Category: TV Reviews

Reviews of tv shows by our amazing critics

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 24 – The Rip Van Winkle Caper

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The scene opens with four men and an eighteen-wheeler out in the desert near some hills.  We are told it’s Death Valley California and they’ve just robbed a train that was carrying gold bullion from Fort Knox.  The leader is a scientist named Farwell who used gas to render the train crew unconscious.  His assistant Erbie is an engineer who helped build the equipment and Brooks and DeCruz are criminals who provide the muscle and the nerve for the crime.

The men unload the gold into a hidden cave and get rid of the big truck and stash a smaller truck in the cave.  Now we learn the reason why this is a Twilight Zone story.  Falwell has perfected a gas that renders its users asleep in a state of suspended animation.  Erbie has built four glass boxes that will retain the gas for one hundred years while the gang outlive the arrest warrants for them and makes the gold, they stole much more valuable.

DeCruz is unwilling to be treated with the gas but Brooks, who doesn’t like him at all, threatens him at knife point.  Farwell has the boxes (or as they appear coffins) wired for sound and he walks the others through the steps to accomplish the plan.  The boxes fill with gas and the scene fades out.

In the next scene they wake up and seem a little dazed.  DeCruz complains that they look exactly alike, their hair and fingernails haven’t grown at all.  So, he concludes that it must be just a few hours later.  But then they find that Erbie’s box contains a skeleton.  A rock had shattered the glass top after falling from the roof of the cave.  The condition of Erbie’s body proves that an enormous amount of time has passed.  The plan worked and it’s a hundred years in the future.

Their plan is to take the truck to the nearest town and figure out the best way to cash in their gold.  Immediately Brooks and DeCruz start arguing about who will drive and who will sit in the back with the gold.  Once again Brooks uses his knife to win the argument.  But when Brooks goes down the road a little to look at a barrel of water, they will take with them, DeCruz runs him over with the truck.  But as DeCruz attempts to brake the truck after the killing he finds that the brakes won’t work.  He jumps out of the truck just as it hurtles down a cliff.

Now the gang is down to Farwell and DeCruz and they will have to walk thirty miles to the nearest town through the searing heat of Death Valley lugging as much of the valuable but incredibly heavy gold bars as they can carry.  Farwell is old and very out of shape.  After a while they stop to rest and Farwell discovers he has dropped his canteen somewhere.  He begs DeCruz for water and laughingly DeCruz agrees.  But the deal is one drink of water for one bar of gold.  As the day progresses much of Farwell’s gold ends up with DeCruz.  Finally, DeCruz ups the ante and changes the equation to two bars per swallow.  While DeCruz is stowing his new gold, Farwell takes one of his last bars and knocks DeCruz down and kills him with the heavy weight.

Now Farwell takes as much gold as he can carry and walks on.  Eventually he collapses from heat stroke.  A futuristic car with a man and a woman inside finds Farwell and the man goes over to try and help.  Farwell is on the point of death but he tries to use the gold as a means of getting the man to give him some water and take him to a hospital.  But before anything can be done Farwell expires.

The man goes back to the car and tells his wife what happened.  He is confused how the man ended up in the desert but he wonders why the man would think gold would be a convincing incentive to get help.  She asks, “Wasn’t it used as money back a hundred years ago?“  He replies, “Yes, but then we figured out how to manufacture it.”  And he throws the bar over by Farwell.

To my way of thinking, this is a terrible episode.  None of the characters are likable, not even the couple who find them at the end.  The surprise ending is not that surprising.  And who except for a complete psychopath would be willing to give up everything he values for some money?  Meh.  D

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 23 – A Hundred Yards Over the Rim

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Cliff Robertson plays a character named Chris Horn.  Horn is a member of a wagon train that had crossed the prairie and deserts between Ohio and the New Mexico to start a new life in California.  Now the rest of the wagon train were despairing of finding water ahead and were talking of turning back.  His wife is heartbroken because their son Christian is terribly ill with a fever and thought near death.  One of the other heads of family, Charlie (played by John Astin) tries to reason with Chris about how futile it is.  Although practically hopeless himself Chris is very reluctant to give up after coming so far.    He tells Charlie he’ll go over the sand ridge to the side of their trail to see if he can find water and what’s on the other side.

