SyFy New Year's Day 2023 Kickoff

 Episodes include:

January 1, 2023

12:00am – Long Distance Call

12:30am – The Mind and the Matter

1:00am – Prove 7, Over and Out

Long Distance Call was actually 11:00 pm here Central time, but 12 elsewhere, so I thought I would kick off my next marathon of episodes starting with it. Billy Mumy makes an appearance as the little boy a dead grandmother talks to across a toy telephone. Eventually the boy attempts to kill himself in the outside pool leaving his parents in hysterics, the father appealing across that toy phone to his mother to allow his son to live. Never one of my personal favorites, the episode nonetheless seems to have resonated with some fans over the years. The quality of the videotaped studio demand, often a bitch and gripe I have contributed to throughout the years, deprives this as it did the other episodes stuck with that look and feel of what the Twilight Zone often thrived on...the power of what fantasy can in film is lost. Twilight Zone can't look like a soap opera...it just doesn't work. I think the story is what often landed impact with folks, though. A grandmother who felt her son was taken from her until the grandson came along. That bond was as such, she wanted it to continue...in the afterlife!

The Mind and the Matter is pretty much a chance for a dour loner seeking continued solitude to get that in spades, just by mentally demanding it. Everybody is gone when Archibald Beechcroft "wills them" away with the power of suggestion, by wishing them away by powerfully focusing all his mental energy into disappearing them. But when there is no one around but himself, how does he occupy his time? Does someone who doesn't like people, and is able to be rid of them, survive on his own without a single soul? To give Beechcroft some sort of company to talk to, he wills into his life copies of himself...unfortunately, he realizes he's no great company, either! The episode tries to make facsimiles of Berman's face, worn by extras, but they are laughable masks. Other techniques are used to have Berman in various clothes with the camera doing its job to make it look like Beechcroft is looking at others with his face...and attitude. Poor Henry, the office gopher (Grinnage), spills water on him constantly. An episode most would probably consider fun among a marathon setting but not one they set out to watch a whole helluva lot.

Probe 7, Over and Out

Not much else to say I haven't said 100 times on the blog in the past: the Adam and Eve and "Hey, let's not destroy ourselves, whadya think?" messages are heavy-handed but it would appear that even in the last year of 2022, and very much a possibility in 2023, we never learn anything. The opportunity to destroy ourselves remains just as strong as ever before. The same enemy it would seem (Russia and ourselves) some 60 years later remains, and we just never learn. Maybe Gould's General Larabee was right...maybe it will take a do-over, perhaps someone getting away from earth with a brand new planet to explore. But if we destroy ourselves here, it's possible, if probable, we do so elsewhere.

Serling introduces Probe 7, Over and Out