The Twilight Zone Discussion Thread

Watched The Man in the Bottle, an utterly predictable genie story. A bitter and weary antique dealer and his wife stumble across a mysterious bottle . . . etc etc, you know the drill.

About the only interesting thing about it is Joseph Ruskin who is a crackerjack genie, managing to be both wryly humorous and utterly charming. Fun performance, rather uninteresting episode, though the final punchline did surprise me, for which it gets point.

And, what's the four wishes? I thought three was standard issue.

 

Watched The Arrival which details the efforts of an FAA investigator to uncover the reason why a plane arrived and landed with no problems right on schedule, only without a single person on board the plane.

This was, I think, the best episode on this DVD. The mystery was a good one and the way it kept getting stranger and stranger was classic TZ. The bit where the guy sticks his hand into the propellor was one of the most suspenseful television moments I've ever seen.

And the solution was a good one, classic TZ tragic moral.

This was an above average episode. Great stuff.

 

Watched In Praise of Pip which had Jack Klugman as an alcoholic bookie faced with a crisis of conscience when he receives the news that his only son is dying in Vietnam.

I actually thought the first ten minutes were superb, Serling writing at his most sympathetic and resonant. When the thing actually took on the supernatural aspect, the episode kind of sunk, really. The crisis of conscience was well acted, the violence that resulted was shocking and brutal and then things had to get weird and it kind of lost the impact it had previously had.

A good episode, but not as great as some, though I'll admit that Serling's closing voice over was a great one.

Putting DVD, Vol. 12 in my Netflix queue.

 

Watched Mr. Denton on Doomsday, an episode that finds Dan Duryea as an ex-gunfighter who's become a sloppy drunk. After a mysterious peddler (again with the mysterious peddlers!) passes through town, he regains his life.

Excellent support from Martin Landau as a cruel town bully who torments the drunken Denton and then receives a quick comeuppance once Denton regains his dignity. The climactic showdown is incredibly tense and the punchline is absolutely jaw dropping as the peddler's hand is evident in more than one way.

A solid episode and one that actually surprised me for a moment. Great work from Duryea and Landau particularly and Serling's closing narration (to help one man crawl out of a pit and keep another from falling in . . . ) is brilliant.

Nice to see a western on the show too.

 

Also watched The Sixteen mm Shrine.

The episode, the series' fourth, owed much to Sunset Boulevard, I guess, but it worked well. Ida Lupino was brilliant, as always (gorgeous, talented and a genius . . . few women are her equal, in my opinion) as an aging movie star who lives mostly within the confines of a small room where she watches her old movies over and over and over.

Martin Balsam was great (two years after 12 Angry Men, still about a year before Psycho) as her long suffering agent. There were two crackerjack scenes, one where Balsam takes Lupino to meet with a studio head regarding a new film role, one that Lupino rejects because it's a mother role. It's a terrible and horrible scene as Lupino comes to grips with her age and reacts with anger and then pain. The following scene shows Lupino and Balsam fighting it out at her house and is great as well.

And this is testimony to why the Twilight Zone was such a great show; literally, up until about the last three minutes, this could be any anthology drama show. Serling's idea was to continue writing the scathing and psychologically driven scripts he always had, adding fantasy elements to bypass censors and this is a great example of that . . . the story literally plays with no fantastic elements at all until about three minutes before the end.

Predictable, but brilliantly acted.

 

I love this show, though many, many of the eps have freaked me out. *blushes*

Living Doll?.Emotionally abusive Erich is displeased when his wife buys an expensive "Talking Tina" for his step-daughter. He becomes even more displeased when the doll tells him it doesn't like him and is going to kill him.

This is actually called "Living Doll"? I thought it was called "Talking Tina"... In any case, I have never seen this episode, but learning about it at the age of eight was enough to give me nightmares. And I still don't dare watch it...

The Dummy?.A ventriloquist is convinced that his dummy, Willie, is alive and evil. He makes plans for a new act with a new dummy: plans that Willie doesn't approve of.

And this one I actually saw and... *shudders* Not good. Oh, the episode is all right, quality wise. But I completely freaked at this one too.

There are several others, but those two are the ones that really have bothered me. I think all of them have a certain freakiness, but that's part of the charm, imo. I've seen many episodes over the years, catching them as reruns and during marathons. And I can't really think of any that I disliked. Some went over my head, as I was too young, but I enjoyed all of them once the ending came. Even if it made me groan or wince when something 'bad' happened/happens.

And I'd love to see them all. I've seen some of the newer ones, but I don't care for them, really. The old ones are definitely classics. But I'm pretty sure that the show doesn't exist in Germany, so my chances of getting it are slim.

 

I love this show! They show re-runs over the weekend on Cable and it's one of the things I look forward to on Fridays.

This weekend, they showed "To Serve Man". Does anyone remember that one?

 

Ah, yes, a classic.

Just took another look at Walking Distance, my personal fave from the show and one of the greatest episodes of all television.

Gig Young is brilliant as Martin Sloan, a man desperate to recover a piece of himself that he lost a long time ago. The set up is not creative as he goes back in time to his home town, the summer he was eleven, but the execution is brilliant.

There's a hyperrealisim to it; the carousel start and stop is a great example. And scenes like Sloan ringing the bell on his old bicycle in the darkness are iconic ones.

Gives me cold chills when he finally meets his father, convinced at last that Sloan is who he says he is . . . and the father gives something usually missing in stories like this: encouragement to look ahead. Thirty-seven can be just as wonderful as eleven, he says, if you try.

And the final scene of Sloan limping back up the road, wearing a limp he didn't have when he first took that walk, and deciding, via Serling's narration, that nostalgia is a closed book, is incredibly powerful.

Nostalgia is worthy of some time, but in the end, we have to shed the past and most stories like this don't say that. A chill bump inducingly beautiful episode. Magnificence.

 

I think my favorite episode is The Obsolete Man