Category: Twilight Zone

individual reviews of all the Twilight Zone series episodes

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 13 – The Four of Us Are Dying

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Serling starts this off by telling us that the protagonist Arch Hammer (I kid you not) is a small time con-man, crumb and all around nogoodnik.  He also has the ability to look like someone else.  If he can look at a photo or remember a face, he can change his appearance to resemble that face.  He uses this ability to scam people.

In the story he takes pictures and descriptions from the obituaries to impersonate the dead.  First, he shows up at the nightclub where a young singer is mourning for her dead boyfriend.  When Arch impersonates him, he tells her that he was mistaken for the dead man and convinces the girl to run away with him to Chicago.  She’s so elated to find him still alive that she kisses him and agrees.  Next, he goes to the home of a gangster posing as one of his mobsters that was murdered during a job.  He shakes down the mob boss and runs off with a load of cash with two mobsters in hot pursuit.  Cornered by them in a dead-end alley he quickly sees a photo of a boxer on a poster and changes his face to avoid the mobsters.  But on emerging from the alley he meets a newspaper seller who turns out to be the father of the boxer.  It seems the boxer was an awful man and the father hates him viscerally.  Arch knocks the old man down and returns to his apartment and his own face.  A police detective shows up at his door and tells him he has to go to headquarters for questioning.  Leaving in the revolving doors of the apartment building he escapes the detective for a second and when he catches up to Arch, he has assumed the face of the boxer.  Walking away free and clear he runs into the boxer’s father and despite his hurried attempt to change his face again the father shoots him down.  While he’s dying on the pavement Arch Hammer’s face changes briefly through all four of the faces he used in the episode.

Let’s give some credit for the plot idea.  A human chameleon has been done a lot but it was probably pretty exciting in 1959.  The three vignettes he involved himself in were pretty simplistic and not highly novel but the acting was mostly okay.  But the payoff was the boxer’s father who wanted revenge.  That actor wasn’t very good or convincing.  It seemed very flat to me and didn’t provide the emotional energy needed to justify the execution of an adult child by a parent.  I didn’t buy it.  I’ll give this a C.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 12 – What You Need

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The good news is there isn’t anyone screaming and crying for the world to hear him in this episode.  The bad news is this is one of those fantasy episodes where someone can see into the future.  But the good news is it’s the first one so I give it a pass.  And actually, the story is pretty good.  The characters you’re supposed to like are likable enough and the bad guy is dislikable enough so let’s give it a whirl.

Pedott is a peddler who sells matches and shoelaces out of his suitcase.  He’s a harmless looking little old man with a quiet voice and a faint smile.  But every now and then he looks at a customer and he tells him, “What you need is this.”  And then he’ll give the customer a small bottle of cleaning fluid or a bus ticket to Scranton PA.  And then the customer will discover that what’s been offered is exactly what he needs.

The scene is a bar where a few customers are sitting around and a surly tough guy named Fred Renard has watched Pedott magically give two people exactly what they need.  When Pedott leaves the bar, Renard confronts him in a threatening way and demands to be given exactly what he needs.  Pedott gives him a pair of scissors.  Later on, Renard catches his scarf in an elevator door and only the scissors save him from asphyxiating.  When Pedott returns to his hotel room he finds Renard lying in wait for him.  Renard demands that Pedott provide him with something to make him some money.  Pedott gives him a leaky fountain pen that spills a drop of ink onto a newspaper directly in front of the name of a horse running in a race the next day.  Renard wins several hundred dollars and immediately comes looking for Pedott to cash in on some other item.

Renard makes Pedott understand that he will never be rid of Renard and that he will risk violence if he doesn’t keep furnishing Renard with miracles.  Pedott lets him know that he can’t produce these things without wearing himself out.  But Renard forces him to produce something right away or risk a beating.  Renard takes a pair of shoes from the suitcase and asks Pedott if they are what is needed and he is noncommittal.

Renard puts on the shoes and says they’re too tight and have leather soles which makes them slippery to walk on.  When he demands to know how the shoes will benefit him Pedott hurries away and Renard chases him through the street.  But a fast-moving car come up behind him and the shoes are too slippery to let him sidestep the car.  Renard is struck and killed.  Pedott speaks to Renard’s inert form on the ground.  He explains that in the bar the first night he saw a vision of Renard trying to kill him.  And finally, he knew that the shoes were what he really needed to escape Renard.

