The Twilight Zone: One for the Angels
Jul. 16th, 2025 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOnce I’d got the shrink wrap off a complete Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set and proven the show’s episodes weren’t all that long (even if that might point out how many old movies I recorded to DVD off Turner Classic Movies but haven’t got around to watching), it was a bit easier to move on to the second instalment of the series. “One for the Angels” hadn’t been adapted into a short story and wasn’t one of the episodes that gets brought up to invoke the show these days, so I was wondering a little how this second step would turn out. I also have to admit that, in the three-decade-old issue of the science fiction journal I returned to just a little while ago, there’d also been an article by Gary Westfahl offering “extracts from a nonexistent book” of capsule biographies from science fiction film and television that had offered faint praise at best for Rod Serling.
As it turned out the closest this episode came to “science fiction” was a Robby the Robot toy (showing up just a few years after Forbidden Planet and sporting a cyclops-eye sticker on the head glass). Having known in advance there was a lot of fantasy in The Twilight Zone (with Westfahl’s faint praise extending more towards Serling’s fantasy), a “trying to deal with Death” story turned out fine with me. I could wonder to what extent the two main characters (a change from the first episode, of course) represented “the past and the present,” and to how “contemporary takes on classic subjects” eventually become “period pieces.” There was a certain amount of sentimentality in the episode, but I seemed better with it than Westfahl had been. Still, I can wonder what might happen after an extended string of sentimental episodes.
As it turned out the closest this episode came to “science fiction” was a Robby the Robot toy (showing up just a few years after Forbidden Planet and sporting a cyclops-eye sticker on the head glass). Having known in advance there was a lot of fantasy in The Twilight Zone (with Westfahl’s faint praise extending more towards Serling’s fantasy), a “trying to deal with Death” story turned out fine with me. I could wonder to what extent the two main characters (a change from the first episode, of course) represented “the past and the present,” and to how “contemporary takes on classic subjects” eventually become “period pieces.” There was a certain amount of sentimentality in the episode, but I seemed better with it than Westfahl had been. Still, I can wonder what might happen after an extended string of sentimental episodes.