rubber soul

I don't care about the themes, I wanna see episodes, Trolls!

I don't know if I 've read any of the short stories to be honest, Bob, but a majority of the episodes are some of the best TV you're ever going to see and it's easily the best thing to come out of the early sixties, especially the first three seasons. Yes, Serling could be pretty preachy and that may have been his Achilles heel, but you can't argue with the concept of something like The Obsolete Man for example.

I like Outer Limits (the original) too, by the way.

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Trollheart

Space exploration: 7

As discussed under the off-world theme, in at least this, the first season, there isn’t as much spaceflight and going to new planets as you might expect from a show many took to be, perhaps mistakenly, a science fiction one. However there are a few. Note: for the purposes of this category, explorations of the afterlife, the future or the past are not included, only efforts - successful or otherwise - to go into space.

WIE? While still taking place on Earth, this first episode does explore (sorry) the idea of going to another world, even if it’s only the boring old moon.

TL: Not strictly speaking exploration, but worthy of inclusion as, had he the interest to, I suppose Corry could explore the barren asteroid he’s been condemned to live on. Not that there’s much to explore there, but, you know.

AWTSWO: Certainly takes as its opening theme the idea of exploring the space outside the Earth (outer space, in other words).

TFTS: Has the protagonists leaving their own, unnamed planet to try to reach ours.

ISAAITA: Although they are actually exploring Earth, the crew believe they’re on an asteroid and that they have been into space, even if they never made it beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

EL: Begins with the characters on the way home from some sort of space exploration.

PAAAO: Has the two main characters head to Mars.

Time Travel: 7

Surely needs no explanation from me. There are few in the first season, so I’m going to be including elements where the possibility is that someone has travelled backwards or forwards in time, even if that is not definitely proven or stated to be the case.

TSMS: I think it’s fair to say that on the face of it, Barbara travels back in time to her glorious heyday, where she will now live.

WD: Martin Sloan goes back in time to his childhood.

JN: Lanser can be said to be getting transported back in time to the moment of the sinking, this happening constantly and, we assume, for all eternity.

TLF: Decker comes from 1915 to 1960 in order to right a wrong outcome and change the future.

EX: Caswell is dragged forward in time to meet his death in 1960 instead of 1880.

ASAW: Whether it happens or not in reality, Gart Williams thinks he has gone back in time when he reaches the stop of Willoughby.

MB: Technically he goes back in time, if only twenty-four hours.

The Afterlife: 5

Episodes which specifically and clearly show or reference what is beyond the veil. This theme will get more prevalent and complicated, not only as the series develops, but as new iterations of it appear down through the decades.

OFTA: Death takes Bookman to, presumably, Heaven at the end.

TSMS: I’m tempted to include this, as Barbara has obviously passed on to some sort of cinematic afterlife, but I don’t think I can as it’s not clear enough.

JN: We have to assume Lanser is in Hell, so therefore that qualifies.

THH: As Nan is in fact dead, though no afterlife is shown this can also be accepted as an example of same.

ANPTV: Probably the most clear example we have in this season of what may await us after death: if we’re very unlucky, or deserving of such a fate.

ASAW: Can we accept Willoughby as a version of the afterlife? Well. given that Williams sees it twice while still alive, I’d have to say no. Can’t count this one.

APFT: But Joey Crown certainly sees Limbo, at least, and meets the Archangel Gabriel, so this one can be counted.


What’s the percentage of serious episodes versus ones meant to be taken in a humorous vein?

Serious ones: WIE?/MDOD/TSMS/WD/TL/TEAL/PTD/JN/AWTSWO/WYN/TFOOAD/TFTS

ISAAITA/THH/TLF/TPT/EL/MI/TMADOMS/AWOD/LLWJ/PAAAO/EX/TBTW/NAAC

ASAW/APFT/TAH

Humorous ones:
OFTA/EC/TF/ANPTV/TC/MB/TMC/AWOHO

So that’s 27 serious versus 8 not, showing that the overall tone of the show was more sombre and serious than flippant, and that lessons should be learned from the programme.


What about the leads? How many episodes had male leads, and how many female? Let’s see.