When Chris crests the top of the ridge, he is met with a scene he cannot comprehend.  There are tall metal towers connected by rope-like lines that extend to the horizon in both directions and there is a black road that also extends in both directions as far as he can see.  Walking down to the road he touches it and finds that it is very warm.  Suddenly a huge machine comes flying down the road making a loud frightening noise and he runs for his life off the road.  While scurrying away his rifle accidentally discharges and the bullet nicks his arm.  Now thoroughly disoriented he walks along the road to see where it goes.

He shows up at a small 1960s vintage general store with a dining area and a gas pump out front.  The friendly married couple who own the store try to help Chris and answer his questions.  They give him water and the wife cleans his gunshot wound and gives him some penicillin to avoid infection.  They tell him about the area where they are (New Mexico) and that there is considerable water and game in the area.  When talking about the penicillin Chris realizes it may help his sick child and so he takes the container of pills.  Finally, when they ask him where he got the antique rifle, he takes offense declaring that it is a brand new 1846 rifle.  They inform him that it’s 1961.  He disbelieves them until he sees the date on the calendar on the wall.  He looks through their books and finds an encyclopedia that has an article on someone with his son’s name that went on to be a doctor in California in the late 1800s.  Now Chris is encouraged to think that not only will he make it to California but that his son will live.  A doctor that the couple had called checks on Chris’s wound and finds it to be satisfactory but after examining him he notes that he has fillings in his teeth that could not have been used after the middle of the nineteenth century.  Because of the gunshot wound and also because he has begun doubting Chris’s sanity, the doctor called the town sheriff to come and pick Chris up.  When Chris realizes what is going on, he makes a run for it.  As he nears the ridge he first climbed to get to this strange world, the police cruiser approaches.  Running to stay ahead of the sheriff he drops his rifle and sprints over the top of the ridge.  And there he finds his own wagon.  When he cautiously looks back over the ridge the twentieth century is nowhere to be seen.  No powerlines, no asphalt road and no sheriff on his heels.

He goes back to the wagon train and tells Charlie that they will find water and game very soon and that they will certainly get to California.  Then he tells his wife to give some of the pills to their son and that the boy will live and get better soon.  Chris Horn is an awestruck man but much more confident of the future for himself and his family.

Back in 1961, the sheriff and the store owner go over the crest of the hill and see no sign of Chris.  They pick up his rifle and return to the store.  But when they return to the store, they realize the rifle is now an antique and in terrible shape from a century of exposure.

I think Cliff Robertson did a very good job with this role.  The story is entertaining and there is plenty of human interest with the various sympathetic characters.  The story is another unexplainable time travel story but it is well done.

B+

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 22 – Long Distance Call

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Grandma Bayles lives with her son Chris and his family, his wife Sylvia and their six-year old son Billy.  Grandma is very old and very sick and she knows she hasn’t long to live but she says to anyone who’ll listen that having Billy around has given her the only joy she has in life.  On his birthday she gives Billy a toy telephone and tells him that wherever she goes he can always talk to her using the toy phone.  The parents take this as a harmless game between an old lady and her very young grandson.  But almost immediately after the party Grandma is at death’s door and the family is assembled at her bed.  While trying to console her she reveals that she no longer considers any of them family except Billy and that she wishes he could go with her to the other side.

After she dies Billy’s parents notice him talking into the toy phone whenever they happen upon him in his room but he always stops talking as soon as he sees them.  When they ask him who he’s talking to he says Grandma.  Finally, one day his Mother sneaks up on him and grabs the phone away from him unexpectedly and she tells her husband afterward that she could hear breathing in the receiver.  Phil tells her that she must have been imagining it.  The phone after all is just a toy.

One day when Sylvia returns from the store the baby-sitter is in a panic and a man is sitting in the living room in an agitated state.  He tells her that he was driving down their street when completely out of nowhere Billy dashed directly in front of his wheel.  He said if he hadn’t been completely alert and swerved the boy would have been killed.  But most disturbingly when he asked Billy why he had run into the street he told him that someone told him to do it.  And of course, the baby-sitter swore she would never such a crazy thing but that Billy had been talking on his phone just before the incident.

Now the parents are convinced that Billy has been influenced in a terrible way by the phone and his grandmother’s feelings about having him join her.  They tell Billy that they are taking the phone away from him to prevent the problem from recurring.  Billy runs away distraught and a few moments later we found out that he threw himself into the ornamental fish pond and wasn’t breathing.

A rescue team of firemen work feverishly with oxygen and respiration gear on Billy but one of them says to the parents that it didn’t look good.

