Twilight Zone - Midnight Twilight Week (well, or close to Midnight)
I'm not even sure why I decided to watch "Black Leather Jackets" and "The Mind and the Matter". I had no intentions of watching Twilight Zone until perhaps July. But sometimes at the spur of the moment I decide to take in a couple episodes. "Black Leather Jackets" is about like "Dead Man's Shoes"; this episode about an alien invasion (three incoming alien colonists dressed in jeans, leather jackets, with black sunglasses "goggles" riding in on their motorcycles) sort of goes in and out of my mind after I watch it. If ever there was an episode that simply doesn't leave any impression, this episode is it. It does include a "devastating" conclusion as the human race remains doomed despite one alien's efforts to stop the colonization, but the presentation is just rather uninspired. It really feels thrown together. I don't see it defended a lot or mentioned a lot, but during marathons (when it is shown, which has been rarer and rarer) you might see the occasional "this is rather underrated" response, but "Black Leather Jackets" just sort of exists within a series that has so many episodes superior to it. The thing is, even with "The Bewitchin' Pool", it is so terrible and weird, it is memorable just for how much I dislike it. But "Black Leather Jackets" is just rather average and lays on screen. I just feel rather empty after watching it. There is just nothing.
Late Tuesday night into early Wednesday, I watched "The Mind and the Matter", an episode I sort of watched during the New Year's Day marathon. It was in the morning and I was sort of in and out of sleep. Archibald Beechcroft is quite a miserable character. He has that sour face that lays stuck and I doubt a smile is capable of freeing itself. Shelley Berman's discomfort and exasperation reeks from every pore...having to go to work on that cramped subway, squeezing into the elevator, and enduring baths of water and drink from a gopher (Jack Grinnage), who could be his only friend, leaves him rather yearning for peace and quiet and no people. He just wants no one around. And so a book given to him by Grinnage teaches him to "will" people away, doors to open, and a subway train to move to work. But out of boredom, when his "conscience" convinces him he could use some company, Archibald wills more of him into existence (the mock masks on some people are quite unconvincing, but I gave them some leeway due to the time). More of Archibald griping and complaining is never a good thing. This episode wasn't as bad as I remembered. I haven't liked it as much in time's past.
As far as Wednesday late, early Thursday, I had wrapped up The X Files two-parter ("Duane Barry" & "Ascension") and sort of decided to continue my "Midnight Twilight" series this week, sort of choosing episodes that are "lower rung" non-favorites not always discussed by Zoners to any great length. A marathon favorite, though, is "A Most Unusual Camera". I have wrote on it many times on the blog and watched it again during the most recent New Year's Marathon, but while I enjoy the cast (all a bunch of crooks using a "clairvoyant camera" to accumulate horse racing loot), the story is very basic (and the end results, as mentioned plenty times before, is absolutely preposterous and laughable) and like other lower budgeted TZ episodes of the past, almost exclusive (besides one trip to a horse race) to a single room in a cheap hotel. Because of the personalities of the cast, I always seem to give in to it. I think in regards to its "marathon slotting time", I enjoy this episode best later in the evening on New Year's Eve after the big prime time line-up of iconic episodes have been featured.
In the case of "The Mirror", I think this will be considerably controversial because of "cultural appropriation" now very pertinent in the culture of the United States. Falk as a Castro figure (Serling mentions a Central American country overthrow of a general), complete with accent, officer's uniform, and beard, might now be quite polarizing while at the time Serling might have felt this kind of emerging leader was a danger to be taken seriously. This episode was made in 1961 and Castro was very much a topical news and political rival to the US. So this feels like a time capsule of history, for sure. I HIGHLY suggest avoiding the SYFY cut version of "The Mirror" and seeing it in full wherever Twilight Zone is available because so much conversation and dialogue feels excised. And the parts of Batanides, Hoyos, Jr, and Karlan as loyalists of Falk's Ramos Clemente are especially done a disservice by SYFY during marathons. They are no fans of all the Ramos executions, firing squads ongoing eventually appalling the very people who supported the new general in his uprising and overthrow. Kuluva as the previous general overthrown, also, has a big dialogue scene with Ramos that needs to be seen in its complete form as his words ring true as the fear and paranoia of Ramos come to fruition, illusions created by his mind through reflections in a mirror. Falk plays this character to the hilt...its full throated and intense. I figure, though, Castro loyalists and supporters will find this whole episode a turn off, even perhaps an insult. Those who hated Castro or opposed him might enjoy it as an outsider's view of how they perceived him. If anything, this is a look back, a document of how Serling and maybe Americans viewed Castro. I think the episode is very interesting, even if the whole picture of Castro depends on your viewpoint of him. Sokolov didn't meet an ethnicity he couldn't inhabit, it seems. His priest in the episode is the moral spotlight that Ramos is awaken by...it was himself, he was his own destroyer. I noticed that on Twitter with my fellow Zoners, surprisingly, "The Mirror" was well favored. I do think this episode perhaps doesn't age well for those who oppose actors portraying a culture different than their own.
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