Trollheart’s note: this (gasp) took a whole lot (wheeze) more out of... me... than I… expected…! Call (gasp) 999. No, not (urgh) 911! I… live… in… Irelaaaaagghhhhh!!
Between Light and Shadow: An Overview of Season One
So we’ve reviewed all of the first season of a show that would go on to become not only one of the most successful and popular science fiction/speculative fiction shows on television, but which would be copied, cited, parodied and used by so many other shows, both science fiction and not, and whose title and theme would enter the human experience in such a way that anything odd or unexplainable would have people humming the title tune. We’ve dissected all the thirty-five episodes, and what have we learned? Let’s see.
Things are rarely what they seem
This appears to be a constant factor running through most of the series. We first encounter the weird, untrustworthy nature of reality in the opening episode, where everything the spaceman sees has been manufactured in his own mind, then Barbara’s closed world of fading glory on the screen turns out to be a portal to another life in “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine”, while in “Perchance to Dream” a man is driven to suicide, though only in his dreams. Apparently, he suffers a heart attack and dies in the doctor’s office. A more horrifying and true nightmare grips the space pilots in “And When the Sky Was Opened”, as each begins to forget the other as they cease to exist, till none of them are left, even the memory of them wiped out, and in “Third From the Sun” we discover that, though Earth-like, the planet the people are escaping a nuclear holocaust from is an alien one.
Decidedly un-alien, in fact, Earth, is the landscape the stranded astronauts wander in “I Shot An Arrow Into the Air”, until the survivor, having killed the others to, as he sees it, survive, realises he was home all along, and the girl who thinks a sinister hitch-hiker is stalking her finds out too late that he is Death, and she has passed on. It is an alien planet - or rather, an asteroid - that the travellers encounter in “Elegy”, but they’re unaware that it also is a massive cemetery, and they have disturbed its peace and must pay the ultimate price, a woman realises her evil double is trying to claim her existence in “Mirror Image” and then there is perhaps the ultimate example this first season of things not being what they seem, when the residents of Maple Street realise they have become the very monsters they fear.
In “A World of Difference”, Arthur Curtis’s world vanishes to be replaced by one he hates, and can’t bear to live in, while Conrad is forced to live in the one he finds himself on, a prisoner in a zoo on Mars in “People Are Alike All Over”. Reality itself shifts in “The Big Tall Wish” and even the afterlife can provide nasty surprises in “A Nice Place to Visit”, though “Nightmare as a Child” shows too that dreams can be very real, and frightening. A secret world lives in “The After Hours” as mannequins take turns coming to life, and finally even the wife is a construct in “A World of His Own”.
You can’t cheat death/fate/the devil
This is amply proven many times. Walter Bedecker, intending to live forever in “Escape Clause”, backs himself into a corner from which there is only one way out, nothing can be changed in “Walking Distance”, and fate has the last laugh in “Time Enough at Last”, as well as in “Elegy”. No matter how many faces he puts on, Arch Hammer can’t avoid death, no more than can Nan Adams in “The Hitch-Hiker”, as death calmly and patiently pursues her. Fate gives Lt. Terry Decker a second chance to redeem himself and save an old friend in “The Last Flight”, but to do so he has to sacrifice his own life, and “The Purple Testament” marks Fitz, taking him as one of its victims after he has seen the presentiment of many men dying.
Walter Jameson, having cheated death for thousands of years, finally ends up being undone by his own callousness and cruelty, succumbing to the most cliched death possible, at the hands of his angry wife, while the noose waits for Caswell, in 1880 or 1960, in “Execution.” Henry finds you can’t cheat fate if the person you want to cheat it for doesn’t believe in “The Big Tall Wish” (or, to Disneyfy it slightly, “if your heart is
not in your dreams, some requests
are too extreme”) and when Valentine thinks he has cheated fate and ended up in Heaven despite a life of crime, he finds out this is very much not the case, and fate has, as always, balanced the books. Trying to make the object of his affection fall in love with him proves hazardous in “The Chaser”, committing suicide doesn’t solve Joey’s problems in “A Passage for Trumpet” and Mr. Bevis finds that, on the whole, he prefers his life as it is, warts and all.
Or can you?
