July 11, 2024: The Twilight Zone rewatch continues with episodes 17-20!

Episode 17, “The Fever”

This episode was originally broadcast January 28, 1960.

This episode was inspired by Rod Serling’s own protracted battle of wills with a one-armed bandit on a trip he took to Vegas with his wife to celebrate the show’s pick-up.

In the 1960 “Stories From the Twilight Zone” collection, Serling added the following to the end of this story: “Flora Gibbs flew back to Elgin, Kansas, to pick up the broken crockery of her life.  She lived a silent, patient life from then on and gave no one any trouble.  Only once did anything unusual happen and that was a year later.  The church had a bazaar and someone brought in an old used, one-armed bandit.  It had taken three of her friends from the Women’s Alliance to stop her from screaming and get her back home to bed.  It had cast rather a pall over the evening.”

No Vegas casinos assisted in the production of this episode. The exteriors were all stock footage.

The production used real slot machines that had been confiscated by the LAPD. An officer stood guard on set to ensure no one tried to make off with them.

The role of the frenzied Franklin Gibbs was originally intended for actor Lloyd Nolan, but ended up going to actor Everett Sloan best known for playing Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane. In fact, Sloan had many collaborations with Orson Welles – until he walked off the production of Othello in frustration over delays. Welles never forgave him. Sloan, who had worked with Serling four years earlier on the t.v. and screen versions Patterns actually wrote the lyrics and theme song for The Andy Griffith Show. But they were not used in favor composer Earl Hagen simply whistling the theme.

This episode isn’t as highly rated by Twilight Zone fandom, but I quite enjoyed it. And, as someone who knows more than a few gambling addicts, I saw a lot of truth in Sloan’s descent into madness. It reminded me of a story my father once told me about a trip to Vegas with friends. On the first night, one of his traveling companions refused to come out of his room for dinner, claiming he was tired. The next morning, he turned down their offer to hit the buffet. My father quickly realized this guy had blown all his money on the first day of the trip. So my dad and a buddy chipped in some cash and gave it to the destitute fellow traveler so he could buy food. Only to have the guy blow it all on the second day. As they wrapped up their trip, they were passing through the duty free shop at customs and my father offered the guy some cash so he could pick up a souvenir for his wife and kids. The guy was enraged, insisting his family didn’t deserve anything because they had gifted him the trip and were thus responsible for his bad luck.

The high point of the episode for me was Al Lewis’s cameo as the drunk who manhandles Gibbs into playing the slots – and winning! I rewatched the exchange three times and laughed every time.

A few things didn’t work as well for me. That backwards fall out the window was, in a word, lame. You could see his progress stopped by the mat lying beneath the window. Also, wasn’t a fan of the somewhat overwrought beat of the silver dollar rolling into the shot and settling down beside his corpse at the end. Nor did I think much of that final shot of the flashing one-armed bandit since the assumption all along was this thing was a figment of his addled imagination and should have ceased to exist after his death. So, while certainly not place it amongst my favorites, I still diid enjoy “The Fever” and would rank it higher than the average Twilight Zone fan.

Episode 18, “The Last Flight”

This episode was first telecast February 5, 1960.

This was the first episode Rod Serling had no hand in writing.

Richard Matheson’s initial pitch about a WW1 soldier landing in the present day was accepted, but: “I didn’t have a story, I didn’t know where it was going to go.  I had to figure that out, but because the image was so vivid, they said “Yeah, go ahead.”  I had been published and they knew, more or less, what I could do.  It wasn’t as if they were taking that big [of a] chance.” He was contracted to write the outline with the understanding that if he did a good job, he would get a shot at the teleplay. Which he did. And that eventually ended up landing him a role as a regular writer on the series. I can’t help but note similarities to my journey to Stargate. My writing partner and I pitched an idea they liked, we were contracted to write an outline with the possibility of a script if they were happy with the outline. They were, so we proceeded to script – “Scorched Earth” – which landed us staff positions on the show. The original title of the episode was “Flight” but it was changed after production.

According to Matheson, the title refers to both our protagonist’s physical journey as well as his “departure from cowardice”.

