I think this disk encompasses how “The Twilight Zone” is different from “Tales From the Darkside” and yet why I’m disappointed in the series as a whole. So let’s get down to the episodes!
The first episode is “One More Pallbearer”. Here, a wealthy and powerful man has built an underground bomb shelter and set things up to fake a hydrogen bomb attack, and then invites three people who humiliated him in the past: a school teacher who failed him and called him out in front of the entire class for cheating and then trying to pin the blame on another student, a reverend who called him out in the pulpit for presumably seducing and then abandoning a young girl, and a military officer who had him court-martialed for cowardice. After he reminds them of this, he tells them that he has information that there will be a hydrogen bomb and missile attack and that the world will end, but they can all survive in the shelter with him. All they have to do is apologize and beg his forgiveness, and they will live. Despite them all believing that the world would end, they all reject the offer and leave, which drives him into a rage as his faked attack plays out. He stumbles out of the shelter into a devastated world, but it turns out that all of that is an illusion and he has been driven insane by how they all rejected his offer.
I think that’s what they are implying there, anyway, because Serling’s opening monologue says that he’s rich. However, since he’s quite disheveled I wondered if he wasn’t rich at all, but was instead a homeless person fantasizing about getting revenge on the people that he felt were responsible for him being in that state, and going mad when his own imagination proved that they had more integrity than him and that he deserved what he got. This ending is okay, but not as interesting as that one would have been. Also, this episode contains a lot of Serling’s trademarked moralizing speeches to his normal often overdone and annoying degree, especially the school marm’s rants against the rich man. The reverend does a better job of expressing the same ideas more succinctly, which ends up making them more powerful. Still, even if the episode seems to drag out the conversations, the interplay between the four is fairly well-written and well-acted, which means that it’s entertaining to watch.
The second episode is “Dead Man’s Shoes”. Here, we open with a body being dumped in an alley, and a homeless person finds the body and notes its distinctive pair of shoes, which he then takes. Soon after, he starts feeling and acting strange, and it turns out that wearing the shoes allows the original owner of them to take over his body, which he uses to find his apartment and set up a plan to get revenge on the person who killed him, his former partner in … shady enterprises who wanted to take over the entire business himself. However, while he manages to avoid the first ambush that killed him the last time, he doesn’t dodge the second, and insists with his dying breath that he will be back. That body is dumped in the same alley and another homeless person — one that we were introduced to earlier — finds the shoes and, having always coveted them, takes them himself … and starts to act as if he’s possessed again.
As you can see from this summary, there’s not a lot of content here … or, at least, content that’s really relevant to the plot. And since the episode sets out the main twist early, the twist itself isn’t all that interesting of a one. Again, though, the conversations are relatively well-written and well-acted, which makes it more interesting than it would have been otherwise, but still nothing really happens in the episode.
The third episode is “The Hunt”. Here, an old man and his wife live in the backwoods, and the old man heads out to do some hunting — for raccoons — against his wife’s wishes. His dog runs after a raccoon and falls into a creek or something, and the old man dives in after him. The raccoon comes out, but they don’t. The next morning, the two of them wake up on the bank and walk back to the house, but the two people they come across are digging a grave for his dog and don’t react to him. Finally arriving at home, his wife doesn’t react to him either and talks as if he’s dead. Finally accepting it, he heads out along the trail that he’s supposed to walk on, and comes across a gate, with the gatekeeper claiming to be St. Peter and telling him that the place behind the gate — which has a cloud of smoke coming from it — is heaven, but he comments that the dog can’t come in and that there’s no hunting in heaven, and the man refuses to enter without his dog, so he moves on. Then he comes across someone claiming to be an angel who tells him that he can enter heaven and that his dog can come, too, and that there’s hunting, and reveals that the first person was Satan, trying to deceive people into entering Hell instead. The old man then wonders if his wife will manage to see through the deception, but the angel says that she will have no problems with that, likely because she is religious. The man and his dog then enter Heaven.
This episode has some interesting ideas, but is really made by the lines and acting of the old man and the old woman. Their interaction early on is interesting and gets us into the story early, and the old man’s commentary on what’s happening is delightfully folksy and so keeps the episode moving, even though there again isn’t all that much plot-relevant stuff happening. The nature of the trail and the deception opens up a lot of questions, but we can forgive them because it’s a potential exploration as per this entire series rather than something that is necessarily true. This is one of the better episodes so far.
The fourth episode is “Showdown with Rance McGrew”. Here, a rather arrogant and untalented actor is playing a famous TV cowboy, and after demonstrating how he isn’t at all like the cowboys of old and how they don’t care about portraying the historical examples they use at all accurately, he gets sent back in time to face the real Jesse James … and fails miserably at it. James then makes a deal with him: he can return to the present if he changes things to portray things accurately. He does, but then James is revealed to still be there as his “agent”, noting that he will be keeping an eye on him and suggesting other changes that he’d like to make.
Again, the dialogue and interactions work well, but the issue here is that neither the main character nor James are at all sympathetic. The main character is pretty pathetic across the board, and doesn’t seem to learn anything from the experience, and the changes that James ends up advocating for are self-centered ones that would hurt the TV show itself, as they have him win more often despite him being a black hat villain. That hurts the episode overall. If James had been more directly opposing misrepresentations and the main character had learned something, it would have worked a lot better.