Like most things in The Twilight Zone, nothing is really set in stone, and while there are many tales of people trying to change their luck, and failing, occasionally it does work. Look at, for instance, Barbara in “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine”. She manages to escape to a better world, as does Arthur in “A World of Difference”, and Gart Williams (technically) in “A Stop at Willoughby”. Technically, too, I guess you could say Bookman cheats, literally, death (or, if you prefer (sigh) Mister Death) in “One For the Angels”, when he manages to divert him from his secondary purpose, or, perhaps it might be more accurate to say, re-aligns him back on the road he was travelling originally, the taking of Bookman’s life.
Denton is a harder prospect, in “Mr. Denton on Doomsday”. Does he cheat fate, or does (Henry J.) Fate cheat him, or does Fate in fact save him? He could, theoretically, go in either column, while in “Time Enough at Last”, Bemis seems to have cheated fate, outlived all those who disparaged his reading, yet fate in the end has the final laugh at his expense. The Sturka and Riden families certainly cheat their own fate, and escape death, in “Third From the Sun”, and even Decker in “The Last Flight” does indeed get a chance to cheat fate by giving himself to death and changing the outcome of the future.
Love doesn’t conquer all
While it’s true that love is a strong force in almost any story,
The Twilight Zone often shows us that love by itself is not always enough. Take Corry in “The Lonely”, who falls in love with the robot Alicia but in the end accepts its loss in order to escape his prison, or Shackleforth in “The Chaser”, who learns all too late that total love and devotion can drive you crazy, and not in a good way. Not quite love as such, but the bonds of friendship and trust snap as easily as three-hundred-year-old chains in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” once paranoia takes hold, and Marsha’s - possible - love for the lift attendant in “The After Hours” is not enough to stop her wanting to remain human, until she’s more or less forced back.
A World of Pure Imagination
I expect this show was one of the first in which audiences were asked to just accept a lot of stuff on face value, willing the old suspension of belief to the nth degree. If someone got murdered in a cop show, the characters - and by extension, the audience - wanted to know why and how. If a family broke up in a romantic drama, the reasons had to be stated. Apart from cartoons though, science fiction - certainly early science fiction anyway - as well as “creature-feature” style horror movies were allowed to just be; nobody asked how The Blob got here or questioned how it survived in space or where it came from, it just was. And so with
The Twilight Zone. Despite my desperate nit-picking, worrying at the fabric of the stories and demanding explanations, sometimes there just weren’t any, or at least, none were advanced. You just had to believe.
How and why does Death (oh this is the last time I’ll say it, I swear! Mister Death then!) find his way to a nondescript New York street to pick up a similarly nondescript street seller and take him to the afterlife? Doesn’t he have better things to do? Where does the gun come from that gives Denton back his courage, and in the end, his life, too? How does Barbara escape into a world of old movies? How does Martin Sloan end up going back in time to his childhood? How can the devil live in Walter Bedeker’s bedroom? Why was Edward Hall being pursued by a maniacal woman in his dreams, and how does Kapitan Lanser end up on the ship he sunk, returning there again and again?
None of these questions will be answered, nor should they. We can ask them, but we know in reality there will be no explanation afforded. There can’t be. If everything was explained two things would happen: the world would be very much a duller place and it would quickly become evident that the things we have seen happen could not in reality have happened, and the illusion would be destroyed. So we allow ourselves this conceit, to accept that some things happen because they happen, because the reason behind them, if any, is well beyond our ken. Or, as an obscure writer from the sixteenth century put it, because there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Which is just as it should be.
So questions like what made the space pilots disappear one by one after their supposedly successful voyage into space, what power motivates Pedott in “What You Need”, how Arch Hammer can change his face and a dead woman be pursued by the personification of that death in the guise of a hitch-hiker, or how a one-armed bandit can push a man to fall to his death, are never to be answered. Nor will enquiries on the subject of a World War I fighter pilot arriving in 1960, a soldier in World War II gaining the power to foresee death, or why and how doppelgangers sudden break through into our world. Dealt with similarly will be the questions how can a man be a character in a movie but then actually live that life, how can a man live as long as Walter Jameson has, and how can a kid have the power to change the outcome of the future? Ask in vain, too, why overworked Gart Williams see a nineteenth-century village on a train line and ends up dying for the vision of a better, more simpler world, or where Professor A. Daemon came from. Question not the existence of guardian angels, animated mannequins or even a man who can make people come to life simply by describing them. There are no answers to these questions, or perhaps there is one, one which covers all eventualities and makes a certain kind of sense.
All these things happen, all these things are possible, because it is
The Twilight Zone.