Not sure what the hell happened with that triple post. Thanks for the heads-up, RS! On we go...
Title: “Mirror Image”
Original transmission date: February 26 1960
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: John Brahm
Starring: Vera Miles as Millicent Barnes
Martin Milner as Paul Grinstead
Joe Hamilton as Ticket Attendant
Naomi Stevens as Cleaning Lady
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Alienation, paranoia, madness, loneliness, parallel worlds, doppelganger
Parodied? Probably
Rating: A+
Serling’s opening monologue
Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes: not given to undue anxiety, or fears, or for that matter even the most temporal flights of fantasy. Like most young career women, she has a generic classification as a, quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote. All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes' shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes, who, in one minute, will wonder if she's going mad.
It’s a dark and stormy night (well, it is!) and a woman is waiting inside a bus depot but the bus is half an hour late. Worried, she checks with the ticket attendant, who snappily tells her that he has the same answer for her as he did the last time she asked: it’ll be here when it gets here. She’s surprised - as well as a little taken aback by his bluff rudeness - because this is the first time she’s spoken to the man, but he is making the case that she has asked several times already, perhaps explaining why he’s so irascible. Then she spots a bag at the check-in that looks suspiciously like hers. She puts the coincidence from her mind, or tries to, not wishing to incur the further wrath of the old guy behind the desk, but the idea won’t leave her, and she has to have a closer look at the bag a few minutes later. Now she sees it is identical to hers (“Even down to the broken handle”) and the guy says it is hers, and that she checked it fifteen minutes ago! She says no, it’s like hers but - and as she turns to indicate her bag, which she had left beside her on the seat, it’s no longer there.
She goes into the ladies to wash her face and meets a cleaner in there, who also swears she was in there just a few minutes before. Now she wonders if she’s going mad. Why are two people both telling her she has done things she has not, that they’ve seen her before when she knows they have not? And how has her bag magically got itself checked in, when it never left her side? As she leaves the ladies in a huff though, she catches sight of herself in the mirror. Twice. She is standing in the restroom and also still sitting outside! When she goes outside, there is of course nobody sitting in her seat, however her case is back where she originally left it, and no longer checked in. As she begins to think she’s losing her mind, another traveller arrives and she starts talking to him, glad to have someone to share her anxieties with, probably eager to be told she’s worrying about nothing.
She introduces herself as Millicent Barnes, a secretary who has quit her job and is leaving town to start a new one, and he as Paul Grinstead. He listens to her story but can’t figure out if she’s crazy or not. He advances several weak theories for what might be happening, and then the bus arrives. As they go to get on it though, Millicent looks up and sees… herself, sitting there, already on the bus! She runs away in fright back into the depot and Paul pursues her, asking the bus driver to wait. However as she’s in no condition to travel he decides to stay with her, telling the bus driver to carry on without them. When Millicent regains consciousness she is gratified to see she is not alone, and begins to relate a strange tale she once heard about parallel universes and how they can sometimes intrude into ours, with the version of us in that universe having to replace the original in order to survive. Paul listens, and says he’s going to phone a friend (hah) who can drive them to their destination rather than wait for the next bus.
In reality, he’s phoning the police, believing she’s sick and needs help. While he’s on the phone though, she goes into the ladies again, intending to hunt down the other version of her. Concerned when he hears her, from outside, seemingly talking to herself, he convinces her to walk outside with him and has the cops pick her up. As they drive away with her, he shakes his head. Then, as he prepares to spend the night in the bus depot, he looks up from taking a drink at the water fountain to see his bag has disappeared, and a man is running out of the door. A man who looks very much like him...
Serling’s closing monologue
Obscure and metaphysical explanation to cover a phenomenon. Reasons dredged out of the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained. Call it 'parallel planes' or just 'insanity'. Whatever it is, you'll find it in the Twilight Zone.
The Resolution
Weirdly poetic justice. After deciding that Millicent is mad, Paul falls under the same spell as her, realising that against all odds, she was right, and that whatever parallel world her double came from, there’s one of him there too, and it wants his life. He’s left to rue losing his one ally, the one person who not only would have believed his now fantastical explanation of events, but might have had some knowledge as to what to do to stop them. Nobody will believe him now.
The Moral
As in many of these episodes, the words of Hamlet come back to haunt us: There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of...
Themes
The main one here is mostly paranoia, and the fear of going slowly mad, as everything Millicent has believed to be true, taken at face value, relied on, shatters and crumbles before her disbelieving eyes. The comfortable, safe world of reality and common sense has broken down into a nightmare existence of uncertainty, doubt and approaching madness. She can no longer trust her own eyes, and when she has made up her mind that she can, she can’t get anyone to believe her. For the first time, the idea of parallel worlds is here also explored, the idea that we all exist in infinite and perhaps very slightly different (or even identical, as in this instance) planes of existence, and, too, the idea, not original to this series and long held in folklore, of the doppelganger, a twin (often said to be evil) that everyone has somewhere in the world.
And isn’t that…?
Vera Miles (1929 - )
Another link to
Psycho, as she played Lila Crane in both the original and the later sequel. She also, rather interestingly, featured in an episode of later “rival” anthology series
The Outer Limits, and went on to have roles in some of the biggest shows of the day, including
Mannix, Ironside, Marcus Welby, Bonanza, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-0, Alias Smith and Jones, Cannon, Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco and
Fantasy Island, to name but a few.
Iconic?
I would say a cautious yes. I’m sure this is not the first time an “evil double” story was written (I suppose in some ways you can even liken that idea to Dumas’
The Man in the Iron Mask) but it surely echoes elements of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel
Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its later adaptation to the screen in 1956, in the building fear and paranoia that nothing is as it seems, that there is evil afoot and that people are changing, but nobody believes it’s happening. Of course, this idea would be carried on throughout science fiction, with such series as
Star Trek using it to varying degrees of effect. It would, in time, become almost a cliche, the “evil twin” story, and turn into a lazy plot device for lazy authors.
Personal Notes
He’s an old guy, but I personally have a problem with the attitude of the ticket attendant towards Millicent. Yes, he’s fed up with her constantly asking, as he sees it, the same questions, but even when she faints and is clearly in trouble, he seems unsympathetic, and when Grinstead tells him he’s calling the cops, he becomes positively eager in a very disturbing way, as if he can’t wait to see her locked up. So much for the older generation protecting the flower of the sex!
Parallels
This is a new section I’m starting today. As I mentioned in the intro, themes and situations and causes and morals are reused throughout the series, and when one episode can be linked or compared with a previous one, when the overall theme or idea fits or builds on something that has already been explored, I’ll note that here.
"Perchance to Dream"
Although not the same thing, the idea of the double and of something or someone crossing over from another dimension is reflected earlier in the episode “Perchance to Dream”. Of course, in that case it’s the world of dreams that becomes real when Edward Hall sees what he believes to be Maya from his nightmare in the shape of the receptionist. Still, the idea of something being here that should not be, something that belongs in another place entirely, links these two episodes I believe.