Cheers to Dennis Weaver!  He is like the TV Gene Hackman — if he is in a show, you can trust it will probably be pretty good.  He was in a couple of a long-running series ^[1] and a ton of other stuff.  Somehow he managed to do it without overdosing, beating up his wife, or condescendingly mouthing off about issues he didn’t understand.  Best of all, at some point, he just went away.  Whatever happened to actors like that?  Oh yeah, they went away. ^[2]

Tonight at 3:50 am, Weaver is having trouble sleeping.  Sitting here typing at 12:50 am, I can tell him what has worked for me the past three years as long as you don’t mind being called a moron occasionally.  He is suffering from acute insomnia.  He turns on the light and reaches for a cigarette, neither of which seems like it would help.

Maybe his room is too cold.  He sits up, puts on his slippers for a 2-step journey, slips into his robe and sashes it, then walks to an old heater a few feet away.  Frankly, bundling up like the dude in To Build a Fire took more time than just going to the heater.  Unfortunately, when he lights the heater, it belches a yuge flame at him.  Frustrated and exhausted, he flops on the bed.  On the plus side, he is not on fire.

Weaver finally decides to see a psychiatrist.  He reveals that his wife died in a fire a year ago.  He tells the doctor of a recurring dream — wait, I thought he never slept.  He dreams of his wife Linda in their old house.

She is standing by the stairs, seemingly unaware of the fire approaching her rear from the rear.  Weaver screams to warn her, but he doesn’t actually, you know, make any effort to rescue her.  The flames engulf her.

Weaver is quick to point out this is not what happened.  They were in bed when the real fire reached their bedroom.  Blinded by the smoke, he screamed for Linda but she did not answer — in the bed might have been a good place to start feeling around (as it usually is).  He was able to get to the bathroom and jump out the window.  The doctor suggests guilt is keeping him awake, but Weaver disagrees.

He does admit to being bothered by the accusations of Linda’s brother Jack Fletcher that he did nothing to save her.  Oh, I guess Mr. Tough Guy would have run right into the fire to save her!  Easy to say, safely after-the-fact from some comfy . . . “military hospital in Maryland”.  Oh.

Weaver realizes that his insomnia did not begin until Fletcher was released from the military hospital in Maryland (oh why the hell can’t they just say Walter Reed?).  Despite making 20 years of progress in their first session, Weaver is not cured.  That night he is tossing and turning in bed again.  He picks up a paperback but the phone interrupts him.  It is Fletcher, saying he is in town.  He menacingly says, “You know why I’m here, don’t you Charlie?”

That night in his pajamas, Weaver calls the military hospital ^[3] to get Fletcher’s new address.  What the hospital lacks in HIPAA privacy rules, it makes up in 24-hour service.  They happily give him Fletcher’s new address in Manhattan.  Weaver goes to visit Fletcher.  BTW, Weaver pays Fletcher the respect of dressing up, but this is the 3rd day he has worn that same necktie.  Oh well, maybe his others were lost in the fire; and it is a snappy number.

When Fletcher opens the door, Weaver sees that he is in a wheelchair.  He begins threatening Weaver about letting his sister die.  They begin fighting — yeah, Weaver vs a guy in a wheelchair.  It’s a closer match than you would expect unless you’ve ever seen Weaver.  Fletcher pulls out a gun, evening the odds quite a bit.  Fletcher is no rocket scientist despite the resemblance to Stephen Hawking.  Weaver gets his hands on the gun and they struggle over it.  Weaver manages to point the barrel toward Fletcher’s noggin and shoots him in the face.

Weaver goes home, has a beer, kicks off his shoes, lights the heater and falls into the deepest sleep he has had in a year.  He even sleeps right through the sirens and roar of the fire engines.  Although, he was probably long dead by that time from the smoke the heater put out.

Despite the great performance by Weaver, I’m a little ambivalent on this one.  Despite him being so twitchy, I still didn’t think of him as a coward who abandoned his wife.  The first fire just seemed like a tough circumstance that he was lucky to live through himself. It even works out that his guilt and self-loathing were tied more to a fear of Fletcher than to his inability to save Linda.

Shooting his brother-in-law might have been extreme, and illegal in most states, but Fletcher really was a threatening dick.  Sure he was in a wheelchair, but he had pointed a pistol at Weaver and literally said, “Here’s my legs!”  It’s hard for me to get too upset about his murder.

Ultimately, it was a nice set-up and spike of brutal cosmic justice.  Ya hear that, yesterday’s Twilight Zone!

Other Stuff:

• [1] For example, he was in 290 episodes of Gunsmoke.  What amuses me is that isn’t even half the run of the series.  Maybe that was an early example of him knowing when to get out.
• [2] Actually, I see one reason he slowed down is that he died in 2006.  He still seems like a reg’lar guy, though.
• [3] Now referred to as Dover Veteran’s Hospital, but they’re not fooling anyone.
• Weaver was also in a sleep-centric episode of the original Twilight Zone one year and 3 days after this aired.  In that story, he was trying not to go to sleep.  It was remade into a 1986 TZ episode where I was trying not to go to sleep. ^[4]
• [4] To be fair, I think it was actually one of their better episodes.
• For more info on the episode head over to Bare*Bones Ezine.