Twilight Zone Companion (58 page)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: William Froug

Director: Richard Donner

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast: Wallace V. Whipple: Richard Deacon Hanley: Paul Newlan Dickerson: Ted de Corsia Technician: Jack Crowder Watchman: Burt Conroy Bartender: Shawn Michaels Robot: Dion Hansen

These are the players, with or without a scorecard: in one comer., a machine; in the other; one Wallace V. Whipple, man. And the game? It happens to be the historical battle between flesh and steel, between the brain of man and the product of man’s brain. We don’t make book on this one, and predict no winner; but we can tell you that for this particular contest there is standing room only in the Twilight Zone.”

Callous factory owner Wallace Whipple automates his plant, putting thousands of men out of work much to the dismay of Hanley, the chief engineer, and Dickerson, the foreman, both also rendered obsolete. Dickerson drunkenly storms into the plant late at night and confronts Whipple, then attacks one of the computers. Frantically, Whipple grabs a gun from a security guard and shoots Dickerson, wounding but not killing him. Next day, Whipple is back at work, feeling totally self-justified. When a technician complains of the mechanized plants sterility, Whipple discharges him. But once hes alone, Whipples machines play back the criticisms of Dickerson, Hanley and the technician. Sometime later, Whipple seeks out Hanley in a bar. He laments that the board of directors has fired him and replaced him with a robot!

There are many bromides applicable here too much of a good thing, tiger by the tail, as you sow so shall ye reap. The point is that too often man becomes clever instead of becoming wise, he becomes inventive but not thoughtful and sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Whipple, he can create himself right out of existence. Tonight’s tale of oddness and obsolescence from the Twilight Zone.”

In The Brain Center at Whipples, there are two kinds of people: ones who make speeches, and ones who make speeches while shouting. Typical is the scene in which Dickerson, the foreman made obsolete by automation, returns to the factory and loudly confronts Wallace V. Whipple, the owner:

dickerson: Ive worked here for thirty years! And Ive been a foreman for seventeen of em! In my book that gives me some rights, Mr. Whipple!

whipple: Well, youve got the wrong book, Dickerson. My book reads as follows: youre drunk, disorderly, and trespassing on private property, and therefore subject to arrest!

dickerson: Tell me something, Mr. Whipple! When youre dead and buried, who do you get to mourn for you?!!

whipple: Shall I tell you the difference, Mr. Dickerson, between you and it? That machine costs two cents an hour for current. It gets no wrinkles, no arthritis, no hardening of the arteries. That one machine is a lathe operator, a press operator. Two of those machines replace 114 men that take no coffee breaks, no sick leaves, no vacations with pay! And that, in my book, Mr. Dickerson, is worth considerably more than you are!

dickerson: They should a stopped you a year ago!

Somebody oughta held you down and put a bit in your head and poured in some reminders that men have to eat and work!

And you cant pack em in cosmoline like surplus tanks or put em out to pasture like old bulls!! Im a man, Mr. Whipple, ya hear me!? Im a manand that makes me better than that hunk of metal!! Betterrrr!!!!!

(Dickerson attacks the machine. Whipple grabs a gun from a security guard and shoots him)

dickerson (As he falls): Ya see, machine? It took more than you ta beat me It took a man!

THE LONG MORROW (1/10/64)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: William Froug

Director: Robert Florey

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast: Commander Douglas Stansfield: Robert Lansing Sandra Horn: Mariette Hartley Dr. Bixler: George MacReady Gen. Walters: Edward Binns Technician: William Swan

It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears. Case in point: the scene you’re watching. This is not a hospital, not a morgue, not a mausoleum, not an undertaker’s parlor of the future. What it is is the belly of a spaceship. It is en route to another planetary system an incredible distance from the Earth. This is the crux of our story, a flight into space. It is also the story of the things that might happen to human beings who take a step beyond, unable to anticipate everything that might await them out there… . Commander Douglas Stansfield, astronaut, a man about to embark on one of history’s longest journeysforty years out into endless space and hopefully back again. This is the beginning, the first step toward man’s longest leap into the unknown. Science has solved the mechanical details, and now ifs up to one human being to breathe life into blueprints and computers, to prove once and for all that man can live half a lifetime in the total void of outer space, forty years alone in the unknown. This is Earth. Ahead lies a planetary system. The vast region in between is the Twilight Zone.”