So, this kind of story becomes another predictable staple of the Twilight Zone stock in trade.  But this is the first one and I actually enjoyed watching this one.  In fact, I don’t remember seeing this one before.  I’ll give it a B.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 11 – And When the Sky Was Opened

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This one is painful.  Rod Taylor is astronaut Col. Clegg Forbes.  Along with Col. Ed Harrington and Major William Gart (played by actors I’ve never heard of) he has returned from Earth orbit to crash land in the desert.  And the major mystery of the flight is that they were out of radio contact with Earth for twenty-four-hours (dah, dah, daaah!).  Gart is the only one of the three to require more than a short-term hospital stay.  I think he broke a collar bone.  Forbes and Harrington are in a bar together when Harrington starts to feel strange.  He describes it as if he doesn’t belong on Earth and if he doesn’t resist, he will just disappear.  He calls home and his parents claim to have never known him.  He tells Forbes from the phone booth what happened and disappears as Forbes goes back to the bar to get a drink for Harrington.  Worse still no one else remembers Harrington being there and even a newspaper story about the space mission now only includes Forbes and Gart.  Forbes tells his girlfriend and the commanding officer of their outfit and of course no one has ever heard of Harrington.  He goes to the hospital and even Gart thinks it was just the two of them on the mission.  Next Forbes looks in a mirror and can’t see himself and runs out of the room screaming.  When Gart gets to the doorway Forbes has vanished and nobody but Gart knows who Forbes was and now the newspaper says Gart was on a solo mission.  Next day the hospital room is completely empty and the space craft that was in a hangar under a tarp is just a tarp on the cement floor.

This is another Twilight Zone where a guy runs around screaming, shouting and crying because no one believes him.  Last night it happened in Episode 10 where the U-Boat Commander tried to warn the occupants of the British freighter that his alter ego would sink them in a few minutes.  That was bad enough but now poor Rod Taylor is running around like an hysterical adolescent girl screaming and crying because no one understands him.  Rod had a pretty good career in Hollywood.  He was in The Time Machine and stuff.  He was a decent actor and not bad with decent dialog.  People liked him.  But this is not science fiction.  It’s primal scream therapy.  There was a pretty girl in the bar and that could have added some interest to the show but they just neglected her.  I mean, why couldn’t she have been consulted about the problem.  Maybe she could have consoled him on his last day on Earth.  This is exactly the kind of episode that makes me cynical about television.

Well, I’m sorry this is a D or maybe even a D-.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 10 – Judgment Night

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Over the course of the Twilight Zone series a recurring theme was people not knowing that they are dead.  And a further subset is these unaware dead reliving over and over again some morally relevant or ironically selected event in their lives.  This is the first occurrence of this type of story so I’ll think I’ll cut Serling a little slack just this once.

The set up is a British freighter, called the Queen of Glasgow, crossing the Atlantic to New York in 1942.  For those unaware that is during World War II when German U-Boats sank Allied merchant marine vessels.  A man named Carl Lanser finds himself on the deck of the ship but is confused about how he got there and even the details of his life.  All he remembers is his name and the fact that he was born in Frankfurt Germany.  Being introduced to the passengers and crew he becomes excited during a conversation about German submarines.  He tries to convince them that if a submarine finds them, they will be sitting ducks.  The captain confirms Lanser’s opinion and remarks that he knows a lot about U-Boat tactics.  As the steward is depositing Lanser’s clothes in his cabin closet he finds a German captain lieutenant’s uniform hat among them.  When Lanser angrily takes the hat back he notes that his own name is printed inside it.

Alright, it’s clear what he is but the story runs its course.  Lanser has a premonition that a U-Boat will sink them at 1:15 a.m. and he starts running around warning all the occupants to abandon ship ahead of the attack.  This is the usual painful Twilight Zone scene of an hysterical individual running around yelling semi-coherently to either no one or to a group of people who don’t know why he’s yelling.

Mercifully the U-Boat shows up.  It surfaces and we see Lanser in uniform directing fire at the Queen of Glasgow and we watch Lanser on the Queen observing as all of the occupants are killed in brutal fashion.  Finally, he goes over the side and drowns as the Queen of Glasgow sinks like a stone.

Next scene is on the U-Boat where Captain Lieutenant Lanser is happily recalling the details of the night’s victory in sinking the Queen of Glasgow.  His junior officer is upset and Lanser tells him he’s a fool.  The lieutenant imagines that the penalty in the afterlife for killing innocent civilians so callously might be to have to be on the Queen of Glasgow every night for the rest of eternity.

In the next scene, we see the first scene again and Lanser is on the Queen of Glasgow once again.

Okay, so I said I’d cut Serling some slack.  If I were watching this episode back in 1959 (but was older than my actual two years of age at the time) I would think this was an interesting twist on cosmic fate.  So, let’s give them this mulligan.  B-.

