Trollheart

Without question one of the first shows to bring science fiction into the mainstream on television, The Twilight Zone is now recognised as one of the most popular and well-written anthology shows ever. Creator Rod Serling often used the stories - set in space, the future, alternate realities or sometimes just the plain old present - to moralise, teach, educate and even to warn. Some of the stories were so good they have passed into the general human consciousness, some were, well, not quite so good. The theme tune to the show has become a byword for whenever something spooky or weird happens, and the phrase has been referenced in songs by, among others, Iron Maiden and Golden Earring.

In this journal, I’m going to go through the series episode by episode, writing synopses and them discussing them in my usual way. I’ll be asking which ones are the good ones, which the great, and which ones fail to measure up? I’ll also be comparing the original 1950s series to its many reworkings, the last of which at the time of writing was this year, 2020, and to my mind fell woefully short of the kind of quality we’ve come to expect from this show over nearly seventy years now. I’ll also compare within series - was season one of the original better or worse than season five, and so on. Comments and debate as usual welcomed.

INDEX

Season One

Episode One (Pilot): "Where is Everybody?"
Episode Two: "One For the Angels"
Episode Three: "Mr. Denton on Doomsday"
Episode Four: "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine"
Episode Five: "Walking Distance"
Episode Six: "Escape Clause"
Episode Seven: "The Lonely"
Episode Eight: "Time Enough At Last"
Episode Nine: "Perchance to Dream"
Episode Ten: "Judgement Night"
Episode Eleven: "And When the Sky Was Opened"
Episode Twelve: "What You Need"
Episode Thirteen: "The Four of Us Are Dying"
Episode Fourteen: "Third From the Sun"
Episode Fifteen: "I Shot an Arrow into the Air"
Episode Sixteen: "The Hitch-hiker"
Episode Seventeen: "The Fever"
Episode Eighteen: "The Last Flight"
Episode Nineteen: "The Purple Testament"
Episode Twenty: "Elegy"
Episode Twenty-One: "Mirror Image"
Episode Twenty-Two: "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"
Episode Twenty-Three: "A World of Difference"
Episode Twenty-Four: "Long Live Walter Jameson"
Episode Twenty-Five: "People Are Alike All Over"
Episode Twenty-Six: "Execution"
Episode Twenty-Seven: "The Big Tall Wish"
Episode Twenty-Eight: "A Nice Place to Visit"
Episode Twenty-Nine: "Nightmare As a Child"
Episode Thirty: "A Stop at Willoughby"
Episode Thirty-One: "The Chaser"
Episode Thirty-Two: "A Passage for Trumpet"
Episode Thirty-Three: "Mr. Bevis"
Episode Thirty-Four: "The After Hours"
Episode Thirty-Five: "The Mighty Casey"
Episode Thirty-Six: "A World of His Own"

Original Series (1959-1964)


Title: “Where is Everybody?”
Original transmission date:October 2 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Robert Stevens
Starring:
Earl Holliman as Mike Ferris
James Gregory as General
Garry Walberg as Colonel
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Loneliness, isolation, insanity
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating: A

(Ratings go from A++ for the very highest quality and best episodes, right down to C- for the trash)

Serling’s Opening Monologue

Every episode begins with a short comment by Rod Serling, either advising what is about to happen, giving clues to the plot or expounding on the theme in what may or may not be an abstract way. As this is the first ever episode, this opening monologue is missing, but from the next episode on, as far as I know without exception, each episode will have such a lead-in.

A man walks into a cafe where there is loud music blaring from a jukebox, but when he calls behind the counter for service nobody answers. He turns the music down but still nobody arrives to serve him, so after calling a few times he vaults over the counter and goes to see… nobody there. He looks back from the kitchen and sees a pot of coffee boiling, so he goes to take a cup and knocks down a watch, the glass of which shatters, the time stopped at 6:15, but whether this is AM or PM is not made clear. Talking to himself now, he admits he has a bit of a problem, in that he can’t remember who he is, and on entering the cafe he had asked what the town was, but having received no response he is none the wiser.

Leaving the empty cafe he heads on down the road till he reaches the nameless town, but it is as deserted as the diner. Everything looks good and proper, all lawns mowed, no sign of any violence or disaster, but not a soul to be seen. A church bell peals, its lonely tones echoing across the roads, and he feels even more isolated, until he sees, finally, a figure, a person, a woman sitting in a car. He approaches her, careful not to spook her, but when he gets close enough he can see she is a mannequin, a dummy. Across the road, a telephone starts ringing but when he gets to the phone box the line is dead. So he tries calling the operator, but only gets a recording. When he tries to get out it seems he’s locked in, but it’s just that the door is one of those old concertina-type ones, and you have to kind of fold it to open it, whereas he’s just pushing against and rattling it.

Once he finds his way out, he goes into the police station, which is as deserted as everywhere else, but here he does find a half-smoked (and still smoking) cigar, so he knows now that he is not alone. Somewhere in this crazy town, someone is watching him, playing with him, observing him, manipulating him. And he aims to find out who that is and what they’re playing at, to use the parlance of the time. In one of the cells he finds running water and evidence someone has been shaving, or was in the middle of it when they suddenly left. He not unsurprisingly thinks he’s dreaming and tries to force himself to wake up, but to no avail.

When night falls lights come on in the buildings, and he’s drawn towards a cinema which is showing a movie about the US Air Force. This triggers something in his memory, and he remembers that he too is in the Air Force. It’s not much but it’s something, something to hang on to, something that might lead to his discovering his actual identity. The cinema is of course empty, but as he sits down a movie begins showing a B-29 flying, and realising that someone must be operating the projector (this is 1959 remember) he runs up to the booth, but there’s nobody there. Running back down the stairs he crashes into a mirror, then, stunned, runs outside and just breaks down completely.

