So it turns out that it’s much more fun to watch The Twilight Zone than it is to write little blurbs about it, and if one feels obligated to write little blurbs every time one watches The Twilight Zone, one watches it less and enjoys it less when one does.
That won’t stand! So I’m out.
Watch The Twilight Zone. All of it. And believe that it’s the best show that ever there was, because it is.
#1.03 “Mr. Denton on Doomsday”
“This is a man who’s begun his dying early.”
Whenever The Twilight Zone does western episodes, I tune out a bit. In this episode, the town lush runs into a mysterious salesman who makes him a gunfighter. Having never lived in the old west or in the fifties when westerns were a thing, I can only suppose that this is exactly how that would happen.
Martin Landau as a black-hat cowboy!
Also, no bonus points for naming your magical peddler character “Henry J. Fate.”
I give this episode two bomb shelters out of a possible five.
#1.02 “One for the Angels”
“Lou Bookman…a nondescript, commonplace little man whose life is a treadmill built out of sidewalks.”
Serling was always on the lookout for people being jerked around supernatural beings, and here we see a nice street salesman (Ed Wynn!) who is not only going to die at midnight, but between now and then, Death is going to follow him around with a miniature notebook and piss in his ear. Ugh- the worst. Bookman manages to talk Death out of taking him, which ends up getting the neighbor girl hit by a car instead. I won’t spoil the way that Bookman ends up working everything out, but I will say that if you ever find yourself in the first act of an episode of The Twilight Zone, don’t tell Death that you won’t die until you do one very specific thing, unless you want to do that thing and then immediately croak in the third act.
This marks the beginning of The Twilight Zone’s preoccupation with daffy old scalawags. Later on on in the series, this guy would have been played by their go-to elderly doofus, Burgess Meredith.
Death is played by Murray Hamilton, the mayor from Jaws. Always a hassle, that guy. Here, the angel of death is personified as an annoying middle manager doing a Robert Vaughn impression. Later in the series, Death would graduate to being a gut-shot young Robert Redford. Either way, though, he just messes with you for a while and then you die.
My review: three magic dictation machines out of a possible five.
#1.01 - “Where Is Everybody?”
“The place is here. The time is now. And the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey.”
Fitting that this is the first episode of the series, because it’s pretty much the basic Twilight Zone story- a guy walks around a normal-seeming suburban world, except one thing is wrong (in this case, there’s no one in town), and then it turns out that there’s a zeitgeisty reason that everything is weird. In this case, the reason isn’t especially interesting or meaningful, especially compared to some of the whoppers they get up to eventually.
Still though, eerie!
Here’s something fun: the town that the guy wanders around is the Universal town square backlot from Back to the Future and the beginning of Sneakers.
My review: three talking slot machines out of a possible five.
