So I was on Twitter with fellow Twilight Zone fans discussing our disappointment in SyFy's decision to choose a boring lineup of movies that typically fill up a lazy Saturday of programming. Yes, they cut up their episodes, egregiously even interrupting with commercials right in the middle of action instead of the designated slots meant for advertisements. So they aren't necessarily even respectful to such a revered and treasured series, but tradition, as many of us sentimentalists will tell you, still lured us to SyFy and feel the least they could do is honor just three days a year to The Twilight Zone. We as fans, though, are quite gifted with streaming services and you can find reasonably priced complete sets for the show. So options are available. As a TZ community, it was the idea of following a lineup with other fans as we did this last December 31st and January 1st, with comments on Twitter and other certain locations that try to replace the IMDb series message board no longer available ranging from clever and poignant to snarky and reflective. One of my favorites from the first of January was the controversial Takei episode during the final season, The Encounter. Walking Distance & A Stop at Willoughby were also quite recognized with great affection. Mentioned by some TZ fans on Twitter was the Decades channel. Scattered across the country are a series of nostalgia networks that function specifically to feature daily programming of older series, many considered classic and iconic. Decades can be found on certain cable lineups and such. I think here in Mississippi there is one location, in Meridian, that carries the network. Honestly, I visited their site when it was mentioned on Twitter. Quite frankly, I wouldn't even know about Decades if not for TZ fans who either once had the network or plan to watch it on the 4th. Decades calls it a Rod, White & Blue TZ special. I dug that. The episodes I did the strikethrough are ones I know won't be in my own lineup, but many of them that weren't on my mind I might consider.
The lineup on Decades:
7AM - "Valley of the Shadow"
8AM - "Death Ship"
9AM -
10AM -
10:30AM - "The Lonely"
11AM - "The Jeopardy Room"
11:30AM -
12PM -
12:30PM -
1PM - "The Howling Man"
1:30PM - "Mirror Image"
2PM -
2:30PM - "A Stop at Willoughby"
3PM - "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"
3:30PM -
4PM -
4:30PM - "The Invaders"
5PM - "Time Enough at Last"
5:30PM - "To Serve Man"
6PM - "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up"
6:30PM - "The Obsolete Man"
7PM - "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"
7:30PM -"The Masks"
8PM - "The Hitchhiker"
8:30PM - "Living Doll"
9PM - "Where is Everybody?"
9:30PM -
10PM -
10:30PM - "Five Characters in Search of an Exit"
11PM - "Long Live Walter Jameson"
11:30PM -
12AM - "The Brain Center at Whipple's"
12:30AM -
1AM - "Nothing in the Dark"
1:30AM - "The Shelter"
2AM -
2:30AM - "The Little People"
3AM -
3:30AM - "Stopover in a Quiet Town"
4AM -
5AM - "The New Exhibit"
6AM - "On Thursday We Leave for Home"
I won't be following this lineup significantly, but I do think Twitter TZ fans consider it a decent option to follow as an alternative to SyFy. I recorded two mornings full of TZ episodes (SyFy showed blocks of first season episodes the first and third early morning), but I have changed my mind about bothering with them because I don't plan of watching a full length of first season episodes in succession. But I will perhaps comment throughout the day on Decades lineup and see if fans on Twitter are involved. If you are a TZ fan, new to the series perhaps because of Peele's own reinvention, or even a virgin who heard about it, welcome to the club. I hope you give the series a chance.
-----------
The Hunt - I was unsure which episode I would start the day with but The Hunt was a good choice. I had a few in the third season I felt could kick off the day with the right tone. I do see how The Hunt would be rejected by today’s Twilight Zone fan, but the two generations this might appeal to either having left perhaps through the same gate as Hyder Smith or close to it might certainly identify with the backwoods, simple living setting and characters this appears modeled towards. Hyder, in overalls, with shotgun and coon-hunting dog, Rip, agrees with hunting for his food, gathering up firewood, speaking to his “old woman” about kissing her after some absence, and living off the land…that sort of lifestyle spoke to the rural-living folk more than perhaps the “high falutin’ cityfolk”. This episode, admittedly hits me in the feels. While I’m not necessarily an animal person in that I want to own a pet of any kind, I do consider pets deserved of love and respect. Hyder and Rip are quite a pair, and you can see his wife, although a meal preparer and tender of the house, and her husband have built quite a loving and respected marriage over their fifty years together. I think The Hunt will not be for certain folks, but dog lovers perhaps will embrace the happy twist involving the owner unwilling to go into any eternity without his pet by his side…it is the dog that keeps its owner from fire and brimstone! Foulk was very clever casting as the hell gate “welcome party”, not looking too imposing though reasonably pressuring to secure Hunnicutt, though the dog would have known better. Dexter Dupont, as the angel in overalls, with the rural charm and speak, just comes up while Hyder and Rip are moving down Eternity Road, preparing them for the heaven that would certainly appeal to them…coon-hunting and square dancing, with Nolan’s Rachel soon to join them forthwith. Hunting and living the simple life, the mountain wilderness setting, and rural characters will just not identify with a section of the viewing audience of today. So The Hunt will divide TZ fans who watch it, I think. But I am a softy for this episode. Maybe it was the melody of the episode, somber due to the loss of life but touching in that the episode’s afterlife for Hyder and his dog will ultimately serve them well. The two of them on Eternity Road and eventually in heaven together is a concept I find quite harmonious. 4/5
