Review: The Twilight Zone
What prompted this was a reference someone on my f-list made to one of this series' episodes. I decided to check this thingy out, and quickly discovered that a lot of people think rather highly of it.
Quite frankly, I saw one more reason why Newton Minow called TV "the vast wasteland". Words like "brilliant" and "genius" aren't ones I'd ever use in reference to this videographic shitfest. Here are some of its many manifest shortcomings:
Second Rate Sci-Fi
The Lonely -- A convicted criminal is sentenced to solitary confinement on an "asteroid". An asteroid with Earth-like conditions. The largest asteroid is Ceres, about 580mi across (though its shape is that of an irregular hunk of rock) and it is found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Not large enough to have a gravitational field that could hold an atmosphere, and so far from the Sun that, even if it did, it could never sustain life. This idea is nonsense.
The captain of the ship does him an unauthorized favour, as he considers this puinishment inhumane. He gives the prisoner an animatronic fuck doll. They fall in "love". So whatcherpoint?
Elegy -- Another Earth-like asteroid, this time a "remote" one.
I Shot an Arrow into the Air -- Three astronauts crash land on yet another asteroid with an atmosphere and an Earth-like environment. At this rate, the solar system must be positively lousy with these magical asteroids. Even back in 1961, people weren't this stupid and uninformed.
Perchance to Dream -- Man goes to see a psychiatrist for some problem, but drops dead in a second, and the shrink never learns what the problem was. Rod Serling's narration at the end then "informs" us that in a split-second, a person can dream up a thirty-minute dream.
This is absolute bullshit. If a dream seems to take a half hour, then it takes a half hour in real time.
And When the Sky was Opened -- This episode's stupidity and pointlessness couldn't even be explained by Serling himself.
The Last Flight -- Chickenshit Brit fighter pilot from WW I is transported to a modern US Air Force base. Learns he is to be a great hero, so he returns to the war. Does not steal one of the jet fighters. Dipshit.
Where is Everybody? -- Man finds himself all alone, yet everywhere he goes, he sees signs of very recent habitation: food cooking on stoves, hot coffee left on tables, and so forth. Yet he can't seem to be able to locate anyone. It turns out this was an hallucination brought on by sensory deprivation for a period of 484 hours and 36 minutes.
Why was this experiment being done? It was to get him ready for a space flight to the Moon! Bullshit! 484 hours and 36 minutes is a little over twenty days. The only way a trip to the Moon could last that long is if the spaceship was doing 515 MPH. Then it wouldn't ever escape Earth's gravity and would never reach the Moon. A Moon trip takes about two days, not twenty.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper -- Gold heist, suspended animation, come to in a future where gold has no value because it's so easily manufactured. Not too damn likely! Gold is so rare because of the 30 or so gold isotopes, only one is stable: Au197. All the rest are highly unstable with half lives ranging from a couple of microseconds to a little over 188 days. Turning lead into gold? Of the four resulting heavy gold isotopes, the longest half life is right around 26 minutes.
Suspended animation: if these thieves knew how to do that, that alone would have been worth far more than the gold they stole.
Seen One, Seen 'Em All
Twilight Zone is chock-full of derivative episodes.
- Selling one's soul to the devil: three episodes.
- They croaked and didn't know it: seven episodes.
- Escaping the Grim Reaper: two episodes.
- Time travel to change history: four episodes.
- Recapturing youth: three episodes.
- Ventriloquist's dummy takes over: two episodes.
Those are just the ones I managed to watch. There are probably plenty more than that.
Rod Serling obviously "thought" he was another O. Henry. The operative word being "thought". Serling strives for the same sort of ironic endings that O. Henry mastered, but all he manages is idiotic instead. This is exemplified by Time Enough at Last. This involves a bank teller, Henry Bemis, who loves to read. (Why is he working as a teller instead of as a librarian?) However, neither his boss, nor his harpy of a wife, will let him.
One day, he's hiding in the bank vault when nuclear war breaks out, and everyone but him is now dead. The only building left standing is the library (why?). Now, he has all the books, and noone to give him any shit over his reading. Then he breaks his glasses.
"That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed...! That's not fair!", Bemis complains.
That pretty much gives you an idea as to what kind of idiotic endings most of these episodes have. Sometimes, they don't even know when an ironic ending is required. Take Nightmare at 20000 Feet, this one about a man newly released from a six month stay at a psychiatric hospital who believes he's seen a gremlin tampering with the airliner he's flying home after being "cured". Naturally, everyone thinks he's completely nuts. At the very end, however, we see that the airliner has indeed been tampered with, so he's not nuts and it really happened. This time, the ending should have been left ambiguous. This time, a good ending was totally spoiled by not being ironic when it would have counted.
Mind Numbingly Stupid Stories
These leave you feeling the IQ points just melting away.
Five Characters in Search of an Exit -- The five characters are dolls in a toy collection bin. Because we all know dolls are actually real people, but only when you're not looking. Usually such beliefs are discarded by the time one if five y/o.
After Hours -- ditto for department store mannequins.
To Serve Man -- "It's a cook book!" I guess this is what passed for "clever" back in those days?
A Thing About Machines -- If he hated gadgets that much, then why have them in the first place?
Raging Misanthropy
Serling is also a raging misanthrope. There is not one episode where people are not revealed as being no damn good whatsoever.
- The Monsters are Due on Maple Street
- I Shot an Arrow into the Air
- People are Alike All Over
- Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up
- The Shelter
- The Little People
- The Gift
- It's A Good Life
- Black Leather Jackets
The Twilight Zone is a shitty, shitty series that people say is "brilliant" mainly because they've heard others say it. Such is the power of hype.
The Twilight Zone gets an x_eleven rating of:
out of five.