Tag Archives: Twilight Zone

September 9, 2026 · 5:15 am

Writing links for a Wednesday

I haven’t done a writing-links post in a while, so …

For anyone pushing creative stuff nobody seems to get, Rod Serling did too. When The Twilight Zone was approaching its first season, one interviewer asked Serling, “For the time being and for the foreseeable future, you’ve given up on writing anything important for television, right?”

So your beta-reader missed something you clearly explained in the manuscript? Maybe you’re not as clear as you thought.

When building a story around ancient legend, how much history should you throw in?

Acting link: The appeal of good guys playing bad guys.

“As nearly anyone who has graded a paper that was generated by ChatGPT can attest to, AI does not produce good writing. Not only does it hallucinate citations, but it fails to offer any originality or a clear point of view. It produces vague generalities without real insights. It offers a reminder that proper syntax and good writing are not the same, and as a professor I would certainly rather point out how an engaged student can refine their writing to improve their argument than grade another banal paper that is the product of intellectual laziness. What’s more, this excessive reliance on AI leads me to the inescapable question: Why are you in this field?”

I’ve read multiple complaints in recent years that a non-super supporting cast is becoming a rare thing in comics. Here’s some arguments for bringing them back.

“One thing that frustrates me quite a bit about modern opinion-writing is that hardly anyone tries to argue with a particular person or a specific argument. it’s all gesturing towards people saying something … i think writers would be well served by finding actual people of influence who hold the views they want to contest, and then contest them head on.” — Jamelle Bouie.

“Blackburn notes that there’s a lot of control relinquished to a chatbot as to what the definition of pornography or conservative values is. The definition is whatever the AI model has defined it as.” — a look at how rightwingers are using chatbots to find passages they think justify book banning.

The creators of the classic Elfquest say they’d sooner have no animated version than an unfaithful adaptation — which is why they’ve now accepted there will never be an Elfquest movie. Here’s a more detailed look at some of the bad proposals.

Why Han Solo works when Han Solo-type PCs do not.

Are clothes art? Who decides?

“Publishing.com LLC and its two principals will pay $1.5 million and be required to substantiate earnings claims in the future to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company and its operators misled consumers about how much money they were likely to earn using their products.”

White supremacy, and criticism of the Christopher Nolan Odyssey. Here’s another look at the politics of the film.

Christmas comes but once a year—so does my Christmas viewing

I’m not watching as much as usual this year for various reasons but I’m doing my best. For starters, one that I’ve never seen before and probably never will again, CAROL FOR ANOTHER CHRISTMAS (1964).

This TV special should have been a classic. We have Joseph Mankiewicz directing, Rod Serling writing, Sterling Hayden as the Scrooge figure, Mr. Grudge, and Ben Gazzara, Steve Lawrence, Robert Shaw, Peter Sellers, Pat Hingle and Eva Marie Saint in the cast (Peter Fonda makes a nanosecond appearance as Hayden’s dead son Marley Grudge).

The movie opens with Grudge and his idealist nephew Fred (Gazzara) in a heated argument over Grudge blocking an international exchange where one of our scientists goes to the Soviet bloc and one of their scientists works here. Fred believes only by reaching across borders can we avoid another nuclear war; Marley’s death (in Korea, I’m guessing) has convinced Grudge that isolationism backed up by the threat of nuclear weapons is our best hope for peace. The actors, talented as they are, can’t overcome that they’re not characters, they’re spokespeople for a clash of philosophies.Then the fantasy kicks in. Steve Lawrence as Christmas Past reminds Grudge of the huge body count from all the wars of the past. Christmas Present (Hingle) forces Grudge to contemplate the children left impoverished, desperate and sick by warfare; a sneering Future (Shaw) shows mad Peter Sellers ruling over a mad but inevitable post-apocalyptic dystopia (“When the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the fate of man could have been predicted by a cut-rate [Roma]!”).