While The Hunt I can briefly remember in and out of sleep during the last 4th of July marathon as it was shown early in the morning, Little Girl Lost is a marathon mainstay that comes on, it seems, when I’m often away or busy when it is on. I chose it for my own Independence Day viewing schedule, after pondering when to watch To Serve Man. To Serve Man is often an early afternoon New Years Day showing, and I guess I have just become too accustomed to its 5:30/6 PM resting place over the years. So I was going over my choices, deciding on a twofer of “Little” TZ episodes. Little Girl Lost was a favorite from my youth because of its extraordinary premise and presentation, particularly when the father goes into the fourth dimension after his daughter and their pet. After The Hunt, it was by happenstance this was the episode chosen, another dog helping to rescue one of the key characters of the story. Mac, the dog, desperately wants in the house to run to the girl, lost in another dimension through an “opening”. Luckily the father has a buddy who happens to be a physicist (Charles Aidman, the unfortunate astronaut whose identity disappears into the ether in And When the Sky Was Opened), positing a theory of how the opening occurred and eventually locating it on a wall. The physicist theory regarding perpendicular lines, how it is offered while chalking together the opening on the wall, is my favorite scene with Aidman…he does this all so matter-of-factly and resolutely, although, at the same time communicates the seething terror of the situation and how to resolve it. The fourth dimension, with its outré art direction and camera work, has just enough fever dream aesthetic to portray itself as quite different from the dimension we currently exist. The fear and anxiety of the parents and their physicist hoping to somehow make sense of the lost daughter and her dog, along with trying to surmise a rescue attempt, is palpable acting. Serling’s walk on in the room to present the episode is one of my favorites. 4/5
Back in the 90s, The Little People was one of those TZ episodes I always looked forward to mainly because of how Joe Maross gets his comeuppance by episode’s end. His Peter Craig is the astronaut always given orders to while all the while yearning to be in control, to have all the power. This desire only manifests itself into quite an ugly and monstrous display when he locates an entire civilization thriving on a distant planet far from Earth after hearing their tiny voices while his commander (played by Claude Akins) tries to get their space ship (damaged by meteorite holes that penetrated the hull causing instruments key to space travel needing repairs). The tiny civilization are at Craig’s mercy and he makes sure, through the scary use of his large bootheel, to intimate his point that they will obey his every command and remain subservient to him. You see in the miserable, highly toxic relationship between Akins and Maross that the captain and co-pilot dynamic, the one who gives orders and the other who must adhere to them through the articles of command, remains a bone of contention. Maross hates taking orders from Akins and Akins tires of his adversarial behavior, the constant balking and complaining about the food rations and location of the ship’s landing. The little people are Maross’ chance to give the orders and what makes him so unsettling is this gradual use of violence and tonal shift in his personality, his facial expressions of bliss and exhilaration in the power he has and can wield, and the laughter as he rolls on the ground. The statue erected in his image, complete with suit and helmet, Maross’ Craig considers himself a deity and will not return to the ship with his captain, as Akins tries to convince him that all of this is madness. As Akins leaves, soon other visitors, much, much bigger than Craig arrive, one of them seeing Craig yelling at them to flee, lifting him up in a crushing grab. The statue falls onto the crumpled body of the man who tormented them, the little people rescued before any further harm could come to them. 3.5/5.
A Hundred Yards Over the Rim is perhaps sometimes overshadowed by The Dummy, but I always love revisiting it for Cliff Robertson. His shock and awe when going over a hill into 1961, experiencing power lines, a mack truck, a highway, gas station, penicillin, encyclopedia, and the calendar depicting the very Frontier west he himself came from in 1847 is what makes this episode so impactful to me. His reactions are so genuine to how any of us might similarly respond to the situation of traveling somehow from his time to "modern day" 1961. Absorbing the details and taking in everything around him, Cliff portrays his frontiersman as a visitor to a foreign land trying to come to grips with what he sees. Good stuff. The husband and wife, eventually the doctor they call to inspect him, all try to figure him out. The rifle left behind, crumbling from one hundred years of rest in the desert, is all that the residents of '61 can ascertain from the visit by Robertson. This episode really more or less uses a time travel theme to convey someone from one time returning with knowledge that his sick son will eventually be a doctor, and their journey from Ohio through the west eventually to California will not be a failure as so potentially depicted at the beginning of the episode. 4/5.
A Hundred Yards Over the Rim is perhaps sometimes overshadowed by The Dummy, but I always love revisiting it for Cliff Robertson. His shock and awe when going over a hill into 1961, experiencing power lines, a mack truck, a highway, gas station, penicillin, encyclopedia, and the calendar depicting the very Frontier west he himself came from in 1847 is what makes this episode so impactful to me. His reactions are so genuine to how any of us might similarly respond to the situation of traveling somehow from his time to "modern day" 1961. Absorbing the details and taking in everything around him, Cliff portrays his frontiersman as a visitor to a foreign land trying to come to grips with what he sees. Good stuff. The husband and wife, eventually the doctor they call to inspect him, all try to figure him out. The rifle left behind, crumbling from one hundred years of rest in the desert, is all that the residents of '61 can ascertain from the visit by Robertson. This episode really more or less uses a time travel theme to convey someone from one time returning with knowledge that his sick son will eventually be a doctor, and their journey from Ohio through the west eventually to California will not be a failure as so potentially depicted at the beginning of the episode. 4/5.
Comments
Post a Comment