National Twilight Zone Day: "One for the Angels."

The second episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) is a remarkably affecting and sweet tale. It's amazing to consider that this fledgling series manages to hit its stride just two weeks into its run, but that's pretty much exactly what happens with this tale by Rod Serling, the first to introduce the series' recurring character: Mr. Death.

"One for the Angels" opens with Rod Serling's staccato narration about "summer in the present." His words introduce us to Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn), a "pitch man whose life is a tread-mill," a character aged about 60. Today, Lou lives alone on a bustling city block, and is well-loved by the local children, who take an interest in the toys he sells on his stoop.

Then, one day, Mr. Death (Murray Hamilton) shows up in Lou's one-room apartment, and tells Mr. Bookman that the old man's departure from this mortal coil has been scheduled for midnight. The "pre-ordination is death in your sleep."

Lou tries to escape his death, and learns that there are only three valid reasons for appealing a death verdict: family hardship, priority for important individuals (a scientist working on a cure for a disease, for example) or unfinished business of a major nature. 

Lou feels his appeal falls under the third category because he's never made a truly big pitch, "for the angels." Mr. Death reluctantly agrees to give him more time to achieve that dream, but quickly learns that Lou has exploited the loophole. Now Bookman plans never to do another pitch again...so he will never die.

Unwilling to be outmaneuvered by a mortal, Mr. Death selects an alternative soul to take with him that night. He decides to take a little girl from the street, a friend of Lou's. When Lou realizes she is to be taken at midnight, he tries to delay Mr. Death by launching into a pitch for the ages, and the angels...

As the above-synopsis makes plain, this early Twilight Zone concerns both mortality and morality. In our effort to avoid one (mortality), we can, somehow, manage to ignore or circumvent the other (morality).  

Lou Bookman is 69 years old, and yet he very much wants to continue to live. He believes that he can trick death, and manages to do just that.  But Death chooses to kill a little girl, and that is an immoral thing, a that, for Lou, he cannot abide. So Lou steps in and makes his pitch for the angels, knowing full well that it is he, not the girl, who will travel with Death that night. Bookman's understanding of right and wrong ultimately wins out over his desire to keep on living.

"One for the Angels" is both sweet and sad for its depiction of Lou, a kindly, unmarried senior citizen, scraping by, barely making a living, and having lived in a one-room apartment for 21 years. And yet Rod Serling sees a kind of dignity in this man, and his life. Lou leaves the mortal coil having saved a child's life, having made room for another soul. Lou's life is not one we might choose for ourselves, but it matters, both to him, the children whom he has befriended, and, in fact, the cosmos itself. 

"One for the Angels" also remains memorable for its depiction of Mr. Death as a kind of mid-level bureaucrat. He is smartly-dressed, attractive (but not too attractive), and he uses the jargon of his job ("pre-ordination," etc.) He seems to rather dislike having to prove his identity, and he is obsessively concerned with administrative details. "When might we expect it?" He asks of Bookman's pitch "for the angels."  Like many bureaucrats, Mr. Death also seems to possess a limited imagination.  

Or, that's one reading of his character, anyway.  

Perhaps, Mr. Death knew all along that Bookman was going to try to outsmart him, and his ploy with the little girl was all pre-meditated, part of the overall plan to make Bookman feel his death was more meaningful, more palatable. Again, this goes back to Serling's view of humanity, and the notion that all people are valuable, that all people matter. 

The episode's only let-down, perhaps, is the underwhelming presentation of Bookman's big pitch. The episode cuts to shots of Mr. Death sweating, forking over cash, etc., but the audiences doesn't get to hear all of the sales pitch "for the angels." This is a bit disappointing since Lou's gift of gab is the thing, in a way, that saves a child's life. It feels like a failure of writing and presentation for the pitch not to come across with more stellar specificity than it ultimately does.

"One for the Angels" is sweet and humanistic. In this outing, Mr. Death is not someone to be feared or loathed, but  just a regular guy doing his job. In the end, this Not-So-Grim Reaper and Mr. Bookman walk off together, under the moonlight, and it's not hard to imagine that both men feel they have done a good night's work.

Next up: "Mr. Denton on Doomsday."

National Twilight Zone Day: "Where is Everybody?"

Sixty years ago, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) premiered on network TV (CBS) with this story: "Where is Everybody?"

Written by Serling and directed by Robert Stevens, "Where is Everybody?" follows the lonely trek of a wandering amnesiac, played by Earl Holliman. This adult man, dressed in military overalls, comes upon a lonely town called Oakwood. 

Although there are signs in the diner and at other locales of recent habitation, the man cannot find any other human...anywhere. He seems entirely alone, not just in Oakwood, but in the world itself.

Increasingly, the lonely man, fears he is going mad. 

Finally, he can't take it anymore, and the truth is revealed. He is actually Mike Ferris, an American astronaut-in-training who has just hit the panic button in an isolation tank on a military base.

For his long trip to the stars, Mike has been learning how to contend with being alone...for 484 hours and 36 minutes, precisely.  

But now, finally, he has cracked. The town and all its locations were delusions.

The next time there is a man alone like this, Mike's superior tells another officer, there will be no escape, no panic button as man faces "an enemy known as isolation."  

That enemy is a force waiting..."in the Twilight Zone."

The pop culture journey of The Twilight Zone begins with "Where is Everybody?" and with an opening narration from Serling which orients audiences to the fact that "The place is here. The time is now." He also alerts viewers to the fact that "this could be our journey."