Now we see a group of people watching him from an office, all in military uniform. We can see that the picture they’re watching shows a man hooked up to electrodes, and with a resigned look one of the men orders the release of “the subject”. As these orders are carried out, the others debate the success or otherwise of the experiment. We see that this was all a test, an attempt to acclimate a human being to the desperate loneliness of space, and that everything the pilot saw was manufactured by his own rambling brain. Eventually it became too much and he snapped. But they’re getting closer. Soon, it will be for real.

Serling’s closing monologue

Each episode also ends with Serling speaking a monologue, usually tied to and sometimes, though not always, offering an explanation of the story.

The barrier of loneliness: The palpable, desperate need of the human animal to be with his fellow man. Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in The Twilight Zone.


The Resolution

Here’s where I’ll be commenting on whether the twist was good, whether the story concluded well, whether or not the resolution was believable and fit in with the story line. This first one dovetails nicely. Of course they could have gone with the obvious ending of the guy being in an asylum, or being studied by aliens, or even just having a dream. But I think Serling here tapped into the almost frenetic sense of something great being on the horizon, with talk of the moon landings still a decade away but closer than before, man on the cusp of taking his first tentative steps out into space. Of course, back then he wouldn’t have known that the moon missions would end up being mostly a colossal waste of time, money and resources, that we’d do nothing with the discoveries we made, and that in the end, our single satellite would turn out to be nothing more exciting than a big lump of dead rock.

But while authors had written and would continue to write about brave space adventurers plying the trackless depths of the interstellar deep, few if any would have grappled with the intrinsic problem of loneliness and isolation that comes with it. Serling had the foresight - he may not have been the only one but at least he was thinking about it - to consider the massive burden man would carry with him when he went up into space. Certainly, in reality it turned out that no single man ever went into space alone - it was always a crew, NASA being perhaps mindful indeed of the danger of depriving its astronauts of human companionship - but even with three or four men on the vessel, it could still be a struggle. Deprived of friends and family, loved ones and familiar people, who might not crack? In Serling’s story, it’s akin to being locked in solitary for - here the colonel says over 484 hours, that’s roughly 20 days - a hell of a long time, and in addition being out in the unforgiving vast reaches of space. A very long way from home.

I’m sure NASA probably did conduct stress tests of this nature, or similar, with their astronauts before allowing them to blast off from the Earth and head out into the remote dark. It’s a scary place out there, and you’ve got to be able to face it.

The Moral

Space can be a lonely place, so you had better be ready to spend a lot of time with yourself if you plan heading out there.

Questions and, sometimes, Answers


What about....?

The broken watch at the beginning? That was a clue; we see it right at the end, a gauge or clock in the booth in which the guy has been sealed. It’s broken because he’s banged his head against it in his frustration, and yes, it shows 6:15.

The telephone ringing? That's never explained, though you could imagine it’s his desire for companionship, contact, the desperate need to know that there is at least one person out there besides him.

The cigar? Presumably the same; there is nobody else in the town, nobody watching him, and nobody running the film, because everything has been constructed inside his mind. It doesn’t exist at all.

I do wonder why, when he hears the church bells (twice) he never thinks to go into it? If the bell is ringing, there’s surely a half-decent chance there’s a service on, so would be not be likely to find people there if anywhere? But he never goes near it.

The interrupted shaving? Hmm. Well it might be a metaphor in his mind for when he says “I never actually woke up this morning”, finding himself instead on the road into the town created by his mind. Perhaps it’s symbolic of something he knows he should have had to do, but could not remember having done.

Those clever little touches

When he runs down the stairs from the projection booth and runs into a mirror, the symbolism couldn’t be clearer. He’s crashing into his own self, the only thing that shares the booth with him, and his personality, his very sanity, is in danger of shattering with that glass. It also harks back to an earlier scene where, making an ice cream, he sees himself in a mirror and begins talking to himself, another indicator of his fracturing sanity.

In the shop, he finds a rack of books all titled The Last Man on Earth, 1959. This is especially clever, as it skews the viewer’s thoughts in the direction that this may all be real, that he may in fact be the last man left living on the planet.

At the very end, he looks up to the moon and says “we’ll be up there soon.” That was 1959. Ten short years later Neil Armstrong was making his “one small step for man”.


Themes

The main theme explored here is of course loneliness brought on by isolation, similar to a man being placed in solitary confinement, or living on a desert island alone for some time. The mind, desperate for company and rationality, begins to play tricks, inventing people and places, but often these constructs lack cohesion and so may not make much sense, such as empty cinemas, a cigar left in an ashtray when nobody is there, a mannequin sitting in a car, a jukebox playing in a deserted cafe. They’re like badly-made cinema sets, liable to fall down at any moment and reveal the stark bare nothingness behind them.

The human animal needs companionship. This much is known, which is why imprisonment in solitary is one of the most feared of all punishments for the incarcerated. No matter how bad things are, there are others to talk to, listen to, argue with, laugh with, cry with or even fear. But being alone is one of the hardest things for any man or woman to contemplate. This may be why some people (myself included) tend to talk to themselves when alone, as if we’re trying to make believe there’s another person there with us.

In the episode, the pilot is desperate to find other living beings. Even just to sit with others and if not talk, just listen to them, but on his mission to the moon he will be utterly alone (as Serling saw it) and will have to be ready for that. His mounting terror and frustration, culminating in a nervous breakdown, shows that he is far from that place yet.

Insanity is the other theme. As it becomes increasingly apparent that he is alone, the pilot, trying to figure it out, slowly edges towards madness. This can’t be happening, therefore the only possible explanation is that he has lost his mind. In the end, ironically, this is pretty much what happens.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018