Category: Twilight Zone

individual reviews of all the Twilight Zone series episodes

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 27 – The Mind and the Matter

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This one is a pure comedy.

Archibald Beechcroft (played by comedian Shelley Berman) is a misanthropic New Yorker who hates his fellow man because he jostles Archie in the subway, steps on his toes in the elevator and spills coffee on him in the office.  When his boss, Mr. Rogers, finds Archie in the bathroom washing up after a particularly aggravating commute and asks him what’s the matter, Archie says people are the matter and they need to disappear and be decimated.  Later on, when the office errand boy Henry spills coffee on Archie’s jacket he is fit to be tied.  At lunch Henry tries to make amends by holding a seat for Archie and then presents Archie with a book called, “The Mind and the Matter,” which he claims allows people to use willpower to control the world around them.  Naturally, Henry spills some more coffee on Archie before he departs but despite himself Archie starts reading the book.  And he must be interested in the contents because we see him reading it on the subway even while he is jostled back and forth on the subway car.  Later on, we see him reading the book in his apartment and when he finishes, he declares definitively that concentration is the most underrated power in the world.  He is convinced that he can change his environment using only his concentration and will power.  His first application appears almost immediately.  Outside his apartment door the landlady is repetitively and annoyingly knocking on the door and haranguing him that his rent is due and he must pay it now.  Archie wishes her out of existence and sure enough, she disappears!  Opening the door and finding her indeed gone he declares today the landlady, tomorrow the world.

The next day as he is standing at the top of the subway staircase, being pushed and shoved by everyone hurrying by him, he stops and closes his eyes and concentrates.  And when next we see him, he is entering an empty subway station and even though the trains are somehow still running they are empty of people.

He reaches his office building which is also empty and heads up the elevator which is also running without the usual operator.  Now he sits down at his desk and fills out the insurance paperwork which is his normal occupation.  But of course, there really isn’t much point in filling out insurance forms if there aren’t any people to care.  After finishing off the day by flying some paper airplanes across the office he ends up talking to himself in the mirror but unfortunately, his reflection is very dissatisfied with Archie’s current situation.  He berates himself for not realizing that no people is even worse than annoying people.  His reflection continues this discussion with Archie back at his apartment and after admitting that the present situation is worse Archie informs his reflection that he will populate the world with the only people he can stand, people just like himself.

The next morning, he fights his way through the subway, the street, the building lobby, the elevator and his office.  All around him are men and women who all look remarkably like him and are if anything even more misanthropic than himself.  After a few hours of this he admits to his reflection that the original situation was better than the all Archibald Beechcroft version of the population.

When next we see Archie, he is sitting at lunchtime at a table and sure enough Henry spills coffee on him.  But Archie, while not very much sunnier in his disposition seems reasonably content with the normal annoyances of his normal environment.  When Henry asks him what he thought of the book he says it wasn’t believable.

You all know I like the comedies best.  Well, this is no exception.  It’s a goofy episode but I find it very entertaining.  Berman does an excellent job.  A.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 26 – Shadow Play 

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Dennis Weaver plays a man named Adam Grant.  The first scene shows Adam sitting in a courtroom where he is the defendant in a murder trial.  The jury declares him guilty and the judge sentences Adam to death by electrocution.  Adam reacts by running toward the bench and telling the judge he can’t make him die again.  He is restrained by the court officers and removed from the room.

In the next scene Adam is on death row and he is interacting with his fellow prisoners.  One of them is particularly amused that Adam believes that the whole situation is actually a recurring nightmare that Adam has every night.  Adam even points out some inconsistencies that wouldn’t actually occur in real life but were playing out here.  For instance, the execution was about to occur directly following the trial and the fact that the inmate has a wristwatch which wouldn’t be allowed in a real prison.  When questioned what electrocution is like he describes the sequence in painstaking detail.

Next, we are in a suburban home where the District Attorney and his wife are about to have a steak dinner when the newspaper reporter who is covering the trial and who also happens to be their friend shows up drunk and begins trying to convince the DA to get a stay of execution.  He goes through Adam’s story and also points out some inconsistencies.  He convinces the DA to go down to the prison to at least talk to Adam.