Today, few critics or viewers would place this particular story -- basically a one-man show -- in the upper tier of series episodes, and yet "Where is Everybody?" still casts an incredibly creepy spell.  What the episode lacks in supporting cast members and pacing, it makes up for in symbol-laden imagery.  

Throughout the episode, for example, Ferris keeps encountering *almost* companionship.  He sees himself in a mirror at one point. So there is a "second" person to talk to, but it is merely a reflection. At another point, Mike encounters a woman, but again, not the companion he would seek. Instead, she is a mannequin.  He is like the mythic Tantalus, always near companionship but forever without real companionship.

The modern technology that should connect Ferris to other individuals also fails him throughout the episode. He attempts to use a telephone, but again, doesn't find the human connection he seeks. An operator's voice tells him that the number he has dialed is not working.  Failure, once more!

And in the diner, another bit of technology, a jukebox, is playing, but there is no sign of any other person for Mike to interact with.  The world seems to be spinning on, with all its devices, only devoid of human life.  One wonders if this could be Purgatory, Hell, or even a weird alien experiment.

Other symbols suggest Ferris's isolation throughout "Where is Everybody?". The audience sees the lonely town through his eyes, and through a barrier (a chain link fence) in one shot, suggesting his constant separation from home, safety, and the rest of the human race.

Intriguingly, it is via the mass media that Mike begins to put together the pieces of his mysterious past and his frightening present.  

For example, the only paperback on a kiosk is one titled "The Last Man on Earth," which seems to indicate (and be aware of...) his plight. And at the local movie theater, a film called "Battle Hymn" is showing. An image on the poster reminds Mike that he is in the air force officer.

A label on the movie poster reads "Now Playing," which is a remarkable self-referential touch. The TV audience watches the story of a U.S. military officer, while the movie theater shows a movie starring a military officer at the same time. Both stories are "now playing."  The poster and the label, "Now Playing" also function as a suggestion that Mike's plight, like a movie now unfolding, is not quite real.

These visuals very much carry the story, as do the sounds of life everywhere, which constantly haunt Mike.  It all feels very much like the dream that Mike fears he cannot awake from.

The episode's final reveal is not one of the more stunning ones in the Twilight Zone canon. The surprise ending (that the town is a delusion of a cracked mind) doesn't feel particularly special or shocking, even if it does foster empathy for the lone, wanderer. The audience learns that Mike has been wandering in his mind, not a real town, and that another astronaut will be doing the same thing soon, only for real...in space.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the early Twilight Zone's focus on the advent of the space program, and that new and unknown age of space travel seems to be the basis for this story. Can man survive in space alone? For long spells?  Without the sights and smells and companionship of home? This episode is very concerned with that idea, noting that man possesses a hunger for companionship, and that such companionship is the "one thing we can't simulate" on a space journey.

It's a good, solid point, and one buttressed by the overall eeriness of the episode's central scenario, an abandoned town, and a man without memory, or company.  Yet with sixty years of hindsight it is also easy to see how this episode doesn't necessarily play to Serling's writing strengths.  This is a series that consists often of great dialogue and stunning narrative u-turns.  

"Where is Everybody" depends on visuals, not Serling's brilliant use of language, and the final u-turn is a little ho-hum in the context of the series, overall.

Again, there's cleverness in abundance here, especially in visual execution: the idea of the cracked mirror as a reflection of Ferris's cracked mind, for example. 

But if anything, "Where is Everybody?" is a potent reminder of the fact that at the beginning, The Twilight Zone still had some growing to do before becoming the classic it is recognized as today.

National Twilight Zone Day: A Nursery Rhyme For the Age of Space

The genre anthology Black Mirror (2011 - ) is beloved by today's audiences as a series obsessed with the nexus of human nature and technology. The titular black mirror is the reflective surface of a contemporary i-Phone, for example.

But going back nearly sixty years, it is possible to understand how Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) also stood on the vanguard of American's culture's imagination about technology. Where today, Black Mirror ponders social media, video games, the cloud, and other evolving 21st century technologies, The Twilight Zone stood on the cusp of a very different world.

Consider, on October 1st, 1958, just a year before The Twilight Zone debuted, NASA came into being. And in 1959, some six months after NASA's foundation, the seven astronauts of Project Mercury were named. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, did not take that famous journey until May 5, 1961, years into the Twilight Zone's run. 

So as The Twilight Zone bowed, America stood on the precipice of a journey mankind had never undertaken before. 

Man-made rockets were going to carry the human race further than it had ever traveled. But no outcomes, no details were yet known about what might be "out there." The Twilight Zone, in its original era, dealt in the realm of "anticipatory anxiety" about the next step in human development.

It is appropriate then, that no less than four episodes of The Twilight Zone's inaugural season obsess on the opening journeys of the space age, on man's first, tentative, frightening steps away from planet Earth.  

It is true that other episodes in the series' run -- and also others in its first season -- explore a later age of "established" space flight ("The Lonely," "Elegy," "The Long Morrow,") but it is fascinating today to remember the four episodes from the 1959 season that fretted and worried about what the first astronauts to leave the safety of Earth's atmosphere would discover upon their historic flight.  

These are the stories that The Twilight Zone imagined would be "Chapter One" in the annals of man's' space age.

The premiere episode of The Twilight Zone, "Where is Everybody," not only began the network run of the series, but also initiated this recurring theme about the beginnings of manned spaceflight.  "The place is here, the time is now," Serling's narration notes, as it introduces the audience to a man (Earl Holliman) who finds himself wandering in an isolated, lonely town. 

