The bridge crew of this White Star Line ship sees a small boat in the middle of the ocean with a single passenger.  I don’t know if the White Line caps were just an error, or if Serling was trying to lead viewers to believe this was the Titanic.

As they move closer, the Captain spots the name Titanic on the bow of the small boat, so the cap ruse wouldn’t have lasted long anyway.  The survivor, who the Captain thought to be a woman, is brought on board and taken to the infirmary.  It actually turns out to be a man who put on women’s clothing to escape the sinking ship.

Or . . . maybe it was a dude who thought, “Gee, I don’t know anyone on the ship, we’re 1,000 miles from land, my parents are dead, I’m alone in my cabin, and I like to wear women’s clothes.  So dammit, I’m putting on this dress and parading around my stateroom singing showtunes.”  Then, BAM!  They hit the iceberg and he is stuck in the dress until he is rescued.  Curse the luck!

Another officer comments that the boat was all barnacled up to the waterline as if it had been in the water for 3 years — the time since the Titanic sank.  The Captain’s theory is that this is some sort of wartime deception.  It’s only then that we learn this ship is the Lusitania.  Of course, if this were remade today, no one would have any idea what the Lusitania was, or what her fate was.

The survivor describes how he put on the dress, put a muffler over his face and knocked people aside to board a lifeboat with the women and children; completely foregoing the less embarrassing scenario I conjectured.  John Calicos chews the bulkheads describing the sound of the collision, the sinking, the tilted decks, the water rushing in, the screams.  In a nice touch, he is in the dress for the whole episode — however, to be fair, it is a simple, understated number.

He describes himself as a Flying Dutchman fated to be picked up by doomed ships.  He tells the doctor the Lusitania will be hit by a torpedo and sink in 18 minutes.

The doctor therefore concludes that the crew must all be phantoms just playing roles in the survivor’s never-ending damnation.  The Captain protests that he is not a ghost, but the Doctor and the rest of the crew disappear. Fittingly, the Captain disappears last; even fate adheres to maritime tradition.  The survivor runs on deck and sees a periscope.  Then a torpedo.

Another ship spots the survivor in a small boat with Lusitania painted on the bow.  A crewman helpfully turns to the camera sporting a cap that says Andrea Doria.  Again meaning nothing to most people today.

All of the casualties on the Andrea Doria were killed upon impact, and it took 11 hours to sink.  Passengers were soon rescued by lifeboat and helicopter.  If the survivor was in women’s clothing for that one, he’s got some explaining to do.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Judgment Night, where a U-boat commander is doomed to experience the fate of his victims.
• The survivor is played by John Colicos, the Baltar of the 1970’s Battlestar Gallactica.  However, he was known as Count Baltar, and did not have the ironic name Gaius.
• Andrea Doria was a man, man!  The Italian Navy has commissioned 2 ships named Andrea Doria after the passenger liner sank in 1956.  Typical government thinking — I doubt you will see the Carnival Cruise Line christening a new Titanic.
• There actually was one non-impact death, but it is too sad to mention in a cesspool like this.
• The Andrea Doria sank off the coast of Nantucket.  Shockingly, no Kennedys were at fault.
• That permanent cigarette holder in Serling’s teeth is getting on my nerves:

Colonel Dittman leads his son Archie Jr. and lawyer Jeffrey Pierce into his trophy room. Sadly, he is not a bowler, so the trophies are the heads of animals that he has killed.  He points out his servant Tom who he says is an Ibo, son of a tribal chief.  But he’s OK because he was highly educated in England.  So now he is a servant.

“Quite a specimen, isn’t he,” the Colonel says proudly.  He tells the Pierce not to be misled by the Oxford accent and tailored clothes.  He has never really left the jungle, still carries amulets, and believes in black magic.  “A pagan savage, like all of his breed.”  Thank God MSNBC was not alive to see this.