Just as a note, the episode has two actors in minor roles that went on to reasonably well-known television careers.  Patrick Macnee (who starred in a 1960s British spy show called the Avengers) was the British first Officer.  James Franciscus (who was among other things, Mr. Novak on American television) was the German Lt. Mueller.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 9 – Perchance to Dream

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I hadn’t seen this one in a very long time.  A man named Edward Hall goes to a psychiatrist to get help.  He has a bad heart and cannot be exposed to excessive stress.  Hall is having dreams in which a woman named Maya is trying to scare him to death.  So, he is taking stimulants to keep from sleeping but the lack of sleep will also eventually kill him.

He arrives at the psychiatrist’s office and lays down on the doctor’s couch for just a moment and then goes on to tell him this story.  He and the doctor discuss his problem and Hall tells him the details of the dreams he is having but doesn’t believe there is a solution.  As he goes to leave the office, he notices that the doctor’s secretary looks like Maya.  Hall then crashes through the glass of the office window and plummets many floors to the street below screaming as he goes.

The scene changes back to the doctor’s office where Hall is apparently sleeping on the couch and the doctor is calling his secretary in.  He tells her that Hall fell asleep and then almost immediately screamed and died.  She replies, “he must have had a heart attack.”  The doctor replies that it probably was an easy death.  So, the whole episode we watched took place in the few seconds after Hall fell asleep.

I don’t know, it’s an interesting concept but the implementation is kinda so-so.  The twist ending is unexpected but I just didn’t seem to care all that much about Hall and his dilemma.  Dream, reality which is which?  Blah, blah.  C+

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 8 – Time Enough at Last

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This episode is relatively well known and I’m sure it’s been parodied on a Simpson’s Tree House of Terror episode at some point.

Burgess Meredith stars as Henry Bemis, a mouse of a man with coke bottle glasses who loves to read.  In this passion he is frustrated by a shrewish wife and an unsympathetic bank manger who happens to be his boss.  You see Henry is a bank teller who as we meet him is being threatened with dismissal if he’s found reading on the job again.  His wife rips up his poetry books and mocks him openly.  Next day he sneaks down to the sub-basement vault on his lunch hour to do a little reading.  He glances at the newspaper headline about a possible doomsday scenario from the latest H-Bomb test approaching just as he is knocked to the ground by an enormous shock wave.  When Henry wakes up and exits the vault, he is surrounded by ruble from a titanic explosion that has levelled the entire city.

Over the course of the next day or two he discovers that he is the only survivor of a nuclear Armageddon, he is the last man on Earth.  He has enough canned food available to him to last for many years but his loneliness is extreme.  Finally, one day wandering the bombed-out city he sees a pistol on the ground an is about to commit suicide when he realizes that he is in front of the public library.  And miraculously all the books are intact.  His mood turns to elation and he says now at last he has the time to read all the books he never could before.

He plans the months and years ahead with piles of Shakespeare, Shelley and Shaw when looking down he sees a stray volume and leans over to pick it up.  But in leaning over his glasses fall off his face and break on the stone steps.  As hopelessly near-sighted as Henry is, he can never now read any of the books he has surrounding him in great piles.  He finishes off the story wailing to no one but us that it isn’t fair.

Well, what can I say?  It’s a fun plot.  The tortured soul has his revenge on the soulless world but then is cheated at the end by fate.  It isn’t deep or brilliant but somehow it strikes me as close to the kind of irony that fills the world, we live in.  I give it a B+.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 7 – The Lonely

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The Lonely is a science fiction short story about being human.  I take a few points off because of the silliness of the set-up.  James Corry is a convicted killer who’s been sentenced to a fifty-year prison sentence but the “prison” is an asteroid nine million miles from Earth.  Let’s forget about the inaccuracies of where and how but let’s look at the silliness of the logistics of this prison.  Four times a year a ship has to come from Earth and drop off supplies to all of the asteroid prisons in use.  So apparently there are enough asteroids to keep each prisoner in solitary confinement.  Next, according to the supply ship personnel, they have to spend eight months out of every year performing their supply circuit.  So in effect, they too are virtual prisoners of their jobs.  The whole things is completely absurd and pointless since a prison on Earth would be infinitely cheaper, easier and equally effective.  Okay, rant off.

Corry is in year four of his sentence when a sympathetic supply ship captain, Allenby brings him a present.  Believing Corry to be an innocent man and knowing that Corry is close to despair, he gives him a crate that he tells him to open after the ship leaves because it is contraband which the Captain would be punished for giving to Corry.

Corry opens up the crate and finds a robot that looks and acts like a living woman.  Alicia, as she calls herself, tries to befriend Corry but at first he rejects her because he feels she is a mockery of life and worse than being alone.  But when he treats her roughly she feels pain and her tears touch his heart and he grows to accept her as a human and love her as a real woman.  The scene of the two of them sitting out in the desert night while he points out the familiar constellations is very touching.