Throughout the episode, he keeps running into the inescapable conclusion that he is totally alone in this atypical town.  There is not a soul to be seen, or heard.

And at story's end, viewers learn that this "last man on Earth" is actually an astronaut in training, one sitting in a hanger, on an air force base, in an isolation chamber. After he goes crazy from the loneliness of the experience in town (really an hallucination), an Air Force officer observes that "next time, it won't be a box in a hanger."  

In other words, the next time it will be real. 

A real life human being will have to deal with being alone in space, far away from his home, family, and every other human being, for a long period. Will he face what Holliman did, the episode wonders, "an enemy known as isolation?"

A few episodes later, another first step to space generates terror in The Twilight Zone. In "And When the Sky Was Opened," the X-20 rocket is launched with much fanfare. It travels 900 miles into space from Earth's atmosphere, the first such voyage of this type. When it returns to Earth, however, something strange occurs.  

The three astronauts who made the journey to Earth orbit are erased from existence, one at a time. Finally, even the rocket, the X-20, disappears from the world. It is as if someone, or some thing has taken them somewhere; ripped them from consensus reality. As the episode observes, the astronauts and their vehicle are "no longer a part of the memory of man."  

Today, this episode plays on an understandable if irrational fear about progress and technology, framed in an almost religious way. Would God be angry, the episode asks, if man were to leave his home, forsaking the Earth? Would an angry deity punish the men who dared to make that journey? Not by killing them, but actually by wiping them from the face of reality?  

These heroic men face terror and oblivion as an unseen force wipes away their histories and lives, before their eyes.  

Then, they just fade away.  

Was their offense so great, hoping to get a "God's eye" view of the Earth?

"I Shot an Arrow into the Air," the third Twilight Zone episode featured in this survey, is oddly, a variation on the premise of "And When the Sky Was Opened." In this tale, the Arrow 1, "the first manned aircraft into space" (think, the X-20!) is launched, with a crew of eight men aboard. 

Something goes wrong during the flight, and that accident is called "a practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature." 

The rocket disappears from all tracking devices, radars, and watch posts on the Earth. A man in mission control discusses the lost rocket, and calls its story a "nursery rhyme for the age of space," an apt description of this Twilight Zone leitmotif.  The underlying fear is that something like this might happen, in real life, and quite soon. Astronauts sent to space could die in an accident, or even become marooned there. With six decades of hindsight, we know that space travel and accidents are not strangers, as Serling's series predicted.

The remainder of "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" follows the surviving astronauts, who believe they have landed on an arid asteroid, and go in search of water. One astronaut, however, is desperate to survive, and kills his ship-mates for their water canteens. 

After killing his captain, the last surviving astronaut crosses a mountaintop only to see, in the valley, below, a sign for Reno, Nevada. The Arrow 1 never left Earth at all, and now the astronaut is a murderer, and will pay for his crimes. He killed for a canteen of water on twentieth century Earth, only miles from civilization. 

This episode's stark photography and story are a clear influence on Serling's Planet of the Apes (1968) screenplay. In that story, astronauts also crash-land on Earth, mistaking it for another planet, and must traverse an arid wasteland in search of water and food. 

More to the point for this essay, however, "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" worries that mankind, when faced with life on an inhospitable world, will regress to his most barbaric, selfish nature. He will murder to stay alive. The underlying idea is that man may not be ready yet, to take to the stars. As "Chapter One" in the annals of manned space flight opens, there is the fear, displayed in this tale, that man is not the evolved creature of rockets, but still a cave man.

Finally, "People are Alike All Over," another first season episode, showcases yet another rocket "taking a highway into space," this time heading for Mars. Man is depicted "unshackling himself...and his tiny groping fingers into the unknown," Serling's narration tells us. 

The episode then showcases a fearful scientist and astronaut on the rocket, Conrad (Roddy McDowall). He is terrified of what might await mankind on the red planet.  He has good reason to be scared, as he soon finds out. After the rocket crashes on Mars, Conrad is captured by Martians and put on display in one of their zoos, where he spends the rest of his natural life, the man "from a primitive planet."

The photo above foreshadows Conrad's entrapment on Mars. In the shot above, he is trapped or caged by his fears of the space flight (which has not yet occurred, in the story). In the shot below, he is trapped or caged by what he discovers on his journey: man's inferiority in a cosmic sense.

Nearly sixty years later, it is easy to gaze at all these Twilight Zone tales and read them as simply "twist-ending stories" about failed space missions. Instead, one must remember the original context of the first season, and stories such as "Where is Everybody?", "And When the Sky Was Opened," "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" and "People Are Alike All Over."  

These tales were watched by a citizenry standing on the brink of a new frontier, not knowing what would await our brave astronauts out there. Would the first people to leave Earth find loneliness and nothingness, at a great distance from the rest of us ("Where is Everybody?") Would they face the wrath of an angry God by developing a technology that allowed them to leave this Eden-like home ("And When the Sky Was Opened?")  Would they face catastrophe, and revert to barbarism in a Darwinian battle for survival ("I Shot an Arrow into the Air?")  Or would they become the playthings of beings far more advanced than mankind ("People Are Alike All Over?")

Today, these science fiction stories remain ones that chill the blood. But imagine living in 1959, as NASA was founded, as the first astronauts were selected.  How must it have felt not to know what the opening chapter of space flight would look like? 

The Twilight Zone exploited these timely, and disconcerting fears brilliantly in its first season, and in these four tales, in particular.