Male: WIE?MDOD/WD/TL/TEAL/PTD/JN/AWTSWO/WYN/TFOOAD/TFTS/ISAAITA/TLF

TPT/EL/TMADOMS/AWOD/LLWJ/PAAAO/EX/TBTW/ASAW/APFT/OFTA/EC

ANPTV/TC/MB/TMC/AWOHO

Female: TSMS/THH/MI/NAAC/TAH

So that’s a mere 5 with female leads, compared to a massive 30 in which male characters take centre stage. But for 1960 this is not at all surprising. Let’s just break that down a little further though. Of the ones with male leads, how many of those episodes even featured a female character?

OFTA has the little girl who is to die in Bookman’s place, and her mother also, very peripheral characters, though the former is the device through which Bookman is motivated to try to cheat Death and ends up surrendering his own soul.
MDOD has the barmaid Denton (presumably) falls in love with.
WD has Sloan’s mother, though she plays little part in the story, it being again a mosly male-driven plot.
EC has the long-suffering wife of Walter Bedeker, who gets treated very badly, and is in fact killed in an off-hand and very casually cruel way by the selfish git.
TL only allows a woman as long as she’s a robot and does what she’s told, however of all these so far it’s the most quasi-sympathetic (and ironically strongest) role for a woman in one of these stories, as Alicia gives Corry back his dignity and his sense of purpose, his will to live and even allows him to find love of a sort. Unfortunately when he’s done he just dumps her, but you can’t have everything.
TEAL brings us two female characters, neither of which are in the least sympathetic. There’s the irritated lady customer at the bank to whom Bemis tries to explain the workings of Dickens, and then there’s his shrew of a wife. And both (along with everyone else) get killed. Heavy message?
PTD again casts a woman in the role of the bad guy, or girl, as it were. While there are essentially two female characters in this, they’re both the same actress so I would count them as one. I guess you could say that this is the first episode in which a woman, while not the main character, triumphs over the man, in that Hall dies of a heart attack supposedly brought on by Maya’s pursuit of him in his dreams. Like Alicia in TL, a strong female character, if for the wrong reasons here.
JN has only one female character, the sergeant (though there may be other, unnamed ones at tables - I don’t count them if they’re there - who plays little more part in the story than as a device to enable Lanser to pour out his troubles to.
AWTSWO has a nurse, and also a girl in a bar, (two I think) but they’re very much surplus to requirements for the story. Oh, and Forbes’ wife, who sort of fulfils the same criterion.
WYN has one female character, at the beginning, and though she is the first the pedlar approaches and so we think she might be a major one, she’s gone pretty quickly, used as nothing more than a way to demonstrate Peddot’s powers of precognition.
TFOOAD gives us one female, the woman ready to run away with the dead musician whom Hammer is impersonating, and again, she’s gone long before the second act.
TFTS tries to make the women a little more important, but the wives are reduced to nodding and looking worried, and only the Sturka daughter gets to do anything, actually being the one who rescues them from the clutches of Carling when it looks like they have been caught. So maybe one more strong female character.
TF is taken over entirely by the husband, with his wife as a scared and worried onlooker.
TMADOMS shows the women bowing to the judgement of their men, and while some accuse, they only do so with the approval of their husbands, so you couldn’t call any of them strong characters, and by the end they’ve descended into one amorphous mob anyway.
AWOD does make an effort. The wife - shrewish and grasping again - in the so-called “wrong” life of Arthur Curtis is well written, btu again she’s a negative stereotype, whining about alimony and her ex-husband’s drunkenness. The other wife, the “real” one, is a pastiche of fifties housewifery and seems to have no real qualities of her own. There’s also the secretary (in both worlds, though in the “wrong” one she’s playing a part) but she doesn’t do much but make phone calls and smile.
LLWJ has just two female characters (other than possibly TMADOMS, I count no more than three in any episode), one of which is the fiancee of Jameson, so demeaned that her father jokingly (we assume) threatens to spank her, the other a previous wife of Jameson’s, who eventually kills him, so I guess that makes her a strong character. There’s also a very brief cameo for a female student, but hardly worth mentioning.
PAAAO: Introduces perhaps the first sympathetic female character in a male-driven episode, though she is unable to go against her male superiors to help the poor Earthman. She does however display more, um, humanity than any of her people.
TBTW has only one female, the mother of Henry and (it’s said) the fiancee of Bolie. There are various women out on the street, but again these are just extras. Henry’s mother gets a small slice of the story, but it’s again dominated by the males, in this case young and old.
ANPTV only makes room for women if they’re floosies, good-time gals, broads or skirts. Very fluff, very eye-candy, very superfluous. I’m not sure they even speak.
ASAW again has a shrewish wife who berates her husband and blames him for not giving her the life she had expected. There are also office workers, but none of them matter to the story much.
TC has a shrew, who first wants nothing to do with Roger and then becomes happily enslaved to him, enslaving him in the process, which I have to admit is pretty clever. But I don’t think Leila can be considered a strong personality in this episode.
APFT brings in a love interest for Joey, but right at the end, and only to show that his life is about to turn for the better.
MB has a snappish landlady who evicts Bevis (though in the redo she thanks him for having paid months in advance) and a sympathetic office worker, as well as a resident in the lodgings from which he is being evicted.
AWOHO shows the utter disdain Gregory has for women, as he writes/creates ones that suit his own personal tastes, though he does try to stop his wife from throwing her tape on the fire, and even considers recreating her, changing his mind when he realises he can instead have the submissive and pretty and undemanding Mary.

