Bidding adieu to the Christmas Season with Pleasence in the Twilight Zone

 I was disappointed in my failure to continue a tradition I had started a few years ago on Christmas Eve. I liked concluding Christmas Eve with the Twilight Zone episode, "Changing of the Guard". It has a certain melancholy to it, as I am sure I've written before on the blog. But a man at the end of his life, Professor Ellis Fowler (Donald Pleasence), "retired" by the college's committee without a new rehiring contract, told by the Administrator (Liam Sullivan; the Twilight Zone episode, "The Silence") of school's replacing him with someone younger; It doesn't go well and Fowler, tears in his eyes, says Merry Christmas goodbyes to a couple of young student boys, and plans to kill himself with a gun...until ghosts of students from his past return to tell him that he wasn't an abject, miserable failure. 

That the poetry he taught to the boys didn't just leave their minds as soon as they left his class, with the ghosts telling him of poems they carried with them after school, it gives Fowler a better understanding of just how much he meant to his students. Definitely seeing ghosts in his class that, after a bell rings--gaining his attention as he made rounds on campus, coming across the statue of a recognized scholar important to the school--emerge, telling him about values and traits learned from his teaching and the poetry offered to them, could have many a viewer wondering if they are real or just manifestations of faces he just read about in a school year book. You can determine whether or not ghosts of kids who died in war or conducting research for cancer did come back to visit Professor Fowler, but I like to think they were indeed "sent" to remind him of his value, what he did contribute. This is the Twilight Zone and Serling had beautiful ways to commend those who influenced young minds for the better, as well as, allow us not to forget the young lost to war, as there were many who never made it out of their twenties....kids in Fowler's classroom. And at the end, Fowler doesn't feel as if he was a failure, and that is important. He should get to find worth in his long life and career and enjoy what is left of the time he has remaining. The Christmas carols by his now former students and Fowler's renewed vigor, with his maid happy he didn't commit suicide, the Twilight Zone gave us a positive conclusion. 

2020, as I among many others have brought up time and again, has kicked our ass so I needed a pleasant close to the 25th of December. I feel this sadness when "Changing of the Guard" is over because every year I grow to love and appreciate it more. Some of that is Pleasence's doing, and some of it is Serling's. I find Twilight Zone to often more than not leave me provide episodes that seem to end far too early.

***As I took time off of the blog to write for my Letterboxd Diary for the Holiday Season, I can now set forward more attention to here. With a lot of devotion to the blog over the years, it was a nice break***