Twilight Zone - What You Need/Additional

 Of course when you have a greedy, no-account brute like Fred Renard demanding things from a much smaller, older "nickles and dimes" peddler of matches and shoestrings named Pedott, no amount of satisfaction seems enough. His life saved by a pair of scissors and a leaky pen's ink landing on a winner in a horserace in the paper isn't enough. Renard grabs Pedott, threatening him, making demands, knowing his good work providing folks what they need in order to better their lives could perhaps provide him with certain help to artificially sustain himself. Pedott, though, had something he needed and Renard's slippery shoes, pulled from the peddler case, provided just that. I REALLY liked this episode the first time I saw it -- as evidenced by my review on this blog -- but on subsequent viewings, I consider now just okay. Truex is obviously better known for his classic Twilight Zone episode, "Kick the Can", but you can really see the worry in his eyes, this distinct vision of what lies in wait if something isn't done about Renard. Cochran makes for an effective heel, and all the time he's in the episode, there is never a moment where he isn't willing to use violence in order to secure something of value from Pedott in order to get what he wants. It would seem, as Serling's opening monologue tells us, Renard has went through 30 something years of disappointment in a life full of failure and setback. I'm sure he brought most of it on himself. So he tries to extract what he can from Pedott, who would seem to be an ATM machine to draw riches from. His own neck freed from a scarf strangulation possibly in an elevator accident wasn't enough. Even money won from the race, not enough. So he kept pushing until shoes slipping on wet street slid him in front of a running car...approaching someone of Pedott's stature was probably not wise. For me, "What You Need" is one of those middle-of-the-road episodes that might leave a brief impression, but some of the items that help people are probably not particularly profound as the episode might suggest. I wonder if that was the same peddlar case prop Bookman used in "One for the Angels".