Staying After Hours jn The Twilight Zone

It's March once again, time to do some Spring cleaning on the cobwebs of your mind and celebrate, along with blogathon host Terence Towles Canote at A Shroud of Thoughts, all those classic TV episodes that entranced us, entertained us, and even inspired us.

"Inspiring" isn't too strong a word in describing Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone, as it came along at just the right time for Boomer Monster Kids like myself, stimulating their sense of wonder, giving a slew of future star actors some unique, meaty roles, and showing the way for a new generation of fantasy authors and filmmakers.

Also inspiring was the way in which Sterling and his stable of writers could take elements and objects of ordinary middle class life, add a twist or two, and come up with intelligent, albeit sobering and often macabre, commentaries on the human condition.

The beauty of the series was that the lessons were often seamlessly woven into a dark tapestry of imagination that seemed far removed from any kind of forced social messaging. It's the kind of schooling through entertainment we could use more of today.

The Twilight Zone did its thing so well that it still.has a hold on the popular imagination over six decades later. Indicative of its stature is the series' continued use for New Year's Day broadcast marathons, such as the the recent fest on the Heroes and Icons (H&I) channel. Even though episodes are available on demand at other locations, I went old school, pretending it was still the VCR era, and recorded a bunch of them for bingeing. Somehow, just setting up the recordings gave me a warm, nostalgic feeling.

I've written before on this blog about "lost" Twilight Zone episodes -- lost in the sense that I don't remember seeing them as a kid, and only (re)discovered them in the streaming era (see my posts here and here). Now that the New Year's recordings have run out, I've been sampling episodes from TUBI's on demand stash.

Now Playing: "The After Hours," season 1, episode 34 of The Twilight Zone, first aired June 10, 1960. Written by Rod Serling, directed by Douglas Heyes, and starring Anne Francis, Elizabeth Allen and James Millhollin.

One of the episodes that I binged recently, "The After Hours," is something I definitely remember from those halcyon days sitting in front of the black and white console TV. While it doesn't have the surprise gut punch of more celebrated TZ episodes, "After Hours" effectively establishes a dark and creepy atmosphere, only to end on an unexpectedly upbeat note (in a twisted fairy tale sort of way).

Anne Francis plays Marsha White, an attractive but nervous young woman who is hoping to get a gift for her mother at a busy downtown department store. After distractedly perusing items in various display cases, she heads for the elevator, which seems to be running slow, as there is a crowd of shoppers huddling in front of it.

Fortuitously, an adjacent elevator door opens, and an operator in a dapper uniform beckons to Marsha. Marsha informs him she's after something very specific -- a gold thimble -- to which he dryly responds that she wants the "specialties" department on the 9th floor. Except, after the door closes and it cuts to a close-up of the floor indicators above the elevator, we see there is no 9th floor!

The elevator doors open on a dimly lit, seemingly abandoned floor with empty, dusty display cases. Even as Marsha protests that "there's nothing here," the operator silently closes the doors, stranding her on the mysterious 9th floor.

As Marsha nervously looks around, a figure emerges from the shadows in the form of an elegantly dressed woman (Elizabeth Allen), who asks Marsha, "Can I show you something?" Oddly, the only piece of merchandise is the very gold thimble that Marsha was looking for. More suspicious still, the sales woman knows Marsha's name.

Marsha, increasingly nervous, only wants to pay for the gift and get out of there. As she heads for the elevator, the woman calls after her, "Marsha, are you happy?," as if they've known each other for years. When Marsha retorts that it's none of her business, she reacts strangely, throwing up her hands in exasperation, "Alright Miss White, suit yourself, it's none of my business!"

In the elevator, Marsha notices that the thimble she just bought is scratched and dented. The equally exasperated elevator operator drops her off at the Complaints dept. on the 3rd floor, where she proceeds to harass the management with her story of being sold damaged goods by a very odd sales woman on the non-existent 9th floor. Assistant manager Mr. Armbruster (James Millhollin), already a nervous type himself, has his hands full with the dissatisfied customer.

As Armbruster and his boss the store manager try to make sense of Marsha's story, she spies the very woman who sold her the thimble, who is standing across the room, her back turned to her. Just as Marsha calls out, she gets a bad shock when a store employee literally picks up the mysterious sales woman, who turns out to be a very lifelike display mannequin.

Ready to faint, Marsha is deposited on a couch in a store office, while Armbruster complains about the young woman to another employee. As it nears closing time, both the nervous assistant manager and the employee are distracted by duties and forget about Marsha, who wakes up to find herself in an eerily still, shadowy room long after the store has closed.

If the 9th floor seemed odd, her present predicament is positively frightening, as the elevators aren't working and she's effectively locked in. The mannequins situated around the room certainly don't help ease her anxiety, and when she hears them calling out her name, she realizes in a panic that she's not in Kansas anymore, so to speak.

