This episode is relatively well known and I\u2019m sure it\u2019s been parodied on a Simpson\u2019s Tree House of Terror episode at some point.<\/p>\n
Burgess Meredith stars as Henry Bemis, a mouse of a man with coke bottle glasses who loves to read.\u00a0 In this passion he is frustrated by a shrewish wife and an unsympathetic bank manger who happens to be his boss.\u00a0 You see Henry is a bank teller who as we meet him is being threatened with dismissal if he\u2019s found reading on the job again.\u00a0 His wife rips up his poetry books and mocks him openly.\u00a0 Next day he sneaks down to the sub-basement vault on his lunch hour to do a little reading.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When Henry wakes up and exits the vault, he is surrounded by ruble from a titanic explosion that has levelled the entire city.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 He has enough canned food available to him to last for many years but his loneliness is extreme.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And miraculously all the books are intact.\u00a0 His mood turns to elation and he says now at last he has the time to read all the books he never could before.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 But in leaning over his glasses fall off his face and break on the stone steps.\u00a0 As hopelessly near-sighted as Henry is, he can never now read any of the books he has surrounding him in great piles.\u00a0 He finishes off the story wailing to no one but us that it isn\u2019t fair.<\/p>\n
Well, what can I say?\u00a0 It\u2019s a fun plot.\u00a0 The tortured soul has his revenge on the soulless world but then is cheated at the end by fate.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t deep or brilliant but somehow it strikes me as close to the kind of irony that fills the world, we live in.\u00a0 I give it a B+.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This episode is relatively well known and I\u2019m sure it\u2019s been parodied on a Simpson\u2019s Tree House of Terror episode at some point. Burgess Meredith<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237,4,244,240,1661],"tags":[1698,38,1355,1194,44,309,265,1691,1697,154,1692,838],"class_list":["post-5893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-tv-reviews","category-twilight-zone","tag-burgess-meredith","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-rod-serling","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-time-enough-at-last","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-twilight-zone"],"yoast_head":"\n