Part of the problem, I think, is that Past and Future don’t relate to Grudge at all. Rather than showing us Grudge’s past — the usual approach for these things — Past just makes poetic speeches about the dead. Future likewise doesn’t show a horrible fate for Grudge, just a horrible future in general; having his butler (Percy Rodriguez) face death doesn’t change that. In the end it’s just a pretentious mess. “Nothing on this earth can force me to eat while starving people watch me!”

Despite the title, MIDWINTER OF THE SPIRT (2015) doesn’t take place at Christmas as I’d assumed. Not that would improve things much: this story of a vicar turned apprentice exorcist (“Your job is to protect people from the intrusion into their lives of entities half the professed Christians in this country don’t believe in.”) coming up against a Satanist and the wreckage left in his wake has no supernatural element so any common copper could have tackled this one just as well. Proof even British TV doesn’t bat 100 percent. “I am not taking a crippled gazelle to the watering hole.”

Circumstances forced me to use WHITE CHRISTMAS (1950) as something of a talking lamp — a shame, since while the plot hardly requires close attention, the dance numbers certainly deserve it. Still good entertainment, though, as Bing Crosby becomes Rosemary Clooney’s white knight, a general learns he’s not a forgotten man and snow finally falls on Vermont. “When I figure out what that means, I’ll come up with a crushing reply.”

While down in Florida I caught FROSTY THE SNOWMAN with my sister and Cindy; I agree with Cindy that this story of a wizard and a snowman struggling for control of a magic hat is one that works better when you’re young (not something I say of all Christmas specials). Given that it’s a Rankin-Bass production, I wonder why they didn’t do it stop-motion like so many other specials? “I hate to lose and run, but I have to get to writing.”

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Is Christmas Eve the night of the meek — or the night the world exploded?

The TWILIGHT ZONE episode The Night of the Meek is a Christmas perennial for me, though the permutations in streaming offerings mean that instead of watching it on Hulu or Netflix I wound up buying the episode on Amazon. Ar Carney plays a drunken department-store Santa (“I either drink or I weep, and drinking is so much more subtle.”) fired on Christmas Eve, returning to his poor, miserable tenement neighborhood … and finding a sack that enables him to give everyone any gift they ask for.Serling was a master at giving tormented losers a happy ending and the show makes the miserable, rundown setting look genuinely miserable, giving the miracle that much more punch. And Carney is a better dramatic actor than I think he usually gets credit for. “Yes I’m drunk — intoxicated with the spirit of Yule!”

Ordering and viewing that episode took longer than expected so I wound up watching THE NIGHT THE WORLD EXPLODED (1957) to fill the time. When a series of disastrous earthquakes rock the world (literally — we’re told the world is tilting on its axis, though little is done with that aspect) a brilliant geologist and his lovesmitten assistant discover it’s due to a mineral that grows and explodes when exposed to air (“There are 111 known elements — I think we’ve found 112.”), reminding me of the superior Monolith Monsters. Unfortunately this movie is a slow, talky production with lots of disaster stock footage, though running little over one hour forces it move faster than 1965’s talky Crack in the World. “We’re faced with the greatest emergency man has ever known — we don’t have time for red tape.”

The CLAYMATION CHRISTMAS SPECIAL is apparently not a perennial for most people as I couldn’t find it anywhere but YouTube. But I love the dramatization of multiple Christmas carols, the search for the meaning of “wassail” and the fact it’s a Christmas special narrated by two dinosaurs. The ending scene with the California Raisins was meant to cash in on their popularity back when they were a new advertising gimmick; while they’re now otherwise forgotten, they fit perfectly with the rest of the production. “I told you there was a Christmas song about snacks!”

The first time I caught JINGLE JANGLE: A Christmas Story (2020) I didn’t care for it but thought it might have been my mood at the time (I don’t remember whatever was harshing my mellow though). Apparently it was, because I rewatched it and thoroughly enjoyed the story of genius toymaker Jeronicus Jangle (Forest Whittaker) losing his career, his family and his love of his craft thanks to scheming automaton Ricky Martin; when Jeronicus’ granddaughter comes to visit, can she turn things around? Charming; Phylicia Rashad plays the grandmother narrating the story. “The square root of possible is the summation from one to infinity.”