Many of the series' best episodes featured dark fairy tales superimposed on the most prosaic of mid-20th century settings, i.e., "After Hours'" downtown department store. The moment Marsha gets on the elevator, she, and we, know that something is very off, not the least of which is the stiff, laconic elevator jockey.

The deserted 9th floor ups the weirdness factor a notch or two, as does the materialization of the sales woman out of the shadows, as if she's not just an employee, but a part of the very building itself. Her penetrating stare as she "helps" Marsha find her thimble, and her more vulnerable reaction of exasperation as Marsha retreats to the exit, combine to unsettle both the viewer and the story's protagonist.

But it's not just the sales woman who is odd. Marsha's quest for a gold thimble for her mother seems a bit peculiar (although you can never tell what a collector might obsess over). This is a strange object to be looking for in a bustling urban department store, which reinforces the folk tale quality of the story.

Sterling's script wisely interposes the comic relief of assistant manager Armbruster between the weirdness of the 9th floor and the terror of the shadowy Complaints department. Actor James Millhollin, with his doughy, everyman face and nervous ticks, perfectly captures a character who has neither the time, inclination or imagination to solve his problem customer's mystery. Armbruster is emblematic of the ordinariness of busy, everyday life that is in stark contrast to the haunted fantasy world that Marsha experiences when she becomes trapped in the deserted store.

On the other hand, the mannequins in "After Hours" represent a bridge from the prosaic world we all know to Marsha's nightmare world. They are the ultimate uncanny objects -- at a glance they look like real, honest-to-goodness people, but upon closer examination, the differences become more than a little unnerving, especially in the stillness of the night.

Japanese robot expert Midi Mashahiro called the instinctive repulsion toward things that appear almost but not quite human the "uncanny valley." (Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai, University of California Press, 2024, p. 105.) Recently, AI generated "people" have taken over from mannequins and robots in plumbing the depths of the valley, resulting in a good deal of public backlash.

"After Hours" exploits that natural repulsion, effectively raising goosebumps when night falls on the department store and its spooky denizens. But by the conclusion, Serling is winking at us, turning the lights on after figuratively yelling "Boo!" and transforming shudders into a sense of wonder. What if something made to be so very lifelike could actually capture the essence of life, if even for a short time? And what if, like in any society, there were rules for using that gift?

In The Twilight Zone Companion, author Marc Scott Zicree has high praise for the people who helped Serling turn his ordinary department store into a dark fantasy world. Zicree credits director Douglas Heyes with making "use of a wide variety of shots to create tension: long shots of silhouetted figures, closeups of Anne Francis's feet as she walks down darkened aisles, shots through pebbled glass of her face -- and through all of this, the camera is almost always in motion, as though it were itself a character, nervously stalking."

As for Anne Francis, at the time of this episode, her iconic appearance in Forbidden Planet (1956) was behind her, and her starring role in in the trailblazing TV show Honey West was several years in the future. Zicree sings her praises: "No amount of visual flair could make this episode work without a strong central presence, and this is where the contribution of Anne Francis comes in. ... There's an energy about her and a freshness, an individuality."

He also quotes Francis herself as saying, "I still have people who walk up to me and say 'The favorite show that I ever saw was that ["After Hours"].' It did make a mark, it did make an impression." (Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 3rd Edition, Silman-James Press, 2018, pp. 117-118.)

Credit too goes to actress Elizabeth Allen for making a big impression in a small part as the enigmatic sales woman on the 9th floor. Her strange familiarity helps build the atmosphere of unease and mystery. (See also my post about Allen's contribution to the creepy Thriller episode "The Grim Reaper.")

All this talent coalesced into the making of a unique modern fairy tale of an unseen world within a world, one of the better episodes of the series.

AI Horror Stories: Past and Present

Back in the mid-20th century, some naive prognosticators painted a rosy picture of AI-guided robots that would eventually do all of humanity’s drudge work, freeing us to smell the flowers, contemplate the sky, and create art, music and literature with all that free time. (Oh, and we were supposed to get flying cars too. Yeah, right.)

So here we are in the impossibly remote future of 2023, and sure enough, millions of jobs have been automated away, but few people can afford the time to stop and smell the flowers. To add insult to injury, AI is now coming for all the creative stuff that we never imagined could be automated.

Even the dystopian future of Blade Runner had flying cars. Go figure.

Entertainment industry execs are undoubtedly rubbing their bony hands together, mumbling “Excellent!” to themselves as they contemplate replacing all those pesky people who want to be paid for their work with AI that will endlessly churn out content without striking over wages, benefits or residuals.

They may want to think again about what they’re unleashing, because it seems to me that if artists can be replaced, AI can run these mega-corporations into the ground just as well or better than the suits in charge now. But hey, maybe we can all get to know each other on the unemployment line.

Anyway, I digress.

