August 13, 2024: Our Twilight Zone rewatch continues with season 2, episodes 13-16!

Season 2, Episode 13, “Back There”

This episode was first broadcast January 13, 1961.

Rod Serlihg originally conceived this story as an hour long episode called “Afterwards” that he submitted to Armstrong Circle Theatre, the only one hour anthology airing at the time, but was rejected. His attempts to get it accepted as a special one hour Twiilght Zone also failed, so he ended up adapting it to the half hour format.

Actor Russell Johnson, who played the time-hopping Peter Corrigan, returns for another time-travel-themed episode following his appearance in season 1’s “Execution”.

In the 50’s and 60’s, Johnson found some success playing villains in westerns but, according to him: “You name a Western, I did it. I was always the bad guy in Westerns. I played more bad guys than you can shake a stick at until I played the Professor. Then I couldn’t get a job being a bad guy.” Nevertheless, he was philosophical about this in his later years: “It used to make me upset to be typecast that way. But as the years have gone on, I have given in. I am the Professor, and that’s the way it is. The show has brought a lot of joy to people, and that’s not a bad legacy.”

Actor Paul Hartman, who played the Police Sergeant, was a dancer, vaudevillian and actor. He and his wife won Tony Awards for their “Angel in the Wings”.

Actor Bartlett Robinson, who played the fortuitous William in this episode, returns in “To Serve Man”.

Actor Jimmy Lydon, who portrayed Patrolman James Lydon, gave 15-year-old Elizabeth Taylor her first onscreen kiss in Cynthia (1947). In later years, he was a producer on 77 Sunset Strip and ran his own production company, Spectrum.

Actor Raymond Bailey, who played the inquisitive gentlemen’s club member Millard, tried acting after high school, struck out, and became a stock broker and banker. He tried acting again, stuck out again, and became a seamen, working as a deckhand on a freighter. He tried acting once again and third time was the charm. His career flourished, most notably as the tightwad banker Milton Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies where he developed a close friendship with his co-star, Nancy Culp, who he affectionately nicknamed “Slim”.

Whenever I watch time-travel episodes such as these, I can’t imagine being as dumb as the characters in these stories. Rather than trying to convince someone I’m from the future or say “I can’t tell you how I know because you wouldn’t believe me”, I’d just tell them something along the lines of “I overheard a conversation by two strangers at the pub. They were plotting to kill the President at Ford theater in a couple of hours!”. But, granted, that would be too easy. Too logical, and too easy. Alas, I found this one pretty cornball. When he pulled out the embroidered handkerchief with the initials J.W.B. Oof.

Season 2, Episode 14, “The Whole Truth”

This episode was first broadcast January 20, 1961.

The idea for this episode came from the combination of two episodes proposed for the doomed Mr. Bevis show. In one, Bevis was “blessed” with the power of telling the truth for 24 Hours. In another, he was a used car salesman.

In the original script, Krushchev appears to answer questions about how much better America is than the Soviet Union.

Actor Jackson Carson, who played sales shark Harvey Hunnicut, made a career out of playing nice guys with a heart of gold. He got his start doing radio comedy before moving on to film and television. In the 40’s, he would often disappear for weeks at a time and only his wife knew his whereabouts. Turned out he joined a traveling circus and entertained crowds, incognito, as one of the Big Top clowns.

Actor George Chandler, who played the old man who sells Hunnicut the haunted automobile, is better known as Uncle Petrie on Lassie.

Actress Nan Peterson, one half of the car-shopping couple, made four appearances in the Twilight Zone : as a Woman in the Park in “Walking Distance”, as a Blond in the Bar in “Night of the Meek”, as a Secretary in season 5’s “From Agnes – with Love”, and this episode.

