Concluding the Fourth Season of Twilight Zone

I wanted to conclude the season Wednesday, so one last marathon for a while:

I won’t even sugar coat it, The Incredible World of Horace Ford was not an easy watch. Having a son who is autistic, Ford’s “child man” trying to survive, even with very patient, caring, understanding adults who try to navigate his mind-wandering tendencies, in the world does scare me because it is often on my mind, I must admit. When he meet Horace, he’s lost in the past, seemingly consumed with the happy days of childhood on Randolph Street, when his boss at a toy company wants him to redesign a robot with too many parts. Horace has a hell of a support system with his patience-of-a-saint wife and tolerant friend (who works with him at the company, helping to design toys as well), both trying to keep his mind on the present when all he wants to do is talk about the past. This episode of Twilight Zone takes on a trope the series is known for: someone in the lead dotes on the past, getting the chance to revisit it, and while there experience what it was like. Sure, the past sometimes does have a glow, a shine to it. This episode takes a different spin, and I’m glad it does because much like his wife says (Nan Martin, who looks quite different than her librarian in The Ghostbusters (1984)), when Laura finds him laying in a pummeled, bloodied heap on the street in the alley after his “friends” beat up his younger self for not inviting their crummy lot to his birthday party. She says to him as he is all too overwhelmed with grief about how the past showed him the ugly truth that all of us often glean over the bad and only recall the good times. I agree with that we oftentimes try to keep the darkness in the fade and latch onto the pleasant memories because it is easier. Horace learns this lesson the hard way. Vaughn Taylor returns as another boss, this time a very soft-spoken, well-meaning but expectant Mr. Judson, requesting over and over for Horace to update the designs of a robot so that they can make a profit on the toy. He tries to reason with Horace, speak to him humanely, but Horace shouts and raises his voice, so windswept with the glories of childhood that everything else falls to the wayside. Ruth White is hovering mama-hen who depends on Horace and his check, a busybody wondering about if anyone leaped off a building (!) and making sure her boy tries to keeps his wits about him. Both mama and wife do humor him and try to keep his mind off talking about kids, teachers, street games, and vendors hawking weenies. But Horace is on a path that leads him back to Randolph Street where he repeats a certain day as a kid on his birthday each time he visits. That same brat with a snaggletooth and that shit-eating grin keeps looking right at Horace, and the subsequent beatdown that he encourages with his thuggish, bullying brood, keeps haunting the episode each time the hero returns to the street. And he returns the watch knocked out of Horace’s hand to his wife. There is a self-destruction Horace inevitably follows and yet by episode’s end he finds wisdom in what the past provides…harsh truth but he needs it. The family, friend, and boss all try to steer Horace in the right direction but Horace had to get there on his own. Horace’s behavior is very much on the spectrum and those in his life, including the wife who loves him without fail even as his childhood trips recreated for her try her nerve. This won’t be an easy episode for many. It wasn’t for me. 3/5

On Thursday We Leave for Home focuses on a colony from earth who landed on a planet with two suns (and no night), hot and struggling for water, hoping for a ship from their home planet. Thirty years on the planet and Captain William Benteen (James Whitmore) has tried to keep what little colony is still left alive and in one piece, surviving despite meteor showers, heavy thirst, metal shacks to live in, dirty rags, and no baths.

“He thinks he’s a God and we’re booting him out of his heaven.”

Whitmore’s Benteen is oblivious to the fact that the colonists want to go their own way when they return to the earth. He can’t accept the fact that they no longer want to depend on him. Being a leader for 30 years, the idea that he will no longer be in charge, it becomes unbearable. He describes them to Colonel Sloane (Tim O’Connor; “Buck Rogers”) as children who need him to just survive. While the ending has me kind of a bit mixed—Benteen deciding he must remain where he will surely perish and alone—if not altogether baffled that even if he thinks the planet he once lived is a lie, not the fantasy he once described to them in “fables”. Imagine trying to convince folks not to leave a miserable, sweaty, harsh planet where there is no green, very little water, or night. No nice winds or lovely sea on this godforsaken place. He tries but Colonel Sloane convinces them that while there is jealousy, prejudice, violence, and war it sure beats remaining under the thumb of a man who tells them what they can and cannot do…they can be individuals with the freedom to live for themselves. Benteen gets so worked up he attacks the ship! Not leaving, staying behind, Benteen makes an inexplicable decision to stay behind. I think many consider that decision to be quite preposterous. But that is the point, I guess. Benteen just can’t let go of the control, the god-complex he developed over thirty years took hold and all he tried to convince to stay on the planet, hoping they’d listen as they always did, leave him behind. It is quite a message by Serling. Benteen is shown at the end lost in delusion, talking to a kid who is no longer there. Benteen talked about earth, all the luxuries it had, what it would be like once the ship came to pick them up. And he looks up still talking about earth as the ship moves on from the hell he decided to remain on. Begging for them to return. Sloane pleaded with Benteen to come with…his arms reaching up, Benteen watches as Sloane leave. Too little, too late. “…Now a population of one.” 5/5