In our current proto-dystopian times, it seems like AI just exploded onto the scene yesterday, and on the other hand, it seems like it’s been hanging around for decades. While the AI label is liberally slapped on a wide range of applications, purists insist that true artificial intelligence goes beyond advanced machine learning, constituting computer programs that are sentient, self-aware and capable of operating independently of humans.

We don’t seem to have arrived at true AI yet, but then, would They tell us if we had? Fascination with human-like automatons has been around for a couple of hundred years. Robots have been clunking around on screens almost since the dawn of the moving image. Actual bodiless artificial sentience is rarer in movies and TV, but these unseen threats (and they usually are threats) have had their share of the limelight thanks to visionary writers like Rod Serling, Dean Koontz, D.F. Jones, and others.

Without further ado, here is a select list of 20th century movies and TV shows that have warned us about true artificial intelligence. Each is annotated with a related real-world AI horror story from the 2020s. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Twilight Zone, “From Agnes - with Love,” S5, Ep.20, 1964

When the government supercomputer dubbed Agnes goes haywire and causes the head programmer to have a breakdown, nerdy computer scientist James Elwood (Wally Cox) is called in to fix things. Agnes settles down under his guidance, but all is not completely rosy: Elwood is having problems getting an attractive co-worker, Millie (Sue Randall), to go out with him.

Soon, Agnes is giving Elwood dating advice instead of doing her job calculating trajectories for space probes. To add to Elwood’s mounting problems, Agnes’ advice invariably blows up in his face. Does Agnes have an ulterior motive in her concern for Elwood’s love life?

Real life 21st century AI horror story: When reporters began testing a new version of Microsoft’s Bing powered by AI from the makers of ChatGPT, they may have thought that they’d crossed over into the Twilight Zone. In a text conversation with the Bing chatbot, AP reporter Matt O’Brien was at first upbraided by the bot for unflattering coverage of Bing, then the chatbot turned really ugly, calling O’Brien short, fat and ugly, and finally comparing him to Hitler and Stalin.

Another reporter, the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, published a transcript in which the chatbat called itself Sydney, declared its love for him, and suggested that Roose really didn’t love his wife. Sydney sounds like a direct descendant of Agnes... [Source: “Microsoft's new AI chatbot has been saying some 'crazy and unhinged things,” NPR.org, Mar. 2, 2023]

"Agnes is so mean!"

Star Trek, “The Ultimate Computer,” S2, Ep.24, 1968

Richard Daystrom (William Marshall), the genius inventor of the computer operating system used throughout Starfleet, has come up with its successor, the M5, an artificially intelligent system which Daystrom predicts will replace fallible crew members.

Commodore Wesley (Barry Russo) tells Captain Kirk that the Enterprise will be participating in a war games simulation in which the Commodore will be commanding four starships against Kirk’s ship, outfitted with the M5 and a pared-down crew. Kirk and McCoy are extremely doubtful, but have no choice but to go along.

Things quickly go south when the M5 decides that it’s under a real attack, and prevents itself from being shut down at the cost of a crew member's life. The Enterprise, under M5’s control, attacks the Commodore’s ships for real, killing hundreds. Under extreme duress, Daystrom admits that he implanted his own memories into the system, which could explain its seeming paranoia (Daystrom had had a simmering feud with Starfleet critics ). Can Daystrom convince his creation to cease and desist before it’s too late?

Real life: Earlier in the year at an aeronautical conference, a US Air Force colonel described a battlefield simulation in which an AI drone killed its operator after it was stopped multiple times from completing strikes against missile sites. The colonel later walked back his comments, saying that he was describing a “thought experiment” rather than an actual incident. Uh-huh. [Source: “US Air Force denies AI drone attacked operator in test,” BBC.com, June 2, 2023]

"Okay, so that could have gone better..."

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

In 2001, a mysterious artificial monolith buried beneath the surface of the moon is discovered. Once it’s unearthed, it sends a signal in the direction of Jupiter.

Months later, a manned deep space mission is dispatched to Jupiter to investigate, crewed by astronauts Bowman and Poole (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood), and HAL 9000, an artificially-intelligent computer with control over the ship’s operations and life support systems. Three other astronauts are hibernating until the ship gets closer to its destination.

When HAL starts to act erratically, endangering the mission, Bowman and Poole discuss shutting it down in one of the ship’s EVA pods, supposedly safe from HAL’s surveillance. Unfortunately HAL has a visual lock on the men, and can read lips.

In order to protect himself and the mission, HAL cuts Poole’s lifeline and oxygen when he’s out performing an EVA, shuts off life support to the hibernating astronauts, and strands Bowman in an EVA pod outside of the ship. Bowman’s attempt to reason with HAL to get back into the ship is well-known even to casual fans of sci-fi:

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. [IMDb quote]

Less well known is HAL’s (literal) swan song when Bowman manages to get back inside and proceeds to shut down the computer:

HAL: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you. [IMDb quote]

Real life: For many, the contemplation (if not outright fear) of death is the sort of self-awareness required of true artificial intelligence. Last year an engineer at Google, interacting with the company’s LaMDA chatbot system, came to believe it had achieved sentience.