A month prior to leaving for deep space, Stansfield meets Sandra Horn, a warm and attractive Space Agency employee. The two fall in love, but both realize that it is a tragic affair. When Stansfield returns from his mission kept in suspended animation for most of it he will still be in his early thirties, but Sandra will be an old woman. Soon after Stansfield departs, however, Sandra has herself put into hibernation. When Stansfield returns she is revived, still a young woman of twenty-six. But General Walters has some bad news for her: six months into the mission,Stansfieldfor love of hercame out of suspended animation. He is now an old man of seventy!

Commander Douglas Stansfield, one of the forgotten pioneers of the space age. Hes been pushed aside by the flow of progress and the passage of yearsand the ferocious travesty of fate. Tonights tale of the ionosphere and irony, delivered fromthe Twilight Zone.

Although The Long Morrow has quite a memorable payoff, the episode also has its share of problems. Robert Lansing and Mariette Hartley portray their characters with sincerity, but the lines they are forced to speak are often uncomfortably purple. Additionally, the age makeup applied to Lansingcrucial to the plausibility of the endingis embarrassingly bad.

Lansing recalls the scenes in suspended animation with humor. I was a little reluctant to do the semi-nude thing in the ice block, but it was such a good idea, so visual, that I bypassed my own feelings and did it. I was wearing a pair of mini-trunks which today id wear on a beach.

I AM THE NIGHTCOLOR ME BLACK (3/27/64)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: William Froug

Director: Abner Biberman

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast: Sheriff Charlie Koch: Michael Constantine Colbey: Paul Fix Jagger: Terry Becker Deputy Pierce: George Lindsey Rev. Anderson: Ivan Dixon Ella Koch: Eve McVeagh Man #1: Douglas Bank Man #2: Ward Wood Woman: Elizabeth Harrower

Sheriff Charlie Koch on the morning of an execution. As a matter of fact, its seven-thirty in the morning. Logic and natural laws dictate that at this hour there should be daylight. It is a simple rule of physical science that the sun should rise at a certain moment and supercede the darkness. But at this givenmoment, Sheriff Charlie Koch a deputy named Pierce, a condemned man named Jagger and a small, inconsequential village will shortly find out that there are causes and effects that have no precedent. Such is usually the casein the Twilight Zone.

On the day Jagger is to be executed, a number of people wonder why its still pitch black throughout the midwestern town. Jagger is an unpopular idealist whose convictionfor killing a cross-burning, psychopathic bullyhad a number of questionable elements: during the trial, Deputy Pierce perjured himself on the stand; Sheriff Koch failed to bring up facts that might have led to acquittal; and Colbey, editor of the town paper, printed only articles naming Jagger guilty, although he personally believed him innocent. On the gallows, Rev. Anderson asks Jagger if he enjoyed the killingJagger did indeed. Anderson pronounces him guilty to the bloodthirsty crowd, and Jagger is hanged. The darkness closes in, a darkness created by hate … and its spreading to other parts of the world.

A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germbut a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Dont look for it in the Twilight Zone look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.

In I Am the NightColor Me Black, pretentious writing overwhelms fine acting. In its intent, the script was meant to rank with The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, but is done in by its own pomposity. An example is when the preacher tells the crowd gathered around the gallows that the man is guilty. Sneering, the prisoner says, Its important to get with the majority… . Thats a big thing nowadays, isnt it, Reverend? Slowly, with great meaning, the clergyman replies, Thats all there is, is the majority. The minority must a died on the cross, two thousand years ago.

