Syfy Twilight Zone Marathon*

Serling introduces Static

This year they kick off their New Year's marathon at 10 (central time here) with "Static". I plan to write about a few episodes I'm able to watch, just for fun. Considering I'll be working on New Year's Eve (booooooo!!!!) and hanging out at my mother's, I'd try to get in as many as I could this year.

I had mentioned elsewhere that "Static" (with a curmudgeonly Dean Jagger--I just recently watched him in "White Christmas") was about longing for the past, what used to be and has gone, certainly not forgotten. An old radio found in the apartment where Ed lives, when he hits it just right and signal comes through (if even just briefly), provides music directly from the past. Despite being a temperamental jerk, Jagger does get the lady in the end...thanks in no small part to the radio. I get the point of the radio being a nostalgic link to the past, considering Jagger just despises modern appliances that seem to capture the attentions of his fellow apartment dwellers, but I often find him a bit hard to take.

"Prime Mover" isn't especially a favorite of mine. I feel as if I wrote about it in another marathon post a couple years back. I was kind of surprised the episode got a plum spot in the lineup, preparing the way for the marathon as it goes into New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Dane Clark as Ace, the gambling junkie with zero luck who happens to realize his buddy, Buddy Ebsen, has telekinesis and can "move the dice" with his mind after he helps assist in the tilt of a car. When Clark gets the fever in Vegas, disregarding his waitress girlfriend, played by Jane Burgess (Shatner's wife in a quite popular episode of TZ, set in an airplane). Soon Ebsen must pretend his abilities are gone (fuse gone out) in order to rescue his buddy from himself.

I think "Static" and "The Prime Mover" are perfect "2 AM pee-yew" slot episodes, the kind slotted in less desirable spots in favor of giving the cream of the crop a better position. But oftentimes it seems as if Syfy isn't as particular with how episodes are slotted.

"Long Distance Call", about a grandmother who dies, leaving behind a grandson she so loves and longs to be with her in the afterlife that she would use "communication" through a toy telephone in the hopes of convincing him (Billy Mumy, quite itty bitty) to commit suicide (!), is yet another example of a less memorable episode taking up decent real estate (perhaps 11 pm before New Year's Eve isn't considered all that great a slot, but I digress...). Mumy's more memorable episode, "It's a Good Life", gets the 7:30 New Year's Eve evening slot, of course.

A couple of my favorites will be on early in the morning at 6 and 6:30 respectively--"The Grave" and "Death's-Head Revisited"--while I'll be missing unfortunately one of the show's very best after them: "The Midnight Sun".

As is often mentioned during this time of year, there are avenues, obviously, to watch TZ anytime during the year. I do so as do others. So this isn't a tradition that necessarily has the same weight it once did. But much like Jagger in "Static", looking back fondly in the past perhaps keeps us returning to Syfy still. We just can't let go, I guess.

Speaking of timing, I used to always enjoy watching "A Hunderd Yards Over the Rim" and "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" (the later reviewed for the blog not too long ago) when I would get home from work in the afternoons. It does seem in past marathons these were slotted in the day instead of night. They just seem to work better that way. I do often like to watch these in the summer due to the settings of both.