National Twilight Zone Day: "Death Ship"

During The Twilight Zone's fourth season in 1963, Rod Serling's trademark anthology was expanded from half-an-hour to an hour in length. 

Most of the episodes produced during this span are not included in syndication packages or annual marathons (except for the Robert Duvall episode, "Miniature"), because they don't fit the half-hour time slot. For Twilight Zone's fifth and last season, the format was restored to the more famous 30-minute period, and many of these hour-long installments faded to undeserved obscurity.

And the general meme on the fourth season, on the hour-long shows, is that somehow the experiment failed. That the episodes are not as good, or as powerfully wrought as the shorter installments. The thinking goes that at a half-hour, Serling sets up the premise, expands it just enough, and then delivers the closing whammy or twist before you grow fatigued with the narrative. It's a perfect thirty-minute structure. 

By contrast, goes the conventional wisdom, at an hour length, you get mired in the story-line and sort of wander off the point.

I haven't watched all of the fourth season shows recently, but based on my viewing of "Death Ship," I'm not sure that the latter argument holds much water. Written by Richard Matheson and directed by Don Medford, "Death Ship" is the sort of creepy sci-fi story I'm almost predisposed to love. Why? Well, as much as I love, adore, revere, and honor Star Trek and what it has accomplished over the long years, I prefer to view the realm of outer space not as a giant ocean separating countries, where starships stay in touch with Earth by subspace radio and serve a sort of cosmic United Nations, but as something more...enigmatic. 

Again, this is merely my personal preference, but I especially enjoy the concept of outer space as terrain of mystery, awe, and terror...a realm that we -- even as intelligent and technologically-advanced human beings -- are not quite able to understand at this point.

Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Space:1999 and yes, Richard Matheson's "Death Ship" all seem to view outer space in these fascinating terms. I think space adventuring is great in any form, but especially so when the mysteries unlocked at the end of the universe have some bearing on our understanding of ourselves and the very nature of existence. I'm not talking about morality (Star Trek was unmatched in focusing on the morality of our species), but the very core ideas of "what are we?" "what is existence?" and so forth.

And those are the sorts of interrogatives raised in "Death Ship."

As the story begins, it is the far-flung year of 1997, and three astronauts from the rocket bureau man the exploratory vessel E-89 as it seeks out habitable planets for colonization. 

Captain Ross (Jack Klugman), Lt. Mason (Ross Martin) and Lt. Carter (Frederick Beir) observe the surface of one distant planet, and spot something odd: something metallic glittering in the jungle far below them. 

Excited at the prospect of man's first alien contact, they land E-89 (the spaceship from Forbidden Planet [1956] redressed...) and discover that the "glittering" on their scope is actually something more frightening, the wreckage of an Earth spaceship.

The astronauts head out to the ruined ship and find that it is of the same class and construction as their own vessel, E-89. When they enter the wrecked craft, they discover the bodies of the three-person, human crew. Disturbingly the corpses are actually...their own. 

The crashed ship is actually E-89 and somehow it crashed on the surface of this alien world, and Ross, Mason and Carter were all killed during the event. Now, thanks to the auspices of the Twilight Zone, the astronauts have caught up with their grim fate.

At first, the thoughtful and determined Captain Ross thinks that they have "circumnavigated" time and somehow arrived on the planet in their own near future, perhaps as the result of a time warp. He makes an interesting decision. If their future involves a crash, he suggests, then he won't order the crew to launch. Ever. He decides to stay on the planet for an unlimited duration instead, because he knows he will eventually discover a "logical" explanation for what they've found on the surface. He just has to puzzle it through. "Eventually, we'll find an answer," he suggests.

But then another odd thing occurs. The longer the crew remains on the strange planet with their corpses aboard that duplicate ship, the more the crew begins to "fall apart," hallucinating a very different existence. Lt. Carter imagines he is home and visits his house on the very day of his funeral. He finds his wife's mourning attire laid out across his bed, next to a telegram from the rocket bureau announcing his demise.

Lt. Mason also experiences what might be a delusion. Outside, on the surface of the planet, he encounters his daughter and wife. They are happily sharing a picnic lunch lakeside, and Mason feels compelled to join them. In short order, however, he is torn out of this pleasant reality by the committed and stubborn Captain Ross, who reminds him that his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident long, long ago.

Captain Ross rallies the troops. He believes he has discovered the logical explanation (because everything has a logical explanation, he says). 

Everything that has happened on the mysterious planet is an alien trick, he tells his men; a ruse to keep humans from colonizing there. It's mind control...illusion.

Ross is so convincing in his "logical" explanation of the events on the planet that Mason and Carter believe him. The three men recommit to their mission, with great trepidation lift off, and head once more for the stars.

Miraculously, the spaceship does not crash on ascent, as the crew feared it would. E-89 makes orbit successfully. The three men have escaped their fate, or so it seems. The trap below cannot snare them.

But then the determined and intellectual Captain Ross orders they return to the planet surface to collect specimens and complete their assignment. After all, he says to his men, he understands the alien trick now, and won't be fooled again.

Ross sets the controls for re-entry, Carter objects and...

...Well, to tell you any more of "Death Ship" would be to ruin the denouement of one of the truly great (and perhaps not very well-known) Twilight Zone episodes. 

What occurs finally on that distant planet, and the explanation to the riddle -- the very thing that renders E-89 "a latter day flying dutchman" -- has nothing whatsoever to do with time warps or alien tricks. 

Instead, as you may have guessed at this point, the solution to the mystery grows out of the characters, and in some aspect, the so-called "cult of personality," the willingness of some men to follow leaders...because they want to believe something pleasant so badly. 