Actor Artie Johnson, who played the part of Irv, got his stage name when a theatre marquee mispelled his original name of “Art E. Johnson” as “Artie Johnson”. He liked it so much, he kept it. He was best known for his work on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

This second season has been a roller-coaster of lofty highs and crashing lows, and this episode was one of the lows. Corny, silly humor, over-the-top music, but it could have been saved had Hunnicut ended up selling to that fast-talking politician who would suddenly find himself speaking truth at a campaign event. THAT would have offered a nice, if not unremarkable, somewhat grounded twist. Instead, we’re led to believe that, for some strange reason (outside of the fact Serling needed for it to happen for the purposes of the story), the leader of th Soviet Union ends up visiting Hunnicut’s lot and is convinced to buy that particular car. THAT is “result writing” in its purest, half-assed form.

Season 2, Episode 15, “The Invaders”

This episode was first broadcast January 27, 1961.

This was Rod Serling’s favorite of the episodes he did not personally script.

Originally, Richard Matheson pitched a version of his story titled “Devil Doll” that was rejected for being too dark. He revised the story, giving it a more sci-fi bent and it was accepted. Years later, he sold the original story, retitled “Prey”, to Playboy. He ended up adapting it as the episode “Amelia” for the television series Trilogy of Terror.

There were early discussions about using rear projection or building scale models so they could use real actors in space suits but, in the end, director Douglas Heyes went with the “puppets” so that Agnes Moorehead could actually interact with them rather than tying them in through camera trickery.

The space suit design was inspired by the Michelin Man. According to Heyes: “I designed the characters, drew them and William Tuttle built them out of a latex-type rubbery plastic material. The whole thing was a hollow shell. They made a model of the character, and then they cast a number of them. We cut them up the back so I could actually get my hand and fingers inside. I had a black sleeve on so you couldn’t see my arm against the dark backgrounds. If I put my finger in their arms, I could move their hands, if I put my finger in their legs, I could walk them. I just couldn’t walk them and move their hands at the same time. I had a little battery in my other hand with all kinds of wires attached to it. I could shooot the ray guns they were holding in their hands by pushing a little button, and the gun would light up. We rehearsed with them, oh yeah, because I needed rehearsal too. My fingers were in there acting along with Aggie. We rehearsed long sequences, since I had nothing really to cut to except, once in a while, to the little men. I was always on Aggie – it was all her and no cuts. I think I only delivered seven or eight pieces of film at the end there. They were long five or six minute takes where we just stayed on Aggie.”

Writer Richard Matheson was not satisfied with the episode, stating he felt the story took too long to get going. “And I didn’t like the little [spacemen], these little roly-poly things. I had them appearing so – just flying past your eye or your attention. They had little space things that made them fly, and you would just see them and then they’d be gone. They weren’t just wobbling around.”

The flying saucer was a prop from Forbidden Planet (1956).

The sound of the ramp lowering was used as the sound for incoming message alerts on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964).

Shortly after this episode aired, a young fan wrote Serling requesting more sci-fi-themed episodes. Serling wrote back: “Next season I’ll see what I can do about dimensional stories and space travel. My sponsors, being rather uniquely square gentlemen, have taken a somewhat dim view of science fiction. Next season, however, we hope to slip a few by them.” Some things never change!

Director Douglas Heyes lends his voice to “The Invaders” as the astronaut who sends the final message back to Earth at episode’s end.

Heyes purpotedly had his pick of scripts: “I generally chose the scripts that I directed on The Twlight Zone for the problems that were involved.” “The Invaders” would mark his ninth and final episode of the series.

Agnes Moorehead, who played the Woman in this episode, was cast on the strength of her performance on a radio show called “Sorry, Wrong Number” in which she talked constantly. Director Heyes revealed: “When this part on “The Invaders” came up and the woman was not going to talk at all – that was no dialogue for her – I said, “This will be the opposite side of the coin. Let’s get Aggie Moorehead. It turned out she had been a student of the mime Marcel Marceau. She chose to play the part like an animal under attack. Her performance built beautifully and got more and more animalistic as she was being attacked. She made sounds when angry, and whimpered when hurt, but she never used a word.”

When Moorehead initially learned the role would have no dialogue, she turned it down until Serling and Heyes convinced her.