When the DA meets with Adam, he hears the story direct from Adam and amusingly Adam is able to not only complete the DA’s sentences but also begin them.  This unnerves the DA but he is still skeptical.  And while this is going on Adam is trying to remember where in his real life all the characters of his dream came from.  He recognizes the prison chaplain as a priest in his parish who had died years ago.  He mentions to the DA how he knew him and then remembered what other parts in the drama he had played on previous nights.  Apparently, the dreams differed subtly and allowed characters to switch roles.

When the DA returns home he is very confused but at the very last minute before midnight the reporter convinces him to call the governor for a stay.  But just as he reaches him the current goes through Adam and one of the characters disappears from the room and then everything goes black.

Next, we see Adam back in the courtroom and this time one of the inmates is the judge and reporter is the DA this time.

There is a little bit of yelling at walls and it is a very down beat episode but it’s pretty well done so I’ll go for a B-.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 25 – The Silence

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The episode takes place in an upper-class gentleman’s club where old money and just plain old Archie Taylor is angrily listening as younger brasher member Jamie Tennyson babbles on and on about some investment scheme or other while all the other members attempt to duck out on Tennyson before he can put the bite on them.  Finally, Taylor has the club butler walk over to Tennyson and hand him a note from Taylor.

The note is a wager.  Taylor is betting $500,000 that Tennyson can’t keep absolutely silent for one year.  The details require that Tennyson inhabit a walled fish bowl area in the club’s basement that is wired for sound and always available for observation by the membership.  When Tennyson asks him why he is making such an odd bet, Taylor says that Tennyson’s speech is so distasteful to him that he’ll do anything to give himself peace.  In addition, Taylor tells Tennyson that he knows he won’t lose the bet because Tennyson is congenitally incapable of shutting up for that long.

Taylor knows that Tennyson is desperate for money.  He has a spend-thrift wife who buys jewelry like it was going out of style.  Because of this Taylor believes that Tennyson will accept the bet and also lose and therefore be forced to resign from the club in disgrace.

Tennyson agrees but demands that Taylor put the money in escrow pending the outcome.  Taylor declines saying that his name and credit are all that’s needed to assure the wager.  Tennyson reluctantly agrees and the year is set to begin the next night.

In the next scene it’s nine weeks later, Tennyson is residing in the clear plastic walled enclosure and Taylor is amazed that Tennyson has been able to control himself so long.  But Taylor is merrily assuring his friends and associates that Tennyson won’t last much longer.

In the following scene it’s nine months into the year and Taylor seems to be getting worried.  He tells Tennyson that he feels sorry for him and offers him a thousand dollars to call the bet off and release him from his prison.  Tennyson refuses and writes on a pad “three months to go.”

Now Taylor starts using psychological warfare on Tennyson.  He hints to Tennyson that people have begun to see Tennyson’s wife going about town with other men.  He mentions over and over that Tennyson could lose his wife if he doesn’t leave right away and get her back.  This tactic is shown several times in the following scenes.  But although obviously tortured by the by the warnings he resists the temptation to quit.

Finally, it’s the last hour of the bet and Taylor’s friend and attorney George Alfred confronts Taylor with the knowledge that not only will Tennyson win the bet but Taylor will be exposed as a fraud and bankrupt.

The year is complete and Tennyson emerges from his isolation booth.  He walks over to Taylor and extends his hand to him palm up waiting for his check.  Taylor admits to the fact that he has no money, that Tennyson is the better man and that Taylor will resign from the club in disgrace.  But instead of verbally abusing Taylor and crowing over his victory Tennyson says nothing.

The other members are astounded and ask Tennyson to speak and tell them his side of the story.  But instead he takes a pad of paper and writes something and hands it to the members.  What it says is that before the contest Tennyson realized that he could not stay silent for a year so before he entered the room, he had the nerves to his vocal cords surgically severed.  Tennyson then removes the scarf that he has been wearing throughout the contest and we see the scars from the surgery.

I remember as a kid this one creeped me out.  The horror of a man maiming himself to win money still bothers me viscerally.  But I will admit the story is rather well done.  Liam Sullivan who plays Tennyson is actually quite a sympathetic character.  Taylor is played by Franchot Tone who was a pretty big star back in the day and is convincingly venal.  And Jonathan Harris (of “Lost in Space” fame) is an able voice of conscience as George Alfred.  I’m not speechless with amazement but let’s say B+.

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.