"Death Ship" is a great story because it arrives at the shocking ending sideways. The episode features all the trappings of futuristic science fiction drama, with discussions of time travel and alien life, but as is so often the case on The Twilight Zone (and in the work of Richard Matheson) the resolution of the enigma involves the very nature of man; the metaphysical not the technological.

In crafting a tale of a protagonist and captain who sees what he wants to see, and the men who follow him in that vision, Matheson's "Death Ship" takes the mysteries of outer space and links them right back to the essential nature of humanity, right here on Earth. For awhile it looks like the story is about "fear," the "death fear" as one character describes it, but the tale actually involves the acceptance of the unacceptable in our lives...and in our deaths.

As is typical for The Twilight Zone, "Death Ship" is presented in stark black-and-white and beautifully shot. There's one terrific, highly cinematic shot in which the camera prowls through a hole in the damaged vessel's wrecked exterior, and then scans the ruined command center, finally settling on the three corpses. 

There's some nice, unobtrusive use of split-screens and photographic doubles in another scene, and the performances are all intense and very good. Jack Klugman, in particular, does well in the role of the stubborn commander. One wouldn't automatically think of Klugman as astronaut timber, but he is intense and charismatic here. We pin our hopes on his character; just as his men do.

It's startling a bit startling to recognize the fact that this series (despite "futuristic" dates like 1997...) and the works of Richard Matheson don't seem to age at all.  They are -- truly -- as timeless as infinity.

National Twilight Zone: Season Five (Underrated but Great)

Across the decades, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone has rightfully earned a vast number of plaudits.  The anthology is beloved by generations, and seemingly exists as a permanent part of the American pop culture firmament.   The series been re-made on television twice (once in 1985 and once in 2002), and a feature film premiered in 1983, with another one slated for release in the years ahead.

And yet to listen to the accepted narrative about it, The Twilight Zone’s quality degenerated as it reached its final year.  The fourth season experiment of making the series episodes an hour in length was hard to recover from, the legend goes.  Creator Rod Serling was burned-out after writing something like eighty episodes and long-standing writers apparently had copious complaints with the new producer, William Froug. 

While all of this background material may indeed be one-hundred percent true, an unbiased look at the final batch of Twilight Zone episodes reveals that the series was actually still in its creative prime.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so take a moment and just gaze across the episode catalog and you’ll see that the final tally of episodes feature some of the most well-remembered and often-talked about installments, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” about the gremlin on the wing of the plane, and “Living Doll,” the episode that introduced the fearsome toy, Talky Tina. 

Other episodes, like “The Bewitching Pool” and “Come Wander with Me” have also grown in critical esteem since they were produced, and become part of the Twilight Zone mystique, a discussion which always begins with the words “Do you remember the one where…” 

Incidentally, Season Five also aired the award-winning short-film “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” simultaneously a budget-saving expedient and a great Twilight Zone installment. And one fifth season episode "Steel," by Richard Matheson was remade recently as the film Real Steel.

Here are five highlights from the underrated Twilight Zone, Season Five

5. “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You.”  In this episode penned by Charles Beaumont, set in the year 2000, all eighteen year-olds in America must undergo a “transformation,” a physical re-shaping into a perfect specimen.  

The problem is that there are only a handful of available models, so by-and-large, everyone in this future society looks like everyone else.  

One girl, Marilyn (Collin Wilcox) doesn’t wish to conform to society’s standard of beauty, especially because all those who do, including her mother (Suzy Parker) seem vapid and obsessed with appearances.  Society eventually forces Marilyn to comply, and after her plastic surgery she immediately proves just as shallow and superficial as everyone else. 

Produced in 1964, this episode gazes at both excessive political correctness (it’s unfair for some people to be beautiful when others are not!), and America’s always-growing obsession with youth and unnecessary plastic surgery.  In the age of Paris Hilton and the Kardashians -- when appearance not substance matters -- “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You” is more timely than over.

4. “Living Doll.” I don’t really have to write anything about the values of this episode here except: “I’m Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.”  This episode is so intriguing because the terrifying living doll is actually, in a weird way, a force of good.  

Here, the doll grapples with a nasty stepfather (Telly Savalas) who emotionally brutalizes his new family.  Tina is murderous all right, but the stepfather certainly has it coming, and a little girl needs to be protected.

Justice is a concept the series often dealt with here, and here a talking doll is the one to mete it.

3. “The Masks” Directed by Ida Lupino, this Zone tells the story of an old man on the verge of death, Jason Foster (Robert Keith).  During Mardi Gras he holds a family gathering for the ungrateful relatives who seek to control and inherit his fortune. He requires each of his ungrateful relatives to adorn a hideous mask until midnight.  

The masks are grotesque, and carved by an old Cajun. Each of the masks expresses a quality of its wearer, showing, respectively, vanity, avarice, sadism and the like.  When midnight strikes and the masks are taken off, the wearers are permanently changed, their real faces now reflecting those inner qualities...for the whole world to recognize on sight.

This ghoulish episode, which also reveals to audiences the face of death, corrects a flaw in everyday human existence: You can’t always tell what’s in a person’s heart by looking at them, can you?  With these masks, you can see – straight up – the ugliness that might be found inside.  It’s a macabre segment, and though the victims wholly deserve their fate, one also feels a sympathetic sense of horror at the thought of having to go through life with a face twisted by those masks.