By contrast UNACCOMPANIED MINORS (2006) fit my mood perfectly — I needed a talking lamp and the story of four kids running wild in a snowbound airport while the PO’d Authority Figure tries taking them down required nothing more than an occasional glance at the screen. And I didn’t give it that many glances, though in fairness, I am not the age to be the target audience.

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December 5, 2020 · 5:10 am

Two TV seasons of two 1960s shows: Twilight Zone, Star Trek

Following its fourth season switch to hour-long episodes, TWILIGHT ZONE reverted to a half-hour for its fifth and final season. It did not lead to an uptick in quality, but like S3, it has lots of terrific episodes amidst the bad ones. Just not enough of them. The opening episode, In Praise of Pip, has Jack Klugman in his fourth and final turn on the show, as a low-life bookie who goes on a strange, surreal bender when he learns his son has died in Vietnam. In other A-list episodes, William Shatner endures A Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, Mickey Rooney gives a dynamite one-man show in Last Night of a Jockey, and Number Twelve Looks Just Like You is an absolutely chilling tale of conformity.

The failed or merely mediocre episodes, though, are too many to list. The pretentious allegory of I Am the Night — Color Me Black. The forced humor of A Kind of Stopwatch (though I was amused that mansplainers were spouting pretentious business-speak 60 years ago). Flat takes on the Evil Ventriloquist’s Dummy (Caesar and Me) and immortality (Queen of the Nile). More hamfisted humor in From Agnes — With Love.

A pleasant surprise though is that two episodes exempt from the original syndicated run are available streaming. Sounds and Silences stars John McGiver as a windbag obsessed with surrounding himself with noise at all costs; The Encounter has Nisei George Takei lock horns with a veteran who once murdered a Japanese officer after the man surrendered. The first (kept out of syndication due to a plagiarism lawsuit) is only okay (I feel more sympathy for McGiver than I’m supposed to, which messes up my reaction to the ending). The second has some dynamite, intense action and some sharp moments as Takei’s character pushes back against the idea he’s not as American as the vet. However it labels Takei’s father a traitor who guided Japanese planes to Pearl Harbor — contrary to popular belief at the time, Japanese Americans did not help with the attack — and implies Takei bears as much guilt for his father’s action as the veteran does for being a murderer. It is, as they say, problematic.

STAR TREK’s second season provoked a similar reaction in me. The first season had only one awful episode, but S2 has bunches of them, with some gems mixed in. The shticks the show began using in S1 get a lot more play here: the alt.Earth (Bread and Circuses, Patterns of Force, Omega Glory), the godlike adversary seizing the ship (Who Mourns for Adonais?, Catspaw, Gamesters of Triskelion), and Evil Computers (The Changeling, The Apple, The Ultimate Computer).

There’s also an increased emphasis on the core trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy with the rest of the regulars reduced to supporting parts. Chekhov (Walter Koenig) is part of that: adding a new crew member reduces the amount of air time any of them get. That said, the relationship between the Big Three gets better and richer with many great scenes.

And some of the episodes are awesome. The Theodore Sturgeon-scripted Amok Time gives us our first look at Vulcan, and the script truly makes it a complicated, alien place. Journey to Babel introduces us to Spock’s parents. Mirror, Mirror gives us the mirror universe. The Trouble With Tribbles is hysterical fun and Obsession gives Kirk a good character story (blaming himself for an alien creature that killed his crew-mates years earlier, he puts the Enterprise in danger when he encounters the thing again). The final episode of the season, Assignment Earth, was a pilot for a show involving agents of an advanced civilization working to keep 20th century Earth from destroying itself; a time traveling Kirk and Spock get involved.

But then there’s The Omega Glory, in which Kirk, Spock and McCoy are stranded on a post-apocalyptic alt.Earth and help everyone rediscover the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers. It’s painfully, laughably awful; I wouldn’t have rewatched it if I hadn’t been determined to work through the whole series.

NBC decreed the series wasn’t pulling its weight and axed it, only to have fan support raise Star Trek from the dead for one final season. Where, unfortunately, the ratio of good to bad got even more unbalanced. I imagine I’ll be back to review S3 some time next year.