And before we leave this category, let’s take a quick look at those female-centric episodes. How does the heroine fare, how is she painted in each?

TSMS shows us a belligerent, haughty woman refusing to live in reality, getting by on her memories and eventually being sucked into them.
THH really has Nan as a scared, confused girl trying to avoid a nasty hitch-hiker, even enlisting the aid of a tough, strong sailor in her attempt to get away. Hardly a strong figure.
MI gives us another scared woman, but one who has a mind of her own and has sussed out what is happening, when she is unexpectedly (to her anyway) betrayed by the male, who rather fittingly ends up suffering her fate as he realises she was quite sane.
TAH shows us the selfish side of a woman (even if she’s not real) and her willingness to risk everything for the chance to remain as she is.
NAAC has another frightened woman, but she does take charge and, while it may be accidentally, triumphs over the male killer, so that has to make her a strong female character.

That makes uncomfortable reading. Of the mere 5 episodes featuring female leads, more than half portray her as a weak, nasty or incompetent figure, making the unmissable comment that really, women should not be allowed out on their own. Sad.

How many episodes written entirely by Rod Serling, how many based on the work of others and how many written without his input (other than as I guess story editor/executive producer/man with the final say)?

The first seven are all his work then TEAL is the first where he bases his story on the writings of another person. After that we have the first written without him (a Charles Beaumont story) in PTD, then him again and then the next six are based on the writing of other authors. The sixth of these is followed by a sequence of 1,2,1,2, by which I mean one written by him, one written without him, and repeat, then he writes the next two before ceding writing duties for the next two, with the one after that based on a short story, as is the next, then one without his input sandwiched between three of his own writing, followed by the first where he doesn’t even write the teleplay, but takes the reins for the next four, while leaving the closing episode to be written by another author, into which he has no input on the story.

So that makes a total of 19 written solely by Serling
9 which he writes based on the writings of others and
7 which are written by others without his input

That’s still pretty impressive, giving him overall 80% of the writing credit for the first season.

While it’s a little simplistic perhaps to say “good” or “bad”, which episodes end well - either for the character(s) or us - and which end badly?

I count 11 ending what I consider as well, or happy, and they are

OFTA: Much as I dislike this episode, I have to admit in the end Bookman sacrifices his life to save the little girl, and so earns a kind of redemption, so it would be considered a “good” ending.

MDOD: Despite its dark tone, ends well and certainly can be said to be a happy ending.

WYN: Despite Renard dying at the end, he is more or less identified as the bad guy in this one, and so I’d say that yes, this is, all things taken into account, a happy ending.

TFTS: The families manage to escape and are heading to a new life so that’s definitely a good ending.

TLF: Although Decker’s decision in the future will lead to his death in the past, his actions will save his friend, and so that has to be a positive ending.

AWOD: Arthur Curtis finds his way home, giving us an unexpectedly happy ending.

NAAC: Again, though there is a death at the end it’s the death of a murderer, and Helen gets her memories back, so this is a good ending.

