The Twilight Zone: Mr. Denton on Doomsday
Jul. 22nd, 2025 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith my knowledge of The Twilight Zone having been limited more or less to “what everyone knows,” a good number of episode titles still feel like enigmas. “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” just the third episode in my complete Blu-Ray set, had me going back to what I did know and guessing at “some sort of ‘little’ man and some sort of allusion to a considerable anxiety of the 1950s and beyond...” It might have taken Rod Serling’s preview at the end of the previous episode (the only time he appears on camera this early on, which is one of the things diverging from my expectations) to realise just what lay ahead. That did amuse me a bit.
The limited number of episodes I’ve seen adapted into short stories did include one playing on “the Western.” Beyond that, I suppose I could bring up assumptions the genre had been a mainstay of movies for years and had carried over into television. (That it didn’t quite last into my own time does have me thinking in a somewhat unfortunate way of just how much stuff from my own early days has lasted until now, and how if that had been the case back then there would have been plenty of “cowboy shows” on TV as opposed to just some “outer space Westerns”...) In any case, an element of the fantastic took a little while to work its way into the dilemma of the main character, who wasn’t quite a “little” man. I wondered a bit a first about “easy ways out” being offered, but complications set in afterwards, which made the story more interesting. The resolution might even have had me thinking a little bit about the anxious standoff of the time, although that thought couldn’t be carried very far before the analogy broke down.
The limited number of episodes I’ve seen adapted into short stories did include one playing on “the Western.” Beyond that, I suppose I could bring up assumptions the genre had been a mainstay of movies for years and had carried over into television. (That it didn’t quite last into my own time does have me thinking in a somewhat unfortunate way of just how much stuff from my own early days has lasted until now, and how if that had been the case back then there would have been plenty of “cowboy shows” on TV as opposed to just some “outer space Westerns”...) In any case, an element of the fantastic took a little while to work its way into the dilemma of the main character, who wasn’t quite a “little” man. I wondered a bit a first about “easy ways out” being offered, but complications set in afterwards, which made the story more interesting. The resolution might even have had me thinking a little bit about the anxious standoff of the time, although that thought couldn’t be carried very far before the analogy broke down.