Twilight Zone/Walter Jameson

 Just a quickie. SYFY continues to show Twilight Zone early mornings and I've recorded a few. I go back and forth between SYFY (cut with commercials) and Hulu (the package with commercials, but uncut). So this episode is part of a small block of SYFY episodes. This was on Saturday morning at 4 AM, November 13th. "Long Live Walter Jameson" was the lone Twilight Zone episode featuring Kevin McCarthy, who had starred in the science fiction classic, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" just four years prior. I've always liked this Walter Jameson, even though the episode seems to just scratch the surface of a premise I find very fascinating. This professor of history at a university who has lived for 2000 years. He is good friends with a chemistry teacher, named Kittridge (Edgar Stehli). Kittridge realizes that Jameson's diary about the Civil War experiences of Hugh Skelton are just too vivid, too real. Eventually Kittridge gets the truth out of him: he isn't 51 years old, but far older. Kittridge fears death and sees how much he's aged in just twelve years while Jameson hasn't aged a day. Something about meeting an alchemist, fearing death himself in the time of Plato, Jameson awakens to a realization that his wife and children grow old and die while he never does. So we are in present day and Jameson plans to marry Kittridge's daughter, Susanna (Dodie Heath). Susanna is madly in love with him. She's much younger, working on her PHD, while Kittridge is concerned that similar to past loves, Susanna will grow old and Jameson will leave her as he has others, including an older woman hiding behind trees and spying on him, Laurette (Estelle Winwood). Laurette has worked hard to find her husband, not willing to let him do to Susanna what he did to her.

The premise really is easy to write and yet I feel that there is so much in the 2000 years of experience that 30 minutes seems incapable of giving real substance to. I think the big conversation that is the heart of the episode between Jameson and Kittridge glosses over a bit, but, for the most part, this is about the fountain of youth idea. Kittridge wants to know the secret but Jameson can't give it to him. The body aging fast and turning to dust with clothes and nothing much left of Jameson is quite a visual, but I can't help but feel so much history, so much experience that could be shared evaporates into the wind and is tragic. How many diaries could be pinned by him and taught in classrooms, all those details of 2000 years gone with one bullet from a gun. Laurette, a woman scorned.