The Twilight Zone - Long Live Walter Jameson

As can happen in such an incredible season of a series where the episodes featured within are often good to great, a few need to be seen perhaps within a marathon where they don’t have to seemingly fall after a string of classics such as “The Hitch-Hiker”, “Mirror Image”, or “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”. And “Long Live Walter Jameson” follows another classic episode I think has “moved up the charts” of TZ fandom over the years, “A World of Difference”. But I think in the case of Walter Jameson, it is the (back)story of the title character that gives the episode this intrigue that is never altogether elaborated beyond a certain bit of history. Jameson (Kevin McCarthy) is a professor of history (and why wouldn’t he be?), engaged to a chemistry professor’s (Edgar Stehli) 29 year old daughter (Dodie Heath), studying to get her PhD. James in his classes can so vividly evoke whatever period he teaches, it is as if he was reciting history from actual experience. And Stehli’s Professor Sam Kittridge picks up on how Jameson hasn’t aged in the twelve years they’ve known each other while he can look in the mirror and see considerable change. Soon Sam gets Jameson to admit, after locating a book of Civil War photographs taken by a combat photographer which has Walter in one of them (with the ring he still currently wears, while also unable to pooh-pooh it due to the mole on his chin), that he is in fact 2000 years old! That Jameson was around in the time of Plato! That is such a wallop, Sam collapses into a chair, a chair at the table of their games of chess. Sam obviously wants to know the secret of immortality while Jameson discourages that pursuit, admitting that he once encountered an alchemist who preformed some kind of black magic that produced the results of not aging. However, if violence ever came to Jameson, his body would then have an adverse aging reaction…James has just been lucky to avoid such violence. But, Jameson has seen many women (and his own children) age while he remains young (except for a bit of grey and white in places of hair) come and go in his life so clearly Sam doesn’t want his daughter to be another discarded wife once she, too, is “past her prime”. Jameson inspires Sam’s daughter to “go upstairs, get dressed, and be ready to get married right away”. A woman from James’ past, though, has other plans, not willing to let her husband do harm to anyone else if she can help it…

I think this episode might have fit rather well into the hour-long format of the fourth season. It just felt like to me that there was just so much to investigate regarding Jameson’s incredible 2000 year life, but this episode decides to limit the story primarily to Sam’s two-story house in a pleasant suburb, at night, perhaps not far from the college for which the professors teach. Jameson isn’t prepared for Laurette (Estelle Winwood) to arrive at his home, first peeking from the shadows behind a tree, making sure he is in fact the man who once looked into her eyes as he now does Sam’s daughter. She still loves him but Jameson is now repulsed by her wrinkled face and hands, reminding him (much like Sam) of what he “dodged”. Jameson couldn’t have anticipated her reaction to rejecting Laurette, and in one fail swoop will feel all those years he lived bombard him in a manner of minutes.

Jameson talks about keeping a gun in the drawer of his desk to Sam, as the two discuss the fear of the unknown of death and why being immortal isn’t quite what it is cracked up to be. McCarthy keeps his Jameson rather subdued, elusive, stoic, never breaking into any theatrics at all, as if he closes off his true emotions, perhaps a trick mastered over the 2000 years of his life. While Sam is desperate to know how to stop his aging and avoid death, Jameson eventually convinces him that it isn’t some picnic, especially watching as those you love age and die.

I think the music really adds to the film, giving Jameson this air of mystery and there has always been this chill I feel when he’s gradually unveiled to be this “miracle man”. I think it could be Jameson’s gift, his revelations of the alchemist, his review of the many parts of life that haunt him, the faces he’s seen age and die, as McCarthy’s character must recollect often, while also burying plenty away. His willingness to marry Sam’s daughter, although he’s far older that her, and disregarding what doing so does to those he eventually leaves for someone younger. Laurette an example of what Jameson does to those he can no longer remain with due to the eventual outcome he has relived over and over, starting again with Sam’s daughter. All of that adds potency to the finale, as crumpled clothes and dust at the collar and hand sleeves reveal what truly represents a man who lives way longer than he ever should have. 3.5/5

*I think this is the case where a skimpier budget doesn’t matter although, it would have been neat to see actual flashbacks to Jameson’s life, easily managed in today’s television, perhaps not so easy for TZ back then.

*I watched the edited SYFY version one early morning during a case of insomnia, and I think it is surprisingly eerie for whatever reason at such an hour.