2022 Memorial Day Marathon Part 2

 

Rod Serling introduces The Gift

Anytime I revisit The Jeopardy Room, from the fifth season, I think about how spy thriller it is, though, if I'm honest, this isn't really "Twilight Zone" in its purest form. I read somewhere else, and I'm sure Martin Landau's connection is part of it, The Jeopardy Room mentioned in relation to Mission: Impossible. You have a Russian defector and the killers (one a master hitman who loves the job for the delights in how he will kill his government target, considering himself an artist while the other just wants to shoot Landau's Kuchenko immediately). The Kommisar (Kuchenko says that title with ever bit of contempt and disgust Landau can muster) considers Boris, his assistant, a butcher, just in it to watch men bleed. The Kommisar, on the other hand, wants to watch his prey squirm and quiver in the fear of a death that could come at any moment. Richard Donner is all over this episode. I don't look at From Agnes, With Love or Come Wander with Me as Donner at his very best, but The Jeopardy Room, this one had that taut edge and the potential for an action thriller is right there on the small screen. It is just a sample size. When you look at the late Donner's resume in the 60s, he really cut his teeth. There's no surprise that Donner directed all kinds of films later in life. He really was more than just the Lethal Weapon director. This three-person play basically is made particularly palatable because of Van Dreelen's sneering, highminded view of himself and how Landau's barely-held-together nerves are on end unless he can somehow outsmart a very egotistical mastermind.

The more I watch Spur of the Moment, the more I realize that this is basically just a soap opera with that slight TZ touch of an older Anne, full blown alcoholic dressed clad in black and looking like a miserable wretch deteriorated by a very bad decision made by the younger 18 year old Anne when she chose David over Robert, going with passion, the results leading to ruin and a fortune lost (including the home, all built by Anne's father). The age makeup for Davis (David) and Hyland (Anne) is just not great. The episode does show how Anne seemed to go with David just to spite her father, and the results of that end with the older Anne on a horse, riding hard after screeching like a banshee towards her younger self (also on horseback). Why the older Anne does that, frightening the teenage Anne, this sort of time warp that rarely gets an explanation in the Twilight Zone, has always confused me. Who wouldn't ride their horse hard in the opposite direction from what appears to be a menace with a black cape?! This has yet another "cyclical" twist where a pattern repeats itself over and over, with the lead character unable to alter the future, with the same results continuing. This device can work and has worked, but by the end of the fifth season this was once a cycle that had me going, "Huh, well that is quite interesting!"; instead, it is another recycled twist that had me going, "Umm, okayyyyyy...."

I just like A World of His Own, the last episode of the first season, because Keenan Wynn isn't on the verge of driving himself to a coronary or bellowing at someone like Kolchak causing him a lot of irritation. He's very calm. I certainly can see why an audience might reject this episode, though. Here you have this novelist creating the woman he wants, without any of the aspects he doesn't want. Kirk constantly looks to disregard what is right in front of her: her husband just dictates into being characters spoken through the machinations of his creative mind. Kirk is just insufferable in the film, while Laroche is soft-spoken, sweet, and obedient...I can just feel the seething fury building up in some who read "obedient" as Wynn waits for Laroche to prepare his drink. Kirk ain't making Wynn a drink. In fact, Kirk wants to put Wynn away and enjoy independence and wealth without him. When you have tape describing Kirk in an envelope that "gets rid of her" when dropped in a fireplace, perhaps saying over and over she will be getting him put away is not particularly smart. Too bad Rod didn't take a cue from what happened to Kirk and not draw the ire of Wynn! If your "break the wall", do it this way!

The Gift is probably the most Christian spiritual episode of the Twilight Zone, so its audience might be smaller than the more universally themed episodes that aren't as on the nose with their message. A kind doctor and a child try to protect the alien who arrives in the form of a kind young man carrying a book with cures that would benefit mankind, not intending to kill a policeman who drew a gun in fear. A horrible bar owner named Manolo is responsible for a lot of unneeded consequences with other villagers (and trigger happy policemen).  "So we have not just killed a man. We killed a dream." I will need to revisit this and watch the episode uncut by SYFY.

The Encounter is always intense and just a two actor play in an attic where race tensions boil and the wounds of a past war aren't at all healed. And Twilight Zone just put it out there on television. That gutsy decision didn't do the episode any favors. But today the episode is now widely available and can now be digested and processed. And there is a lot there to chew on, too.

Once Upon a Time is time travel mined yet again for the fish out of water formula playfully celebrating Buster Keaton, landing him out of "silent film 1890s" to "very loud film 1960s". Adams as the inventor looking to use the time travel head helmet so he can retreat back in time, while Keaton wants to get back so he can wear his pants again. You were never going to get prime Keaton ever again, but this is just a homage to honor his place in the history of film and comedy. His genius can still be seen, even if TZ could only offer him a modest budget to work with.