Watching A Stop at Willoughby
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shareNext stop Willoughby! Willoughby!
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MovieChat Forums > The Twilight Zone (1959) Discussion > Watching A Stop at Willoughby
Love it so much!
shareI once got into a huge online argument about this episode. Some people can't handle the fact that this was a downer episode.
shareWhether it's an upper or downer is a matter of debate, so there is no "fact" to handle.
shareI see it as beginning miserably and ending happily.
shareYou think it's up for debate, even though it ends with a sardonic twist of the guy having killed himself and Willoughby being a mortuary?
shareYou think it's up for debate, even though it ends with a sardonic twist of the guy having killed himself and Willoughby being a mortuary?
Sure.
Gart kept asking about "Willoughby" several times. If we accept your explanation of the name also being the name of the funeral home as a sardonic twist, then something supernatural happened one way or the other to tie the name of a funeral home to a real place. Where there's supernatural, there is often goodness in the Twilight Zone.
Also, from Serling's own summation regarding whether Willoughby was just a thought, state of mind, or a real place: - or perhaps, for a man like Mr. Gart Williams, who climbed on a world that went by too fast, it's a place around the bend where he could jump off.
Serling wrote it, and he never said whether Gart simply killed himself, or made the leap to the place he wanted to be.
To argue the ending either way is pointless as there is nothing in the 25 minutes filmed that conclusively answers the question of what exactly happened to Gart.
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