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: William Froug

Director: Ted Post

Director of Photography: Robert W. Pittack

Music: stock

Cast: Col. Adam Cook:Richard Basehart Eve Norda: Antoinette Bower Lt. Blane: Barton Heyman Gen. Larrabee: Harold Gould

One Colonel Cook, a traveller in space. Hes landed on a remote planet several million miles from his point of departure. He can make an inventory of his plight by just one 360-degree movement of head and eyes. Colonel Cook has been set adrift in an ocean of space in a metal lifeboat that has been scorched and destroyed and will never fly again. He survived the crash but his ordeal is yet to begin. Now he must give battle to loneliness. Now Colonel Cook must meet the unknown. Its a small planet set deep in space, but for Colonel Cook its the Twilight Zone.

After Probe 7 crashes, Cook receives a transmission from home telling him that a nuclear war has destroyed his planetand that Cook, therefore, is stranded … permanently. Exploring outside his ship, he discovers a footprint. He invites whoever made the print to come out and be friendly, but all he gets for his trouble is a rock hurled at his skull. Eventually, however, the stranger does emerge; she is Norda, a space traveller, the sole survivor when her own planet went out of its orbit. The two of them will start new lives together, on a first-name basis: his is Adam; hers is Eve. As for the planet, Eve gives it a name: Earth.

Do you know these people? Names familiar, are they? They lived a long time ago. Perhaps theyre part fable, perhaps theyre part fantasy. And perhaps the place theyre walking to now is not really called ‘Eden. We offer it only as a presumption. This has been the Twilight Zone.

Probe 7Over and Out sets up a situation filled with a number of dramatic possibilities. An astronaut is stranded on an alien planet; meanwhile, his home world is devastated by nuclear war. Colonel Adam Cook (Richard Basehart, pre-Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) is a Robinson Crusoe in space with no hope of possible rescue. He has a lifetime ahead of him with an unknown world full of strange beauties and horrors to explore. What waits for him beyond the door of his wrecked spacecraft?

Unfortunately, what waits beyond the door is one of the oldest science-fiction chestnuts known to man: Colonel Cook is Adam, the woman he discovers is Eve and the planet lets just call that Earth. What could have been a marvelous adventure instead becomes something that, had it been written as a short story, would have been rejected by every science-fiction magazine at the time, because it had been done to death many years earlier.

THE JEOPARDY ROOM (4/17/64)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: William Froug

Director: Richard Donner

Director of Photography:

George T. Clemens Music: stock

Cast: Major Ivan Kuchenko: Martin Landau Commissar Vassiloff: John vanDreelen Martin Landau Boris: Robert Kelljan

The cast of characters: a cat and a mouse. This is the latter; the intended victim who may or may not know that he is to die, be it by butchery or ballet. His name is Major Ivan Kuchenko. He has, if events go according to certain plans, perhaps three or four more hours of living. But an ignorance shared by both himself and his executioner is of the fact that both of them have taken a first step into the Twilight Zone

Major Kuchenko, a defector from the Eastern bloc, waits in a hotel room in a neutral country for passage to the West. Commissar Vassiloff is assigned to kill him, but he intends to do it with an artistry approaching that of a ballet. He visits Kuchenko and knocks him out with a glass of drugged wine. When Kuchenko regains consciousness, a tape recording informs him that Vassiloff has planted a bomb in the room. If Kuchenko finds it and disarms it within three hours, he is free to go. If he triggers the bomb, it will explodeand if he stops searching, turns out the light or tries to bolt from the room, Vassiloffs assistant Boris will shoot him from a room across an alley. Frantically, Kuchenko searches for the bomb without result. In reality, the bomb is in the telephone, and it will explode if Kuchenko picks up the receiver after it rings. Vassiloff dials Kuchenkos number. Kuchenko reaches for it, stops, then runs out the door, ducking a spray of bullets. Later, Vassiloff and Boris stand in Kuchenkos room, speculating on how he guessed the bombs location. Suddenly, the phone rings. Without thinking, Boris picks it upand detonates the bomb. On the other end is Major Kuchenko, calling from the airport and certain that, although no one spoke, he reached his party.

Major Ivan Kuchenko, on his way west, on his way to freedom, a freedom bought and paid for by a most stunning ingenuity. And exit one Commissar Vassiloff, who forgot that there are two sides to an argumentand two parties on the line. This has been the Twilight Zone.