Now Phil Bayles takes his son’s toy phone in his hands and starts making an impassioned plea to his dead mother to let Billy go and let him live to grow up.  He says it’s not fair to take away all the good things in life that growing child gets to enjoy.  As her son and Billy’s father he pleads with her with a sob in his voice.

And as he finishes, we hear from the emergency crew the news that miraculously Billy has revived and seems to have escaped the risk of permanent damage from his scrape with death.

This episode has always made me very angry.  Unless that phone was a line to Hell, what kind of Heaven would allow in a grandmother who was capable of telling six-year-old grandson to run into traffic or drown himself in a pond.  Either way I have such contempt for her that I can’t enjoy the happy conclusion.  But I do recognize that it is a story with powerful imagery and Billy Mumy is a very convincing little boy actor, as usual.

Let’s say A-.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 21 – The Prime Mover

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This is a morality play disguised as science fiction. Jimbo Cobb (played by Buddy Ebsen of Beverly Hillbillies fame) is a partner in in a small diner in the southwest. His partner Ace Larsen is a very unlucky gambler with a bad temper. He begs and threatens the slot machine installed in the diner whenever he loses a try. Their waitress is a young woman named Kitty Cavanaugh who is also Ace’s long-suffering girlfriend. She is growing tired of Ace’s gambling problem and his stalled marriage proposal. It is implied by his facial expressions that Jimbo is very sympathetic to Kitty’s plight and wishes that his friend Ace would get his act together and move all their lives forward by concentrating on constructive actions instead of wasting his resources on gambling.

Outside on the highway that day a car skids off the road and tumbles into an electric substation. Ace and Jimbo run over to the crash site and Ace is prevented from reaching the passengers of the car by the high voltage current arcing around the car. He somewhat incoherently tells Jimbo to do something to help the passengers trapped inside and amazingly Jimbo does something.

A looked of pained concentration goes across Jimbo’s face and the automobile reverse flips away from the substation and clear of the electrical hazard. He clutches the sides of his head as if he is in great pain and Ace goes to the aid of the motorists.

Afterwards, Jimbo is lying on a bed in the apartment behind the diner rubbing his temples while Ace talks to him. He tells Jimbo that the car passengers weren’t critically injured and were expected to recover. The Ace asks Jimbo to explain how he had saved them.

Jimbo explains to Ace that he has always had the ability to move things by thinking it. At first, he had thought everyone had this ability but later he figured that it was something that was best left unsaid because he had gotten in trouble back in grammar school when people didn’t understand how he was able to do these impossible things. He also explains that using this ability too much gives him blinding headaches.

Ace asks him to prove it by moving something. Jimbo lifts the bed off the ground and lets it float for a few seconds before landing again. Then Ace asks him if he can move smaller things and Jimbo tells him that smaller things are of course easier to move. Ace flips a coin onto the bed and it lands tails. He asks Jimbo to make it heads and as Jimbo twitches his head to the side the coin flips over to heads. Then Ace gets a pair of dice and asks Jimbo to make the dice land seven. Ace tosses them and as they are tumbling Jimbo twitches his head and the dice land seven.

Now Ace is ecstatic and his gambling dreams have all come true. He gathers Jimbo and Kitty (and Kitty’s hundred dollars) and they head to Las Vegas to make some money. With Jimbo as his guarantee Ace goes on an unbroken winning streak at the roulette wheels and craps tables of all the casinos on the Vegas Strip. Perhaps they practiced on a site like casino-bonus.me.uk beforehand or it may have even been beginner’s luck but they accumulate two hundred thousand dollars in winnings before Jimbo’s headaches become too extreme to continue.

When they collect their cash, Ace has let the money go completely to his head. He starts flirting with the cigarette girl in front of Kitty and Jimbo and tells them that he intends to make enough money to buy the state of Nevada tomorrow with the money he will win. Jimbo tells Ace that he doesn’t want to keep going with this gambling setup because it’s cheating and goes against Jimbo’s ethics. Ace convinces Jimbo to allow just one more bout of gambling the next day before quitting. But Kitty has had it and declares she’s heading home. She walks out the door of their suite. Jimbo convinces Ace that Kitty is more important than the money and that he should run after her and win her back. Ace catches up to her in the lobby and tells her it’s just one more day and then he’ll be filthy rich. But she’s so disgusted by the way he’s acting that she runs out of the casino without looking back. Now Ace is angry and just at that moment Sheila the cigarette girl shows up again and after she flirts with Ace again, he decides to celebrate his good fortune with her instead of Kitty. The casino manager wants to know why she is walking away from her job so Ace gives him some cash and tells him she’s keeping him company which works for the manager. Then Ace tells the manager to get in touch with whoever is the highest roller in town and tell him to get in touch with Ace. The manager tells Ace that would be the Chicago gangster Big Phil Nolan.