ASAW: I’m a little torn on this one. Essentially, Williams gets his wish and ends up in Willoughby, out of the rat race. But then we see his dead body, adn he’s out of the human race too. But overall I think it’s a happy ending, for him at least.

APFT: Joey Crown gets a second chance, so that has to be a happy ending.

MB: Bevis chooses in the end to be who he was in the first place, problems and all, and while a simplistic one, it has to be regarded as a good ending.

AWOHO: Gregory gets the wife he wants, and all is well in this final happy ending.

Well, that should leave 25, more than twice as many, ending badly or darkly, should it not? Let’s check it out.

WIE? While there’s a happy resolution - the astronaut is not alone - he does go a bit mad, and the problems of the intense loneliness of deep space remain, so on balance this one I would consider a dark ending.

TSMS: While you could argue this is a happy ending, I don’t agree. I feel Barbara turned her back on the world and ended up being consumed by her past, and for her agent at any rate it’s a bad ending, as she’s gone.

WD: Sloan achieves nothing, but adds a limp for the rest of his life which he didn’t have before his trip back through time, so that has to be a bad ending.

EC: While we want the little **** to die, or be left living forever in jail, Bedeker does end up having to give up his immortality, and far sooner than he would have expected if at all. That then makes this a dark ending to a bitingly satirical episode.

TL: Corry escapes but has to turn his back on the robot that has made his life on the asteroid bearable, and there’s a palpable sense of pathos and tragedy to the ending of this one.

TEAL: Perhaps the darkest of all dark endings, as not only is the world destroyed but Bemis’s chance to be alone with his books is taken from him with cruel caprice.

PTD: Hall dies. Can’t get too much darker than that.

JN: Except I guess if you’re condemned to relive one terrifying night you’re responsible for, all down through eternity in your own private Hell.

AWTSWO: Or when you are literally erased from existence, no memory or trace of you remaining.

TFOOAD: Another death, another dark ending.

ISAAITA: Corey finds he has killed his crewmates for nothing. There’s no coming back from that.

THH: Death claims his dominion.

TF: A stupid, funny episode ends in tragedy.

TPT: More death and despair here.

EL: And more here, with a twist.

MI: Millicent is committed while Paul realises too late she was right all along.

TMADOMS: Chaos explodes in smalltown America as neighbour turns on neighbour and everyone is a suspected alien.

LLWJ: No matter how long you live, remember the words of the bard: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!

PAAAO: There’s really no way to put a positive spin on ending up as an exhibit in a Martian zoo!

EX: And if death follows you eighty years into the future, you know it’s not going to be your day.

TBTW: What could have been a sappy, happy ending turns sour because one man can’t believe in magic.

ANPTV: Even the nicest most gilded cage is still a cage.

TC: Trapped, not in a loveless relationship, but a suffocatingly close one, there’s no escape for Roger.

TAH: Hard to feel good about the sudden revelation and realisation that you’re a shop dummy.

So that’s 24, not 25. Why? Because I deliberately left TMC out, as I can’t decide (or care) whether it’s a happy or a sad ending. In some ways it’s happy, as the robot gets to live with a human heart and there is an intimation that he ends up becoming part of a team of all robots. On the other hand, his career playing against human opponents is over, and so are the hopes of the shitty baseball team of dragging themselves into the big leagues. But again, as I say, I don’t care.

Leaving that one out then, we still have over 70% of the episodes ending darkly, sadly or badly, in terms of their tone. For a family show, that’s, as they say, pretty dark, man. And it will only get worse.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

You'll care about what I tell you to, and like it.
Coming in the new year...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

How many famous actors, or actors who went on to be famous, did we meet in season one?

MDOD: This is the first where we can say there are any real actors who had, or would go on to, achieve fame. We have Martin Landau, Doug McClure and Jeanne Cooper, so that makes 3, and all in one episode! Then Ida Lupino and Martin Balsam in TSMS, so that’s 5, Ron Howard makes 6 when he appears as a kid in WD, Jean Marsh and Ted Knight in TL bring it to 8, Burgess Meredith in TEAL and Richard Conte in PTD rounds it out to 10. Patrick McNee in JN, Rod Taylor, Sue Randall and Jim Hutton in AWTSWO bring it to 14, Fritz Weaver and Denise Alexander in TFTS make 16, Jeff Morrow and Kevin Hagen in EL run the total to 18, and Vera Miles in MI and Claude Atkins in TMADOMS give us 20.

