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

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Hitch-Hiker"
Original transmission date: January 22 1960
Written by: Rod Serling, from the play by Lucille Fletcher
Directed by: Alvin Ganzer
Starring: Inger Stevens as Nan Adams
Leonard Strong as The Hitch-Hiker
Adam Williams as Sailor
Russ Bender as Counterman
Lew Gallo as Mechanic
George Mitchell as Gas Station Man
Eleanor Audley as Mrs. Whitney (voice)


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Terror, death, pursuit
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

Her name is Nan Adams. She's twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store. At present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California from Manhattan...Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania. Perhaps, to be filed away under "accidents you walk away from." But from this moment on, Nan Adams' companion on a trip to California will be terror. Her route: fear. Her destination: quite unknown.

A mechanic fixes up a young girl's car after it has spun out, marvelling that she's alive at all. She follows him into town to get a spare tyre, but then gets shivers when she sees a hitch-hiker standing by the side of the road. When she points him out to the mechanic, he can't see him and when she looks again he is gone. She drives off, but keeps seeing him on the road. Somehow he always seems to be ahead of her. The guy in the cafe she stops at feels it would be unlikely anyone would be hitching on the turnpike.

When he actually approaches her, she drives off in terror, and when her car dies on a level crossing and she almost gets hit by a train, he is there again, thumbing, beckoning her, and she now is convinced he is trying to kill her. When her car runs out of gas in the night she tries to wake up the gas station owner but he's a prick and won't come down. Then she meets a sailor on the way back to his ship in San Diego. She asks him to accompany her, saying she will give him a ride back to San Diego (she's heading to LA anyway) but she has no gas. The sailor bangs on the door and he's not as easily put off as she was, so the old man has to give them the gas.

They set off, and it's not long before they come across the hitch-hiker. Nan tries to run him down, but the sailor says he saw nobody, and spooked by her reaction, decides to leave her and strike out on his own. She tries to persuade him to stay but he has had enough, and she is left alone. Reaching a diner she uses a payphone to call home, but is shattered when she is told her mother suffered a nervous breakdown when she heard of the death of her daughter in a road accident.

And now she knows.

The hitch-hiker is Death, and he wants to ride with her because she is dead too.

She never survived the accident, she was killed, and she's been running from the realisation of her death ever since.

Serling's closing monologue

Nan Adams, age twenty-seven. She was driving to California; to Los Angeles. She didn't make it. There was a detour... through the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

Superb. The idea being created that the hitch-hiker is evil, deadly, menacing, is trying to get her to kill herself becomes nothing more than the inevitable realisation and acceptance that she has already died.

The Moral

You can't outrun death, and when it's time to go you have no choice.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

Why was the gas station owner so ornery? Sure, he was annoyed at being woken up, but this is a young woman on her own in the dark in the night with no gas. Surely some form of male chivalry would beat in his heart, if not, the fact that she's pretty and he could be seen to do a good deed for her would be enough for most old men. Does he not worry that she might be attacked in the night? He can go back to bed and sleep soundly knowing that?

Picking up the sailor is surely a bad move, even in what I guess is the 1960s. The guy is young and strong, and she's very pretty. He kind of looms over her in the car, and the first time I watched this I thought, that guy is gonna attack her and then the hitch-hiker is going to come up and save her, showing that he wasn't evil after all. Didn't happen, but still: giving a ride to a randy sailor in the middle of nowhere, dead of night? Hardly smart, is it?

And if she is dead, how come everyone can see her? The mechanic, the old man at the gas station, the sailor, the guy in the cafe? How can she eat, and drink? How can she drive? How can she use the telephone?

The Times they are a-changin'

Yeah, like I say, wouldn't happen today. Single girl, very pretty, picking up a single male in the night on her own? Recipe for disaster.

Ten or Less Things I Hate About You

This is a new section in which I'll be detailing, if there are any, the aspects of the episode I didn't care for.

1. The irascibility of the old man, as mentioned in the Questions section - what's his deal? We'll see this later in another episode, proving I guess that for some dried-up old husks of men, even a pretty face can't melt a heart of stone.

