Brief Passages - Twilight Zone (Where is Everybody?)

Where Is Everybody? is the easiest perhaps for this fresh format because I’ve written about it ad nauseum on the blog. I believe I watched this and talked about it more than once last year. My son actually watched this episode with me this Wednesday afternoon, so it was a special for me personally. He was just fascinated with the café/medicine store, the “cheap” prices for ice cream and goods.  Holliman’s Mike encountering the mannequin in the truck near the factory that makes them. Holliman quoting Dickens and finding “The Last Man on Earth” books on a spinning book holding rack…remember when stores used to have comics on these? I am always captivated, no matter how many times I watch this, with how Mike seems to come upon the jukebox playing, a sink in a prison cell with shaving cream still on a brush, coffee brewed in a pot in an abandoned eatery. It was as if folks vanished. Only for this to be a created illusion based on loneliness. If you spend anytime on Reddit, you realize what loneliness does to folks.

 --Brian

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” 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.