Passage of the Lady Anne might not be the best episode of the fourth season, but it is a delight for its stalwart cast of aging veterans, such as Gladys Cooper (sadly, her TZ episodes, all of them wonderful, feature death as a significant component), Wilfrid Hyde-White, Cecil Kellaway, Alan Napier (right before Batman) and Cyril Delevante, on a once glamorous, extravagant romance ship’s final voyage. Married for six years, the Ransomes (Lee Philips and Joyce Van Patten) are facing certain divorce if their relationship cannot be repaired during a trip to London, booked on a relic soon to be decommissioned instead of a quick airplane ride. Van Patten’s Eileen insisted on a slower paced trip while busy financier, Alan, is seemingly focused on closing a deal on the horizon. For almost the entire episode, Alan is a cold fish while Eileen tries and tries to get him to see how far south their marriage has fallen due to no time together and too much focus on the job. Thankfully these passengers, all elderly and retired, might can repair them before it is too late. The sheer joy of spending time with the pleasant, elegant Cooper, charming, appealing Hyde-White, cheery-cheeked Kellaway, and eventually the captain of the “doomed voyage”, Napier, makes this melodramatic soaper of an episode bearable. The ship is quite the luxury liner, very much costumed and designed to represent an era once quite ornate and opulent. Van Patten is quite reasonable even as Philips often just appears aloof and distanced. She tries while he often seems little interested in anything but getting to the London meeting. It takes the magic of those onboard (and Van Patten going missing for a bit) to shake him loose so that he can find that ardor for the marriage seemingly dead. I guess we might not know for sure how dedicated he will remain even as his face and demeanor lightens once he “recovers” his wife. The pleasantries of Hyde-White and Kellaway as a team can be quite amusing, while Cooper graces our screen quite warmly. I didn’t think the story was all that luminous but the cast sure as hell is. 3/5

The Bard is one of the more polarizing TZ episodes of the series. Insiders perhaps would dig it, and I felt while watching it Serling had a blast writing the screenplay, but personally I wasn’t altogether the audience for this one. I LOVED Williams (Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder) as Shakespeare conjured from the dead by dark magic found in a dusty library by desperate Weston (the TZ episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), for the most part a conductor trying to break into the biz. And Reynolds as the Brando method actor (his imitation is flawless) looking for his motivation (his “getting into the character” bit cracked me up) is a side-splitter. But all the sound effects and music bits following Weston everywhere he goes as if a laugh track hoping to get a response out of us irritated me to no end. There is a lot of that “forced desperate comedy” that begs us to laugh, which I wasn’t having none of. The cast, though, really gives the material their all. Weston especially tries hard to get the bits that do and don’t work to tickle our funnybone. As a patsy to the sponsors and producers, Weston having to explain to Shakespeare the changes to his work is perhaps at his best, while when he’s begging to get a job at the beginning just left me groaning. John McGiver, the wholly unpleasant lead in Sounds and Silences TZ episode, is the sponsor for the special, as yes men (including Floyd the Barber (Howard McNear)) cater to him while he grumpily responds to Shakespeare’s mentions of his work before changes and alterations turned the plot into Tennessee Williams. Serling dreaming up Shakespeare and Brando talking about past and present plays before The Bard socks the method actor must have been a hoot to see presented on screen. I can imagine the entire cast and crew breaking into laughter while shooting that scene. Twilight Zone really did feature young and up and comers like Redford and Reynolds so the pop culture relevance of this show was quite succinct. The one sequence where Shakespeare looks on in haughty disagreement with how his work is turned upside down by others as Weston unsuccessfully tries woefully to smooth things over rescued this from a sure 1.5/5 for me. 2/5. Easily the worst episode of the fourth season, though.

While I think there are indeed some gems in the fourth season, it was a slog due to the length of each episode. Much like the shot-on-video episodes, this hour-long format was another experiment that did more harm than good.