I will admit something a bit morbid: every time I watch this episode (the tenth of the first season), I check to verify Nehemiah Persoff is still with us. He is, at the great age of 102! Keep hanging in there Nehemiah! He's phenomenal as Carl Lanser. I've written about this one a lot, but it wasn't an episode I recall from the 90s being a big hit with me. It was in the 2000s during New Years marathons that "Judgment Night" became so much more significant. I think the power of the cyclical nightmare that continues to repeat itself over and over for you when you committed atrocities in life has lost some of its steam considering there has been plenty of television and drama over the last 60 years to use that device to great effect. I think to be a monster at the end of the episode while drawing us in during his time on a doomed English ship from Glasgow to New York as this tormented amnesiac who feels something is very wrong, some inner premonition he can't pull out of his mind, trying to unlock what that is, Persoff champions the haunted man with a mysterious past, unable to escape it because of his responsibilities for what those very horrors are. To be ensnared in the cycle forever, an eternal hell spent with those very victims of your actions, Persoff delivers in spades that underlying terror he senses but can't lift the veil from until he's able by God (or whatever deity you choose to believe has forced this upon Carl Lanser) to see who he truly is and realize all too well there is a price to be met...I like how Serling said that was meted out by the Twilight Zone.
While it seemed like the Twilight Zone was particularly cruel to Henry Bemis in "Time Enough At Last", the next to previous episode, what happens to Carl Lanser is more than justified. He gets to know these good people his sub torpedoes and capsizes, experience their horror, watch them die, and look into binoculars at the very one leading this strike out of the fog of darkness. I think that is really a great setpiece...Lanser looking through the binoculars at himself, being on the ship that is torpedoed by him. I don't think the conversation between Lanser and Franciscus' Lt Mueller is needed. I always feel if the episode has that one blight on it, this conversation that is so on-the-nose and over-explanatory is it. I get the need to expose Lanser before his eternal hell in a conversation with an officer about what he had done, with so much advantage in such a sneak attack, but the attack itself really explains so much without that need to double down with this conversation that has the young, troubled officer filled with regret and anxiety over the whole situation. But this was 60 years ago, so I get that at that time perhaps writers just felt their audience needed that follow up. We need to see who Lanser was in order to celebrate what he has to go through in his own afterlife. He was rewarded justly for the horrors he brought.
Comments
Post a Comment