Howard Duff, Eileen Ryan and David Whyte in AWOD move it to 23, Kevin McCarthy in LLWJ makes 24, then Roddy McDowall, Vic Perrin, Susan Oliver and Paul Comi in PAAAO push it to 28, and Russel Johnson and John Lormer in EX take it to the round 30. Morgan Brittany and Joseph Perry in NAAC increase the total to 32, James Daly, Howard Irving Smith and Jason Wingreen in ASAW make it 35, while George Cooper Grizzard Jr and John Herrick McIntire in TC lift it to 38, and Jack Klugman and John Anderson in APFT make it 40. Orson Bean, Florence MacMichael, Charles Lane, Vito Soctti and William Schallert in MB bring the figure up to 45. Anne Francis in TAH and Jack Warden and Abraham Sofaer in TMC make it 48, Keenan Wynn in the final episode of season one, AWOHO, leaves us one shy of 50, at 49.

That is one impressive list! Look at the big names!

Klugman. McDowell. Howard. Lupino. Meredith. Landau. McClure. Serious stuff.

The final thing I want to do before I close is to check the
Bodycount.

That’s right: how many people died overall in season one? I should say, how many people are shown as dying? And this can be stretched to people losing their minds, just for the heck of it. In later seasons when I’m doing the overview we’ll be adding these and doing a cumulative bodycount, so we can see how many died over the entire series. Could be fun! For now, though…

WIE? - 0
OFTA - 1 (Bookman)
MDOD - 0
TSMS - 1 (Barbara - all right, technically she’s not said to be dead, but she may as well be)
WD - 0
EC - 2 (Bdeker and his wife)
TL - 0 (Unless you count a) Alicia which you can’t as she’s a robot and therefore not alive or b) Corry’s victim, which I’m inclined not to)
TEAL - 0 (I seriously can’t count all of Earth’s population, and while yes obviously his wife, his manager, that annoying customer etc all died, it seems a pointless exercise so we’ll gloss over this one)
PTD - 1 (Edward Hall)
JN - ? Not sure how to approach this one. Obviously Lanser dies, but later, possibly after the war, and I have no idea how many crew and passengers the Queen of Glasgow was carrying, so it’s hard to make a stab at it.
TOTAL SO FAR (with some caveats) = 5
On we go.
AWTSWO - 3 (Technically, as it turns out they are seen never to have existed, but we know they did, so let’s include them)
WYN - 1 (Renard)
TFOOAD - 3 (We know of the musician Johnny Foster, the musician whose identity Hammer takes, Virgin Sterig, who again he robs the face of, and then Andy Marshall, though in reality that person never died, Hammer just took his appearance, so he himself is number three, and in actuality it’s the three of us, not the four of us are dying)
TFTS - 0 (Again, the assumption is the whole planet, or most of it, will die, but we don’t even know the population of the planet so must ignore those deaths).
ISAAITA - 7 (The ship had a crew of 8; 4 died on impact, Corey killed 3 more)
THH - 1 (Nan is already dead when the episode begins, though she doesn’t know it)
TF - 1 (Franklin is the only one to die here in Vegas)
TLF - 1 (Decker goes back in time to give his life to save his friend)
TPT - 4 (Obviously it’s far more than that, but given this is wartime and we know nothing of the size of Fitz’s platoon, we can’t get an accurate count so can only look at the ones we actually see die. That’s the soldier in the bed in the hospital, Fitz’s CO and Fitz and presumably his driver at the end)
TOTAL NOW STANDS AT 26
EL - 3 (All three crew are murdered by Wickwire)
MI - 0
TMADOMS - 1 (The only one we see actually die is Peter Van Horn, who is shot as he returns to Maple Street that evening)
AWOD - 0
LLWJ - 1 (Walter himself)
PAAAO - 1 (Marcusson dies on the ship)
EX - 3 (Caswell, the professor and the thief)
TBTW - 0
ANPTV - 1 (Valentine)
TOTAL IS NOW 36
And finally
NAAC - 2 (Helen’s mother and Selden)
ASAW - 1 (Williams)
TC - 0
APFT - 0
MB - 0
TAH - 0
TMC - 0
AWOHO ? (Hard to say; if Victoria was a construct of Gregory’s mind, could she die? He could just bring her back again, as he did Mary).
FINAL TOTAL = 39

So there are - leaving out world populations, ship’s crews and marine battalions - more people killed in the first season of The Twilight Zone than there are episodes!

