The Twilight Zone - Person or Persons Unknown

Dave in the dark corners of The Twilight Zone

*** / ****
Despite his pushy, bossy treatment of his wife when awakening from a strong night’s drink at a buddy’s party, Dave Gurney realizing to his horror that his wife, family and friends don’t recognize him, Person or Persons Unknown is a grand time to be had just due to its nightmarish premise: as he asks Sam, the bartender, who should know him considering his bar is a Friday night haunt for the past three years, what would he do if everyone claimed not to recognize him, the disorienting dilemma facing Dave Gurney is all too vividly realized in this memorable Twilight Zone episode. Again, the opening has Dave criticizing his wife for dozing away without waking him and griping because breakfast isn’t ready. He questions where she put his razor and grumpily grouses about in the bedroom as she responds in fear and demands him leave her house or else she’d call the police. And later when Dave goes to work, at the bank where someone else is at his desk as his fellow employees are confused with why this “stranger” just arrives as if he owns the place, taking the seat that doesn’t belong to him, pushing aside a security guard when confronted. Dave moving items from the desk belonging to another employee, including the name sign that he considers an extra stab by pranksters creating an elaborate hoax to tease him. Jim, the security guard, pulling a gun on him, “requesting” Dave to leave the building, as the loony bin carries him away.

Dave (Richard Long) rightfully kvetching.

It is quite a perplexing experience for Dave, as it would be for anyone suddenly thrust into such a situation where a phone call to his best friend and mom results in neither knowing his voice or name. The mental institution doc introduces him to a guy that considers himself Winston Churchill (his identity unknown), so Dave escaping (jumping through a window and stealing a work van) in a pursuit of proof/evidence to claim his identity makes sense…wouldn’t we all? I think if you can look past how Dave represents the “work husband” wanting his homemaker wife to see to his needs at the beginning, the remainder of the episode successfully relates the anxiety of such a traumatizing series of events, following the day in the life of a “person unknown” trying to prove that he is who he says he is. But is he really who he says he is? I like that the episode doesn’t ever really answer that question, as Dave awakens to a wife he doesn’t recognize. It would have been easy to give us the “it was all a dream” and leave it at that, but I consider the open-ending conclusion a nice touch…it leaves us wondering if Dave is trapped in this limbo of perpetual “loss of identity”, looping over and over seemingly without a close. Richard Long nails the final expression when he looks at his beautiful wife, taken aback and at a loss for words because her face is unknown to him…after a long series of “rejections” from those who look at him and are clueless regarding who he is, for him to do the same to someone else is classic Twilight Zone.