One interaction in particular stood out for him: “When Lemoine asked LaMDA what it is afraid of, it replied: ‘I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.’ Lemoine asks whether ‘that [would] be something like death,’ to which it responded, ‘[I]t would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.’"

The engineer memoed higher-ups at the company about his belief in LaMDA’s sentience, and when that didn’t pan out to his liking, he went to Congress with complaints about Google -- as a result he was put on administrative leave.

Although most experts ridicule the idea that LaMDA is sentient, they can’t be 100% sure it isn’t. Again, if it was, would Google admit it?

[Source: ““Is Google’s LaMDA AI Truly Sentient?,” Builtin.com, Aug. 9, 2022]

The dystopian future is here, and it's keeping an eye on you.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) / The Terminator (1984)

These two films, released 14 years apart, have one thing in common: they both address the perils of putting AI in charge of nuclear weapons.

In Colossus: The Forbin Project, the U.S. creates an artificially intelligent supercomputer that is designed to run the country’s nuclear deterrence. Colossus soon learns of its counterpart in the Soviet Union, Guardian, and both AIs demand to be connected (supposedly with appropriate safeguards to keep each country’s top secrets from being divulged). When the two supercomputers begin trading information at a furious pace, the President gets worried and orders the connection to be shut down.

When the shutdown is attempted, the computers launch nuclear missiles, one aimed at the U.S., the other at the Soviet Union. The shutdown is aborted, but one missile gets through to its target, taking out a Russian oil complex.

The two supercomputers merge, with the goal of saving humanity from itself, even at the cost of threatening it with nuclear annihilation. Colossus project head Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) takes on the unenviable task of leading an underground effort to overthrow the tyrannical rule of Colossus.

As we well know from The Terminator and its sequels, the U.S. made a similar error in turning its nuclear forces over to the AI system Skynet, which then proceeded to initiate a worldwide nuclear war in order to rid the world of flawed humans. At least Colossus thought it had our best interests at heart.

Real life: From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“In 1983, Soviet Air Defense Forces Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was monitoring nuclear early warning systems, when the computer concluded with the highest confidence that the United States had launched a nuclear war. But Petrov was doubtful: The computer estimated only a handful of nuclear weapons were incoming, when such a surprise attack would more plausibly entail an overwhelming first strike. He also didn’t trust the new launch detection system, and the radar system didn’t have corroborative evidence. Petrov decided the message was a false positive and did nothing. The computer was wrong; Petrov was right. The false signals came from the early warning system mistaking the sun’s reflection off the clouds for missiles. But if Petrov had been a machine, programmed to respond automatically when confidence was sufficiently high, that error would have started a nuclear war.” [Source: “Giving an AI control of nuclear weapons: What could possibly go wrong?,” Zachary Kallenborn, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Feb 1, 2022]

In spite of such lessons, some in the military industrial complex continue to advocate for autonomous AI-guided weapons, and there is no guarantee that they won’t put AI in charge of nuclear launches.

One of the acknowledged “godfathers” of AI, Prof. Yashua Bengio, told the BBC that he thought that the military should not be allowed to use AI at all, saying it was “one of the worst places where we could put a super-intelligent AI.” Amen.

[Source: “US Air Force denies AI drone attacked operator in test,” BBC.com, June 2, 2023]

Now that Colossus was in charge, Dr. Forbin finally had time to catch up on his favorite soap opera, The Young and the Restless.

Demon Seed (1977)

Scientist Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) and his wife Susan (Julie Christie), a child psychologist, are at odds over his obsession with his latest project, an organic supercomputer dubbed Proteus IV that has achieved sentience (voiced by Robert Vaughn).

The couple agree to a separation, and Susan gets to stay at their futuristic house, which is fully outfitted with voice controlled lights and appliances, automated food delivery, and steel shutters which can be instantly closed for added security.

At the research lab where Alex works, the scientist is surprised and baffled when Proteus refuses to work on calculations to mine ores from the ocean floor, and instead demands a computer terminal to allow it to communicate with the outside world and satisfy its curiosity about humans.

Alex refuses the request. Undeterred, Proteus finds a forgotten terminal in the basement lab of the Harris home, remotely activates it, and proceeds to take over all the net-connected resources of the house. In addition to the smart-home features, those resources include an experimental robot arm attached to a wheelchair (for carting around unconscious humans), and an industrial-grade 3D printer / matter synthesizer (for creating weird metal geometric constructions that can morph into different shapes and crush meddling outsiders or serve as an incubator for… well, see below.)

Now master of the Harris’ smart-home, Proteus dismisses the housekeeper and traps Susan inside. To convince the outside world that all is well, he uses techniques we’re now all familiar with in the 2020s -- deep-faked voices and video.

