The Cruelest Twilight Zone Episode
Eric Leif Davin
A local TV sub-channel airs episodes of the original “Twilight Zone” every late weeknight. Recently I caught the 1959 episode, “Time Enough at Last.” The episode is based on a 1953 story in “If” magazine by the female science fiction writer Lynn Venable. I’ve seen every episode of the series, both at the original airing time and since, so I’ve seen this episode several times. But, I always watch it again, because I think it’s perhaps the most memorable of many memorable episodes.
It stars Burgess Meredith as a meek, harmless, and sympathetic bookworm who is so nearly blind he needs thick eyeglasses to read the books he’s constantly, everywhere, reading. He’d love to talk about what he’s read, but he lives in a world of philistines, beginning with his wife and including his co-workers in the bank where he is a teller. No one is interested in talking about, or hearing about, the books he’s always reading.
One day, after he has retreated to the depths of the bank vault to eat his bag lunch and peruse the book he carried to work with him in privacy, his world suddenly changes. The nuclear war erupts that all the newspapers and radio broadcasts warned about. The entire city, nation, world (?) is wiped out. But, he is spared because he was in the bank vault reading his book.
He emerges to find only a ruined city. As he stumbles among the ruins, he comes to the public library. He goes inside and finds that the tens of thousands of books inside have been mostly preserved. He joyfully stacks the books in numbered piles and plans the weeks, months, years of pleasant undisturbed reading he now has ahead of him, now that he has “Time Enough At Last” to read everything he wants to read.
Then he bends over, his glasses slip from his face, and the lenses shatter on the pavement. The camera shows the world from his viewpoint, all fuzzy and unrecognizable, as he is almost blind without his glasses. Now, of course, he will never be able to read all those wonderful books he loves, and which he has stacked all around him. He collapses on the library’s steps and pitifully cries, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair!” And the story thus ends.
And, of course, it isn’t fair, as he has done absolutely nothing to deserve this fate. As I said, he is a meek and mild man, harmless, put upon by all around him who don’t share his love of reading. Our sympathies are entirely with him. This should not happen to him. It’s a cruel joke of the universe. Indeed, I think this is the cruelest “Twilight Zone” episode in the entire series.
Which is exactly why it is such a memorable episode.
Good stories, memorable stories, gut-wrenching stories, are about bad things happening to good people, ideally people who don’t deserve those bad things. We don’t care if bad things happen to bad people. They deserve their fates, and we feel that justice has been served. We nod approvingly, and quickly forget them.
But, when fate defeats good people, people we care about, even identify with, people who have done nothing to deserve their defeat, our guts are wrenched and we recoil at the injustice of the universe. And we remember it. That’s the reason we remember the sad love songs, the hurting love songs, most of all. That’s why the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet still touches us more than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote of the those young “star-crossed lovers.”
In Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” published in 2000, he said that a writer (and, thus, a reader) has to “love” his or her people. “There is no horror without love,” he said. This is because only if you love your people do you, the writer or the reader, care about what happens to those people.
And now, after watching “Time Enough At Last” again, I finally understand what he means. I always disliked this episode because of its gratuitous cruelty to an undeserving victim. But, I always remembered the episode vividly. And now I know why. I love that Burgess Meredith character. And so the horror – the undeserved horror – of what happens to him is unforgettable.
And this is no doubt why Rod Serling chose Lynn Venable’s story to dramatize as the cruelest “Twilight Zone” episode of them all.