2. The somewhat improbable circumstance of a young pretty girl giving a sailor a lift and not getting attacked. I feel this is a little too hard to swallow, keep your dirty thoughts to yourselves please

3. Her desperation to keep him there in the car with her, even going so far as to promise him a date. It's embarrassing.

4. The inconsistencies with her apparently being dead but still in the living world, able to interact with it.

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Fever"
Original transmission date: January 29 1960
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Robert Florey
Starring: Everett Sloane as Franklin Gibbs
Vivi Janiss as Flora Gibbs


Setting: Earth (Las Vegas)
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Addiction, obsession, madness, gambling
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:


Serling's opening monologue

Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights all expenses paid at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs's knack with a phrase. But unbeknownst to either Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there's a prize in their package, neither expected nor bargained for. In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce. A most inoperative, deadly life-shattering affliction known as the Fever.


A man and woman who have won a competition to spend a few days in Las Vegas argue as the husband, a stuffy Puritan type, disapproves highly of gambling and refuses to lighten up. Suffering her to spend the holiday, he nevertheless refuses to let her gamble. However when a drunk who has lost his shirt on one of the machines forces a coin into his hand and leaves him to play the machine, Franklin wins. Surprised, he determines to take the money he has won back to the hotel room, rather than, as he says these "baboons" would do, shovel it back in and lose it all. As he leaves though, he seems to hear someone call his name...

The voice continues to call him, and soon he can't sleep. He keeps watching the pile of coins, and eventually decides he can't keep them, must go back down to the casino and put them all back into the machine, lose them all, get rid of them. He's soon hooked though of course, and once the coins are gone he starts cashing cheques, trying to win back all the money he has lost. He becomes irritable, irrational, obsessive, standing at the machine till morning, convinced it will eventually pay out. Of course it doesn't, and when the arm jams as he puts in his last dollar, he loses it and accuses the machine of taunting him, of being alive, of deliberately breaking down so it wouldn't have to pay out. He pushes the machine over, and is escorted from the casino.

Back at the hotel, he keeps hearing the sound of the machine's voice calling his name, and when he opens the door it's there, advancing towards him, taunting him, laughing at him. He backs away, away - his wife tries to convince him there is nothing there - but he keeps retreating towards the window until he falls out of it and is killed. As a final insult, or joke, the last dollar he lost, the one that got caught in the machine, rolls out to land beside him.

Serling's closing monologue

Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally his life to an inanimate, metal machine, variously described as a "one-armed bandit", a "slot machine", or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs' words, a "monster with a will all of its own." For our purposes, we'll stick with the latter definition because we're in the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

Poetic justice really. The man who rails against gambling becomes so addicted that he loses his reason and ends up falling out of his window to his death. Or, if you prefer, is haunted by a slot machine and forced out the window. Either way, gambling ends up being the death of him.

The Moral

Clearly, gambling is for mugs. Gamblers only play to lose, not to win. Quit while you're ahead.

Themes

Obsession and addiction play the largest parts in this episode. Once hooked, Franklin cannot stop playing the machine. He tells his wife this is because he has to win back the money he's so far lost, and as far as it goes, this is true. However, in reality he just can't stop playing. He's become a slave to the one-armed bandit, and could not more walk away than he could stop breathing.

Obsession and gambling usually go hand in hand, of course. Gambling is an obsession, an obsession with winning, or trying to win. While Franklin initially puts all the money he has won back into the machine, he can't leave it at that, and has to keep playing. He's now hooked, and the family fortune is being fed to what Homer Simpson once called Gamblor.

Madness features too, of course: did Franklin go crazy, thinking the machine was coming for him? Well of course he did... didn't he? His wife neither heard nor saw the machine, and you have to wonder how an inanimate machine with no power of propulsion could have somehow made it up to their room, and not only that, then been down on the ground beside the lifeless body of Franklin, to deliver the final insult.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

On their arrival, the manager of the casino tells the couple they have "unlimited credit" (absolutely would never happen - casino would quickly go broke but that's what he says). If this is the case, why then does Franklin have to use his own money to gamble? Why, when he goes up to cash his first cheque, does the teller not advise him he has unlimited credit?

Considering how much he hates/hated gambling, why did Franklin go to Las Vegas, the Mecca of the gambler? Why didn't he let someone else go with his wife? And even if he had to go, did he realistically not expect his wife to want to gamble?

Iconic?

No, this is a one-off episode and I don't recall anyone else doing it.

Those clever little touches

When the gambling machine is coming for Franklin, seeming to call his name, a slot in its base is curved upwards, and looks like a mouth smiling or grinning. Also, when it "speaks", you can hear the sound of coins rolling in the sound, a little like in Pink Floyd's "Money".

Personal Notes

This was the first of the "funny" Twilight Zone episodes, and while it's patently ridiculous it is good fun. It's nice to see Serling could preach on the evils of gambling without getting all high-handed about it, inject a lot of humour into what is essentially a very dark subject for a lot of people.

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Last Flight"
Original transmission date: February 5 1960
Written by: Richard Matheson
Directed by: William F. Claxton
Starring: Kenneth Haigh as Flight Lt. Decker
Simon Scott as Major Wilson
Alexander Scourby as General Harper
Robert Warwick as Air Vice Marshal Alexander Mackaye
Harry Raybould as Corporal
Jerry Catron as Guard
Jack Perkins as Mechanic
Paul Baxley as Jeep driver


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Cowardice, bravery, second chance, time travel
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

Witness Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, Royal Flying Corps, returning from a patrol somewhere over France. The year is 1917. The problem is that the lieutenant is hopelessly lost. Lieutenant Decker will soon discover that a man can be lost not only in terms of maps and miles, but also in time - and time in this case can be measured in eternities.

A British pilot from World War I lands at an American airfield in the present, and when taken to the commanding officer is told he is in 1959. Finding this hard to believe - duh - he mentions his friend "Mac", Alexander McKay, and is told with extreme scepticism for his story by the base commander that Air Vice Marshall McKay is in fact due there to inspect the facility. The pilot believes this impossible, as he tells them McKay is dead. He tells them that when he last saw McKay he was encircled by seven German aircraft, and later confesses that he himself is a coward, afraid to engage the enemy. He says he has to put on a face, because to be a coward is bad enough, but admitting to, or even worse, being proven one is a fate worse than death.

He's placed under "protective custody" while the base awaits the arrival of the Air Vice Marshall, though Decker is reluctant to meet his old friend, believing he will be recognised for what he is. Unable to understand how McKay can still be alive, when, as he tells the major, he left him to die, ran off, Decker suddenly gets it. The only reason Mac is alive has to be that he, Decker, changed his mind and went back to help him. He had to come 42 years into the future to learn the truth, that he could save him, but if he stays where he is then the chances are, the two men will never meet in 1959 because McKay will have died in 1917.

Desperate, he slugs the major and breaks out, racing to his aircraft. The major tries to detain him but he gets away, back up into the sky. A short while later, the major is being upbraided by the general for having let him escape when Air Vice Marshall McKay arrives. The major asks him about Decker, and McKay tells them the man saved his life back in World War I. Says he looked as if he was running out on him but then came back, took out three of the German fighters before they got him. In amazement, the general shows McKay the personal effects he had confiscated from Decker, and McKay, dumbfounded, confirms they belong to his old friend.

Serling's closing monologue

Dialog from a play, Hamlet to Horatio: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Dialog from a play written long before men took to the sky: There are more things in heaven and earth and in the sky than perhaps can be dreamt of. And somewhere in between heaven, the sky, and the earth, lies the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

A good one. A man who needs the courage to do what needs to be done finds it in the future, finding that his friend, who would otherwise be long dead, has distinguished himself in the next world war and risen in the ranks, and realises he has to go back to help him survive, facing his own cowardice and giving his life bravely.

The Moral

Everyone gets a second chance, it's up to them how they use it?

Themes

Cowardice, bravery, being given a second chance. Time lines, which should, of course, have shifted when Decker came to the future, meaning McKay should have been dead. And maybe he was; until that helicopter bringing him to the air force base landed, who knew who would have stepped out of it, depending on what Decker did? It's good to to see Matheson - this being entirely written by him - tackling the thorny idea of cowardice in the armed forces. It can't be that every young man who went to war did so with no fear, and while cowardice would be liable to get you killed as much by your own side as that of the enemy, it was surely a constant threat to those who fought for liberty.

I believe this is also the first time travel story, if you don't count "Walking Distance".

The Times they are a Changin'

Decker mentions that he has often thought of allowing himself to be captured by the Germans, remarking that pilots get the best treatment. Yes, back in WW I they did, seen as some sort of knights of the sky, gentlemen flyers, worthy adversaries. By the time World War II came around though it was a very different matter!

Personal Notes

This is the very first Twilight Zone episode in which Serling basically has no input, the story having been written by Richard Matheson (whose stories had been adapted for two previous ones) from his own work, "Flight".

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Purple Testament"
Original transmission date: February 12 1960
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Richard L. Bare
Starring: William Reynolds
Dick York
Barney Phillips
Warren Oates
Paul Mazursky
Ron Masak
William Phipps
S. John Launer
Marc Cavell


Setting: Earth (Philippines)
Timeframe: Second World War, 1945
Theme(s): War, prediction of the future, death, isolation, paranoia
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Philippine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear—yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.

An officer in the US Army serving in the Philippine Islands in World War II seems to have developed the strange - and unwanted - power to divine when men are going to die. He sees a purple light in their faces, and knows they're marked for death. He confides this to his CO but of course is not believed. While visiting one of the wounded in the hospital, the officer, "Fitz" Fitzgerald sees the light in the kid's face, faints and sure enough when he regains consciousness he finds that the soldier has passed away in the bed. When he sees the light in the face of his commanding officer he is shocked, and tries to get the captain not to go on the raid, but the captain thinks he's just overworked and seeing things.

The captain is of course killed, and when Fitz is recalled to headquarters for observation, he sees in his shaving mirror the light in his own face, and knows he will never make it back alive. He is to be evacuated back home for medical evaluation, but soon after his jeep has disappeared into the jungle there's a loud explosion.

Serling's closing monologue


From William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, a small excerpt. The line reads, 'He has come to open the purple testament of bleeding war.' And for Lieutenant William Fitzgerald, A Company, First Platoon, the testament is closed. Lieutenant Fitzgerald has found the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

Not bad. No explanation of course, but then you seldom if ever get one in The Twilight Zone.

The Moral

Other than war is hell? I guess when your number's up, there's not a lot you can do about it.

Themes

The horror of war is the main one here, allied to the pain of being able to predict which men will come back from a mission, and which won't. So it involves combat and also a sense of precognition. Fear, too, which is of course endemic to war, but a different kind of fear. Fear from his own men, that he can see if they are going to die (and so, in some twisted way, they probably blame him for this) and fear, too, from the lieutenant, who feels he has become an albatross hanging around the neck of the squad, and refuses to tell the men whom he sees are marked for death that they're not coming back, but the relationship has changed, become strained, fraught with tension, and he must feel very isolated.

Iconic?

Not sure if it's the first to feature a sort of presentiment of death, probably not, but this would become a recurring theme in science fiction over the years. Wasn't there a movie called The Medusa Touch, or am I misremembering? What about Knowing? What about fucking off - well, how rude!


Personal Notes

Just one comment to make: the captain in this is called Riker, spelled that way, and I just wonder if Roddenberry had seen this episode and if it influenced his naming of Captain Picard's famous "Number One"?

Well, two actually. Isn't it interesting that Serling's closing quotes on both this and the last episode reference Shakespeare? No? Sod ya then.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Elegy"
Original transmission date: February 19 1960
Written by: Charles Beaumont, from his story
Directed by: Douglas Heynes
Starring: Cecil Kellaway
Jeff Morrow
Kevin Hagen
Don Dubbins


Setting: An asteroid
Timeframe: 2085
Theme(s): Death, Commercialism, social status
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating:



Serling's opening monologue

The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They're looking for home. And in a moment, they'll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt.

Off-course and drifting in space, the crew of a spaceship locate an Earthlike planet and land. More than Earthlike - it's identical, except everything seems to be frozen in place. They're soon disabused of the notion that this could in fact be Earth by the older technology - it appears to be about 200 years in the past - and, more importantly and conclusively, two suns in the sky. When they encounter people, they too all seem to be frozen, and one falls over when one of the spacemen pushes him lightly. Hearing music, they rush to the bandstand but the music seems to be piped in, though there's a full band, standing like models.

They consider the possibility that time might be moving at a different speed for them. They decide to split up, to see if there is anyone living they can contact, but though they come across a party where a man is dancing with his wife, a beauty contest and a card game in session, nobody moves or talks, or responds. Then, unseen by the spaceman, one of the figures at the beauty contest does move, and smiles knowingly to himself. Meeting back up, the men go to check out houses, and are astonished to come across the old man who moved back at the beauty contest. He introduces himself as Jeremy Wickwire, and he explains that the asteroid they are on is a giant purpose-built cemetery.

Here, anyone who can afford it may have their body preserved in whatever fantasy or ambition they like, and because the company, Happy Glades ("The Biggest Mortuary Company in the World") promises eternal peace, forever, to its, ah, clients, the place had to be built out in space. And so it was, says Wickwire, in 1973. He reveals that he is not human, merely the perception of a computerised image, a caretaker that looks after the place and ensures its denizens are not disturbed.

But they have been disturbed, and as he serves the space pilots drinks, he asks them what their fondest wish would be. As they lose consciousness, he ensures that it comes to pass, arranging their dead bodies in their ship, so that they can feel as if they are heading for home.

Serling's closing monologue

Kirby, Webber, and Meyers, three men lost. They shared a common wish—a simple one, really. They wanted to be aboard their ship headed for home. And fate—a laughing fate—a practical jokester with a smile stretched across the stars, saw to it that they got their wish with just one reservation: the wish came true, but only in the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

Clever. Although you have to question the likelihood that bodies, even embalmed ones, would stay in pristine condition - and in place - for two centuries, the idea of a huge, exclusive and expensive graveyard in space is an interesting one, and once you know that this is the case, there can never be allowed any sort of disruption, least of all from humans. Or at least, live ones.

The Moral

Man will never achieve peace, for he can never bring it about.

Themes

Death, nuclear war, commercial entrepreneurism, and social strata all figure in here. Happy Glades is only available to those who can afford its, no doubt exorbitant rates, and so, as ever, even the cemetery maintains the human societal hierarchy. There's mention of an "atomic war", supposed to have taken place in 1985, which is interesting on two levels. Given that this was written in 1953, that means that Beaumont foresaw this apocalyptic disaster occurring a mere thirty years in the future, and considering what almost happened in a mere ten years - the Cuban missile crisis - he could have been right. Also, he puts the date of the war at one year after that predicted by George Orwell in his famous novel.

The idea of creating the cemetery on the asteroid is not fully explained: who built it? He says it was built in 1973, but that kind of technology would have been unlikely to be achieved in twenty years, so did some alien race build it?

Oops!

Again, we're told the spacecraft is 65 million miles from Earth. That's not even halfway out of the solar system, so where are they supposed to be?

And isn't that...?



Jeff Morrow (1907 - 1993)

Famous as Exeter in the classic science fiction movie This Island Earth and also as Paulus in the Biblical epic The Robe.



Kevin Hagen (1928 - 2005)

Without question, the role he's remembered for is the likeable Doc Baker in the series Little House on the Prairie.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

I know these are supposed to be fine, moral, upstanding specimens of humanity, but still, when one of them comes across a card game where all the players seem frozen (like everyone and everything else) and there is literally money everywhere on the table, thousands, surely, of dollars, he doesn't experience even the momentary temptation to take some, or all of it? Seems a little unlikely.

Who pays for the cemetery, for its upkeep and maintenance, now that the Earth has been mostly destroyed? The spacers say that it took nearly 200 years to get the planet back on its feet after the war, but if such an enterprise existed wouldn't everyone on Earth know about it? And these guys certainly never seem to have heard about it. How can it be such a well-kept secret? Don't they advertise?

Can you kill someone by pumping embalming fluid into them? I mean, I guess it would kill them, but wouldn't it be horribly painful? And Wickwire assures the men it will not hurt. Surely there could have been some other way to get rid of them? I know this is two centuries in the future, and they may have some more humane process for death that involves embalming fluid, but still...

Iconic?

Very much so. The idea of a purpose-built planet has been used many times since, in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for one, and this very story is closely mirrored later in a Star Trek episode called "Shore Leave". Different aim, same basic idea though. Similar attendant too. Also, to some slightly different extent, an early Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ("The Royale", I believe) in which aliens purpose-build a new home for a NASA astronaut who has been stranded far from his planet. I guess you could even attribute the last scenes in 2001 to it too, as Bowman is cared for by the aliens to whom the monoliths belong.

This also features a rocket-shaped exploration craft of the type which would become very popular in sixties science fiction movies and serials.

Those clever little touches

That Star Trek sound effect used on "Third From the Sun" is again in evidence in the opening scenes inside the spacecraft.

The Times they are a Changin'

Who would have thought that science fiction writers could have envisioned a basic space station being built in the 1970s, or that Earth would undergo a cataclysmic nuclear war in 1985? And yet, here we still are, bothering the galaxy with our presence over forty years later...

Personal Notes

So far as I can see, given that this was only 1960, I don't think any special camera tricks are used in the "suspension" effect, which means all the actors are standing or sitting still of their own accord, and if so, it's a testament to their acting that, while there are the odd almost imperceptible movements, as will happen when anyone tries to remain entirely still, they achieve the illusion really well.

[Trollheart]

Title: "Mirror Image"
Original transmission date: February 26 1960
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: John Brahm
Starring: Vera Miles as Millicent Barnes
Martin Milner as Paul Grinstead
Joe Hamilton as Ticket Attendant
Naomi Stevens as Cleaning Lady


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Alienation, paranoia, madness, loneliness, parallel worlds, doppelganger
Parodied? Probably
Rating:

Serling's opening monologue

Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes: not given to undue anxiety, or fears, or for that matter even the most temporal flights of fantasy. Like most young career women, she has a generic classification as a, quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote. All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes' shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes, who, in one minute, will wonder if she's going mad.


It's a dark and stormy night (well, it is!) and a woman is waiting inside a bus depot but the bus is half an hour late. Worried, she checks with the ticket attendant, who snappily tells her that he has the same answer for her as he did the last time she asked: it'll be here when it gets here. She's surprised - as well as a little taken aback by his bluff rudeness - because this is the first time she's spoken to the man, but he is making the case that she has asked several times already, perhaps explaining why he's so irascible. Then she spots a bag at the check-in that looks suspiciously like hers. She puts the coincidence from her mind, or tries to, not wishing to incur the further wrath of the old guy behind the desk, but the idea won't leave her, and she has to have a closer look at the bag a few minutes later. Now she sees it is identical to hers ("Even down to the broken handle") and the guy says it is hers, and that she checked it fifteen minutes ago! She says no, it's like hers but - and as she turns to indicate her bag, which she had left beside her on the seat, it's no longer there.

She goes into the ladies to wash her face and meets a cleaner in there, who also swears she was in there just a few minutes before. Now she wonders if she's going mad. Why are two people both telling her she has done things she has not, that they've seen her before when she knows they have not? And how has her bag magically got itself checked in, when it never left her side? As she leaves the ladies in a huff though, she catches sight of herself in the mirror. Twice. She is standing in the restroom and also still sitting outside! When she goes outside, there is of course nobody sitting in her seat, however her case is back where she originally left it, and no longer checked in. As she begins to think she's losing her mind, another traveller arrives and she starts talking to him, glad to have someone to share her anxieties with, probably eager to be told she's worrying about nothing.

She introduces herself as Millicent Barnes, a secretary who has quit her job and is leaving town to start a new one, and he as Paul Grinstead. He listens to her story but can't figure out if she's crazy or not. He advances several weak theories for what might be happening, and then the bus arrives. As they go to get on it though, Millicent looks up and sees... herself, sitting there, already on the bus! She runs away in fright back into the depot and Paul pursues her, asking the bus driver to wait. However as she's in no condition to travel he decides to stay with her, telling the bus driver to carry on without them. When Millicent regains consciousness she is gratified to see she is not alone, and begins to relate a strange tale she once heard about parallel universes and how they can sometimes intrude into ours, with the version of us in that universe having to replace the original in order to survive. Paul listens, and says he's going to phone a friend (hah) who can drive them to their destination rather than wait for the next bus.

In reality, he's phoning the police, believing she's sick and needs help. While he's on the phone though, she goes into the ladies again, intending to hunt down the other version of her. Concerned when he hears her, from outside, seemingly talking to herself, he convinces her to walk outside with him and has the cops pick her up. As they drive away with her, he shakes his head. Then, as he prepares to spend the night in the bus depot, he looks up from taking a drink at the water fountain to see his bag has disappeared, and a man is running out of the door. A man who looks very much like him...