2. “Come Wander with Me.”  I’ve made no secret of my absolute love for this episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s one of my all-time favorites. Here, the Rock-a-Billy Kid, Floyd Burney (Gary Crosby) goes to backwoods Appalachia in hopes of exploiting the local music scene (and musicians), but instead comes across his own unpleasant fate, and a song that expresses his story. 

That particular song, “Come Wander with Me,” is one of the most haunting things you’ll ever hear, and as it is replayed in the episode, again and again, it grows increasingly menacing, changed with new and upsetting lyrics.  The song was resurrected by director Vincent Gallo for his 2003 film, Brown Bunny.

1. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Written by Richard Matheson and directed by Richard Donner, this episode aired originally on October 11, 1963, and is one of the show's most legendary efforts. In fact it's one of those stories that has become part of the American pop culture lexicon, and seems to have effortlessly survived the test and passage of time (and was remade, in 1983's Twilight Zone: the Movie). 

You all know the plot of this episode by heart: a man named Robert Wilson (age 37), played by William Shatner has recently recovered from a nervous breakdown caused by "over-stress" and "under confidence." The incident that spurred his six months in a sanitarium occurred on a plane in flight.  Now Bob and his wife, Ruth (Christine White) fly home, and Robert spies a gremlin walking on the plane during flight..

I'll be blunt: if there is a more pitch-perfect half-hour of horror television in the medium's history, I haven't seen it. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” loses none of its power (or terror...) on repeat viewing. The story draws you in, and the universal fear of flying renders the story riveting.  William Shatner’s twitchy performance is great, too.  He plays a man trying to hold on to his sanity, but a man who is likable and good. We relate to his predicament and his fear on a very deep, very basic level.  How good is “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet?”  So good that you don’t care that the monster looks like a cuddly, over-fed teddy bear.

Runner-ups on this list of great Season 5 episodes would include "Uncle Simon," about an old man's ultimate revenge upon his greedy niece, "Spur of the Moment" about a woman trying to correct her past and destroying her future, and "The Long Morrow" a tragic story about star-crossed, time-crossed lovers.

National Twilight Zone Day: They Call Him Mr. Death

The Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964) is an anthology series and thus it features no continuing characters save for Rod Serling’s staccato-voiced narrator. However, in one memorable circumstance, a character does recur in the series. 

His name is Mr. Death.

This distinctive character -- this personification or embodiment of mortality -- appears in three episodes of The Twilight Zone: “One for the Angels,” “The Hitch-hiker” and “Nothing in the Dark.”

And in each installment Mr. Death serves roughly the same thematic and narrative purpose: to provoke first fear, and then, finally, a sense of acceptance about mortality. 

In other words, those characters that come to interface with Mr. Death in The Twilight Zone first consider him an existential “terror,” but upon closer contact come to understand that his presence, beyond being inevitable, is not so dreadful. 

In fact, Mr. Death -- in shape and deed -- is a reminder of the natural order.

My wife, a psychologist and therapist, often reminds me of her belief that virtually all Twilight Zone episodes concern Rod Serling’s fear of impending death or lost youth. So perhaps it is no surprise that Mr. Death is the only continuing character in the writer’s most famous canon. 

Uniquely, Mr. Death is never physically depicted on The Twilight Zone as a fearsome “Grim Reaper”-styled or “Charon”-type creature, but rather as a human being who appears, well, relatively mundane. 

He’s a well-groomed, Don Draper-esque businessman (Murray Hamilton) in “One for the Angels,” a handsome police officer (played by Robert Redford, no less…) in “Nothing in the Dark” and an amused, smiling Hitch-hiker (Leonard Strong) in the scariest episode of the bunch, “The Hitch-Hiker.” 

No matter how, specifically, Mr. Death appears to his prey in a physical sense, he is first greeted with the emotions of terror, dread and disbelief. 

In “One for the Angels,” an almost-seventy year-old street peddler, Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn) is shocked to learn that Mr. Death has scheduled him for “departure” at midnight. He categorically refuses to accept that Death has come for him, and then attempts to find a technicality in Death’s “law” that will allow him to remain on Earth.

In “The Hitch-hiker,” a woman, Nan Adams (Inger Stevens) on a cross-country trip has (unknowingly) died in a car accident, and keeps seeing the same Hitchhiker appear on the open road before her. She grows to dread seeing this figure, and the fear that she feels – and which the audience also feels – is a throat-clenching one. 

Who is this grinning stranger?  What does he want?  Why is he stalking her?  Why does she keep seeing him?

In “Nothing in the Dark,” poor old Wanda Dunn (Gladys Cooper) has spent the last few years of her long life locked away inside a dark, condemned basement apartment. She steadfastly refuses to reckon with the outside world – or any outsiders – for fear that Mr. Death will come for her should she open her door even a crack. 

All three cases reflect a similar notion: these protagonists steadfastly attempt to ignore and defy the fact of their own mortality, specifically through the recognizable and nearly Kubler-Ross-ian stages of bargaining (“One for the Angels”), denial (“The Hitch-hiker”) and even anger (“Nothing in the Dark.”)    

But by denying and rebelling against death, in fact, The Twilight Zone reminds us that these individuals may be denying the vibrancy of life itself…the meaning of our moment-to-moment existence.

The protagonists soon learn the error of their ways.  By denying Mr. Death, Mr. Bookman causes an unfortunate chain reaction. Since Death can’t take him, the personification of mortality arranges to take a little girl, Maggie, in his place. Bookman attempts to trick Mr. Death and delay him from this deadly rendezvous, in the process fulfilling a life of dream of making a “big pitch…one for the angels.” He knows that the vetting of this pitch will result in Mr. Death taking him from our mortal coil, but Mr. Bookman is able to see and detect a value greater than his own ending at this point: a little girl’s continued survival.  He sees detects how precious life is, especially for the very young.  He has already lived; she has not.

