The Twilight Zone - Four O'Clock

This was a revisit tonight as it was treated as background during the 4th but I must say its inclusion in the marathon over the likes of The Hitchhiker and Midnight Sun is surprising. Oliver Crangle and his witchhunt, dictating himself the seeker of those evil, researching and categorizing them, conducting his own library of "communists, subversives, thieves, and evildoers". On files, in alphabetical order, eyeballed through thick-lens glasses, visor and vest his costume, Oliver takes this job seriously. To many a hobby or extracurricular activity, for Oliver this is life, obsession, mission.


Calling up the employers of folks he considers bereft of value, sizing up his targets through slanderous accusation, issuing letters to businesses and institutions he feels should adhere to his calculating indictments; Oliver is a one man crusade obviously resembling McCarthy and those of his ilk who went after those they deemed unfit to be called American and patriotic. Substitute "evil" as an oft-used derogatory term for all Oliver [McCarthy] considers worthy of punishment, plotting to get 'em real good when it properly comes to him, and it's Salem all over again.

It's certainly a pulpit ministry, this episode. Poisonous rhetoric and an obsessive quest to point out the supposed weaknesses and frailties of others, Oliver is quite a gratuitous cartoon sized up correctly by the wife of a young doctor he seeks to ruin for the death of a patient during a busy night and a FBI agent called by him to root out the wicked he has so doggedly stockpiled in his files. They see him in full bloom insanity, swept away in his hysteria, enveloped by his prejudice and devoured by his judgemental nature. At 4:00 they will all pay for their sins. They will be two feet tall. He is sure of this.

But ultimately the one so sure others were cruel, and deserved of whatever righteous judgement he felt positioned to choose, through phone call or poisoned pen, thumbing across pages with names and numbers, nose stuck in books and eyes grabbing whatever details his dark heart and foul soul could use as weaponry; Oliver was the perfectly fit subject for what 4:00 would bring. Superiority setting him off to look upon the masses from his apartment as lesions and sores, nothing more than oozing disease, Oliver failed to realize he was the true gangrene. His parrot had him pegged..."nut."