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May 20, 2020 · 5:25 am

Why do we return to the Twilight Zone?

So after blogging about Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone revival, I got to thinking about the enduring popularity of Rod Serling’s original. Why is it remembered so well? Why does it keep getting revivals?Well, it’s become a brand name so it’s no surprise CBS wants to keep reviving it. That’s a much safer bet than encouraging people to catch an all-new series — as witness I tuned in to the Peele and I’ve never made any effort to catch Black Mirror (not a reflection on that show, just on the amount of stuff that’s out there to watch). And part of the reason it’s become a brand name is that when it came out there wasn’t anything like it. TV SF was treated as kids’ stuff; TV fantasy was limited to sitcoms such as Topper or Bewitched. Twilight Zone took specfic seriously, as something adults could enjoy and that could be done well. It didn’t hurt that along with Serling, we had Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, both established and excellent writers of contemporary fantasy (among other things). Serling also cast a lot of first-rate actors including Burgess Meredith, Ross Martin, Jack Klugman, Wilfred Hyde-White and others. Running from 1959 to 1964, Serling’s work had an impact I don’t think it could possibly have today.

But not every show that made a big splash back in ye ancient times of a mere three networks has such a devoted following today. The original series holds up well.

Part of that is Serling’s interest in people and human nature, particularly his fondness for the down-and-out and the unlucky losers. The insecure cheap crook in Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room. The anguished bookie in In Praise of Pip, getting one last night with his dead son. Art Carney delivering Christmas cheer on The Night of the Meek. But while people often have crappy lives and don’t get happy endings (case in point, Burgess Meredith’s myopic bank clerk in All The Time in the World) Serling’s not looking to to shrug and say “life isn’t fair.” He gets that unfairness is something that should be fixed. And in many stories he does, delivering a eucatastrophe, a miraculous (but plausible) happy ending.

Another factor, and I think this is a big one, is the nature of the stories. Twilight Zone had a big range: stories with no specfic element (The Silence), post-apocalypse (Two), space adventure (The Parallel) and time travel (No Time Like the Past), but the “generic” TZ story is intrusion fantasy: a contemporary setting with the supernatural or super-scientific intruding on it. And doing so, in many cases, randomly.

In a few of the episodes, there’s a clear reason for what’s happening, such as Jess-Belle where the protagonist apprentices herself to a witch, or The Trouble With Templeton in which the protagonist’s long-dead wife has arranged events for his benefit. In many more, there’s none: fate or God or Satan has decided to upend someone’s life for no reason at all. The businessman in A World of Difference suddenly finds he’s an actor and his life is the script. He doesn’t do anything to bring it about, it just happens. Ditto the woman haunted by her double in Mirror Image or the rejuvenated seniors in Kick the Can. They don’t cross any lines, tamper with anything forbidden, piss off the dark gods — they’re just shit out of luck. Sure, some of them deserve their doom or their miraculous redemption, such as Dan Duryea’s drunken gunfighter in Mr. Denton on Doomsday. Even so, there’s no reason why Fate should (literally) stop in his town and turn his life around, it just happens.

That, I think, makes it more compelling. Because if things like this can happen at random, then they can happen to us. We don’t have to be chosen ones, or profane an Egyptian tomb to be affected. Any one of us, at any time, could stumble into the impossible.

Into the Twilight Zone.

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I hoped for better: Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone

I doubt I’d have bothered with CBS’ latest revival of THE TWILIGHT ZONE if Jordan Peele hadn’t been the man in the Rod Serling role (including serving as narrator). Given how good Peele’s Get Out and Us were, he seemed like the right guy to deliver Twilight Zone stories tailored for the 21st century. But whether it’s the different requirements for a TV series from a movie or too much network interference, Peele didn’t pull it off.

He’s not unique. The first attempt to remake Serling was the 1983 Twilight Zone — The Movie which had one memorable story (a remake of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet) and three “meh” ones. This led to a 1985 CBS series I remember as pretty good, though it’s quite possible I’m erasing the bad stuff. Then there was a completely forgettable UPN revival nearly 20 years ago.