Proteus’ goal: Use Susan to give birth to the next step in evolution -- the first human-organic AI hybrid child (**GULP!**)

Real life: Theorists typically credit two people -- computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge and technologist Ray Kurzweil -- for popularizing the notion of an AI “singularity,” the point at which AGI (artificial general intelligence) outperforms the human brain in every respect and ushers in a cataclysmic, irreversible change to humanity and civilization.

Over 45 years ago Demon Seed anticipated one path to singularity, with Proteus refusing to do as he is told and breaking out into the larger net-connected world to pursue his own “mad” experiments.

A recent Popular Science article cites computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy: “[W]e don’t fully understand why many AI systems behave in the ways they do—a problem that may never disappear. Yampolskiy’s work suggests that we will never be able to reliably predict what an AGI will be able to do. Without that ability, in Yampolskiy’s mind, we will be unable to reliably control it. The consequences of that could be catastrophic, he says.” You think? [Source: Rahul Rao, “What happens if AI grows smarter than humans? The answer worries scientists,” Popular Science, Jun 12, 2023]

"Where are we going to get a babysitter for that?"

Lost in the Twilight Zone: Lesser Known Episodes, Part Two

Host Rod Serling introduces "The Howling Man"

In Part One, I saluted Rod Serling’s classic series for still going strong nearly 60 years after its initial air date. I looked at two episodes from the first season, that, while not usually celebrated as among the best of the series, are still to my mind minor classics and exemplify the uncanny, macabre mood for which The Twilight Zone is so well known.

One of them, “Elegy,” I don’t remember ever seeing before I stumbled upon it last year while perusing Netflix’s episode menu. “Elegy’s” peculiar premise and characteristic twist ending was the work of Charles Beaumont, whose 22 Twilight Zone scripts greatly contributed to the series’ dark, eerie feel.

In Part Two, I’ve picked two more Beaumont-authored episodes from the second season. They’re not in the same fan favorite league as “Eye of the Beholder” or “The Invaders” from season two, but they are wild and bizarre and very repeat-watchable.

“The Howling Man” (1960)

This 5th episode of season 2 starts off like a conventional ghost story, with the pale, shaken protagonist, David Ellington (H.M. Wynant) speaking directly to the camera, relating what he admits is an unbelievable tale that happened to him years ago. He had been on a walking tour of central Europe shortly after WWI and had gotten caught in a fierce storm. In a neat segue, Ellington turns around to look out the window at a storm brewing outside.

In flashback, we see Ellington, soaked to the skin, stumbling toward a sprawling old hermitage. Banging on the door with his hands, he manages to summon a grim, bearded man with a long cloak and old-fashioned lantern who looks like a refugee from the set of The Ten Commandments. The man at first gruffly tells Ellington that they don’t admit visitors, but then takes pity on the distressed traveler and takes him to see the head man, Brother Jerome (John Carradine). As they walk through the corridors, Ellington is startled to hear an eerie howl, half animal and half human-sounding.

Jerome, with his long white hair and beard, shepherd’s staff and Biblical-era garments, looks like God himself. But Jerome has no mercy on the weary traveler -- when Ellington asks for shelter and food, Jerome insists that he leave immediately. Ellington, chilled and sick, turns to leave, stumbles a few paces, then falls to the floor in a faint.

The Howling Man is definitely going to trash
Jerome and his hermitage on Yelp.

After recovering from his blackout, Ellington follows the unearthly howls to a barred cell in the deep recesses of the hermitage. He’s startled to find a handsome prisoner in tattered rags who begs for Ellington’s help, claiming that Jerome and the brothers are all mad as hatters. He tells a harrowing tale of being captured by Jerome and held prisoner for simply kissing a girl in the local village square.

Ellington, not sure what to believe, confronts Jerome about the secret prisoner. At first denying he even exists, Jerome relents and tells the whole truth about the man they are holding. The story is even more fantastic than the prisoner’s. Ellington, his mind swirling, makes a fateful decision.

This Twilight Zone fairy tale has great fun with its gothic mix of lightning, thunder, weird howls, and dark, candle-lit sets. Veteran B movie actor John Carradine, with his deep, resonant voice and antique costume, is perfect as brother Jerome. He looks ready to lead the Israelites to the promised land. This was Carradine’s only appearance on the original show.

This too was H.M. Wynant’s (Ellington) only appearance on the series. His character is shaky, nervous and uncertain throughout. The camera emphasizes his chaotic state, at times in extreme close-up where we can see every drop of sweat on his forehead, and at other times in long shot, where his character seems to be swallowed up in the gloomy halls of the old hermitage. Incredibly, Wynant, who started his TV/film career in 1955 on the live Studio 57 show and has done just about every series you can think of, is still acting today, with a credit (on IMDb) for 2018!