The fifth episode is “Kick the Can”. Here, we focus on an old folks’ home where they are all feeling and acting old, but one of them notices some kids playing and gets the urge to play again, thinking that the reason people get old is that they forget how to play. He wants to try it, but his long-time friend reports him to the doctor and they think that he’s becoming senile. Not giving up, he rallies all the other residents together to play “Kick the Can” and they go out into the yard and play, and end up being turned into children, and the friend realizes that the main character was right too late and asks them to wait for him … but they won’t or can’t, and as established he can’t do it himself, so he’s stuck being old when everyone else has become young.
Again, we can forgive the episode for not thinking about the consequences of this — where are the children going to live, for example — and again there’s not much content here, but again the performances and conversations carry the episode. This is an episode that really could have felt like it dragged but there’s enough content here and the conversations work well enough to carry it through.
The sixth episode is “A Piano in the House”. Here, a wealthy man and theater critic goes into a curiosity shop looking for a player piano so that his young wife will stop trying to learn how to play the piano, and discovers while trying it out that with the right music a person will reveal their real nature and innermost thoughts. He brings it home and plays it for the servant, who reveals that despite his dour countenance he finds the critic’s abuse to be funny and is a fairly jovial person himself. He then plays it for his wife who reveals that she might have loved him once but hates him now, and that she thinks he only married her to find someone who would put up with his abuse. The critic loves this, and plays it for the guests for her birthday party. He plays it for a friend first, who admits to being in love with and having an affair with his wife. Once all the other guests arrive, he uses another woman as an example and uses it to humiliate her, which causes the guests to be less than thrilled with him. The next roll, however, gets him to reveal his innermost thoughts, which are that he’s a spoiled and fearful child and is acting out to hurt others before they hurt him. This causes the guests to leave and his wife and the friend to leave him alone. He throws a tantrum, and at the end the servant comments that he’s just not funny anymore.
Again, the strength of the episode is in the conversations and interactions, which are well-written and well-performed. That he’d end up revealing who he really is, though, was telegraphed and so the ending is more of a dramatic one than a “Twilight Zone” one. One thing that I’ve commented is that a number of the episodes would work better as regular dramas, but despite the structure working out that way we really do need the supernatural element here to reveal everyone’s true faces.
The seventh episode is “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”. Here, we start with the funeral of a young man, but he then comes to life, which freaks everyone out, but they are all mollified when his younger sister accepts him. He starts to demonstrate strange abilities — a bouquet of roses he brings to his girlfriend dies before he can do that, he wins a fight against her older brother when he’s never won before, and so on — which causes the townspeople to turn against him, but he proposes to his girlfriend and she accepts, and then he hints that with his “powers” he could do bad things to them so they might not want to tick him off too much. When they leave, his now-fiance asks if he’d really do that, and he says he was lying. However, he still demonstrates that he does have some strange powers.
Again, the strength here is in the dialogue and characters, as the main character is engaging and sympathetic. The twist is, again, a bit weak, but again we do at least need the supernatural elements to build out the story.
The last episode is a famous on in “To Serve Man”. Here, we see aliens arrive on Earth, and they promise to give us lots of technology and to turn Earth into a paradise, and want to create an exchange program between their worlds and ours, shuttling people from their planet here and people from Earth to their planet. They talk through telepathy, but pass lie detector tests, and have left behind a book that the main character’s group is trying to decode, but they only really manage to get the title, which is “To Serve Man”, which is promising. The main character finally gets his chance to go, but his female colleague, waiting for her chance, had decided to keep working on the book and at the last minute goes to the spaceship having discovered that it’s really a cookbook … but he’s forced onto the ship anyway, as it was too late.
The episode is told as a flashback, which works fairly well. Again, the writing of the conversations and the acting works well. However, I think that if I hadn’t already known the twist I wouldn’t have liked the episode as much, because again the episode spends a lot of time talking about how great the aliens are and the wonderful things they are doing, which given that this is a “Twilight Zone” episode means that there’s some kind of twist that will undo that. So if I hadn’t known what the twist was in advance I’d have been spending the entire episode waiting for it to come off. Also, the twist is handled poorly, as the episode spends a lot of time setting up the aliens as benevolent with scenes that could have been done with simple exposition and yet we don’t ever get any scenes with the translation of the book to whet our appetites and to show that there’s something odd going on, and so we just get a “It’s a cookbook!” scene at the end that comes out of nowhere. Some of the time spent talking up the aliens could have been spent setting up the twist. I also noted that, intentional or not, there are a lot of parallels between this episode and the original “V” miniseries, with the multiple saucers, promises of peace and technology, going through the U.N. to set this up, and ultimately wanting to eat the humans.
Ultimately, the difference between “The Twilight Zone” and “Tales From the Darkside” is really the quality of the writing and acting. “Tales From the Darkside” did have some well-known actors, but many of them didn’t act all that well nor did the writing do much for them. In “The Twilight Zone”, the writing and acting are better, but it amazingly has a tendency to drag in part because of that, as it focuses on those things at the expense of building out the plot, and in a half-hour show you don’t have a lot of time to waste. The episodes, then, work best when the characters and their interactions are compelling to make us not care too much about the plot. But there’s an issue here, which is that pretty much every episode of “The Twilight Zone” has a twist and since we are aware of that we can’t stop caring about the plot. If we already know the twist or the episode sets it up too obviously, then we can enjoy the interactions, but then the twist comes across as weak. If we don’t know the twist, then we can’t really enjoy the interactions because we keep looking for the twist. The best episodes, then, are the ones where we are trying to figure out the twist along with the main characters so we can enjoy both, which is why “To Serve Man” would have been so disappointing, since it had the perfect structure for that sort of mystery but spent so much time talking up the aliens that it never developed that.
Still, this was a more entertaining disk, at least. Let’s see if that continues with the next disk.