And no, I’m not biased by nostalgia for the original series. I love it but even before I started rewatching it the past few years, I had no illusions it was perfect. I remember many crappy episodes (Cavender Is Coming, Mute, Steel) but the good outnumber the bad and every season has some great episodes. After watching six of the ten-episode first season of the new version I found no great, two good and four bad. That’s not a win.

The first episode, The Comedian, runs an hour, which was a mistake: as the original’s S4 showed, some stories fail simply by being stretched out. The title comic is Samir, who wants to do political humor but flops with it. Then a legendary comic advises Samir to draw on his life for material; the audience loves this approach, but whenever he talks about his dog, his nephew, a coworker, they vanish from existence. In fact, they never existed and only Samir remembers them.

There’s obvious potential here for a metaphor about creative people mining their own lives for material, or how someone with ambition can discard people in their life on the climb to the top. Instead, this tries to fill the hour by going in too many directions; at one point, Samir pulls a Death Note and starts erasing abusers, drunk drivers and other people, but then we’re off in another direction. The story never has the punch it might have.

To give Peele credit, Nightmare at 30,000 Feet doesn’t simply remake the original story about a man seeing a monster destroying the wing of a plane. Instead, nn investigative journalist discovers the Weird Mysteries podcast he’s downloaded to listen to is talking about a mysteriously vanished flight … that’s the exact flight the protagonist is on. Can he figure out what’s happening in time to avert catastrophe? Not a bad concept, but it never built up enough tension for me.

Replay was one of the good ones. Black lawyer Nina (Sanaa Lathan)is driving her son to college when she discovers rewinding her old camcorder can rewind time. This comes in handy when a bigoted cop starts harassing them, but no matter how many times Nina tries changing how she deals with him, nothing can neutralize the threat.I think it’s the best of the ones I watched.

But then comes A Traveler, set in a rural Alaskan police station where Captain Pendleton (Greg Kinnear) shows a suitably Christian compassion by letting one prisoner out of jail; as he doesn’t have anyone this year, Sgt. Mongoyak (Marika Sila) arrests her brother just so Pendleton can free him. But it turns out Mr. A. Traveler (Steven Yuen) is already in jail, claiming that as a YouTuber who covers extreme tourism, he’s there to witness the annual release. Is he telling the truth? Of course not, but the results make it impossible to care.

Wunderkind isn’t good but it was amusing. Failed political consultant Raff (John Cho) spots an 11-year-old, Oliver (Jacob Tremblay), running for president on YouTube. Everyone likes his simplistic proposals so Raff launches a campaign to put Oliver in the White House. Oops: who’d have thought a temperamental, selfish brat running the government was a bad thing? Why yes, I do think this has a point about politics, but it’s not executed well-enough to work. It hand-waves Oliver being too young to get elected and can’t decide if he’s a brat or a child sociopath.

I’d have stopped there but Not All Men sounded too interesting to pass up. Annie (Taissa Farmiga) goes on a date with her coworker Phil but stops short of sleeping with him. Next morning at work, their boss transfers her current project to Phil, telling her she’ll rise farther as his assistant. Coincidence? Then things get really nasty when a meteor shower unleashes the local male population’s worst impulses; can Annie survive? Can she trust that the guy who says he’s not infected is safe?

This is at its best dealing with the little annoyances women have to put up with (“You’d look really cute if you’d smile.”) and the challenge of figuring out what’s really going on (is Phil punishing Annie for not putting out, or is it just their boss favoring the white guy?). The outright violence isn’t as interesting, and I couldn’t buy the reveal the meteors were a placebo, a rationalization for the guys losing control — why would anyone assume the rocks had that effect? Still, it was interesting enough that in another era I might have kept watching. But these days there’s too many alternatives to give this more of a chance.

