Trollheart

Title: “The Purple Testament”
Original transmission date: February 12 1960
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Richard L. Bare
Starring: William Reynolds
Dick York
Barney Phillips
Warren Oates
Paul Mazursky
Ron Masak
William Phipps
S. John Launer
Marc Cavell


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Second World War, 1945
Theme(s): War, prediction of the future, death, isolation, paranoia
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating: A

Serling’s opening monologue

Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Philippine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear—yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.

An officer in the US Army serving in the Philippine Islands in World War II seems to have developed the strange - and unwanted - power to divine when men are going to die. He sees a purple light in their faces, and knows they’re marked for death. He confides this to his CO but of course is not believed. While visiting one of the wounded in the hospital, the officer, “Fitz” Fitzgerald sees the light in the kid’s face, faints and sure enough when he regains consciousness he finds that the soldier has passed away in the bed. When he sees the light in the face of his commanding officer he is shocked, and tries to get the captain not to go on the raid, but the captain thinks he’s just overworked and seeing things.

The captain is of course killed, and when Fitz is recalled to headquarters for observation, he sees in his shaving mirror the light in his own face, and knows he will never make it back alive. He is to be evacuated back home for medical evaluation, but soon after his jeep has disappeared into the jungle there's a loud explosion.

Serling’s closing monologue


From William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, a small excerpt. The line reads, 'He has come to open the purple testament of bleeding war.' And for Lieutenant William Fitzgerald, A Company, First Platoon, the testament is closed. Lieutenant Fitzgerald has found the Twilight Zone.

The Resolution

Not bad. No explanation of course, but then you seldom if ever get one in The Twilight Zone.

The Moral

Other than war is hell? I guess when your number’s up, there’s not a lot you can do about it.

Themes

The horror of war is the main one here, allied to the pain of being able to predict which men will come back from a mission, and which won’t. So it involves combat and also a sense of precognition. Fear, too, which is of course endemic to war, but a different kind of fear. Fear from his own men, that he can see if they are going to die (and so, in some twisted way, they probably blame him for this) and fear, too, from the lieutenant, who feels he has become an albatross hanging around the neck of the squad, and refuses to tell the men whom he sees are marked for death that they're not coming back, but the relationship has changed, become strained, fraught with tension, and he must feel very isolated.

Iconic?

Not sure if it's the first to feature a sort of presentiment of death, probably not, but this would become a recurring theme in science fiction over the years. Wasn't there a movie called The Medusa Touch, or am I misremembering? What about Knowing? What about fuc - well, how rude!


Personal Notes

Just one comment to make: the captain in this is called Riker, spelled that way, and I just wonder if Roddenberry had seen this episode and if it influenced his naming of Captain Picard’s famous “Number One”?

Well, two actually. Isn't it interesting that Serling's closing quotes on both this and the last episode reference Shakespeare? No? Sod ya then.

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