Nick of Time

The hand belongs to Mr. Don S. Carter, male member of a honeymoon team on route across the Ohio countryside to New York City. In one moment, they will be subjected to a gift most humans never receive in a lifetime. For one penny, they will be able to look into the future. The time is now, the place is a little diner in Ridgeview, Ohio, and what this young couple doesn't realize is that this town happens to lie on the outskirts of the Twilight Zone.

                                                                                                                                 ****

The Bisbee Café in Ridgeview, Ohio. Just a small town on the way to New York to a new job as an office manager for Don Carter (Shatner), with wife, Pat (Patricia Breslin) along for the trip. It’s a nice promotion, and he’s excited about the prospects of a bright future. That is until he eyes a “Mystic Seer” machine with a devil’s head that is a prop in the aforementioned café holding napkins, sitting down with Pat, putting in a penny for its answer to questions of the foreseeable future.

What I have always loved about Twilight Zone is how the simplest items can be used to weave some really suspenseful, thought-provoking stories. Sure, music, use of the camera, performance, and just the right kind of dialogue can give the item of the story great weight. I realize when one associates William Shatner with The Twilight Zone, Nightmare from 20,000 Feet is what often comes immediately to mind, but I actually prefer the less heralded Nick of Time.

This, to me, works so well because it places an emphasis on superstition and putting faith in objects against that of one’s senses, dependency on a rabbit’s foot, four leaf clover, and, especially, a supposed future-telling napkin holder in some common café rather than common sense. Whether a certain seat being responsible for the Red Sox winning streak, or the same pair of sox (or jock strap) worn because you are performing at a high level, many depend on some sort of dependency based on superstition that works to your advantage.

Don desperately wants that promotion; he probably already had it, but asked the devil-headed machine, with it telling him he’d get it. After a phone call, it is assured and Don believes the machine is an accurate fortune-telling mechanism. Then the dependency starts when he believes that following a series of answers (the answers are printed on a little card that slides out of a horizontal slot on the front of the machine upon the penny’s drop inside) the machine provides saves his wife from being hit by a car. The superstitious addiction to the specific machine (he doesn’t even attempt to try another one at Pat’s request, staring at the one particular mechanism on a table now inhabited by two elderly ladies) just increases and Pat is under the stressful predicament of prying her husband’s compulsion from it.

This is the Twilight Zone, though, and so the episode does offer the possibility that it is telling the future. One such instance has the machine telling them (in its own peculiar way) that the car was fixed (the reason the couple is in this town is because of a vehicle problem) that the car is repaired, the auto mechanic almost immediately informing them of its completion. Then Pat herself asks a series of questions to dispel its accuracy, with each eerie answer testing her own indifference towards the machine.

I love the ending of this episode. There’s a contrast between dependency and freedom from dependency. Don and Pat are able to successfully detach themselves from the machine while another couple comes in after them, still under its dark spell, unable to escape the fortune it might foretell. I wish those who consider Shatner such a ham could see him in work like Nick of Time. It’s wholly believable, never too monotone, yet never too overdone. He shows a slow attachment to the machine, soon completely under its grip, almost beholden to its every slip of paper with a bit of writing that spits from the slot. Any machine could tell him the same exact answer, but since this is the Twilight Zone, the very idea that it could be actually correct in what is written gives the episode a compelling power. To think, this episode is almost entirely shot in a singular location of the café, near the table of the napkin holder. There are instances outside the café, on the street and block, where a clock is located, as the activity of cars and locals continue unabated by the terror that befalls Don and his gal, Pat. Breslin ably shows the anxiety and anger that result from seeing her husband under the entrapment of superstition. Obviously, we sympathize with both characters because they are totally relatable. 

 Counterbalance in the little town of Ridgeview, Ohio. Two people permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread. Two others facing the future with confidence - having escaped one of the darker places of the Twilight Zone.

Season Two: Episode Seven