Tag: SF&F TV Show Reviews

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 18 – The Last Flight

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In this episode a British WWI fighter pilot lands at an American Air Force base in France.  Only instead of it being 1917 it’s 1959.  Flight Lt. Decker is of course immediately detained by the base military personnel and questioned.  Major Wilson and General Harper interrogate Decker and he tells them this story.  He was on a mission over France with his fellow pilot Alexander Mackaye when they were attacked by seven German planes.  Decker escaped into a cloud and he assumed that Mackaye was shot down by the Germans.  The two American officers completely disbelieve his story.  They tell him not only is his story completely impossible but Alexander Mackaye not only hadn’t been killed in WW I but was in fact an Air Vice Marshall of the Royal Air Force and further was expected to arrive at that very base on that same day for a visit.

Decker is placed in a guarded room and visited by Major Wilson who wants to understand what exactly is going on.  Meanwhile Decker is forming a new opinion as to what actually happened to him.  He tells Wilson that he was a coward back in the war and that he had deserted Mackaye when the German planes had surrounded him.  But hearing that Mackaye had survived and knowing that no one else could have saved him, Decker interpreted his own presence in the future as a second chance given to him to find the courage to save Mackaye.  He reasons that hearing that Mackaye had been a great hero in the Second World War and having saved many men by his actions was meant to give Decker the reason and example he needed to redeem himself and save Mackaye.

Decker knocks out Wilson and when the guard hears the scuffle and opens the door Decker knocks him out too.  He runs on the tarmac and finds his plane and overpowers another airman who tries to stop him.  Finally, as he’s about to take off Major Wilson shows up and puts a pistol to his head and warns Decker to stop, he would shoot him.  Decker says he’d rather die that way than live a coward.  Wilson lets him go and Decker flies out of sight.

General Harper berates Major Wilson for his action in letting Decker escape but the reprimand is interrupted by the arrival of Air Vice Marshal Alexander Mackaye.  When questioned by the Americans he states that Decker saved his life.  He states that although initially it seemed Decker had fled the attack into a cloud later, he reappeared and managed to shoot down three German planes before he himself was shot down.  They asked if his effects had been recovered and Mackaye replied in the negative.  Upon showing Mackaye the effects that had been confiscated from Decker earlier in the day, including a photo identification card he confirmed that they were authentic.

Inexplicable time travel is a very regular feature of the Twilight Zone episodes.  In fact, most of the time there isn’t any rationale for it at all.  In this case it appears to be divine intervention to allow Lt. Decker the grace to summon up his courage.  As fantasy it’s rather an overused device and not particularly original.  But I actually enjoyed the story a great deal.  It appeals to my sense of what I would like the universe to be, a place where our better angels have a say in things.  Call me a rank sentimentalist if you like, I give it a B.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 17 – The Fever

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I’m going to save some of you some time.  This is one of the worst Twilight Zone episodes I’ve seen so far.  And that’s saying a lot because I’m counting the manikin themed ones.

Franklin and Flora Gibbs are in Las Vegas because Flora won a contest to go there.  Franklin is a moralist who abhors gambling.  While dragging his wife away from the slot machines a crazed gambler forces Franklin to pull the lever on a slot machine and Franklin wins about twenty silver dollars.  Pontificating to his wife on how wise he is he tells her he will take the winnings and exit the gambling area never to return.  But as he’s leaving, he hears a voice calling to him.

Late that night he can’t fall asleep because he has an insatiable urge to go down and play the slots.  By morning he has gambled away some enormous sum of his savings and is practically insane from the gambling mania.  Finally, the machine eats his last dollar without giving him the last play so he goes berserk and knocks it over and starts pummeling it.

He’s carried to his room but once up there he hears the slot machine calling to him in a mechanical voice.  Then it appears in the hallway and advances on him in his room.  His wife pleads with him that there is nothing there but Franklin cowers and retreats from this invisible foe and eventually backs through the window and dies on the pavement below.  The last scene is a silver dollar rolling to a stop next to his body.  It was ejected at him by the slot machine which is in the parking lot flashing and beeping away.

It’s as bad as it sounds.  What are we supposed to make of this?  Why would anyone waste the time to watch this?  F.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 16 – The Hitch-Hiker

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Inger Stevens plays a young woman named Nan Adams who is driving across country from New York City to Los Angeles.  When we meet her, she is in rural Pennsylvania waiting while a mechanic changes out a tire that blew out while she was driving.  He tells her how very lucky she was not to have been killed by the high speed blow out on that stretch of road.  As she is leaving the area, she notices a hitchhiker looking at her.  Later on, that day she happens to catch sight of this same tramp hitching at the side of the road.  After several more days and numerous more sightings of this man she became terrified by his continuing ability to stay ahead of her on the road.  Finally, in panic, she attempts to cross a railroad crossing and is almost hit by the train.  Now she is sure the tramp is trying to get her killed.  Later she convinces a sailor to ride with her to California and while driving she sees the hitchhiker and tries to run him over.  This panics the sailor and he leaves Nan.