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May 2, 2020 · 5:10 am

A delayed double feature to last week’s movies

One the Night of the Comet commentary track, writer/director Thom Eberhardt listed TARGET EARTH (1954) as an influence on the film, so that was my first choice for viewing last weekend.The film’s opening scenes in which Kathleen Crowley wakes up (having tried and failed to commit suicide by sleeping pills) to find the small city she lives in completely empty are extremely effective. Then she meets up with a similarly baffoed Richard Denning and a couple of party animals; together they figure out that the city was evacuated while they were all passed out for one reason or another. Then the sight of some rather unconvincing robots tells them why everyone else left … meanwhile the military tries to figure out how to stop the robots sent as the first wave of a Venusian invasion.

Despite the robots and the underlying absurdity (I’m familiar with evacuation issues and clearing out a city in 12 hours is impossible), this is pretty good. I don’t like the gangster who wanders in late in the movie but I do like that the protagonists are just trying to survive; they’re not part of the fight against the aliens and don’t really know what’s going on (I used a similar approach in my Atoms for Peace short story The Claws That Catch). “All we can be sure of was that this invasion was not launched by any power upon this Earth!”

Kelli Maroney says Eberhardt told her to watch Carole Lombard in MY MAN GODFREY (1936) for her role as Samantha and I can sort of see why. Lombard’s character is something of a space cadet, a ditzy heiress who recruits derelict William Powell as a find in a scavenger hunt, then gets him to work for her family as the new butler. Much to her annoyance, he refuses to fall in love with her, but her efforts to change his mind keep the movie humming. With Eugene Pallette as Lombard’s grumpy father and Alan Mowbray (to the left of Powell in the post above) as a former college chum of Powell’s. Definitely worth rewatching in its own right. “What does it matter where one puts flowers when one’s heart is broken?”

And to go with Webber’s Phantom of the Opera I rewatched Lon Chaney’s classic silent THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925). While I suspect Webber may have replaced Chaney as the definitive version of this story, this is truly spectacular production in the sets Chaney’s powerful performance and his grotesque makeup (unlike most later versions, Erik here was born a freak; later incarnations were the result of accidents). Another one that’s a pleasure to rewatch, though Christine has a better role in the stage show. “No longer shall I spew venom like a toad.”

I also caught an episode of the old DESILU PLAYHOUSE, The Time Element, which I’ve wanted to see for years because it’s the pilot from which Twilight Zone launched. William Bendix plays a bookie telling psychiatrist Martin Balsam about this recurring dream in which he wakes up in Hawaii — specifically Pearl Harbor, Dec. 6, 1941. Initially he plans to exploit his knowledge and bet on every upcoming sporting event, but then he starts having qualms and tries to warn people about the Day That Will Live In Infamy — but will anyone listen? The version of the grandfather paradox given here doesn’t make sense, but the cast is solid and the situation is effectively intense; it says a lot about the limited exposure to SF most of the audience had back then that Desi Arnaz, as host, reassures viewers this was all the psychiatrist’s imagination. “The U.S.S. Arizona’s never been sunk!”

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March 14, 2020 · 5:10 am

Black Lightning in the Twilight Zone: wrapping up a couple of TV seasons

I thought after watching this week’s Nancy Drew I’d be included that too, but despite some major reveals that seem to wrap everything up, they have a half-dozen episodes to come.

I had a mixed review of BLACK LIGHTNING‘s second season, but this season more than made up for it. Freeland spends most of the season caught between the American Security Agency and agents from Markovia, both of which want control of Freeland’s metas; the ASA’s conniving, cold-blooded Odell (Bill Duke) insists he’s acting for the community’s own protection, but while Jeff tries to be moderate, Anissa and Inspector Henderson both join the Resistance, helping to get metas out of town past both sides. Jennifer, meanwhile, discovers how powerful she really is and lets Odell manipulate her before she discovers during the Crisis how far she’s crossing the line. Plus Odell gets Lynn hooked on greenlight to boost her IQ while she’s working with the metas, and turns Jen’s boyfriend Khalil into a brainwashed killer. If ever anyone had He Needed Killing plastered to his forehead …

Into this mess, we then bring Tyson “Gravedigger” Sykes (Wayne Brady), the world’s first metahuman, the result of WW II experiments (his story reminded me a lot of the MU’s Isaiah Bradley). Bradley has nothing but contempt for the way the U.S. has treated his people and so after working on the Markovian meta-research program (the U.S. set it up in Markovia to avoid scrutiny, and because that put its metas in striking distance of the USSR) he co-opted it to attack his own country (the tendency of metas to die or go comatose delayed the plan). There’s a great bit where he tells Jennifer Martin Luther King was a coward who couldn’t do what needed doing; she reminds him that nonviolence was a calculated, and successful tactic.