Nan Martin’s epiphany in “The Hitch-hiker” is that death has been her co-pilot all along, at least since her accident. Mr. Death thus represents a force she can’t escape from, no matter how fast she drives or how much highway her car covers. And this realization too, reflects our human condition. We’re all mortal, and death is part of the natural order of life. In the end, we can’t outrun it.

Old Ms. Dunn in “Nothing in the Dark” learns that her fear of death has cordoned her off from the rest of humanity unnecessarily.  She has tried so hard not to let Mr. Death into her apartment that her life has hardly been worth continuing, or living.  What is life if it is lived in perpetual fear of “the dark.” 

When Mr. Death “wins” -- as death inevitably wins -- he is not a gloating, cackling, monstrous victor.  Instead, he’s charming, and sometimes downright soothing. He politely informs Mr. Bookman that “he’s made it,” meaning he’ll be going to Heaven. He tells Nan Martin, without irony that she is “going” his way (a foregone conclusion at that point). And finally, Death offers beautiful, comforting words for Ms. Dunn:

“You see. No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning.”

That last line suggests Mr. Death’s third “gift.” First he brings fear, then acceptance and finally…transcendence?  Mr. Bookman will go to Heaven…to join the angels, no doubt. Nan Martin too is being taken on a continuing journey (destination: unknown…), and Ms. Dunn faces not annihilation, but what Death describes enigmatically as “a beginning.”

Thus in all three Twilight Zone episodes featuring Mr. Death there exists, at least a little, the specter of hope, of an existence beyond this mortal coil where humanity can find something…different. Interestingly, other episodes of the series dwell on what that something different may look like (“A Nice Place to Visit,” for instance)

But for these three Mr. Death episodes, the most important thing to focus on is the paradigm he represents. I call it the inevitability of mortality and the natural order inherent in death.

In some horror films, such as Final Destination (2000), death is viewed as an ominous, vengeful, dark force. What I enjoy so much about The Twilight Zone Mr. Death episodes, however, is the Grim Reaper’s obvious humanity. He is by turns gullible (“One for the Angels”), jocular (“The Hitch-hiker”) and gentle (“Nothing in the Dark”).

In other words, when Death comes a calling for human beings, The Twilight Zone promises that he will arrive in forms that we automatically understand, recognize, and can relate to. 

The only proper end to a human life comes from a death that is also…human.

Message conveyed…in The Twilight Zone. 

National Twilight Zone Day: "It's a Good Life" ("It's Still a Good Life")

In 1953, acclaimed author Jerome Bixby penned "It's a Good Life," a terrifying story later voted one of the greatest in sci-fi history.

Nearly a decade after the story's publication, television legend and producer Rod Serling famously adapted Bixby's story of a God-like (or Devil-Like?) child, Anthony Fremont (Bill Mumy), for The Twilight Zone during its memorable third season.

The result, which first aired on November 3, 1961, remains among the most famous -- and creepy -- installments of the landmark anthology program.

In his opening narration of "It's a Good Life," Rod Serling stands before a map of the United States and introduces viewers to the quaint little town of Peaksville, Ohio.

As our guide soon relates in staccato, clipped tone, something strange happened in this little American burg. "A monster had arrived" there and the "rest of the world disappeared," leaving Peaksville in a New Dark Age without electricity; without any modern conveniences at all, for that matter.

This monster, Serling quickly informs the viewers, is "a six-year old boy" named Anthony Fremont, who can make things happen...with his mind.

Anthony can also "hear" what others are thinking and has a nasty habit of wishing away his enemies "to the cornfield."

This frightening psychic power means that the grown-ups of Peaksville are constantly re-assuring and excusing the boy's bad behavior, so he doesn't turn his laser-like glare towards them. 

"That's a good thing you did, Anthony. That's a real good thing you did."

On the night of a birthday party, Anthony's neighbor Dan Hollis learns about the terror of the cornfield the hard way when -- after drinking too much -- he urges his terrified neighbors to kill the dictatorial child. Nobody moves. Although Aunt Amy does contemplate a fireplace poker, at least for an instant...

You're a very bad man," Anthony tells Dan before transforming the poor sap -- in a horrifying moment -- into a living toy; a macabre, bouncing jack-in-the-box.

Anthony's father then urges the boy to wish the monstrosity away to that cornfield, where all of Anthony's misshapen, monstrous creations dwell.

The capper of the episode is overtly pessimistic. On a whim, Anthony causes a snow blizzard. This sudden, drastic alteration in the weather will likely result in the destruction of half the crops supplying the town's food supply...

For almost fifty-years, "It's a Good Life" has resonated with generations of TV audiences, and I suppose that's primarily because the episode expresses some brand of universal truth about children and parents. 

When a child doesn't know limits, when a child isn't taught limits, the result may very well be a selfish, entitled monster. Not a monster who can destroy the world, like Anthony perhaps, but a monster nonetheless. 

When a child goes out-of-control, and the community does nothing, everyone suffers. Or as Ben Franklin once famously suggested: "educate your child to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society."

So it takes a village to raise a child. Or the village suffers. Or something like that. 

Considering this notion, it's not difficult to parse this iconic episode of The Twilight Zone as a commentary on what I sometimes term parenting paralysis. Nobody is entirely immune to this condition. Not me, certainly, though I try to be aware of it. 

