Going to the zone. The Twilight Zone.

I really enjoy the hour long episodes of The Twilight Zone. Certainly they are slow: they lack the punch of the better half hour episodes. But the longer format allows for deeper exploration of theme.

"He's Alive" features Dennis Hopper playing a would-be fascist with convincing emotional vulnerability. It ends with a haunting and eloquent image: a moving shadow of Adolf Hitler, as Rod Serling talks about the spirit of Hitler being kept alive wherever there is prejudice, hatred and bigotry. He is alive, Serling tells us, because we keep him alive.

"Valley of the Shadow" is really interesting. A reporter stumbles upon a ubiquitous creepy small town to find they have the power to manipulate matter, a power that could end disease and hunger. They must keep it a secret, however, until the world is ready to live in peace. Great scientific discoveries, the mayor tells the reporter, have been used for violence and destruction--this scientific knowledge too could destroy the world. The reporter and the mayor are able to have intriguing conversations about ends and means. If the townspeople would justify killing the reporter as an evil means to a good end, are they any better than the warmongering world outside Peaceful Valley? The town withholds the scientific knowledge that could be used for evil, but withholding the science also means letting people in the world suffer and die--are the townspeople, too, weighing means and ends? The episode features explicit and implicit exploration of peace and of freedom.

Many of the half-hour episodes feature rather ham-fisted theme; the longer format allows for deeper reflection, and even for something The Twilight Zone isn't known for: subtlety.

Treasures of the Twilight Zone

"Where is Everybody?"
An artistic episode, with motifs like imprisonment (a landscape scan from behind a chain fence, getting stuck in a phone booth, and finally visiting a jail cell) and mirrors. Good episodes of The Twilight Zone have spectacular, memorable endings; mediocre episodes have disappointing endings. Though this episode is the latter, I suppose for folks in 1959 watching the show for the first time, this was wild stuff.

"An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Excellent. Few words, obvious feeling.

"The Encounter"
An extremely tense episode. Themes such as the racism of war, the trauma and guilt of war, atrocities of war, and the way the horror of war doesn't just stop at the end of it.

Coming Up Milhouse

When I was in grad school, I was home by myself most of the days and I stayed up late at night, and I watched a sickly amount of the Sci Fi Channel. I mean, it was just ridiculous how much I watched. Outside of, you know, my school work, my days revolved around The X-Files, The Twilight Zone, and the other more silly things that were on the network at the time. Sometimes I thought Rod Serling was off in the shadows narrating my life (well, not really narrating: just introducing some episode in my life then coming back afterward to provide some esoteric but fairly obvious commentary).

Now this week my wife is leaving town for a few days, so I get the chance to move to the top of the Netflix queue a disk that she would not possibly ever watch with me. So, I've chosen Treasures of the Twilight Zone. Here's what Netflix has to say about the disk:

"Three rarely seen, most-requested episodes of the original 1959-1965 series are presented uncut in this collection: "Where Is Everybody?" represents the series' premiere episode; "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is the Oscar-winning 1963 short subject (from France) that Rod Serling acquired and presented (as an episode) just once; and "The Encounter" features George "Mr. Sulu" Takei in an episode that was banned from later syndication."

So I've got that going for me, too!