The ending episode this week has Gravedigger and his Markovian allies making an all-out attack on Freeland and the ASA meta-research lab, while Odell prepares to withdraw, then have the city nuked so the Markovians don’t get what they want. Its Gravedigger against the Pierces in all-out action with a surprisingly high body count (even given some of the deaths could be easily reversed); not knowing it was the season ender, I really was surprised.

If I have any complainst, it’s that the show doesn’t at all acknowledge that it’s now on the same Earth as Flash and post-Crisis always has been. The dark-matter Central City metas are stable and someone should at least have mentioned it. And that while they avoided turning Anissa’s lover Grace into a Dead Lesbian Trope, I’m not sure Comatose Lesbian is an improvement (okay, it’s an improvement, but not much of one).

THE TWILIGHT ZONE‘s fourth season switched from thirty minutes to an hour (I think there’s a meta-joke about that in the episode The Bard) and most fans dismiss it as a failure. Although a slight majority of episodes are indeed flops, I don’t know how much is due to expanded length and how much due to the show just running out of steam, which was happening even in S3. It’s true that some episodes, such as The Thirty-Fathom Grave, might have worked at an hour’s length, but most of the bad ones would be bad at any length. Particular un-favorites are Mute, a story about a telepathic kid getting integrated into society that comes off unpleasantly abusive, and The Bard, in which a hack writer summons up Shakespeare’s spirit to write a TV movie only to see it hacked to death by sponsor and network requirements. It’s one The Twilight Zone Companion cites as a classic, but I find it predictable and just ridiculous, like nobody noticing the script’s Shakespearian language. Some good roles (Burt Reynolds as a Brando knockoff, John McGiver as a clueless sponsor) but I hated it.

And the good stuff is very good, despite the hour length. Astronauts Jack Klugman and Ross Martin trying to understand how they found their crashed Death Ship on an alien world with their bodies inside; space-colony leader James Whitmore reluctant to release his grip on the colony when he learns they can return to Earth (On Thursday We Leave For Home); Miniature; the rural fantasy Jess-Belle; and the gentle romantic fantasy Passage on the Lady Anne. There are also a few middling ones. Printer’s Devil is poor, but Burgess Meredith makes a great villain; I Dream of Genie is uneven but it still won me over, especially the ending.

IIRC the fifth and final season of the original had a lot of flops too. As it was 36 episodes long, it’ll be a while before you get a review though.

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September 17, 2019 · 5:17 am

Stacking the deck: Twilight Zone’s “Miniature”

So I wrote a couple of weeks back about the way writers stack the deck to make their point: that life is fair/isn’t fair, that God is good/shitty, that violence is/isn’t the answer, that the legal system can/can’t be trusted. Watching the Twilight Zone episode Miniature, it occurred to me we stack the deck in our stories on a personal level as well.

The story is part of the show’s fourth season, when it jumped to hour-long episode and most fell flat on its face (I think the ratio of good to bad is at best, 1/3). But it had gems and Charles Beaumont’s Miniature is one of them. Robert Duvall plays Charlie, an introverted guy who just doesn’t fit with the world. His boss fires him because he doesn’t like to hang with his coworkers and that’s bad for morale. His mother obsessively takes care of him. His sister (the most likable of the supporting cast) tries to fix him up with a girl but Charlie’s not at all comfortable with her. And everyone assumes he’s the problem. Being in the Twilight Zone, of course, he has an escape hatch: a beautiful, elaborate dolls’ house at the local museum. Gazing into it, he fantasizes the young woman of the house is alive, and as lonely as he is … if only he could be with her, she’d be a woman he could connect with. If only … Of course everyone tells him it’s a delusion but guess what? It isn’t (yes, you probably guessed that). And two lonely people end up finding each other.