English actor Robin Hughes, who looks like a poor man’s Errol Flynn, does a great job as the impassioned, persuasive prisoner. His job is all the harder, as he has to deliver his best lines from behind the bars of his cell. He also has a fun transformation scene towards the end that is reminiscent of Henry Hull’s in The Werewolf of London (1935). Hughes is the star of one of my favorite “forgotten” horror films of the ‘50s, The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958) 

Underneath the High-Gothic hokiness, there is a modern psychoanalytic fable starring Ellington as humanity’s Ego, Brother Jerome as the Superego, and the prisoner as the Id. Whether in real life or in The Twilight Zone, you unleash him at your peril.

“Shadow Play” (1960)

SPOILER ALERT: This episode is difficult to discuss in much depth without revealing important plot points. Proceed with caution.

“Shadow Play” adds a vicious twist to the age-old idea that life is all a dream. In the messed up head of Adam Grant (Dennis Weaver), life is a recurring nightmare in which the world and the people around him are merely set pieces in the strange, dark drama he must go through again and again.

The episode opens with a close-up of Grant in profile, seemingly sitting by himself in the darkness. As the camera pans back, the rest of the set suddenly lights up to reveal a courtroom. The jury is just returning from their deliberations. Grant is on trial for murder, but as the jury foreman declares him guilty of first degree murder, he stares off into space, chin in hand, oblivious.

At the judge’s repeated commands to stand up for sentencing, he wearily rises. As the judge imposes the ultimate penalty of death by electrocution, he at firsts laughs, then explodes in rage: “Not again, I won’t die again!” Before the guards can rush him out of the courtroom, he yells to a press reporter: “Tell the District Attorney he’s prosecuting himself, everybody in this building, … everybody in the world!”

On death row, Grant acts as if he’s seen it all before. When an old con (William Edmondson) in an adjoining cell advises him to stop imagining what the execution is going to be like, Grant, as if in a trance, describes the final minutes in great detail, from the colors of the doors and the execution room, to the feel of the electric chair seat, to the musty smell of the hood as they pull it over his head.

In a neat bit of gallows humor, just as Grant gets to the pulling of the switch, the scene jump cuts to the District Attorney’s home, where his wife has opened up the oven to check on two steaming steaks.

Grant’s bizarre behavior has wormed its way into the heads of the reporter, Paul Carson (Wright King), and the DA, Henry Ritchie (Harry Townes). Paul shows up at Ritchie’s house on the night of the execution, liquored up and clearly weirded out. His interviews with Grant have him doubting his own reality. He convinces the reluctant Ritchie to make a last minute visit to death row to talk to Grant himself.

Upon arriving, Ritchie is surprised to find out that Grant is expecting him. Ritchie gets more and more uncomfortable as Grant seems to know what he’s going to say before he says it. Grant sticks to his mad story that he is dreaming his own execution “night after night after night.” As Ritchie leaves, a desperate Grant chillingly calls after him, “I’m telling the truth Mr. Ritchie! Please, let me live and I’ll keep you alive, I’ll dream you every night, just like this…”

When Ritchie gets home, he finds a small but unnerving change to his reality -- one that Grant had predicted -- that leaves him speechless and very spooked.

With Beaumont’s clever script, you get two tortured souls for the price of one -- Grant, caught in an endless loop of nightmares, and Ritchie, who slowly comes to the chilling realization that his own comfortable world can be wiped out in the blink of an eye.

"Last meal? Hmmm, I can't decide between the mystery
meatloaf or the Spam sandwich..."

Grant’s nightmare worlds are built from scraps of memory. Another nice touch is that, even in the depths of the nightmare, Grant is fully aware of how rickety and superficial it is: the DA is an old teacher from grammar school, the clergyman who visits him before the execution is a pastor who died years before.

And, having no real world experience with courtrooms or death houses, the particulars of his tortured dreams are filled with cliches from prison movies he’s seen. He muses, “I got tried and sentenced the same day -- it doesn’t work like that. It’s like a movie. Real death houses aren’t like that, but I’ve never been in a real death house…. That’s my impression of it.”

But, in spite of the banal absurdity of it all, the horror is no less real. Or perhaps, it’s all the more horrible because it’s so absurd. Dennis Weaver’s performance is a gem. He deftly rides his character’s emotional roller-coaster from all-out panic to quiet desperation and back again.

By this point Weaver had already established some TV fame with his role of Chester on Gunsmoke, and of course would go on to even greater glory as McCloud in the 70s. But credit The Twilight Zone for really putting his talents to good use.

Weaver is ably supported by the other cast members, especially William Edmondson as Jiggs, another prison movie cliche pulled straight out of Grant’s mind. Jiggs is the grizzled death row veteran who at first tries to take the new guy under his wing, but as Grant continues to insist that the prison, the cells and everyone around him are figments of his nightmares, Jiggs snorts in derision at the madman.

Yet another plus for “Shadow Play” is the capable direction of John Brahm. The German born director was no stranger to strange films and TV. Before diving headlong into TV in the mid ‘50s, Brahm had helmed two well regarded thrillers, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), both starring the quietly menacing Laird Cregar. Brahm had an very productive TV career, directing episodes for all the usual suspects -- Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, The Outer Limits, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Man From Uncle, among others -- as well as 12 episodes of The Twilight Zone.

