Brief Passages - Twilight Zone (Time Enough at Last)

This was the opening narration from Serling describing Bemis, his love of the literary word, and a summary of folks in his life who want to deprive him of his passion for reading:

A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself - without anyone.

Again Serling wrote a wife who is absolutely horrid. Yes, perhaps Bemis is too obsessed with focusing intensely with attention in a book, much to the dismay (and distaste) of his boss at a bank (he tells Bemis to quit reading, get back to his “cage”, or else he’ll find himself with plenty of time to read because he’ll be fired), but does she really have to be so cruel as to mark through his book of poetry and then rip out the pages? Yes, Bemis shouldn’t read “David Copperfield” on the job but does his boss have to smile villainously because his employee laments that his wife won’t even let him read the ingredients from ketchup at home or even articles in the newspaper? Serling indeed gives us two examples (and a bank customer who has no interest in “David Copperfield” or its contents/characters that amuse Bemis so) of book-haters who fail to see why he is so interested or captivated with the written word between the bindings of hardback. Then the big bomb drop that leaves Bemis with structural rubble and the dead, okay because he snuck off to a vault with a newspaper to read for a bit. The city in ruins, his surroundings capsized and scattered remains, Bemis scans the wreckage that society once was. Canned goods, cigarettes, and no one to talk; Bemis is left to contemplate suicide when he realizes books are available for as long as he so desires…but he’s wholly blind without his glasses. Even with no one around to stop him, his own failed eyesight deprives him of the very passion that was plentiful before his glasses fell accidentally from his face…Serling could be quite staggering with his twists. The city in ruins looks incredible but I guess scrutiny might be directed at how Bemis would probably perish due to nuclear fallout…still the sets and wreckage design is eyepopping. Meredith’s role here is considered by many to be one of the very best of his career. While I’m partial and particular of “The Obsolete Man”, I totally get why “Time Enough at Last” is so heralded. I can't imagine how viewers felt at the conclusion of this episode at the time it aired...I got chills at his despondent reaction to losing his sight after preparing books for the next years.

--Brian

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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.