The episode opens up in Vienna where five married couples who also happen to be scientists studying extra sensory perception are setting up a grand experiment to restore telepathic ability in humanity.\u00a0 Their plan is for each couple to bring up their children without any use of speech and solely use telepathy for communication.\u00a0 One couple, the Nielsens would return to their home in Pennsylvania and communicate their progress to the others by monthly letters.<\/p>\n
The Nielsens were extraordinarily successful and their daughter Ilsa is a natural telepath who has never learned spoken language at all.\u00a0 But ten years later when Ilsa is twelve a terrible fire breaks out in the Nielsen home and only Ilsa escapes.\u00a0 She is physically unharmed but in deep shock from experiencing telepathically the death of her parents.<\/p>\n
The town sheriff Harry Wheeler and his wife Cora shelter Ilsa in their home after the fire.\u00a0 Ilsa can\u2019t speak but Cora comforts her like a mother.\u00a0 Cora had lost her own daughter to a drowning accident a few years before and is very lonely without her child.<\/p>\n
Harry finds out from the postmaster that the Nielsens regularly received letters from Austria and obtaining the address, Harry writes a letter telling these friends about Ilsa\u2019s orphaning.\u00a0 But unknown to Harry, Cora steals the letter from the mailbox and burns it.\u00a0 But Ilsa sees it and reads from Cora\u2019s mind what is happening and in despair she runs out into the street and collapses in grief.<\/p>\n
Ilsa takes up residence with the Wheelers and Cora heaps great kindness and attention on her.\u00a0 When the Wheelers send her to school she is taught by Miss Frank, a woman whose father also brought her up mute in order to become a medium to the dead. \u00a0And because of this shared background she is able to get through Ilsa\u2019s telepathic behavior and force her to learn to speak and understand human language.\u00a0 At about the same time, a couple of the Austrian scientists, Karl and Maria Werner, show up to find out why the Nielsens have stopped writing.\u00a0 They go to see Harry Wheeler and he tells them of the fire and brings them to see Ilsa. Karl talks telepathically with Ilsa and implores her to answer him.\u00a0 But Miss Frank\u2019s training has changed Ilsa from a telepath to a normal girl and she rejects the telepathic appeal by instead speaking clearly out loud.<\/p>\n
The Werners say that they will leave Ilsa to be adopted by the Wheelers.\u00a0 They pretend that they haven\u2019t a legal right because they see how happy Ilsa is with her new parents.\u00a0 When Karl is walking away from the house with Maria, he expresses misgivings about allowing the experiment to be lost.\u00a0 But Maria states that the love that Ilsa has gained is much more important than the telepathic gift she would have possessed or even the benefit to mankind in rediscovering telepathy.\u00a0 She reminds him that though the Nielsens were kindly people they really treated Ilsa as more of their experiment than their child.<\/p>\n
So, this is a morality tale wrapped in a science fiction story.\u00a0 It\u2019s a minor work but enjoyable.\u00a0 B.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The episode opens up in Vienna where five married couples who also happen to be scientists studying extra sensory perception are setting up a grand<\/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":[1941,38,1355,1194,44,309,265,1691,154,1692,838],"class_list":["post-7400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-tv-reviews","category-twilight-zone","tag-mute","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-rod-serling","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-twilight-zone"],"yoast_head":"\n