“The Last Flight” was filmed at Norton AFB, San Bernardino, California which subbed for Lafayette Air Base in Reims, France. The various drafts of the script were forwarded to Captain Damon Eccles of the US Air Force in the hopes that he, as a constant, would help facilitate production. Again, I’m reminded of my time on SG-1. Every script was vetted by the U.S. Air Force and their assistance on many aspects of production proved invaluable (see Stargate: Continuum). Two acting Chiefs of Staff, Generals Jumper and Ryan, guested on the show.

An authentic 1918 Nieport biplane was used for this episode, on loan from a collection of some 16 vintage aircraft belonging to actor/stuntman Frank Tallman.

English actor Kenneth Haig, who plays the wayward Lt. William Terrance Decker, broke out in a big way playing Jimmy Porter in the 1956 play “Look Back in Anger”, a role he reprised on Broadway. He would later see success as Joe Lampton in the t.v. series Man at the Top and its spin-off film. In 2003, he choked on a chicken bone while dining at a restaurant in Soho and suffered brain damage due to lack of oxygen. As a result, he was confined to a care home until his death in 2018.

I found this a thoughtful, well-written episode bolstered by Haig’s powerful yet restrained performance. There were a few frown-worthy instances – like the fact that, in the good old days, it would only take a single punch to fold someone in two or send them toppling over a desk, incapacitated. Also, if I was Decker and heard that the guy I’d abandoned all those years ago was still alive, my first thought would not be “I’ve got to go back and save him to ensure this future happens” but rather “Well damn, glad it all worked out!”

Episode 19, “The Purple Testament”

This episode originally aired February 12, 1960.

Rod Serling drew on his own WWII experiences for this episode, as he did for a number of scripts and stories.

The eerie glow on the faces of the doomed soldiers was achieved by overexposing the film.

Actor William Reynolds was a last minute replacement for actor Dean Stockwell who had originally been cast to play the role of Lieutenant Fitzgerald but had to drop out due to a scheduling conflict. Reynolds ended up having to shoot the very next day yet, when all was said and done, had nothing but high praise for the show and Serling: ““Rod Serling was great.  He was hands-on on the set and kinda gagged around with Dick York and me, keeping people loose.  But he was a pretty intense guy.  His narrations were indicative of the kind of intensity he projected.  A chain smoker, a very creative and dynamic kind of guy, obviously, and remarkably prolific.”

Commenting on the episode, Reynolds would add: “The Purple Testament was quite a personal experience for me, because of what had happened to my brothers in World War II and Korea.  And I found out how personal it was for Rod Serling.  Rod was one of the real giants of our industry, very Jack Webb-like in the way he changed the business and the whole genre of the theater of imagination.  It was his thing and he was totally dedicated to it.  We filmed the whole episode on a soundstage at MGM; the eerie light you see on the faces of my men was an effect they added later.”

While flying back from Jamaica after shooting the pilot for The Islanders, Reynolds’ plane went down and effected an emergency on water. Reynolds suffered sever injuries to his legs and several broken ribs but survived the crash alongside episode director Richard L. Bare. According to Reynolds, the Twilight Zone production “heard a news flash that our plane had crashed and they didn’t know whether I had survived.  I guess they were sensitive to the fact that I had a daughter who was a year and a half, and two week old baby, and a wife, and they knew that it would have been a little macabre to show The Purple Testament, an episode in which I see my own death, on the day that i had perhaps died in a plane crash.  So out of respect for the feelings of my family, instead of taking advantage of what had happened, they took the show off the air that night.” It is, however, uncertain whether the episode was, in fact, removed from the schedule.

The part of Captain Phil Riker is played by actor Dick York who would later land the role of Darrin Stephens opposite Elizabeth Montgomery in the series Bewitched, a role originally slated for actor Dick Sargent who had to bow out due to prior commitments. York held the role for four seasons until suffering a seizure on set in 1969 after which he was replaced by Dick Sargent. York had been suffering from a chronic back ailment, the result of an injury he suffered while shooting the 1959 film They Came to Codura, an injury plagued him throughout his time on the show that necessitated special furniture be used on the set to accommodate him. His condition would eventually lead to an addiction to painkillers. In 1976, York lost his life savings in a failed real estate venture. He spent his later years as an advocate for the homeless. A three-pack-a-day smoker, he developed emphysema and died from complications of the disease.