The Colonel tells Pierce that hunting is his life, there is no game he hasn’t stalked and killed.  Pierce finally brings Archie Jr. into conversation mentioning that he just graduated from college.  The Colonel says it is Jr’s. one achievement in life other than swilling copious amounts of brandy.  He is clearly disappointed by his son and steers the conversation back to his trophies.

Pierce asks Archie Jr. if he hunts and his father mocks him as being a “dish of jellied consomme”, also a waste of space, lacking character and guts; a “pallid hand-wringer” who the colonel fears will take his inheritance and give it to one of his causes:  “Senegalese Unwed Mothers, Pickaninny’s Free Lunch Program or the Women’s Liberation Movement.”

This episode originally aired on January 7, 1971 — six days before the debut of All in the Family.  The template is similar, though.  The Colonel is Archie Bunker and Archie Jr. is Mike Stivic with better hair (but unlikely to marry a busty blonde).

The Colonel taunts Archie Jr. about the trust fund he is due to receive.  He wants to add a codicil that his son must kill an animal within 15 days or the trust will be dissolved.  The Colonel even mocks Archie Jr’s. passive reaction to this threat.

If Archie Jr. does not come through, the Colonel will take his $2 million and purposely squander it on risky investments.  Archie finally lashes out and asks his father if it is really so inconceivable that he could kill something.  The Colonel says it is inconceivable that he “sired such a mewling, sniveling, self-indulgent milksop.”  This guy is priceless!

Archie mans up and points a rifle at the Colonel, but Tom intercedes, taking the rifle.  The Colonel tells Tom to see Archie Jr. to bed and leave a light on as “he’s probably afraid of the dark, too.”  Zing!

Archie Jr. admits his father is a 20th century man, probably closer to the norm than himself.  He will try to shoot a deer tomorrow.

That night the Colonel finds Tom in the trophy room praying.  Despite Serling’s best liberal intentions, he turns Tom into the amulet-wearing believer in pagan gods that the bigoted Colonel accused him of being.

The next day in the woods, Archie Jr. and the Colonel spot a deer.  Archie Jr. raises the rifle and lines up the shot. But he hesitates.  The Colonel swats the rifle and the shot goes awry enabling the deer to escape.

Does no one care about composition? The antlers have to go right into his forehead?

As Pierce is leaving, Tom says the Colonel has been punished for making Archie Jr. fire at the deer.  Last night Tom prayed to his gods that “the hunter should know what it is like to be the victim.”

The Colonel was so over-the-top nasty that he was pretty fun to watch.  Serling did not give him a worthy adversary, though.  Archie Jr. is supposed to be a much more passive, sensitive soul than his old man.  Unfortunately, Serling attempts to achieve this by giving him nothing to do.  He has very few lines despite being present in nearly every scene.  When he does let loose, it is in an effeminate, high-pitched screech.

And the peace button is a nice touch.

Post:Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.
• Ironically, Archie Jr. (Barry Brown) shot himself at age 27.
• Tom went on to play Boomer in Battlestar Gallactica.

No, the one in the 1970’s.

The first original tale by Rod Serling and it is a turd.  Well, it is credited as an original, but it should say “Based on a story by Charles Beaumont” as it shares the same exact twist as A Nice Place to Visit from The Twilight Zone.

Godfrey Cambridge plays a comedian and it is excruciating to watch.  OK, his character is supposed to be bad, but this is just painful.  It is inconceivable that he is making a living at it.  After his act, he talks to his manger Tom Bosley who has managed him for 16 years, also inconceivable.  The club owner played by Grandpa Munster Al Lewis comes in and fires him — conceivable.

Cambridge tells his manager he would give everything he’s got just to make somebody laugh.  Later in a bar he gets word his manager has bailed on him.  A guru, complete with turban approaches him. He must perform one miracle a month. Cambridge asks the guru to make it so he can make people laugh.

The guru obliges.  Soon Cambridge is hugely successful, but is left unfulfilled as people laugh at everything he says.  His manager even comes back.  When he tries out for a serious dramatic role, they all laugh at him.

