The Twilight Zone - The Trade-Ins

The Holts (Joseph Schildkraut and Alma Platt) are senior citizens, married 50 years,  looking to “get new bodies” as a company can offer those with aged bodies a “rebirth”, as explained to them by representative (Ted Marcuse, very memorable in the TZ episode, “The Arrival”), hardly able to retain the excitement of another sale. Marcuse’s voice is delicate, appealing, convincing, and hard to resist when making his pitch. The Holts are sold on the idea that these well-toned, young adult bodies could be theirs for $5000 dollars a piece. And there’s the rub. The Holts have $5000 only. So only one of them could “transfer” to the young body. Schildkraut was incredible as the ghost of a concentration camp victim in “Deaths-Head Revisited” and he’s so dramatically potent in “The Trade-Ins”. Just conveying the pain his character was in, at a card game in the hopes of winning an extra $5000, barely able to withstand it, Schildkraut communicates the agony his John Holt desperately wishes to escape. Alma Platt is mostly quiet, just giving her advice or encouragement, wanting her husband to be happy. What major point does get across by episode’s end is that agonizing pain or no, John Holt chooses what life is left to be with his elderly wife. And this is after John has a chance to experience what it is like to inherit a “perfect” body, no pain, with the ability to move about a room effortlessly, considering with great enthusiasm what life will now give him and his wife. But the wife realizing she’s this old woman and her husband is now an athletic stud, horror strikes her so he decides to return to the relic shell, okay with it because she is more important than this young body. It breaks the heart but also brings a tear because  Rod gives us a story about how love is chosen over ease, that despite the pain not being with the woman he truly cares about with great totality is just not acceptable. I think the acting is what really drives the episode as is the tragic conclusion, but that card game scene—where Terence De Marney decides to let John “keep” his $5000 after witnessing (as others at the table do) just the onset of continuous pain he was trying to battle off—leaves a lasting mark. The humanity in that scene, as De Marney tries to find this tune as he whistles, and a truly appreciative, within his wincing, John Holt thanks them as he leaves…De Marney found his tune. The science fiction of the episode plays second fiddle to the choice of what to do about the lack of funds needed for a couple to experience a second life together. The procedure’s success, thanks to the science fiction Rod includes for dramatic purposes, short-accepted because of the wife’s reaction hints at what might have been. Unable to convince Marcuse to allow for both to get the bodies they so desire because of “federal guidelines”, not allowed to use credit, the episode is another classic Serling tragedy that leaves us knowing that the time remaining would be of suffering but nonetheless love remains as strength to get through it. 4/5

*Decades Network gave this a great spot in their schedule at 5 in the afternoon on the first of January. A good position for an episode not often talked about. It is quite melancholic. But it has so much potency to it.