Then Allenby’s ship returns unexpectedly with the best news he could possibly hope for.  Corry has been pardoned and can now return to Earth immediately.  In fact he has only minutes to leave and can only bring fifteen pounds of belongings.  He is overjoyed and states that he doesn’t have fifteen pounds of possessions, just a notebook and a pencil.  He tells Allenby that he’ll call Alicia and they can go right away.

But Allenby breaks the news to him that Alicia cannot come.  There is no allowance for her weight and she is a criminal possession anyway.  Corry becomes agitated and angry and tells Allenby and his men that Alicia is a real woman and she must go along with them.  Allenby realizes the harm he has caused by his gift to Corry but sees the only possible resolution to the dilemma.  He shoots Alicia in the face and thereby destroys her.  Corry goes into a shocked silence seeing the mechanical components behind her face and Allenby assures him that leaving the asteroid will mean waking up from a nightmare and the only thing he’ll be leaving behind is loneliness.  To which Corry mechanically replies, “I must remember that, I must remember to keep that in mind,” as he’s lead back to the relief ship.

Jack Warden who played Corry was a pretty familiar face to television viewers of the era.  He seemed to play a lot of cops from what I remember of him.  He does a good job playing the part.  Allenby is played by John Dehner who is not as well known but played in several Twilight Zone episodes and is actually one of my favorites for western sheriffs and space ship captains.  He also did a good job.

I like this episode.  It’s far-fetched and a little bit contrived but fits my tastes for a half-hour drama.  It gets a B.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 6 – Escape Clause

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At last, the first season has an episode I can applaud.  Escape Clause is the story of Walter Bedeker a hypochondriac in a high rise who says that it’s unfair that he can only live such a very short span.  Along comes Cadwallader a portly fellow who says he can provide Walter with virtual immortality and indestructability in exchange for his insignificant soul.  After just a little bit of haggling the bargain is struck and Cadwallader even throws in an escape clause just in case the day ever comes when Walter tires of life and wants an easy way out.

Mr. Bedeker strides forward into his new life by hurling himself in front of every subway train and bus he can find.  He makes a few thousand dollars of liability insurance but finds himself bored to tears.  After drinking a glass of poison in front of his horrified wife, the jaded Methuselah informs his better half that he’s going to the roof and jump the whole fourteen stories just to see how it feels.  When she follows him to the roof and tries to block his way, she accidentally falls over the edge to her death.

Walter calls the police and claims he murdered his wife in order to try out the electric chair.  But the trial ends with him sentenced to life in prison without parole (damn Democrats).  Faced with the endless boredom of a perpetual prison sentence he agrees to the escape clause and Mr. Cadwallader gives him an immediate heart attack exit.

Now that’s my idea of a Twilight Zone.  Walter is a cranky egomaniac and Cadwallader is a friendly if oily ambassador for hell.  It’s an obvious match made in heaven?  There aren’t any big stars but it’s filled with character actors that you’ll recognize from any number of shows and series of the time.  The most notable for me is Joe Flynn playing one of the insurance agents paying off on his accident cases.  Flynn played Captain Binghamton (Old Leadbottom) on the McHale’s Navy sit-com opposite star Ernest Borgnine as Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale.

Finally a Twilight Zone that deserves a solid B+.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 5 – Walking Distance

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Gig Young plays Martin Sloane a Manhattan  advertising VP burned out from modern life.  Driving his sports convertible through a rural area he realizes he’s at his home town (of course named Homewood).  He wanders around and realizes he’s back 25 years ago when he was an 11-year old.  He of course, meets himself and his parents.  And he causes trouble.  He accidentally causes his 11-year old self to fall off the carousel and hurts his leg.  Finally, his father realizes that Martin is who he says he is but that retreating into the past is wrong.  So some how or other he finds himself back in the present and although he is wiser he doesn’t appear any happier.

One small detail, a very young Ron Howard is a little boy playing marbles in the street near Martin’s boyhood home.

It’s a slight tale and not particularly poignant but I’ll give it a solid C.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 4 – The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine

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This is the homage to Sunset Boulevard.  Ida Lupino is playing an over the hill actress named Barbara Jean Trenton.  Martin Balsam plays her manager Danny Weiss who wants her to stop living in the past and rejoin the world.  But Barbara Jean wants it to be 1934 forever, back when she was a beautiful young star.  So basically, this is Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard except instead of murder we get urban fantasy.  So, no surprise, after she realizes she was too old for the movies the world no longer had any appeal.  So, of course, she ends up entering into the 16 millimeter film of the title.  She is seen walking off camera with all of her old friends from twenty five years ago.

Obviously, there are no surprises here.  It’s a straight forward wish fulfillment plot.  It’s a good story and I’ll give it a B.  Not bad.