This is the same revelation as in TZ’s A Nice Place to Visit — that there can be too much of a good thing.  Actually it makes a little more sense here.  In the TZ version, the small time hood finds himself in the “hell” of always getting the winning hand, always getting the perfect roll of the dice, and never having the dames play hard to get.  OK, the thrill might have gone out of gambling, but did he really get tired of the girls?

In TZ, the character is revealed to be dead and in hell.  In NG, Cambridge is alive, but we experience the hell of watching him.  He begs the swami to give him a new wish — he wants to touch people, to bring a tear to their eye.  That happens as he is hit by car.  A woman selling flowers nearby sheds a tear of sorrow.  The audience sheds tears of joy.

The real shocking twist here is that this episode was directed by Steven Spielberg.  He didn’t write it or cast it, but he sure didn’t do much with what he was handed.  There are stories of turmoil on the set and him being fired, but ultimately most of the scenes were directed by him.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.
• Serling did already have one segment that was an original, the embarrassing Nature of the Enemy.  I am doing his memory a favor by pretending that short “sketch” does not exist.
• Six years later, Cambridge was dead at 43.  He had a heart attack on-set playing Idi Amin in Victory at Entebbe.  Amin claimed his death was an act of God . . . the actor who replaced him lived to 81.
• If I knew this was the next act on the bill, I wouldn’t be so quick to boo Cambridge off the stage; I would keep him there like Jerry Lewis on the telethon.  Ladies and gentlemen, the Rocky Mountain Rockettes:

Yikes!

Again, I say Yikes!

It is impossible to see that title without thinking of the Statler Brothers song from Pulp Fiction.

Agnes Moorehead’s brother is reading to her from Charles Dicken’s Bleak House.  He and their two sisters all live in this house under the thumb of Agnes as she alone inherited their father’s fortune.  His patience is clearly running out as he has been at her beck and call for 25 years — most of it probably spent reading the 1,000 page Bleak House.

He gives her some pain pills.  She asks him to start reading Great Expectations to her.  At this point, no jury in the world would convict him.

Agnes’ brother is a doctor who has abandoned his failing practice.  After giving her the pills he goes downstairs for some standard Rod Serling padding-out-the-run-time dialogue.  He eventually gets to the point, which is that Agnes “has only a matter of days left.”  Demonstrating the diagnostic acumen that sent his practice into a tailspin, she croaks within 5 minutes.

Hearing a noise upstairs, her brother goes up to check on her and finds her dead.  He calls to make arrangements for the funeral as his sisters, or one of them anyway, get weepy.  They are startled to find that Agnes’ shadow has suddenly appeared on the wall.

The doctor is troubled by the shadow, and calls it a trick of refraction, maybe due to the way the furniture is positioned.

The funeral home calls and the doctor tells then the cause of death was acute dyspepsia — that’s the ticket — and uh, no need any verification on that, no siree Bob.

Wracked with guilt, he tries painting over the shadow, but to no avail — although the paint also does not even cover up the pattern on the wallpaper, so maybe it just isn’t very good paint.  And wouldn’t the solution be to strip the wallpaper, not to paint over it?

Sister #2 believes a cover-up is impossible, and she plainly states that she means covering up the murder also.

Sister #1 puts some of Agnes’s “meds” in the doctor’s tea to calm him down.  He dies just as he killed Agnes.  This whole process is a little too cutesy as far as who knows what.

The sisters don’t seem too upset at his death.  His shadow has joined Agnes’ so he will be reading Dickens to her for eternity.  Or until they redecorate.  “It is just like having them here,” says one sister.  Yeah, if there were silent, grey and two-dimensional before they died — well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.