Serling's closing monologue

Obscure and metaphysical explanation to cover a phenomenon. Reasons dredged out of the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained. Call it 'parallel planes' or just 'insanity'. Whatever it is, you'll find it in the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

Weirdly poetic justice. After deciding that Millicent is mad, Paul falls under the same spell as her, realising that against all odds, she was right, and that whatever parallel world her double came from, there's one of him there too, and it wants his life. He's left to rue losing his one ally, the one person who not only would have believed his now fantastical explanation of events, but might have had some knowledge as to what to do to stop them. Nobody will believe him now.

The Moral

As in many of these episodes, the words of Hamlet come back to haunt us: There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of...

Themes

The main one here is mostly paranoia, and the fear of going slowly mad, as everything Millicent has believed to be true, taken at face value, relied on, shatters and crumbles before her disbelieving eyes. The comfortable, safe world of reality and common sense has broken down into a nightmare existence of uncertainty, doubt and approaching madness. She can no longer trust her own eyes, and when she has made up her mind that she can, she can't get anyone to believe her. For the first time, the idea of parallel worlds is here also explored, the idea that we all exist in infinite and perhaps very slightly different (or even identical, as in this instance) planes of existence, and, too, the idea, not original to this series and long held in folklore, of the doppelganger, a twin (often said to be evil) that everyone has somewhere in the world.

And isn't that...?


Vera Miles (1929 - )

Another link to Psycho, as she played Lila Crane in both the original and the later sequel. She also, rather interestingly, featured in an episode of later "rival" anthology series The Outer Limits, and went on to have roles in some of the biggest shows of the day, including Mannix, Ironside, Marcus Welby, Bonanza, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-0, Alias Smith and Jones, Cannon, Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco and Fantasy Island, to name but a few.

Iconic?

I would say a cautious yes. I'm sure this is not the first time an "evil double" story was written (I suppose in some ways you can even liken that idea to Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask) but it surely echoes elements of Jack Finney's 1954 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers  and its later adaptation to the screen in 1956, in the building fear and paranoia that nothing is as it seems, that there is evil afoot and that people are changing, but nobody believes it's happening. Of course, this idea would be carried on throughout science fiction, with such series as Star Trek using it to varying degrees of effect. It would, in time, become almost a cliche, the "evil twin" story, and turn into a lazy plot device for lazy authors.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

Just exactly what legal right has Paul to call the cops and have Millicent (presumably) committed? Firstly, doesn't there have to be some sort of familial or relationship by marriage for that to work? Surely someone off the street can't just decide someone they've only met is mad, and needs to be incarcerated? And as well as that, should not the police be calling a doctor, rather than taking her off in their squad car? Seems a little precipitious to me. What do the guardians of the law know about the mental condition of people? And if they are taking Paul's word for it, why is he not required to accompany them and make a statement, sign something? Who's going to vouch for her lack of compus mentus in order to get her taken into an asylum, or even hospital? The cops?

If Millicent looked up and saw her doppelganger on the bus, and the bus departed, who was she talking to in the ladies afterwards? Another one? If the double had got off the bus, is it not likely the driver would have come in, asking if she was coming with them? And why would it get off anyway?

Personal Notes

He's an old guy, but I personally have a problem with the attitude of the ticket attendant towards Millicent. Yes, he's fed up with her constantly asking, as he sees it, the same questions, but even when she faints and is clearly in trouble, he seems unsympathetic, and when Grinstead tells him he's calling the cops, he becomes positively eager in a very disturbing way, as if he can't wait to see her locked up. So much for the older generation protecting the flower of the sex!

Parallels

This is a new section I'm starting today. As I mentioned in the intro, themes and situations and causes and morals are reused throughout the series, and when one episode can be linked or compared with a previous one, when the overall theme or idea fits or builds on something that has already been explored, I'll note that here.

"Perchance to Dream"

Although not the same thing, the idea of the double and of something or someone crossing over from another dimension  is reflected earlier in the episode "Perchance to Dream". Of course, in that case it's the world of dreams that becomes real when Edward Hall sees what he believes to be Maya from his nightmare in the shape of the receptionist. Still, the idea of something being here that should not be, something that belongs in another place entirely, links these two episodes I believe.