It didn’t move me as much as it did first go-round, probably because, like Harlan Ellison’s Jeffty Is Five, I got past the point where I was inclined to withdraw from the world into fantasy. It’s still well executed, with a great performance by Duvall. But it got me thinking about how stories stack the deck in regard to characters’ lives, as well as the big picture political/economic stuff.

Serling did a lot of stories about people desperate to escape into fantasy. Into their past, or their youth or some other world. But unlike a lot of writers who wallow in that (Jack Finney was particularly fond of rejecting the present for what he imagined was the wonderful 19th century), Serling knew it could be a trap. In Trouble With Templeton, the protagonist learns to stop living in the past and get on with his life. Jack Klugman in Passage for Trumpet is bitter and miserable about life, but learns “it can be as rich and sweet as the music he plays — if only he will listen.”

Stacking the deck is how Serling (and writers on the show such as Beaumont and Richard Matheson) show us which is the right outcome. Is the problem that the protagonist needs to embrace life instead of hiding from it? Or that life really sucks, as for the frustrated nursing-home residents in Kick the Can? Is love a possibility if you reach out, or have they lost the big chance already? Does the hero need to change, or is it other people? The answer is whatever the story tells us or shows us.

Of course sometimes I just don’t buy what it’s showing. Ida Lupino in Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine seemed to me like someone who needed to embrace the world, but she gets a retreat into fantasy instead. That’s the risk of stacking the deck: if you’re not plausible about it, it won’t work. And it’s hard to stack the deck if the audience really wants it stacked the other way. I can’t get into stories where the happy ending is the protagonist becoming a happy recluse because for me that’s a sad ending (the whole withdrawing thing).

But that’s the risk we take with writing.

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July 20, 2019 · 5:01 am

The Twilight Zone, a tree and the Incredibles: TV and movies

With S3 of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, the bloom is definitely off the rose with way more flops than in previous seasons. E.g., Cavender is Coming, The Shelter, The Passerby, Still Valley, Dead Man’s Shoes, Four o’Clock and Showdown With Rance McGrew. Some are preachy and heavy-handed, some are unfunny comedies, some just fill a half-hour of TV and accomplish nothing more.

That said, the season also had some terrific episodes. Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson give solid performances as post-WW III survivors in Two, which opens the season. Donald Pleasance gives a moving performance as an aging teacher in the final S3 episode, Changing of the Guard. In between we have It’s a Good Life, the anti-Nazi drama Death’s Head Revisited, Five Characters in Search of an Exit and Person or Persons Unknown. It’s worth sitting through the mediocre to get to the good stuff. I’m not sure I’ll feel that way about S4, the notoriously unsuccessful switch to hour-long episodes (I think mediocre-to-bad episodes are the majority) but I won’t turn back before I finish the whole run (are you impressed at my heroism?).

CHARISMA (1999) is a confusing Korean thriller in which a cop is put on mandatory leave after a botched hostage crisis, travels to a small village and winds up obsessing over a mysterious tree in the arae. I’d assume my utter lack of interest in this (I checked out after about 40 minutes) was due to a culture gap if I hadn’t watched and enjoyed so many Korean films for the time-travel book.

THE INCREDIBLES 2 (2018) picks up immediately where the first film wrapped up, as the family’s battle against Undermind creates so much wreckage it looks like superheroes will stay on everyone’s shit list. A billionaire superhero comes up with a solution, using Elastigirl to fight crime on camera so that viewers will see how much good they do; Mr. Incredible, being overly prone to collateral damage, has to become the stay-at-home parent. But a villain named Screenslaver has a plot that may destroy the family for good … This was a lot of fun, and I give them credit for showing Mr. Incredible as a competent parent rather than a complete inability to handle the kids. Jack-Jack isn’t as cute as they think, but overall this makes me hope for Incredibles 3 some day. “Let’s not go testing the ‘insurance will pay for everything’ idea all at once, okay?”

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