Mr. Denton on Doomsday (SSN 1, EP 3, 10.26.1959)

Second chances don't happen often in real life and when they do, it's pretty special. This rare nature of second chances -- combined with the peculiar state of awestruck that often accompanies the realization that one is occurring -- renders them perfect subject matter in The Twlight Zone.

With all this talk of the extraordinary qualities of second chances, I would not describe "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" as especially remarkable. The town drunk, Mr. Denton (Dan Duryea), finds a gun purposefully dropped a peddler named Henry J. Fate (Malcolm Atterbury). (Pretty clever, right?) Soon enough, Mr. Denton finds himself becoming a new man or a former version of himself, depending on how you want to think about it. Word spreads that Mr. Denton is back to being a fast gunsman and soon after, a young cowboy comes to town for a duel. Not surprisingly, Fate steps in again, and not surprisingly, neither man wins.

I feel as though I am being harsh on "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" in saying that it's not extraordinary. Perhaps why I can't seem to muster up much enthusiasm is because it presents less questions and less things to ponder. There's less intrigue. Unlike Mr. Death from the last episode, I have never found myself wondering what Fate looks like, although the whole peddler image seems to work well. Beyond that, I've just been stumped thinking about second chances: when I've been on the receiving end, when I've given them, when I've wanted them...you get the idea. Second chances are generally only remarkable to those experiencing them, so it's honestly not even worth sharing one of my own stories to try to prove a point or make a connection between Mr. Denton and me.

Yeah, that's about it. And trust me, my conclusions came after giving "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" a second chance.

One for the Angels (SSN 1, EP 2, 10.09.1959)

Bored and lonely on a Saturday night during my freshman year of college, I watched Meet Joe Black. And to be honest, the only thing I recall is that Death pays a visit and that he is extremely fond of peanut butter. Beyond that, I would have to do a second viewing. With 154 TZ episodes to go, not to mention my entire other ever-growing "to see list," I don't think I will be doing in the near future. Sorry, Brad Pitt.

So here's the connection between Joe Black and the second TZ episode: the general premise of "One for the Angels" is the same. Death visits and life becomes complicated.

More specifically, Death (Murray Hamilton) confronts Lew Bookman (Ed Wynn), an elderly sidewalk salesman and informs him that he will die in his sleep at midnight -- that is, unless Bookman comes up with a compelling reason to delay the event. Bookman makes a plea that he should be allowed extra time that would permit him to pitch the big sale that his career lacks -- "one for the angels." Death agrees, but upon realizing that Bookman has tricked him because he intends to delay that sale infinitely -- and by doing so, prevent his death -- Death punishes him by threatening to take another person in his place, one of the neighborhood children that Bookman adores. If you can't see where this is going, I'll just say that Bookman's pitch for the angels ends up being one that prevents Death from taking the child, instead forcing Death to take him, as originally planned.

"One for the Angels" is not one of the more captivating episodes, both in the writing and the acting. It's not one that I think I would watch twice. That being said, while watching the episode may not be especially memorable, it raises questions that don't have easy answers.

So here are the ones that are bothering me the most. No, I don't have answers. Sure, I have ideas of how I would answer, but nothing so definitive that I would dare to publish it here. But here they are:

1. What does death look like? In both Meet Joe Black and "One for the Angels," Death is a man. And not just any man -- one who's sharply dressed, articulate, and thoughtful. But why a man? Perhaps if physical manifestations of Death really do exist, it's personified, sort of like how things work in Monsters, Inc. (Strange as it may seem, I really like this idea. Thanks, Pixar.)
   
2. Who would you sacrifice yourself for? The only thing I will say is that I suspect one's answer to this question depends greatly on age. Beyond that, things get complicated.
   
3. If you knew when you could die, would you want to know? In an ideal world, it seems like we should all be able to look back on any given day and be able to be okay with that being our last one. Seems like a good goal.

With that last question in mind, midnight is four minutes away. I guess I have a couple of things to do before I'm really okay with answering it in a satisfactory way.

Where Is Everybody? (SSN 1, EP 1, 10.2.1959)

"Where is everybody?"

