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AngularTurnip's Replies
While I concede the acting and music in TP are an acquired taste I would encourage you to keep watching. Especially if you like weird -- TP hitting its stride in this regard with the Season 2 opener. Just make sure you abandon the show once the Laura Palmer case is resolved. Then again, you might regard the Pilot much more favorably once you've been subjected to Windom Earle and Miss Twin Peaks.
Nothing in the Dark is another good example.
"The Last Flight" is great. How it goes unrecognized is beyond me.
This and "A World of Difference" are among the better "loss of identity" episodes.
Spoilers ahead
Anyone else caught off guard by the end of this one? As one of the hosts on the superb "Twilight Zone" podcast "The Fifth Dimension" observed: "It's literally like they took an episode of 'Seinfeld' and then murdered half of the cast."
A Kind of Stopwatch.
The Twilight Zone version of this story is actually an improvement over the Charles Beaumont-penned original of the same name. They both have a very dream-like atmosphere that makes you question what is and is not happening. I think the part where the wino disappears is unsettling also.
Serling does say in the outro "to be believed or disbelieved depending on your frame of reference." He expresses similar sentiments at "The Grave" 's coda: "you take this with a grain of salt or a shovelful of dirt, as shadow or substance, we leave it up to you." Whether the viewer is partial to a supernatural explanation or a non-supernatural explanation I don't believe it's an open-and-shut-case in either instance.
While the Grandma is odious the son is no prize either. What's with how he manhandles his wife whenever she expresses understandable concern over Billy's relationship with his Grandma? The way he grabs her shoulders has got to hurt. Not only is the poor wife dealing with a deranged crone but also a deep-in-denial husband who goes to such lengths to keep his wife from airing her unflattering thoughts about his mom by putting his hand over her mouth. Sheesh.
I found the dad's plea to his mom at the end to let his son go hardly moving since throughout the episode he seems like your typical '50s TV dad: partial to employing subtle and not-so-subtle bullying tactic to make sure his better half sees things his way. It would have been better if the voice of reason throughout the episode -- the wife -- got on the phone and channeled Ripley from "Aliens": "Get away from him you Bitch!"
Richard Matheson once said in an interview that "The Twilight Zone" worked best in black and white because film noir was in black and white, a genre "The Twilight Zone" often emulated. With that in mind having the main character of "The Hitch-hiker" share her thoughts with us is very much a tradition observed by countless noir classics of the '40s and '50s (though in those cases the main character is usually a male cut from the Dick Powell-mold).
SPOILERS AHEAD
I think what we're witnessing in "The Hitchhiker" are Nan Adam's dying thoughts. It's not unlike "Perchance to Dream" where the protagonist Edward Hall go goes into a shrink's office, sits down, closes his eyes, and then dies almost immediately therafter from a heart attack. The bulk of "Perchance" transpires between the time the protagonist closes his eyes and when a heart attack renders him a stiff. As Mr. Serling notes in "Perchance" 's outro: "They say a dream takes only a second or two, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime." Perhaps the last shot of Nan going still in her car before the camera goes up into the stars is the aftermath of the accident the mechanic at the episode's start points out Nan must have been on the side of the angels to have avoided. Maybe like the protagonist of "Perchance" Nan lives a lifetime in a matter of seconds as she first struggles with and then accepts her untimely demise.