Brief Passages - The Twilight Zone (Elegy - Monsters Due...)

The Twilight Zone was just on a real roll after “The Fever” sort of derailed the first season a bit.

“Elegy”, an episode I seem to really enjoy late at night (I think that might stem from a marathon viewing of the episode some years ago, featured in like the 11 PM slot), features three astronauts (Morrow, Dubbins, and Hagen) having to land on an asteroid due to meteorites pelting their space ship (many, many miles away from earth, the year 2186) with small holes as fuel was about gone. The asteroid, much to their surprise, has the perfect atmosphere to them…and has humanoids “in a type of freeze stasis” in various familiar trappings (a fisherman resting near a lake, a farmer propping on a rake near his tractor, while a dog is nearby, a bandstand in the middle of playing to a mayor’s election victory, a beauty pageant with audience, a mariachi band in the middle of violining to a couple dancing in a room, etc.). The astronauts are confused and needing answers. Soon a Mr. Wickwire (the cheery-faced Kellaway, with the pleasant demeanor and attitude) surprises them because he actually moves and talks, informing the stranded astronauts that what they see is a “cemetery”, created from the fantasies of those that died, paying for the “service”, far away from earth where such “eternal harmony” could be interrupted. Wickwire also admits that he is a caretaker, a “service machine that turns on and off when needed”! With a cast of extras forced to stand still and not blink, dressed as one of those seemingly innocent, simple, little hometowns in the 50s/60s; “Elegy” gives us quite a setting…this would be somewhat emulated in the civil war set, “Still Valley” with the “folks frozen still” caused by witchcraft. Kellaway doesn’t seem to pose any threat at all which makes the twist at the end all the more potent…it seems to be an action that could have been avoided as the astronauts didn’t seem to pose any threat to the cemetery asteroid, Happy Glades, they had landed on. There is a closeup to Kellaway’s face, admitting that man just can’t be trusted where there is peace, and that cheery, non-threatening picture he created is at this very moment somewhat dropped. You could cop it to his programming, as he dusts at his “new additions” to Happy Glades, settling down at his seat in his “home” until someone else “arrives”. A lot of the episode has the astronauts taking in their surroundings, and the director depended heavily on his serious cast of extras to remain as perfectly still as possible. I consider this one an interesting sleeper that might sort of fall under the radar as the intense “The Purple Testament” and later classics, “Mirror Image” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” obviously dwarf it. 3/5

“Mirror Image” is such a showcase for the talented Vera Miles—if you thought of her only as the drab, ornery, stubborn firebrand sister in “Psycho” (1960), see her in Hitchcock’s “The Wronged Man” starring Henry Fonda, she’s sensational—who realizes a doppelganger is in this bus depot station during a dark, rainy night. John Brahm’s talents as a veteran director are once again on display, with Miles the perfect actress to cast inside an eerie, relatively empty station, where the cranky grump ticket agent (Joseph Hamilton) offers hostility towards her for “repeatedly approaching him with what time the bus will arrive”. Since Miles’ Millicent Barnes doesn’t recall going up there or checking in her bag (she notices her bag behind the counter and off to the side), his bossy taking her to task seems incorrectly nasty. Soon the janitorial lady (Naomi Stevens) also tells Barnes that she had just been in the restroom, when Millicent turns around and sees her doppelganger sitting in her seat in the station. While none of those in the station ever see both Millicents, they can only assume the one we follow is bonkers, quite freaked out by her. Soon Paul Grinstead (Martin Milner) arrives, a kind-faced man passing through from Rod Serling’s Binghamton (this station appears to be in New York State somewhere), who freely listens (and eventually worries about) to Millicent as she talks about other lives “converging” in one life and because only one can inhabit this life the doppelganger must assume the role of the Millicent she’s “replacing”. Not only is the ticket agent sure Millicent has a “leak upstairs” but Grinstead surmises she “needs medical help”, until he sees for himself what she was talking about. The unfortunate fate of Millicent thanks to Grinstead calling “a friend” leaves the doppelganger (now off to wherever Millicent intended…Buffalo) to assume her identity. The conversation where Vera describes the doppelganger scenario and her face lost in the possibility of it as Grimstead fails to get through any longer has quite a creepy quality to it…maybe the rain reflection in the background on the wall as she talks and the way Vera is haunted by what she has experienced are the reasons. The station shouldn’t be all that scary, but with what is happening to Millicent, there is just this sinister presence that exists. Great episode. 4.5/5

“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” was written 60 years ago and yet I watch it and feel like Serling could see into the future. I see this in the news day after day. We’ve learned nothing. I am very cynical these days, as cynical as I have ever been. You see good human beings committed to good human behavior, trying to help their fellow mankind, but there is also all the same suspicion, scapegoating, and accusations ongoing more than ever before it seems. All that is left is for cities to feature their locals attacking each other en masse. I wish I didn’t feel this way, but I guess where we are has driven me to this point. There has never been a time where we are more divided and on the precipice of eating each other alive. An ordinary neighborhood in Beaver Cleaver 1960 loses their power, their “machines” and when one car starts up, the rest look at why. One of the neighbors leaves (the emphasis on the hammer in his pants’ sleeve) to check the next street neighborhood over, returning when its dark to a shotgun to his chest. While Akins tries to keep everyone calm and settled, Atwater takes offence to being singled out because his car starts and stops. His looking into the sky, or Akins listening to a ham radio in his basement, a kid with a comic book that talks about a family (monsters sent forward from outer space) to earth to appear as human, reporting back to their own kind when colonization might be ready. Before you know it Weston is accusing everyone as is Metcalfe and Strickland. There are shots of feet rushing forward, eyes in fright, fear, and panic, Weston with a blooded head from a rock thrown at him, a kid running for his life just because he voiced concern for Akins and Weston who planned to leave to tell the police of the power outage, and eventually a street engulfed in terrified and violent street folks going after each other…Serling wrote this 60 years ago. He was a genius…and his prophetic idea of a society in turmoil, out of balance, at each other’s throats couldn’t (sadly) be timelier. 5/5

Two quotes from Serling’s script:

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.” – Serling closing the episode.

A conversation at the end between the two aliens who have committed the successful social experiment on Maple Street:

Alien 1: Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawnmowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours, and then sit back and watch the pattern.

Alien 2: And this pattern is always the same?

Alien 1: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves. All we need do is sit back and watch.

Alien 2: Then I take it this place, this Maple Street is not unique.

Alien 1: By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets and we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other, one to the other, one to the other...