Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

McDowell and Comi prepare to leave for Mars.  Aliens visiting the UN, dropping off their cook book, providing goodies for humans on Earth, easing them into trusting them, spiriting them away to be food for them on their home planet. To Serve Man is nearly 60 years ago. I've been watching Twilight Zone since I was a teenager in the mid 90s thanks to Sci Fi Channel. Many of my family have passed since (for instance, my mother's siblings are all about gone except one last sister), and it wouldn't be right to avoid a marathon during the 4th if just for nostalgic reasons. Syfy didn't see the value of TZ on Independence Day, except last year, so even though I cannot watch episodes like I do during New Year's Eve and Day, it is nice to try and sneak in a block of episodes whenever possible. I started with Death Ship from the fourth season, continuing with Stopover in a Quiet Town and The Gift . To Serve Man would feel like a later afternoon watch but SYFY showed it at 3:...

Serling introducing Stopover in a Quiet Town  Kicked off with Death Ship in a previous post and will drop marathon notes on this blog post until I hit the bed: Imagine waking up in the bed of an alien girl’s doll town called Centerville, a fictional replica of Earth; Bob and Millie Frazier can run nowhere, get away, or return home. They are the playthings of a much larger alien girl until she’s tired of them (or they need food). Daddy brought them from Earth to exist as his baby girl’s human toys. I imagine they wish this was nothing but a hallucination or some alcoholic fever dream. Stopover in a Quiet Town just has that eerie quality I never tire of. A couple bewildered by a ghost town, not realizing they are far, far from home. An alien in The Gift does come in peace and has a miracle offering but the village sees him as a threat, destroying the very gift that could have provided them all with so much more than they had. This is the kind of episode that comes and goes during SyF...

 I was gone all day at my mom's house for the 4th, but I did look at the schedule when I got home later in the evening. Death Ship was at 1:30 PM in the afternoon, which is where I decided to start my own marathon. For some reason, SYFY decided to plop Resident Alien within the marathon inexplicably, and why the network did that is anybody's guest. The Twilight Zone audience wouldn't bother with this show, and if they did, most of us would have done other things waiting for the return after it was over. I know I would have if I had been home. At any rate, Death Ship continues to be a sad experience because it's clear Ted Mason and Mike Carter are ready to go to the afterlife (especially Mason, whose wife and child were killed before his lift off, while Carter encountered a friend and relative before reaching home who had previously died, where no wife was there because she was still alive) while their captain (Jack Klugman's most infuriating, unlikeable character on...