At one point or another, everyone has asked this question. But why? For as much pride as someone may take in their independence or happy solitude, there remains that unexplainable need to interact with people. Sometimes, it doesn't even need to be personal contact, maybe just walking down the street. But total shutoff from people, no one in sight? No, that doesn't work so well.

Such is the case for Mike Harris, the protagonist of "Where Is Everybody?," the pilot for The Twilight Zone. He appears to be the only person in a small American town, coincidentally the same set used for Back to the Future. Confusingly, traces of a human presence exist (hot water on the stove, a lit cigar) but save Mike Harris, there are no people. Wandering from place to place, he grows increasingly panicked as he struggles to answer "Where is everybody?" while simultaneously and paradoxically sensing that someone is watching him. Eventually, we learn that Mike Harris's Twilight Zone is his mind, while his real location is a five foot square metal box in an airport hangar: a testing site being observed by military scientists to determine man's physical and psychological readiness for a trip to the Moon.

Like all Twilight Zone episodes, the obvious magic of this story rests in the people. In other words, while the name "Twilight Zone" conveys a place, what an audience generally remembers and pays attention to are the people in the Twilight Zone, not the Twilight Zone itself. What happens when we think of the Twilight Zone as a site, a character in its own right that possesses a dynamic relationship with its inhabitants? As I mentioned, the Twilight Zone in "Where is Everybody?" is Mike Harris's mind, or more precisely, a Main Street American town. But why here? Why not a city, where the contrast of empty streets and establishments would have rendered the question "Where is everybody?" all that much more troubling for Mike Harris? Surely there could have been compelling scenes involving some form of vacant public transportation, an empty park with human statues, or a long boulevard lined with towering skyscrapers, totally void of people.

Only Rod Serling could properly respond to my question, but I speculate that that he felt the smaller scale (undoubtedly influenced by his life in upstate New York) to be more accessible to his target audience. The town's institutions visited by Mike Harris capture and confirm what we conceive to be quintessentially American: an ice cream parlor, a jail, a town square, a movie theatre. But without people, we too realize that something is these amiss with these places: a point that becomes clear when Mike Harris bursts into an empty movie theatre and completely melts down. Yes, we may spend our lives hating the crowd, but we still need it -- and want it -- in familiar places.

Fifty years after "Where Is Everybody?", filmmakers continue to grapple with the relationship between man and the Moon. Most recently, "Moon" explores one man's crisis on the Moon, in which he discovers that his corporate employer has endlessly cloned him, thus negating his chance of ever returning to Earth, or more precisely, going home. Until the protagonist, Sam Bell, discovers the corporation's plot, all of his time is spent yearning for human contact -- and rightly so, after almost three years of being on the Moon. In the same way that in missing a loved one you might listen to a voicemail a million times, reread an e-mail until you have it memorized, or replay a memory until any DVD player would have worn it out, Sam becomes totally absorbed in videos sent to him by his wife and his dreams of being with her. It's all he thinks about it. And you know that you'd be doing the same thing if you were stuck on the Moon.

Well, it's not all Sam Bell thinks about in his pre-crisis mode. Like The Twilight Zone, the emphasis in "Moon" is the people, not a site. For as much as Sam Bell longs for home -- which we most readily understand to be defined by the people he misses -- he clearly values the notion of home as a place, as evident in his primary leisure activity: carving wooden buildings for an impressive model of a town. Footage of Sam Bell casually chipping away at these miniature structures seems relatively unimportant until his clone arrives and wants to move the model to search for the rest of the clones. The real Sam Bell adamantly refuses to move the model, and what ensues is a bloody, violent battle between the two men. The town -- a mere representation of home, scarcely the real thing -- is worth fighting for.

You have to wonder what the crew behind "Where Is Everybody?" would have said if they knew that just a decade later, man would conquer the Moon. Yes, skeptics contest that this event may have not actually occurred. But one way or another, we did land on the Moon, even if it was just in our heads. After all, Mike Harris demonstrates the power of the human mind, for given the right circumstances, a person can believe just about anything.