of all iconic science fiction movies, Forbidden Planet.

Themes

Survival being the first, survival in the face of impending nuclear disaster. Also hope, hope that the families can find a new home on this strange planet called Earth. The futility of war - MAD - is addressed too, when Sturka tells a gleefully confident Carling that "they can get us too" or something like that, I'm not going back to check. Basically he's letting him know that though their side can wreak unimaginable havoc, the other side is capable of doing the same. Finally, there's a sort of space exploration theme, as for only the second episode we see man in space.

And isn't that...?





Fritz Weaver (1926 - 2016)

Known for among other things, Creepshow, The X Files, The Martian Chronicles, Law and Order, Star Trek Deep Space 9 and The Streets of San Francisco.





Denise Alexander (1939 - )

Famed for her role as Lesley Webber on the American soap General Hospital.



Personal Notes

It's not important and it doesn't impact on the story, but I must note the names of the two families. Sturka sounds so much like the feared German divebomber used to such terrifying effect in World War II, the Stuka, and this is a war episode at its heart. Not to mention that Fritz Weaver is surely of German descent? And I could not resist: the other family is Riden. Riden with Biden? Sorry. 


Questions, and sometimes, Answers

Why is Jody, the daughter, the only one kept out of the secret? I understand that as a younger person she might be more likely to say something, or to possibly want a boyfriend to come, a boyfriend who might not be trustworthy and might sell them out, but it's clear that there is tension as the card game proceeds, and she must wonder what the problem is. Of course, she's already on edge, like everyone, over the imminent war, but it must feel to her like she's the only sober one at a drunken party. Would it not have been better to have told her and sworn her to secrecy?

Those clever little touches

Riden has been sketching out their flight plan on a piece of paper, and when Carling arrives he turns it over face down, and pretends he's using it to keep score how much his friend owes him. As Carling looks at the paper, we can see the reverse, showing the diagram, and it's quite clever: a tense moment when you think "if he just turns that over they're done for". But he doesn't, and returns it to the table, never realising he had held the evidence of what would be seen as their treachery in his hands.

[Trollheart]

Title: "I Shot an Arrow Into the Air"
Original transmission date: January 15 1960
Written by: Rod Serling, from the story by Madelon Champion
Directed by: Stuart Rosenberg
Starring: Dewey Martin as Officer Corey
Edward Binns as Colonel Donlin
Ted Otis as Pierson
Harry Bartell as Langford
Leslie Barrett as Brandt


Setting: Earth (desert in Reno, Nevada) (sssh!) 
Timeframe: The near future?
Theme(s): Survival, greed, selfishness, despair, being lost
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:



Serling's opening monologue

Her name is the Arrow 1. She represents four and a half years of planning, preparation, and training, and a thousand years of science, mathematics, and the projected dreams and hopes of not only a nation, but a world. She is the first manned aircraft into space and this is the countdown. The last five seconds before man shot an arrow into the air.

The first spacecraft to leave Earth falls off the radar and control loses contact with it. On a deserted asteroid, the survivors decide to strike out from the remains of the crashed craft, to see where they are and if there is any chance of survival. Corey, one of the crew, resents the fact that his commanding officer is "wasting" water on a dying crewman, but the colonel will not leave him to die. He points out that there's no chance of rescue, as they had the only spacecraft ever made  by man, so there is no way anyone can come after them even if they knew where they were, which they don't. While Corey fights over the water, the crewman dies. That leaves only three of them.

Nerves are frayed; Corey is being belligerent and insubordinate, perhaps thinking why should he obey a man who represents an authority that is no longer in charge? They're on an asteroid, not Earth, and unlikely ever to be back under military command again. When Corey returns from patrol without Pearson, the third member of the crew still alive, the colonel forces him to admit that the other man is dead. Though the colonel can't prove Corey killed Pearson, he insists they go and bring his body back. Corey is reluctant, but his CO forces him. When they get to the spot where Corey says he was though, Pearson is nowhere to be found.

They follow a trail and find him, not dead after all, but he is dying. He points to the top of the mountain, indicating he found something up there, but has not the strength to speak. He sketches out a rough figure - two horizontal lines crossed by a vertical, like a cross. The colonel has no idea what it is, but Corey decides it's time for him to die and shoots him, continuing on alone up the mountain. When he gets to the top, he sees what it was that Pearson was trying to tell them, what he had found before losing his balance and falling back down the mountain, the icon he sketched.

A telegraph pole.

Turns out they aren't on an asteroid at all. They're on Earth. They fell back to Earth and crash-landed in the desert, only a handful of miles from Reno. Nevada.

Serling's closing monologue


Practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature and a combination of improbable events. Practical joke wearing the trappings of nightmare, of terror, and 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.

The Resolution

Perhaps where The Twilight Zone began to come into its own. This is absolutely brilliant. There's no way you could figure it out, yet when you go backwards, it all makes sense. Why was there an atmosphere if this was supposed to be an asteroid? Why did the control centre lose contact with the ship? Just fantastic, and really puts the two murders (we more or less assume he fought with and left Pearson for dead) into dark, dismal perspective.

The Moral

Perhaps stick together, look after your friends?

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

We know at the end why, but you have to ask the question why the crew didn't wonder that there was an atmosphere, since asteroids are just big chunks of rock and have no atmosphere?

Themes

Survival again, greed and a determination to be the one left standing even if you have to kill everyone around you. Hubris, and despair in the end when it's all been for nothing.

Iconic?

No. I don't recall anyone ever using this idea again. It's kind of a one-shot deal isn't it? Once you know, the impact is gone. Still, Wiki maintains it came up again with Planet of the Apes. Meh, I don't see it myself. Basic idea, yes, but not this actual theme.