Title: “Long Live Walter Jameson”
Original transmission date: March 18 1960
Written by: Charles Beaumont
Directed by: Anton Leader
Starring: Kevin McCarthy as Walter Jameson/ Tom Bowen/ Maj. Hugh Skelton
Edgar Stehli as Prof. Samuel Kittridge
Estelle Winwood as Laurette Bowen
Dody Heath as Susanna Kittridge
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Immortality, Subterfuge, Time travel (of a sort), Callousness
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating: A
Serling’s opening monologue
You're looking at Act One, Scene One, of a nightmare, one not restricted to witching hours of dark, rainswept nights. Professor Walter Jameson, popular beyond words, who talks of the past as if it were the present, who conjures up the dead as if they were alive...In the view of this man, Professor Samuel Kittridge, Walter Jameson has access to knowledge that couldn't come out of a volume of history, but rather from a book on black magic, which is to say that this nightmare begins at noon.
Walter Jameson is a history teacher who holds his subjects enraptured by his delivery, making it seem as if he was there in the times of which he speaks. His professor, Sam Ketteridge, invites him to dinner; as he leaves, a strange old woman watches him from behind a tree. At Ketteridge’s house, it appears Jameson is engaged to his daughter, who is studying for her PhD. While she hits the books after dinner, Sam takes Walter aside and quizzes him on his age. He’s forty-four, Jameson tells him, but Sam is unconvinced, saying in twelve years he hasn't seen Walter age at all. Now he brings out a book of photographs taken during the American Civil War, and shows Walter one which looks very like him. Pushed by Sam, he admits it is him. When Sam asks him how old he is, he says he is old enough to have known Plato personally.
Now that his suspicions have been confirmed, Sam wants Walter to impart to him his secret, the secret of long life, perhaps immortality. But he is to be disappointed, as Walter tells him he doesn’t know why he has never died, why he goes on, why he doesn’t age like other men: he just does. He tells Sam that he too sought the secret of eternal life, and found it when he met an alchemist who wanted to experiment on him, for a price. Jameson paid the price, and lost consciousness. When he awoke the alchemist was gone, but the experiment had worked. He no longer aged, he could no longer die. He just went on living, but he laments that he did not become any wiser, any braver, any more honourable. More than anything, he wants to die, but he is too frightened to. He tells Sam he was a coward then, and he is a coward now.
This is illustrated in lurid detail when, knowing that it will only last a few decades for him, but unwilling to be lonely, he sticks to his plan of marrying Suzanne, even though Sam has now forbidden it. He looks triumphantly at the professor, knowing there is nothing her father can say to her to change her mind, without seeming as if he has lost his reason. Back in his own house he is accosted by the woman who was hiding behind the tree, who says she is his wife from a previous marriage. Grown very old now, she can’t explain why he has not, but she knows it is him, the man she knew as Tommy Bowen. She shoots him, and when Sam goes over to check out the noise, he finds Walter dying, and ageing. Ageing rapidly. Ageing till he’s nothing more than dust.
Serling’s closing monologue
Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end.
The Resolution
Quite
Dorian Grey-like, but a little simplistic and rushed in my opinion. I suppose he was eternal but not invulnerable, and in the end was as easy prey to a simple bullet as any of us. His sins caught him out in the end.
The Moral
Nobody lives forever, nor should they.
Themes
Eternal/long life is the main one here, something that would be revisited in films, books and series in the future, and which had previously been dealt with by writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. Selfishness, too, is here: Jameson knows he can only have a short time with Suzanne, but is prepared to marry her anyway to assuage his loneliness, if only for a comparatively brief moment in his long life. One might postulate that, were he to have children from the marriage, he could carry on the same with any daughters, though that is not mentioned nor even hinted at, and might not be in his makeup. I might have had a little more sympathy with him had he stayed with any wife until she had died, but his selfishness is shown in the fact that he clearly only stayed until each had grown old enough to no longer interest him, not till they died, as he is tracked down by one such, well, discarded wife as he went in search of a younger, fresher model.
Loneliness will almost always go hand in hand with immortality or very long life; if you’re the only one who can live beyond the span of a normal human existence, you’re going to be on your own for a lot of your time.
And isn’t that…?
Kevin McCarthy (1914 - 2010)
No, not
that one! Interestingly, given my reference to the movie with regard to the previous episode, McCarthy starred in the original 1956 version of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a clever cameo in the remake of 1978. He also resurfaced to play a role when
Twilight Zone was made into a movie, in 1983. In between, he had the usual roles in the usual shows, like
The High Chapparal, Columbo, starred in the remake of
Fantastic Voyage, 1987’s
Innerspace and as Grampa Addams in
Addams Family Reunion.
Iconic?
Nah. Stories about immortals or near-immortals have been around since the Bible - Cain, Noah, Methusaleh - and probably before, and have been absorbed into the likes of vampire stories and things like
Highlander.
The Times they are a Changin’
Sam grins to Walter that his daughter is going to pass her exams, even if he has to spank her. You wouldn’t get away with even saying that today, not even as her parent. Probably.
I’d also like to pass on my compliments to the makeup department. While the transformation scene as Jameson ages and then dies would be far better today of course, for 1960 they did a very good job, and considering that
Star Trek wouldn’t start in earnest till eight years later, and even then had some, shall we say, questionable effects, this is kind of state of the art for the time.
Parallels
Though not the same stories at all, there is a link here with earlier episode “Escape Clause”, as both men lament the brevity of human life, and while Bedeker did not consciously seek immortality, he was quick to grab it when it presented itself. Both men also found out that living forever (or in Bedeker’s case, being impervious to harm, as his immortality didn’t last very long) is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Personal Notes
I feel the writer missed a trick here. When Walter shows Sam the diary of the Civil War soldier, Major Hugh Skelton, who turns out to be him, Sam should have noted that the writing was Walter’s. After all, people’s handwriting doesn’t change over time, and Walter would have no reason to disguise his, especially in the middle of a war. Then Sam could have used this as incontrovertible proof that Walter was Skelton.