Barney Phillips, who plays Captain E.L. Gunther in this episode, would go on to make several more Twilight Zone guest appearances. Prior to The Twilight Zone, he had portrayed Sergeant Ed Jacobs on NBC Radio’s “Dragnet”, leaving after the first season. The departure led many, including several friends, to believe he had died, forcing him to take out an ad in a Hollywood newspaper assuring everyone he was still alive and available to work. Later in his career, he would play Judge Buford Potts in The Dukes of Hazzard.

Writer-Director Paul Mazursky has a small role as an orderly in this episode. The co-creator of The Monkees, Mazursky wrote and directed features like An Unmarried Woman, Harry and Tonto, and Bob & Carl & Ted & Alice.

Not even the great Rod Serling was immune to the haters and one particularly critical piece of fan mail he received about this episode prompted him to write back: ““I regret we were unable to please.  Of the several hundred letters received commentative on The Purple Testament, yours was in the distinct minority through I must say none of the other letters, pro or con, came even remotely close to the hysteria of yours.  why not Robert Taylor’’s The Detectives?  They’re on at the same time, and I rather imagine they would please you more.”

Another solid outing with some great performances and an eerie and prevailing sense of dread and doom that would typify many a future episode. The ending feels a foregone conclusion and our protagonist feels a little passive, all things considered, but my biggest bump is the ending. The scene of them hearing the distant explosion and commenting on it felt like (literal) overkill to me. The mere fact that Fitzgerald drives off knowing his fate (as surely as the viewer knows) is an incredibly effective conclusion to this story. The additional scene just belabors the point, detracting from the whole.

Episode 20, “Elegy”

This episode’s original broadcast date was February 19, 1960.

The episode was based on a short story by Charles Beaumont published in the February 1953 issue of Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy.

Director Douglas Heyes swapped out a motionless car race sequence from the original short story in favor of the beauty pageant, much to writer Charles Beaumont’s dismay. And yet many fans consider the beauty pageant one of their favorite moments.

The caretaker, Wickwire, informs the astronauts that the mortuary was established in 1973. In a dark coincidence, this turned out to be the year actor Cecil Kellaway (Wickwire) passed away.

The background noises in the spaceship, first heard in the episode “Third From the Sun”, would be re-used for the classic Star Trek series. The ship’s interior, meanwhile, built for Forbidden Planet, appears in several Twilight Zone episodes. Other re-uses include the staircase and lower landing (depicting a scene where a group of people are celebrating a Mayor) which made an appearance in “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” as well as the hospital scene in “The Purple Testament”.

According to director Heyes: “The big trick was to use these crowds of thirty or forty people – motion picture extras – and not have them move. I decided that this was impossible, that they would have to move a little if they were human. You just don’t take people off the street and expect them to totally freeze. But they could stand reasonably still so I decided that the camera had to move while these people were standing still. That way, if you saw any slight movement, you’d think it was the camera’s fault, not theirs. You never had a chance to analyze whether these people were standing absolutely still. That was why I took that episode – to see if it would work.” Shades of my experience on Stargate: SG-1’s “The Quest, Part 1”!

To be honest, I was on the fence about this episode. I don’t recall watching it way back when (In fact, this may have been my first viewing) and I suspected it would all be explained by a temporal distortion similar to what Star Trek did in “Wink of an Eye”. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised to be surprised – and to have my big question about that beauty pageant sequence answered. On the other, I didn’t love the actual reveal, especially as the whole was accompanied by a kooky/comedic score I found annoying. BUT what saved this one for me was the dark turn at episode’s end. As the “eternifying fluid” started to course through their veins, I was fully onboard. And that final scene of them, back in their ship was the chef’s kiss.

So, what were your thoughts on these four episodes?

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