Completely demoralized, Nan stops at a phone to call her mother back in New York City.  She reaches the number but is told by someone she doesn’t know that her mother has had a nervous breakdown after the death of her daughter Nan in an automobile accident in Pennsylvania several days before.

Now she knows that the hitchhiker is death waiting for her to realize that she is already dead.  And just as she gets back in her car, she sees the tramp in her rear-view mirror and he says “I believe you’re going my way?”

The Twilight Zone specialized in stories about people who were misinformed about themselves.  Sometimes they didn’t know they were manikins or robots or dead or on Earth instead of an asteroid.  But you can always see it coming a mile away.  Since this is the first “didn’t know I was dead” episode I’ll take only half a grade off and give it a B- (plus Inger Stevens was a very pretty girl which counts for something with me).

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 15 – I Shot an Arrow into the Air

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So, here’s a lifeboat drama folded into an early space flight story.  A rocket with eight astronauts is lost during the launch.  It disappeared from the radar and all communication is lost.  We next see the astronauts in a desert landscape, which we are told is an asteroid, near the smoking wreck of their ship.  Four of the astronauts are dead, one is critically injured and three are unharmed.  As senior officer Colonel Donlin takes charge of the survivors and orders his subordinates Corey and Pierson to bury the dead and care for the injured man.  Corey balks at giving the injured man water because of its short supply.  This sets him at odds with his fellows who come to see how selfish and inhumane he really is.  When the injured man dies Donlin sets Corey and Pierson to the task of exploring beyond the vicinity of the crash site and find if there is anything to help their plight.  Hours later Corey comes back without Pierson claiming they went in separate directions and he didn’t know where Pierson was.  But when Donlin accused him of having Pierson’s full canteen instead of his own empty one Corey confessed to taking it but claimed he took it after finding Pierson’s dead body in the desert on the way back.

Donlin takes Corey’s pistol away at gunpoint and forces Corey to retrace his steps and show him Pierson’s body.  When they reach the spot, the body is gone so they follow a trail and find Pierson lying on the ground with a head wound and badly injured.  Donlin drops his rifle and kneels down next to Pierson and asks him what happened.  Pierson can hardly talk so he tries to draw a symbol to show what he found at the top of the mountain above them.  It’s a long vertical line with two short horizontal lines through it, sort of like a double armed cross.  Pierson then collapses and dies.  Meanwhile Corey has grabbed the rifle and trained it on Donlin.  He admits that he attacked Pierson and now he would kill Donlin.  He shoots Donlin and proceeds to climb the steep mountain in the hot sun.  When he reaches the top, he sees that he is in Nevada and the symbol Pierson drew represented the telephone poles across from the ridge.  They weren’t on an asteroid.  They had crashed back to Earth.  He starts laughing hysterically because he has killed his comrades and will now have to answer for it.

I’m going to put aside how stupid it is to think that somehow, they could crash into an asteroid while lifting off from Earth.  I’m going to ignore the absurdity of an asteroid that was too small to be noticed from Earth having the atmospheric pressure and gravity field of a full-sized planet.  Putting those things aside you get the classic law of the jungle scenario of the sociopath murdering his friends to get to live last in the lifeboat.  This has been explored before but we get the twist of the state of nature turning out to be an illusion.  He hasn’t escaped society.  It will have the chance to set him straight.  One observation, apparently the desert southwest is indistinguishable from another planet to astronauts of the nineteen sixties.  Apparently, they hadn’t seen any westerns on tv or the movies.

As with several other tropes that will be reused in the series not knowing they are on Earth is used here for the first time so I’ll give them a pass on that.  This is a relatively lively drama so I’ll give this a B-.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 14 – Third from the Sun

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This is a Cold War science fiction story.  A worker at a nuclear munitions plant is sure that a nuclear war will occur within forty-eight hours.  He plots with a friend of his who is a test pilot to steal an experimental space craft (actually it looked like the flying saucer from Forbidden Planet) and escape to another planet with their families.  The base has some kind of security chief who suspects the plot and he shows up that night to transparently hint that he suspects they will attempt to steal the space craft.  When they try to sneak on the base the security guy catches them and threatens them with a pistol.  They turn the tables on him and after repelling the security forces they succeed in escaping into outer space.

On the ship (which also looks like the internal set from the Forbidden Planet space craft) we find out that their destination is the third planet from the sun which the inhabitants call “Earth.”

So, this is a pretty straight up sci fi from the period with the whole Cold War nuclear war phobia thing.  The protagonist lays on the anti-military thing a little thick for my taste.  I looked up the actor and found out he had been a conscientious objector in WWII.  But Serling always seemed like a Lefty so it goes with the territory.  It’s a simple story and even though the surprise twist is kind of lame I actually enjoy watching the episode.  It’s sort of a fairy tale.  I’ll give it a B+.

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+