Trollheart

Title: “The Hitch-Hiker”
Original transmission date: January 22 1960
Written by: Rod Serling, from the play by Lucille Fletcher
Directed by: Alvin Ganzer
Starring: Inger Stevens as Nan Adams
Leonard Strong as The Hitch-Hiker
Adam Williams as Sailor
Russ Bender as Counterman
Lew Gallo as Mechanic
George Mitchell as Gas Station Man
Eleanor Audley as Mrs. Whitney (voice)


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Terror, death, pursuit
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating: A++

Serling’s opening monologue

Her name is Nan Adams. She's twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store. At present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California from Manhattan...Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania. Perhaps, to be filed away under "accidents you walk away from." But from this moment on, Nan Adams' companion on a trip to California will be terror. Her route: fear. Her destination: quite unknown.

A mechanic fixes up a young girl’s car after it has spun out, marvelling that she’s alive at all. She follows him into town to get a spare tyre, but then gets shivers when she sees a hitch-hiker standing by the side of the road. When she points him out to the mechanic, he can’t see him and when she looks again he is gone. She drives off, but keeps seeing him on the road. Somehow he always seems to be ahead of her. The guy in the cafe she stops at feels it would be unlikely anyone would be hitching on the turnpike.

When he actually approaches her, she drives off in terror, and when her car dies on a level crossing and she almost gets hit by a train, he is there again, thumbing, beckoning her, and she now is convinced he is trying to kill her. When her car runs out of gas in the night she tries to wake up the gas station owner but he’s a prick and won’t come down. Then she meets a sailor on the way back to his ship in San Diego. She asks him to accompany her, saying she will give him a ride back to San Diego (she’s heading to LA anyway) but she has no gas. The sailor bangs on the door and he’s not as easily put off as she was, so the old man has to give them the gas.

They set off, and it’s not long before they come across the hitch-hiker. Nan tries to run him down, but the sailor says he saw nobody, and spooked by her reaction, decides to leave her and strike out on his own. She tries to persuade him to stay but he has had enough, and she is left alone. Reaching a diner she uses a payphone to call home, but is shattered when she is told her mother suffered a nervous breakdown when she heard of the death of her daughter in a road accident.

And now she knows.

The hitch-hiker is Death, and he wants to ride with her because she is dead too.

She never survived the accident, she was killed, and she’s been running from the realisation of her death ever since.

Serling’s closing monologue

Nan Adams, age twenty-seven. She was driving to California; to Los Angeles. She didn't make it. There was a detour... through the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

Superb. The idea being created that the hitch-hiker is evil, deadly, menacing, is trying to get her to kill herself becomes nothing more than the inevitable realisation and acceptance that she has already died.

The Moral

You can’t outrun death, and when it’s time to go you have no choice.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

Why was the gas station owner so ornery? Sure, he was annoyed at being woken up, but this is a young woman on her own in the dark in the night with no gas. Surely some form of male chivalry would beat in his heart, if not, the fact that she’s pretty and he could be seen to do a good deed for her would be enough for most old men. Does he not worry that she might be attacked in the night? He can go back to bed and sleep soundly knowing that?

Picking up the sailor is surely a bad move, even in what I guess is the 1960s. The guy is young and strong, and she’s very pretty. He kind of looms over her in the car, and the first time I watched this I thought, that guy is gonna attack her and then the hitch-hiker is going to come up and save her, showing that he wasn’t evil after all. Didn’t happen, but still: giving a ride to a randy sailor in the middle of nowhere, dead of night? Hardly smart, is it?

And if she is dead, how come everyone can see her? The mechanic, the old man at the gas station, the sailor, the guy in the cafe? How can she eat, and drink? How can she drive? How can she use the telephone?

The Times they are a-changin’

Yeah, like I say, wouldn’t happen today. Single girl, very pretty, picking up a single male in the night on her own? Recipe for disaster.

Ten or Less Things I Hate About You

This is a new section in which I'll be detailing, if there are any, the aspects of the episode I didn't care for.

1. The irascibility of the old man, as mentioned in the Questions section - what's his deal? We'll see this later in another episode, proving I guess that for some dried-up old husks of men, even a pretty face can't melt a heart of stone.

2. The somewhat improbable circumstance of a young pretty girl giving a sailor a lift and not getting attacked. I feel this is a little too hard to swallow, keep your dirty thoughts to yourselves please

3. Her desperation to keep him there in the car with her, even going so far as to promise him a date. It's embarrassing.

4. The inconsistencies with her apparently being dead but still in the living world, able to interact with it.

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