So ends our first foray into one of the most important and influential television programmes in history, and certainly in science fiction history. Five years on, a new and different phenomenon would take the world by storm, using and building on many of the themes expressed here, and looking to Serling’s moralistic, teaching nature for guidance on how to handle their own show, which would itself become a template and marker for science fiction and drama. By the time Star Trek debuted The Twilight Zone would have finished its five-year run (five-year mission?) and Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy and Co. would take up the baton, taking television audience where no man had gone before, and in the process predicting much of the future.

Like Star Trek though, The Twilight Zone would not stay dead and has been revived three times, the most recent being last year, although it must be said I found personally the quality of the episodes to be far below par, even compared to later incarnations of the show. But that’s all for later and we’ll get there in due course.

Feel free to continue to engage me and each other in conversations about the show - there’s certainly enough there to talk about - and I’ll be back before you know it.

Literally, if I can get this darned time machine working!

See ya some other time!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

No, no! You can't get rid of me that easily! I have more statistics to impart!


Here's a graph (look at it!!)

showing what I consider to be the progress of the show over the first season, in terms of quality. It's pretty simple: ratings are from 1 to 10 at the side and each episode is numbered at the bottom, the red line shows how good, or bad, each episode was and how the quality fluctuated, or remained solid, or even rose, over the course of the season.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

rubber soul

If that's your EKG, boy are you in trouble

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Trollheart

Wait! Wait! Don't go! I have more!


And here is my how I rated the episodes, numbering them from 36 (worst) to 1 (best)



36. The Mighty Casey

35. Mr. Bevis

34. A Passage for Trumpet

33. The Big Tall Wish

32. One for the Angels

31. The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine

30. Mr. Denton on Doomsday

29. The Fever

28. A World of His Own

27. The Chaser

26. A World of Difference

25. Nightmare as a Child

24. Walking Distance

23. The Last Flight

22. Execution

21. The Purple Testament

20. The Four of Us Are Dying

19. Perchance to Dream

18. Long Live Walter Jameson

17. Judgement Night

16. A Nice Place to Visit

15. Where is Everybody?

14. What You Need

13. Escape Clause

12. People Are Alike All Over

11. Elegy

10. The Lonely

9. Mirror Image

8. And When the Sky Was Opened

7. Third from the Sun

6. Time Enough at Last

5. A Stop at Willoughby

4. The Hitch-Hiker

3. I Shot an Arrow Into the Air

2. The After Hours

1. The Monsters are Due on Maple Street

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

DianneW

rubber soul

You rates A Passage for Trumpet 34th? Even better, you rated it an A- while you rated One For the Angels a C- and it came in at number 32. Now that's an accomplishment.

Anyway, A Passage For Trumpet is my favorite TZ of the first season (love Klugman) followed by A Stop at Willoughby.

Do agree with you on Mighty Casey though (and you even rated that better than One For the Angels, albeit barely). Can't think of a TZ that bad until the final season.

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Trollheart

Statement: Trollheart is currently being given oxygen in the ICU. We told him not to overdo it, but did he listen? Does he ever? He was barely able to walk when he arrived at the hospital and it's only the mercy of god that we were able to get him stabilised in time.

He will not be doing any interviews or anything more strenuous than lifting an eyebrow for some.... what? He's done what? Discharged...? That man is going to kill himself! Fine, fine: I wash my hands of the idiot.

What? Oh, I think there's a need for a hospital in the age of the Crimean War. Can't let that bitc - ah, brave lady Nightingale take all the glory now, can we?

Engage time warp circuits (NO NOT the bloody dance! Stop that!) - time warp circuits engaged - ah, well, I guess, um, ENGAGE!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018