Month: March 2019

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 19 – Mr. Dingle, the Strong

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Burgess Meredith and Don Rickles.  Need I say more?

The episode opens up in a bar where two of the patrons, an unnamed bettor played by Don Rickles and his bookie are arguing over whether a bad call in a baseball game means Rickles doesn’t have to pay up on a bet.  Rickles asks the opinion of Luther Dingle (played by Meredith), a stuttering vacuum cleaner salesman who has more honesty than sense of self-preservation and for his opinion gets knocked over the bar by Rickles.

As the bartender breaks up the fight and gives Dingle advice on staying out of trouble a two headed Martian enters the bar (invisibly) and discussing what they just observed decide to give Dingle the strength of three hundred men.  Dingle notices something is wrong when he can lift one of his vacuum cleaners with his pinky.  But the first indication that something had really changed for Dingle was when he accidentally pulled the front door to the bar off its hinges while trying to open it.

The next day Luther is in the town park when a young woman with a baby carriage sits down next to him on a bench.  Striking up a conversation, he asks her if he appears normal.  When she says yes, he asks her to observe something strange.  He lifts her and the bench she is sitting on with one hand.  He follows this up by taking a round rock about eighteen inches in diameter and pulling it apart with his bare hands.  A passing newspaper photographer asks him to do it again but instead Dingle lifts a larger than life size bronze statue of a soldier over his own head with one hand.  The photographer snaps the shot and it ends up on the front page of the town gazette.

Now Dingle is a celebrity and he is receiving job offers for everything from television shows to boxing careers.  A tv crew arrives to televise his story and Dingle provides examples of his strength.  He punches holes in the walls, smashes a table in two and even cracks one of the supporting beams of the bar while showing how he can lift the building.  And he picks up Don Rickles and spins him around and tosses him away.

But the Martians are not impressed with what Dingle has done with the power they have given him so they reverse the treatment and while attempting to continue in his exhibition of strength he becomes a laughing stock.  As the crowd disperses the Martians meet a pair of Venusian experimenters who are looking for Earth subjects to test their high intelligence ray.  On the Martians’ suggestion they pick Dingle and give him five hundred times the intelligence of a normal man.

While Rickles and his bookie are arguing about what a batter is going to do in a televised baseball game Dingle opines that based on his understanding of probability and quantum mechanics the batter would hit a home run, which he immediately does.  While Dingle lectures the barroom denizens on advanced physics Serling tells us that Dingle will continue to draw the attention of interplanetary behavioral scientists in this corner of the Twilight Zone.

Dopey?  Of course.  Cheesy?  Indubitably.  Good or bad?  Good.  B+

Who is 20BooksTo50K?

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One of our readers here, Chemist, sent me this link in response to my link to Dave Freer’s post on sf short stories.  So I read it.

Turns out 20BooksTo50K is a a “community dedicated to helping authors with the business of writing.”  What could be wrong with that?  Well anyone who remembers the Puppy Wars over the Hugo nominations know that the scolds of science fiction would prefer to burn down their own awards rather than allow anyone who isn’t up on the current LGBTQ grovelling to get into the nominations.  so it surprises me not at all to hear that Puppy redux is happening at the Nebula awards over the nomination of several 20BooksTo50K authors.

Having been a strong supporter of the Puppy writers (in terms of buying their books), I’ll have to check the authors in 20BooksTo50K to see if any of them click with me.

So many books, so little lifetime left.

Thanks to Chemist for the heads up.

 

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 18 – The Odyssey of Flight 33

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The plot of this one is very straightforward.  A jet airliner in route from London to Idlewild (present JFK Airport in NYC) experience s strange turbulence that mysteriously boost its air speed to 3,000 knots.  The pilots and navigators speculate about the jet stream and other natural phenomenon but most troubling they lose all radio contact with the outside world.  The stewardesses attempt to keep the passengers calm but the strong turbulence frightens them.

Finally deciding that risking a mid-air collision with another plane is less dangerous than their depleting fuel level they descend and get below the clouds.  The can make out the shapes of the New York City islands, Manhattan, Long Island and Staten Island but there is no sign of the buildings.  Flying in to get a closer look they discover that the area is a Jurassic landscape complete with jungles, giant fern trees and sauropod dinosaurs.

Shocked by what they saw they decide that somehow, they not only broke the sound barrier but somehow, they also broke the time barrier.  No knowing what else to do they decide to ascend back into the jet stream and push their speed to the maximum in hopes of reversing their situation.  And this is what they do.

When they begin to descend again, they can see the New York skyline and are jubilant.  When they radio the tower, they get LaGuardia airport and ask to be provided a radar vector to land.  When the tower says they don’t know what radar is the pilot said that his jet aircraft was running out of fuel.  The tower tells him they don’t know what a jet is but he is free to try and land.

But as they approach Queens, they see the unmistakable outline of the 1939 World Fair.  They are still over twenty years in the past.  The pilot tells the passengers over the intercom exactly what has happened and that they will make a second attempt to return to 1961 but that they are running low on fuel.  He also asks them to remain calm and pray.

Then Serling says if you hear a plane up there that sounds lost, it may be Flight 33 lost in the Twilight Zone.

This is a straight up time travel story.  No real explanation just facts on the ground (or in this case in the air.).  Not a particularly likely or even clever premise.  But guess what?  I like this story a lot.  The flight crew is very appealing.  The captain and his officers are capable and don’t lose their heads under extremely stressful circumstances.  The two stewardesses are very human and refreshingly feminine.  There is one funny vignette with two of the passengers that is mildly amusing and also very familiar.

And best of all nobody starts screaming at the walls as is sometimes the case in a TZ episode.  All the characters are stereotypes of the time; the brave war tested pilots, the pretty ingratiating stewardesses and the Claymation brontosaurus in the swamp.  No neurotics.  Check, check, check, check.

A.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 17 – Twenty Two

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A woman in a hospital bed is awakened at night by a very loud clock ticking.  She reaches for a glass of water and drops it on the floor where it shatters.  She hears footsteps in the hallway and gets up and follows it in time to see a nurse enter the elevator and head for the bottom floor.  The woman waits for the elevator, takes it down to the bottom floor, follows the hallway to the end and in front of Room 22 which is the morgue, she sees the nurse open the door and say to her, “Room for one more honey.”  She screams and runs away.

The next morning the woman who is a stripper named Liz Powell is visited by her doctor who tells her that she is imagining that a dream is reality.  She tells him that she’s had this alleged dream several nights running and every time it happens exactly the same way.  He tells her that it’s a symptom of her nervous exhaustion and can’t possibly be real because the night nurse looks nothing like the description that Liz gave.  He tells her tonight to change what she does to force the dream out of its pattern.

That night she tries to change things by not reaching for the glass but she ends up knocking it over accidentally anyway.  The dream finishes out as expected.  The next day she leaves the hospital and goes to the airport to catch a flight.  She has the same strange feeling she did during her dreams.  Then she drops a glass figurine that shatters like the glass.  Finally she heads for Gate 22 and at the top of the stairs is the nurse dressed as a stewardess who says “Room for one more honey.  Liz screams and runs down the stairs back to the airport.  Watching from the window she sees the airplane take off and burst into flames.

What the hell?

Okay, Barbara Nichols, who plays Liz is a voluptuous babe (although a little the worse for wear and tear).  But I’ve gotta say this was a hot mess.  It’s the story of a prophetic dream but I don’t know how to describe this as a good episode.  Let’s be generous and give it a C.