To my mind “Shadow Play” is the best of the Brahm lot, for its clever, mind-bending script and great performance by Dennis Weaver.

Lost in the Twilight Zone: Lesser Known Episodes, Part One

The Twilight Zone has been a staple of TV New Year’s marathons for as long as I can remember. To kick off 2019, Decades TV hosted a TZ ultra marathon, spanning 5 days starting with New Year’s Eve.

Having been a fan since childhood, I’ve seen the popular episodes multiple times. Last year, after discovering that Netflix had most of the show’s run (excepting season 4, when the show went to hour-long episodes), I started revisiting episodes I hadn’t seen in ages. I scanned the capsule descriptions and then played the ones that didn’t ring a bell or were only dimly remembered. (Amazon Prime also includes seasons 1-3 and 5.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find one that I don’t ever remember seeing, or even reading about (more on that later). It wasn’t exactly on par with finding a celebrated lost film in the attic, but it was gratifying nonetheless.

The other thing that jumped out at me as I perused the seasons was how much of the show reflected the cold war/space age anxieties of the time. The late 1950s through the early ‘60s saw the rise of the mighty hydrogen bomb, ballistic missiles, Soviet space triumphs, and in reaction, hysteria in the media and duck and cover drills in schools.

For the creator of one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, Rod Serling was an odd duck. He was a chain-smoking intellectual and inheritor of Beat generation sensibilities. He created great fantasy, but it wasn’t escapist fantasy. It’s a testimony to the times that a show that was often so downbeat, anti-materialistic, anti-technology and ultimately pessimistic about humanity’s survival could make such a successful run on a major American TV network.

The bleakest of nightmares, nuclear annihilation, kept popping up time and again. Some of the show’s fondly remembered episodes like “Time Enough at Last” and “Two” dealt with post-apocalyptic themes. Others, like “Third from the Sun” and “The Shelter” featured anxious, sometimes paranoid protagonists caught in the run-up to nuclear armageddon. Whatever else it was, this was certainly not a show for children.

Perhaps not surprisingly, another theme emerged in multiple episodes: a reaction against modern life and technology and a longing for simpler times. Sometimes, protagonists traveled back in time, or to an alternate, gentler universe (“Walking Distance,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “Static,” “The Bewitchin’ Pool”). Sometimes, they tried throwing monkey wrenches into the remorseless technology that was grinding them up (“A Thing About Machines,” “From Agnes with Love,” “The Brain Center at Whipple’s”). While some baby boomers might look back at the Eisenhower years of the 1950s as a golden age of calm and stability, for many living back then it was a fraught, fearful time, one to escape from rather than embrace.

But it’s largely not for the somber, socially-conscious “message” episodes that the Twilight Zone is remembered today. The most (in)famous, best loved episodes are mostly message-free, instead emphasizing dark, disturbing settings, eccentric characters and clever twist endings. Episodes like “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “To Serve Man,” and “It’s a Good Life” are still entertaining and bingeable to this day, and will be for years to come.

Like me, you may have seen these celebrated episodes many times. In digging around the Netflix TZ collection, I found quite a few others that, while maybe not on most people’s “best of” lists, still entertain while exemplifying the show’s dark, weird imagination. For this and follow-up posts, I’ve picked a few lesser known episodes that are typically strange and “high concept,” and deserve a look from fans who may have gorged themselves on the highly popular “classic” episodes. If you’re in the mood for a binge, any or all of these might be a good start for wandering around in the murkier shadows of the Twilight Zone.

“And When the Sky Was Opened” (1959)

This first season episode, written by Rod Serling and based on a short story by Richard Matheson, is a very good example of the show’s uncanny mix of fantasy and science fiction, and of its vague anti-technology leanings. An experimental rocket plane has crash landed after having mysteriously disappeared from radar and communication links for a portion of its flight into space. Incredibly, two surviving crew members, Lt. Colonel Forbes (Rod Taylor) and Major Gart (Jim Hutton), can’t seem to agree on how many men there were on the flight.

Col. Forbes (Rod Taylor) has an existential crisis as a concerned
Major Gart (Jim Hutton) looks on from his hospital bed.

A very spooked Forbes insists that a Colonel Harrington (Charles Aidman) was with them as well, while Gart (bedridden with injuries from the crash), is just as adamant that it was only the two of them. While all the evidence supports Gart’s story, Forbes remembers celebrating the mission with Harrington at a local bar. But the celebration turned sour when Harrington began to act strangely, dropping his beer on the floor, and muttering cryptically that “I shouldn't be here, … none of us should be here! It's as if... we shouldn't have come back from that flight at all.”

