Brief Passages - Twilight Zone (Judgment Night)

Nehemiah Persoff is just unforgettable in “Judgment Night”, as a puzzled Lanser, finding himself on the USS Queen of Glasgow in 1942, a British ship caught in the fog as a German U-Boat submarine seems nearby in the scary dark. Who Persoff is, only sure of his name and where he came from (Frankfurt), will soon emerge and why he’s on the Queen with the doomed passengers and crew (including a young Macnee as the captain’s (Ben Wright) first officer) has a certain satisfaction once everything is revealed. While I was not sold on Franciscus as a German officer answering to his U-Boat commander at the end—he’s the one who offers a perspective on doing horrible things and answering for them after you die in a rather over-explained analyses of shooting a ship without a single warning, in the dark, capitalizing on the advantage of being in a submarine—Persoff as an anxious, bewildered Lanser can’t seem to shake that at 1:15 in the morning the USS Queen would be impacted somehow. I love the idea that you are punished in the afterlife by spending time with those you destroyed, getting to actually know them, to feel their fear of what lies ahead, to understand that the waters they are occupying features an ominous threat. And the whole time Persoff tries to shake the cobwebs, his eyes wide and full of disorientation…if he could just figure out why he is on the ship and uncover the back story that seems evasive. When he does figure that out…this episode really does build to the answer with this dread of the unknown clarified in quite a suspenseful way. I’d say about a fifteen or so years ago, I remember watching this in the dead of night, right before New Year’s Day was about over and it was bedtime, as Midnight approached. “Judgment Night” was very much a dead of night Twilight Zone episode, if there ever was one. The darkness and the foggy night never more looked dreadful as they do in this episode where I think viewers just knew, as they waited, something awful was inevitable. And when we see that happen and watch Persoff order multiple attacks on the Queen, that twist (seeing you fire on the ship you currently occupy is quite a wild revelation!) packs a punch. And the repeat of it again and again…that is Persoff’s hell. The first season of Twilight Zone just ran off quite a series of great performances, an impressive streak! It wouldn’t stop here, either!

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So just for 2020, along with my other ongoing projects for the horror genre, I thought it would be fun to build towards my [now annual] self-created 4^th of July Twilight Zone Marathon with a “brief passages” series for the first season. I thought it would be a neat sort of 2020 episodic footprint and the point of the “brief passages” part is to try and limit myself to just a “mini-review” five-to-six line paragraph for each episode of the Twilight Zone (and some Universal Monster films as well) in the first season. My marathon for Independence Day will not be as extensive as it was in 2019…ten episodes, five from the third season and five from the fifth. Because I have written big reviews for many of the first season episodes in the past, this “brief passages” format won’t be as difficult while those certain few that might not have gotten a more elaborate, detailed treatment, it should be quite a challenge to limit myself.