Twilight Zone Tuesdays on Syfy (edit)

Serling prepares us for "Four O'Clock"

I like Syfy's idea of airing a 24 hour slate of episodes every Tuesday into early Wednesday morning. Still their cut episodes aren't the ideal if you want to see the show in it's purest form but if you have nothing better to do, why not? I never dedicate official write-ups to Twilight Zone episodes from Syfy viewings, but I do often mention the marathons themselves just because the channel brings certain episodes to light that might otherwise necessarily remain in the shadows.

The Gift

Person or Persons Unknown

Young Man's Fancy

"The Gift" was one of the last episodes I had never seen. Set in a Mexican village, little Pedro is a mature, respectable, gentle boy who befriends an alien whose ship crashlands not far from him. The alien, in the form of a local, arrives injured after he's been shot by police, misunderstood by them as a menace and danger. The alien has a book he considers a gift but the locals and police won't listen to him. A doctor tries to help the alien, but in a previous scuffle with a police officer, the alien accidentally kills him in a fight against a gun pointed at him. There's a bond between the boy and alien, with conversations about God and even Jesus Christ, which eventually paints the alien as Messianic. Because the police and locals fail to listen to the alien, and consider his offering to mankind dangerous, they will squander a precious gift.

"Young Man's Fancy" is another episode I was unfamiliar with. It sort of follows similar themes of resisting the present as the past and what it has to offer seems so much better ("Walking Distance" or "Kick the Can" or "Static" all came to mind). I think because this has been done before, the episode's son yearning for his lost mother as his wife tries to keep him from wanting it so badly he'd will the past to "fetch him" didn't impact me as it might have if this hadn't already been well tread theme-wise.

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I was surprised to see that "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet" and "Living Doll" were actually dumped in the unflattering domain of 3AM and 4:30AM respectively Central time where I live, quite unusual for Syfy. But they might be airing them eventually in the prime time hours. I didn't watch any episodes from the first season except some of "Third from the Sun", which reminded me of what I have to look forward to upcoming. I "worked overtime at home" so I just caught "To Serve Mankind" as the Kanamit was at the UN, leaving behind its cookbook for humans to try and decipher. It was nice to revisit "The Little People" where Akins must try and contend with malcontent, Maross (he was in "Third from the Sun", I noticed this morning), after they must land on a two-sun planet where a civilization of micro-small folks live. Maross, due to his size and obsessive, narcissistic need to be in power and have all the attention, demands that the little people erect a statue to him and keep him happy or he'll crush them under his bootheel, with the result of other astronauts landing on the planet much larger than him providing the Twilight Zone irony to be expected.

Serling at a club where the popular act is "The Dummy"

And "Person or Persons Unknown" got a plum spot in Syfy's marathon as did "Four O' Clock" about a crazed moralist looking for evil, manufactured by his craving need to find the worst in people and document their failing in this OCD filing system where he catalogues everyone  to determine their punishment, even calling the FBI to investigate "infiltration in the government". The "Reds" and all those he considers degenerate are to be sized small at 4 in the afternoon. Bikel is unbearable and unreasonable in the role of Crangle. Long in "Person or Persons..." will not exactly be a model candidate for husband/man of the year in feminine circles. He demands plenty from his wife and pushes a security guard in a bank while tossing a guy's things from *his* desk because they should know him. The identity crisis episode is quite a ride because the premise is a frightening concept to me...what if no one knew you any longer? The afternoon-into-evening block was third season, with some of the great and lesser-known TZ episodes sharing the screen together. I closed my night with "The Dummy", never a bad time and Robertson's deterioration as the dummy further and further dominates him while his defeated agent calls it quits due to all the claims of a "fugitive from a fireplace" being alive.