Next morning Jimbo wakes up to the phone ringing. It’s Nolan and he tells Ace he wants to have a high stakes craps game with Ace. When Nolan shows up with his bodyguards, they set up the game and with Jimbo’s help Ace turns his two hundred thousand dollars into a million. Ace tells Nolan that he wants to bet his whole million on one throw of the dice, his last play. But just then Sheila shows up and Jimbo sees that Ace has replaced Kitty. As Ace gets ready to roll, Jimbo tries several times to stop Ace and warn him that there were no more guaranteed wins. But Ace ignores him and rolls a loser. He has lost the whole million. The happy mobster leaves with the money and seeing the gravy train departing Sheila leaves too. Now Ace asks Jimbo what happened. Jimbo lies saying he blew a fuse. But instead of becoming enraged, he starts laughing uncontrollably and seems to have learned a lesson.

The next scene is back at the diner. Ace is having the slot machine removed and then he asks Kitty to marry him. She agrees and Ace grabs Jimbo’s arm in excitement and Jimbo dropped the broom he was holding. He watches approvingly as Ace and Kitty kiss and while they are distracted, he uses his ability to lift the broom handle off the floor without touching it.

The lesson is love trumps greed. A simple story with enjoyable characters. A solid B.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 20 – Static

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Ed Lindsay is an old man living in a rooming house that features a communal living space where the residents gather to watch tv at night.  When we meet them, Ed is playing checkers with the “Professor” who is also paying more attention to the tv western than to his game.  This enrages Ed who goes off on a tirade on the stupidity and unhealthiness of the tv content.  His fellow boarders barely respond to his invective and remain glued to the tube.  Finally, in disgust, Ed heads down to the basement to reclaim his antique console-sized radio and with the help of a neighborhood boy carries it upstairs to his apartment.

Once powered up Ed attempts to tune in some kind of acceptable programming.  After rejecting the local rock and roll stations he finds that the rest of the dial is just static.  But just as it seems he will be defeated he bangs the top of the radio with his hand and he hears the sound of his favorite Tommy Dorsey song coming over the radio.  Ed is delighted to hear his old music and afterwards the radio plays others of his favorite radio shows from more than twenty years ago.  Ed calls to the neighbors to share his discovery.  But when the Professor and a female resident named Vinnie come to his room to hear what he’s excited about there is nothing but static.

The pattern repeats itself where Ed hears some old time show but when anyone else enters the room the broadcast is gone.  When the Professor recommends that Ed call the radio station to find out how to improve reception the operator informs Ed that the radio station, he named went out of business ten years ago.  Ed isn’t disturbed by this revelation but the other tenants assume that Ed is imagining hearing things that aren’t there.

The next day Ed returns to his room to find that his radio is gone.  He confronts his neighbors and Vinnie admits that she gave the radio away to the junk dealer.  Ed goes off in a rage down to the junk dealer’s store and pays the man to take back his radio.  When he returns Vinnie shows up at his apartment and gives the back story to what is going on.

When She and Ed were twenty years younger, they were engaged to be married but Ed’s mother was ill so they postponed it and events conspired so that they never married and became bitter ex-lovers who lived next to each other in disappointment and regret.  And she further notes that every year on the anniversary of their engagement Ed waxes nostalgic for his earlier life.  For instance, the Tommy Dorsey song he keeps hearing was actually the song that Ed and Vinnie had considered their own.  Ed rejects this explanation and forcefully sticks to his story that he was hearing the programs he said he heard on the radio.  And he tells Vinnie to leave his room.

Once alone, Ed tunes in the radio and he hears Tommy Dorsey again and is so excited he calls out to Vinnie to come back and hear it.  She walks through the door and this time she’s a young woman again and she’s still in love with Ed.  And Ed is much younger too.  And now they will relive their lives the way they should have, together and in love.