The shadow of Agnes really is very well done.  The silhouette painted on the wallpaper is great and the coloration is perfect for a shadow.  When they reveal the brother’s shadow, it is obviously a real shadow; clearly they did not want to pay the artist to come back a second day.  There was no attempt to match the colors, and as they pan to show the two shadows, the brother’s shadow is even moving for the first few frames.  Very cheesy.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Agnes Moorehead was in the classic The Invaders.
• Directed by Jeff Corey who was in The Dead Man.
• Whereas the other tale in this episode, The House, reused the interior from Roddy McDowell’s house in The Cemetery, this episode reuses the exterior of that same house.
• And minor point, but is it too much to ask that shows be in the same order as they aired or appear on the cover?  20 Horror Movies for $5, Night Gallery and Ray Bradbury Theater all fail on this most fundamental level.
• RBT is especially a challenge as the episodes are in somewhat random order, and not listed on the box or the disks.  When I say watching that show is a chore, I mean it literally.

Another non-original from shirkoholic Rod Serling.  Purposely ambiguous, but maybe a little too squishy for its own good.

Elaine Latimer is describing a recurring dream where she is driving, and with a sense of calm, arrives at the titular house.  She gets out of her car in slo-mo, clothes billowing dreamily behind her and knocks on the door.  She has no idea what she would say if anyone answers.  No one comes to the door, so she returns to her car and drives away.  Only then does the doorknob turn and the door open.  Which is a little strange because this is her dream, but she is not in it at this point.

It is revealed that she is telling this to a psychiatrist.  She will be leaving the sanitarium tomorrow, having been cured, or her insurance having run out.

As she is driving away from the sanitarium, apparently aimlessly, she finds herself recognizing sights from her dream — the road, a pond, and finally the house.  The house is for sale and the realtor happens to be standing in the yard.  They go inside and shockingly do not have sex (note to self, ease up on the porn).  She does not require  a tour; she knows the layout and the contents of the house from her dream.

Turns out the house is a steal because it is haunted.  Maybe it is haunted by the ghosts of Roddy McDowell and Ozzie Davis as this is the house where they died in The Cemetery:

This is where it gets weird.  She has moved into the house, and is taking a nap during the day.  We cut to her recurring dream as she pulls up to the house in her billowy orange outfit.  In the dream, she again knocks on the door.  But the knock wakes her up and she goes downstairs only in time to hear a car pulling away.  OK, like it, very TZ.

She calls her psychiatrist.  While on the phone, she again hears a knock.  Apparently the phone is tethered to the wall with some sort of cord.  What is this the 70’s?  Oh yeah.  She tells the doc to hang on and runs downstairs.  She opens the door and gasps, but we don’t see at what.

She goes back to the doc on the phone and says she just saw the ghost.  “I am the ghost, doctor,” she says as the camera cuts to her in orange in the driveway again.  We hear the car pulling away as she says goodby to him.

She naps again — maybe she was in the sanitarium for narcolepsy — and we see the woman in orange approach then house again.  She gets out of the car, and gives the standard single knock on the door.  Elaine awakens at the knock, laments not having a bedroom on the first floor, and runs downstairs again. She is just in time to see the car pulling away and runs after it in full billow.

This would be fine, but she was face-to-face with her doppelganger earlier during the interrupted phone call, so there is no mystery who/what is doing the knocking.  That would have been the time for confrontation.  So, are we to believe this cycle will go on forever?  There is really no torment now that she knows the identity — other than lost sleep, and this only seems to happen during daytime naps to correspond to the sunny day in the dream.  Will the ghost never allow a face-to-face meeting again?  Then why that one time?  Even ambiguity needs to be bottled to make sense.  It just felt like a piece was missing.

Or maybe there was an extra piece, as it would have made more sense if she had never seen the “ghost” (or maybe just from a window, seeing the car pull away).

There are a few other actors, but the episode is really carried by Joanna Pettet. Strangely, I didn’t find her all that attractive even though I see a lot of praise for her online.  But I will say this: she wears the hell out of those 70’s billowy clothes.  Just the scenes of her walking and running in slow-mo in those outfits are worth the price of admission.

Good stuff.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.
• Directed by Gomez Addams.
• The episode was devoid of humor, and didn’t need it.  But I wonder if this was an intentional joke they slipped in or a faux pas: