Twilight Zone - Diners

 

Will the Real Martian Stand Up?

Nick of Time

A Hundred Yards Over the Rim

There is a Twilight Zone scholar (well, he's a big Serling devotee, giving a lot of his time on Twitter and a blog to The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery) who also wrote a thesis on diners in the Twilight Zone. I thought before I took a less write-heavy approach to Twilight Zone the rest of the 4th of July, I would bring up my personal appeal of the show and that involves the diners. I purposely put together in my personal block for the start of the 4th of July marathon today episodes with diners. "Nick of Time", "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim", and "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" all feature diners as very important settings. They serve as a place where a big part of the individual stories converge, develop, and conclude. And their locations couldn't be any different. In "Nick of Time", Shatner and Breslin are awaiting a car repair by eating some rather substandard grub in a smalltown diner in Ohio, where they encounter the devil-head napkin holder which has them all bent out of shape. In "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim", Robertson finds himself out of his own time period of 1947, "relocating" (as only the Twilight Zone could do it with that time travel device that is quite peculiar in how and where it places its characters) to a 1961 Arizona diner where married couple, Crawford and Evans, and doc Edward Platt, must somehow shake the disbelief that their "guest visitor" is actually a pioneer leading a wagon train from Ohio to California, in dire need of medicine, water, and food. In "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?", the diner is, from what I can gather, some Northeast rural diner (must be somewhat close to Boston, since Hoyt (who isn't what he seems) was expecting to be there at a morning meeting). The diner ran by Barney Philips looked to me to be in a Colorado like location, but that is never fully identified. Still, if a scouting mission by Martians or Venusians were to locate "off the beaten path", why not in a mountainous small town where being spotted isn't as likely as opposed to a big city. A chamber piece in a mountain diner where a Martian is among a group of humans waiting out an unstable icy bridge as two cops try to determine if among seven people (the diner cook / operations manager never looked upon with any scrutiny) one is from "up there" seems like such a Twilight Zone gold standard. 

Diners remain such a hallmark of this era of television, I guess. For such a random location where sinister trappings wouldn't be so usual or expected, Serling and his TZ team could find so much to do with the diner. As evidenced by so many episodes in the series, the diner is a stopping place where the extraordinary can occupy the typically ordinary.