I define parenting paralysis as the refusal of a parent to step up and do something that needs to be done "in the moment," even if it's distinctly unpleasant. But the downside of avoiding conflict is tremendous. The next time the same behavior pops up, it will be even harder to address...

Instead of confronting Anthony, the Fremonts in "It's a Good Life" just keep appeasing him over and over, refusing to acknowledge that every time they engage in this appeasement they simultaneously encourage Anthony's bad behavior. 

Behavior like creating three-headed gophers...that bite.

I don't know that Anthony is actually evil, as some have suggested. Rather, he's merely Id unloosed. He's six, and he wants what he wants he wants, and there is no one in his family courageous enough to subject those selfish desires to an "upright and reasoning will."

I have to say, Captain Kirk did substantially better addressing a teenager with the same powers, Charles Evans (in the episode "Charlie X"). As a father figure, Kirk understood he had a kind of psychological authority over the boy, even if the boy was the one with all the powers. There's no one like that in Anthony's world.

One aspect of "It's a Good Life" that I still find remarkable is the meticulous attention paid to detail. Specifically, the episode's screenplay informs the audience that Anthony doesn't like singing, and that he doesn't like people to talk while the TV is on. But Anthony also, apparently, does not like art work. And if you look closely, every painting, photograph or other piece of artwork in the Fremont house is missing...sent to the cornfield, I would presume. Throughout the episode, you can see shading on the walls, tell-tale signs of locations where picture frames once hung.

Again, the episode doesn't specify this particular dislike by Anthony, but again and again we detect those rectangular outlines and variations in shading...reminding us that once upon a time, art work was present. 

What's the larger purpose of such a background detail? Not to sound cruel, because I am a happy father who loves his child to the moon and back, but "It's a Good Life" suggests that in having and indulging a spoiled child, parents stand to lose a lot. The "comfortable" elements of their lives (electricity, art work, music, bars of soap etc.) virtually evaporate as the child becomes the sole focus of their lives.

I also have to admit, I get a kick out of the episode's not-so-veiled critique of television. There is no television in Peaksville, save for what Anthony generates from his strange and childish mind. The drama he creates consists of dinosaurs endlessly growling and duking it out on volcano tops. There's no human interaction whatsoever.

To please Anthony, one of his neighbors notes, deadpan, "It's much better than the old television..." Now, on one hand, she's trying to ingratiate herself with the boy and this is an entirely appropriate remark. 

On the other hand, I think I hear Serling's voice there, commenting on the quality of a medium designed to sell cigarettes and laundry detergent.

Perhaps the freakiest element of "It's a Good Life," -- and as a kid I was absolutely terrorized out by this -- is the fate of Dan Hollis. The episode utilizes two shots to reveal this fellow's metamorphosis into a Jack in the Box. In the first shot, we see a close-up of Dan's bobbing head, wearing a pointed cap. In the next shot, sequentially, we see a silhouette of Dan's head, the springs, and the box, on the wall.

Somehow, this one-two punch seems more psychologically effective than seeing some special effect deployed. Because the transformation involves two shots -- and is never viewed entirely in one frame -- it's as if the viewer's brain has to assemble the pieces. And when it does, the image is grotesque and disturbing.

I also love that at the denouement of the episode, Rod Serling feels no need to expand or explain any of what has occurred in the narrative during the preceding half hour. 

"No comment here," he says. "No comment at all." Again, I think that gets at the universality of the theme: that parents make monsters of their children by not disciplining them; by avoiding conflict.  The parents are, therefore, the ones to blame.

On February 19, 2003, the UPN update of The Twilight Zone broadcast a follow-up to this tale called "It's Still a Good Life." The story involves a grown Anthony (Bill Mumy) still holding Peaksville hostage to his narcissistic whims. But now he has a young daughter, Audrey (Liliana Mumy), who has kept her similar powers a secret. Anthony's Mom, Agnes (Cloris Leachman) believes that Audrey can be made to turn against her father, and save the town.

In addition, Audrey possesses a psychic power Anthony lacks: a creative power. She can return everyone and everything that Anthony has banished into the cornfield over the years. I felt that this was an interesting narrative development, and an effective counterpoint to Anthony's destructive abilities.

In fact, if you view the end of the episode in this light, I would submit that Audrey pulls a fast-one on her Dad. She beats him at his own game by making Anthony feel, for the first time, what it's like to lonely. This is the very thing that allows Audrey to use her power and actually restore the entirety of the world. I guess some people felt that this episode features a downer ending, that it lets two "monsters" rule the day. 

I would argue the opposite. Audrey doesn't so much as join up with her Dad, as skillfully undermine him. She wishes away all of Peaksville residents so that she and her Dad are really and truly alone. When he confesses he's feeling the effects of that isolation, Audrey brings back the world. Airplanes. Cities. Communities

That's a happy ending, isn't it? 

Sure, if you ever see these tourists in your town, you should think only happy thoughts, but still...at least the planet and human race are restored. The wrong of four decades ago is set right, at last. So if you want to see how things turned out for Anthony and his Mom, I recommend this follow-up episode so you can get a sense of closure.

However, If you are hoping that the story will be vetted with the same confidence, visual distinction and resonant imagery as the original you're going to be sorely disappointed by the pedestrian nature of the presentation.  The Twilight Zone's brand, for me, is expressive black-and-white photography, and staccato Serling-esque dialogue.  

"It's Still a Good Life" doesn't get the sound or images right, even if it is nice to see what became of indulged little Anthony.