Agnes Moorehead earned an MA in English and public speaking and, later, a doctorate in English literature before taking up teaching for five years. While doing so, she traveled back and forth to and from Paris where she studied under famed pantomime artist Marcel Marceau.

She worked heavily in radio where she befriended Orson Welles, eventually taking part in his War of the Worlds broadcast. The notoriety of the event earned her a 100k/picture deal with RKO.

An incredibly versatile actress, she earned an Oscar nomination for her role in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and would receive two more nominations over the course of her illustrious career. She was the first woman to co-host the Academy Awards (with Dick Powell). She starred on Broadway, and on television where she appeared in “Prescription Murder” which introduced the world to a young Lieutenant Columbo.

Agnes Moorehead is probably best known as Elizabeth Montgomery’s onscreen mother on Bewitched (1964), a role she initially turned down until being convinced by Montgomery after running into her in a department store. She didn’t enjoy shooting the show that required her to get up at 4:45 a.m. so she could be in make-up by 6:00 a.m., and continued shooting until 8 p.m. Her deal with the production limited her to a maximum eight episodes a season so that she could pursue other work. Despite all this, she received many Emmy cominations for her work on the show.

Moorehead was one of the many cast members of the movie The Conqueror to die of cancer, it is suspected because the film was shot on a former nuclear test site.

The second Serling stepped out in front of the camera holding a lit cigarette to deliver his opening monologue, I knew I was going to love this episode. And I absolutely did. The little space-suited invaders are pretty hokey by today’s standards, but that didn’t make the episode any less gripping, or Moorehead’s speechless performance any less enjoyable. Another one for the season 2 Top 10 list.

Season 2, Episode 16, “A Penny for Your Thoughts”

This episode was first broadcast February 3, 1961.

This was George Clayton Johnson’s first script for the series. He was encouraged to pitch by his good friend and writer Charles Beaumont. The production accepted his idea and offered to buy it, but Johnson asked for the opportunity to write the first draft of the script as part of his deal. Twilight Zone producer Buck Houghton balked at the idea but Rod Serling, perhaps feeling guilty about the fact that they had bought a previous idea from Johnson only to have a sponsor object to the subject matter, leading them to rescind the sale, agreed. And Johnson ended up delivering one of the show’s most memorable episodes.

Johnson was on set with his wife Lola when Serling visited. According to Johnson: “He’s leading a choir of on-lookers like a tour guide for visiting dignitaries and everyone on the set was electrified. No one dared to make a move while he was there. Then he sees me and Lola standing there, and he introduces me to the people “And this is George Clayton Johnson, the writer of this absolutely dandy film we are making right now.” And I am hearing my name and the praise. Then Serling introduces the director…but he introduced me first. I felt like a king.”

In talking about the seeing his script translated to the screen, Johnson said: “I had young Hector Poole, a man who will eventually become telepathic…get hit by a car, which caused the change in him so that he could read people’s minds. But MGM had a special effects guy, and the special effects guy had a gag in which you weld a steel wire on a coin, and you run this wire down and through a cigar box and the wire goes down and has a weight on the end of it, so they’d stretch it out and a man could stand way back, take out a coin, toss it into the box, and the wire would snap it up on its side. And they said instead of the car crash, let’s do this. So there were changes, but most of the changes were directional,. Rod respected other people’s work – he wasn’t interested in doing any rewriting.“

The actual chance of a coin landing on its side is 1 in 6000 rather than the one in a million odds Serling gives in his outro.

This episode was said to be the inspiration for the movie What Women Want (2000).

Actor Dick York, who played Hector Poole in this episode, previously appeared in season 1’s “The Purple Testament”. He was the first Darrin on Bewitched (1964).

Hayden Rorke, who played Sykes, was best known as the suspicious Dr. Bellows on I Dream of Jeannie (1965).

Holy smokes, I can’t believe it! A comic episode that is actually funny, restrained, heartfelt, and well-executed. I thought the writing was sharp and the story moved quickly, covering a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time and offering some truly wonderful little character moments. This one was a pleasant surprise.

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