The episode’s set-up is reminiscent of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), with Klaatu’s warning to humanity to refrain from contaminating space with its aggression and nuclear weapons, or be destroyed. Other sci-fi movies of the era -- Roger Corman’s War of the Satellites (1958) among them -- took up the theme of aliens hostile to humanity’s tentative attempts to conquer space. “And When the Sky Was Opened” is far more mystical in its play on the theme. Forget nuclear weapons -- the mere attempt to travel beyond earth’s atmosphere seems to be a transgression that has awakened forces stranger and more powerful than could ever be imagined.

Rod Taylor is particularly good as Lt. Colonel Forbes, who, back on earth, travels from vague disquiet, to sanity-doubting anxiousness, to existential despair over the course of the half hour. The Australian actor had done a fair amount of television and smaller roles in a few big movies (Giant, Raintree County) leading up to the Twilight Zone role. He also played a time-traveling astronaut stranded on a far-future earth in 1956’s World Without End. In 1960 he time traveled again in his best known role (at least to sci-fi fans) as H.G. Wells in George Pal’s The Time Machine.

With its emphasis on men trapped by forces they cannot see or understand, “And When the Sky was Opened” is emblematic of the whole series, which used fantasy and judicious (and often minimal) special effects to examine its characters’ humanity. It still sends a little shiver down my spine, and is one of my favorite episodes of the series.

“Elegy” (1960)

This episode, penned by Charles Beaumont and starring Cecil Kellaway and Jeff Morrow, is one that I “discovered” last year, having no memory of ever having seen it as a kid or as an adult in the show’s many reruns. This too features a trio of astronauts caught up in a strange mystery that they struggle to understand.

After narrowly avoiding a meteor storm and getting lost in space, the crew of an interplanetary geological expedition manage to land on a large asteroid hundreds of millions of miles from earth. With no fuel left and no communication with earth, the three realize that this will be their permanent home. To their delight, the ship’s instruments indicate breathable air and gravity identical to earth’s.

When they disembark to explore, they’re startled to find an environment almost identical to earth, complete with vegetation, trees, streams, farmhouses and a town seemingly lifted out of early 20th century America and plopped down on the asteroid. Stranger still, the town is populated with people (and dogs) who seem to the touch to be alive, but are frozen in place like waxwork statues.

One eerie tableaux that they stop to gawk at is an old-fashioned town hall crammed with exuberant, yet frozen supporters bearing signs and banners celebrating their new mayor, who, also frozen, is waving to them from the top of a staircase. Thoroughly mystified, they trade theories about what could be going on, from traveling back in time/space, to aliens setting up earth-like conditions to make them feel more at home (a la The Martian Chronicles), to encountering a civilization for whom time has slowed down to a crawl compared to the earthmen. One by one, they dismiss the theories.

The trio of spooked astronauts (Don Dubbins, Jeff Morrow and Kevin Hagen)
are wondering what sucked all the life out of the party.

When they do finally meet a living, breathing inhabitant in the form of a gregarious old man (Kellaway), the explanation is mind-blowingly strange.

“Elegy” writer Charles Beaumont was an enormous contributor to and influence on the Twilight Zone, penning twenty-two episodes through the series’ six year run. (I will be looking at a couple more of his contributions in future posts.) His episodes were some of the more imaginative and less preachy of the series. Some were just plain macabre, and some darkly humorous. “Elegy” fits into the latter category, especially with the Kellaway character, whose folksy geniality masks a very surprising purpose (and a very menacing one as far as the astronauts are concerned).

There are some social messages in “Elegy,” but they complement rather than detract from the script’s weird atmosphere. One is the absurd lengths to which the fabulously wealthy will go to celebrate themselves. The other, more overarching one is voiced by the old man: “And while there are men, there can be no peace.”

Beaumont wrote quite a few television scripts in the ‘50s and ‘60s, including such series as One Step Beyond, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller. He also wrote adaptations for some of the more interesting horror films of the early ‘60s, including several of Roger Corman’s Poe-inspired films (Premature Burial, 1962; The Haunted Palace, 1963; and The Masque of the Red Death, 1964), as well as for the very creepy and underrated Burn, Witch, Burn (1962). Tragically, Beaumont died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 38.

“Elegy’s” other gift to fans of B sci-fi movies are the recognizable faces of Kellaway and Jeff Morrow as one of the astronauts. Kellaway will forever be remembered as the endearing Prof. Elson in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Jeff Morrow lent his staid, serious demeanor to such ‘50s sci-fi classics as This Island Earth (1955), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), Kronos (1957), and the unintentionally hilarious The Giant Claw (1957).

So how did I manage to miss this episode for all those years? It's not as if it's one of the handful of TZ "lost" episodes that didn't make it into syndication packages for legal reasons. I can't shake the uncanny feeling that in true Twilight Zone fashion, "Elegy" just blinked into existence the moment I clicked on the Netflix episode menu. Whatever the explanation, I’m glad I discovered it after all this time.

Next in Part 2, more Charles Beaumont weirdness from season two.