Dean Jagger plays Ed and he puts all the right amount of cranky old man and someone mourning for the good old days when things were great.  The rest of the cast do well enough and the story moves along without slowing down enough to annoy me.  The plot is simple wish fulfillment around a magic talisman, in this case the radio that has a direct link back to the old world that Ed longs for.  This type of story is done quite often on the Twilight Zone.  I won’t claim that this version is particularly special but it seems to work and I like it enough to give it a B.

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+

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.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 16 – A Penny for Your Thoughts

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Hector Poole is a bank clerk who while walking one day to work bought a newspaper and when he threw the quarter into the newsie’s cash box it landed on its edge and stayed there.  The newsie tells him he’s never seen that happen before and when Hector sees what he happened he realizes he now can read the minds of the people near him.

Unfortunately, almost everyone whose mind he reads are thinking of doing something bad.  One of the bank’s customers is planning to use a loan to bet on the horses in an attempt to pay back money he embezzled previously.  His boss is planning to cheat on his wife.  And one of the other clerks is planning to steal a briefcase full of money and run off to Bermuda.

The only positive is that the secretary Helen is secretly in love with him.  As the day progresses Hector gets deeper and deeper in trouble.  When he tells his boss about the embezzler his boss assumed he was cracking up.  When he tells him about the clerk who planned to rob the bank he convinces the boss to confront the clerk and when no money is found in the clerk’s bag Hector is fired.  As he’s packing up he gets up the courage to tell Helen he likes her too and that he can read minds.  But when Bagby finds out that the embezzler has been exposed he rehires Hector.  Helen telepathically tells Hector to confront Bagby and demand a promotion and new office.  Bagby refuses but Hector lets him know he knows about the affair he is having.  Bagby relents and gives in to Hector.

Hector asks Helen to walk home with him and on the way he buys another newspaper and this time his quarter knocks over the one that was still standing on edge.  And at once he could no longer hear the thoughts of those around him.

This episode is a fantasy take on the Jack Lemon movie “The Apartment.”  Hector Poole was played by Dick York who was Darrin Stephens on Bewitched.  He has the face of a beleaguered honest shnook.  Here’s a Twilight Zone with a goofy plot and a happy ending.  A.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 15 – The Invaders

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The story takes place in a rustic farmhouse, with only candles and lamps for light, out in the middle of nowhere.  An older woman (played by Agnes Moorehead) is cooking her dinner in the kitchen.  Suddenly a high-pitched whine hurts her ears and then there is a crash on the roof of her house and she falls to the floor.  When she climbs up a ladder and opens a door onto the roof, she sees a miniature flying saucer about five feet in diameter has landed on the building.  As she watches a little man in a space suit about eight inches tall walks out of the ship.  She knocks him into the opening and he falls down the hole.  Another comes out of the ship and fires a tiny ray gun at her so she bowls him over with a lamp she throws at him and he falls off the roof.

The woman climbs back down the ladder and starts searching the house for the little invaders.  She meets up with them a number of times and they manage to hurt her enough with their ray guns to raise a series of blisters on her skin.  One of them even steals a kitchen knife and cuts her on the hand and calf at various points in the story.  Finally, at a certain point she traps one of them in her bed blanket and after tugging the knife out of his grasp she beats the blanket with the space man in it against a table until we assume, he is dead.  Then she puts the space man into a box and throws it into the fire place to burn.

The woman then up the ladder to the roof and taking a small hatchet she chops the space ship into wreckage.  While she is doing this, we hear a voice apparently calling over a radio to his base reporting that they have landed on a planet of giants and that his crew mate has been killed and that he himself is dying.  He warns that no retaliation or further landings should be attempted because the giants are just too powerful.

As the woman walks away, we get a closeup of the ruined ship and written on the side is US Air Force, Space Probe No. 1.  The tiny men were us!  Dun dun dunnnnnn!

When I was a little kid, I thought this was great.  Then when I grew up, I thought it was really cheap.  Now, I’m somewhere in the middle.  Agnes Moorehead is an annoying mute and pretty homely to boot.  She only screeches, whines, cries and moans a little.  Are the giants mute?  Who the hell knows?  The fact that the space men were running around like high speed mice whenever they were off camera but stood like statues whenever you could see them was very cheesy.  How they wielded a knife that was bigger than they were and almost weighed as much is beyond comprehension.  And how the two of them weren’t killed when they were dropped from what to them would have been a hundred feet on Earth is laughable.  And finally, once again they managed to recycle a prop from Forbidden Planet (the miniature flying saucer).

Alright, I’ll split the difference B-.