The Twilight Zone: Walking Distance
Aug. 13th, 2025 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter a week’s break I returned to my Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set. In that extended pause I had been thinking ahead to the episode “Walking Distance.” It was one of the handful I was already aware of through adaptations, but I did have the impression it hadn’t left quite as much of an impression on me as other examples had. When I did get around to the episode, though, I could see a real point to it now. I suppose I also thought a bit about how my week’s break had involved going home, which put me in a better position than the main character of the episode...
So far as having been aware of the episode through adaptations went, that had happened in my youth. It seems quite possible that in advance of the short story adaptation, I’d read a slim digest-sized volume of black-and-white comics adaptations in the children’s section of my home town’s library. That does seem to fit in with the thought the story of a man in his mid-thirties, speeding away from a seemingly well-off yet still somehow unsatisfying life in his sports car and then walking the last mile and a half from a gas station to his home town, would have more of an impact on me now even if part of this involved thinking again about how much entertainment at hand these days seems to involve selling things people were first exposed to as children.
At first I did wonder about the episode being heavy on the “sentimentality” I saw Rod Serling accused of not that long ago, but things did start to bite harder as the man came across not just how his home town hadn’t changed from the way he remembered it, but also people from back then. The twist ending might have lingered with me from before; this time I might have toyed with thoughts of it being set up by “unconscious anticipations of how history is going to change.” There was a bit of working out the chronology and supposing this was one more example of “having been unaware of the tough parts of grown-up life,” and also a bit of thinking the message was delivered through sheer “speechifying,” but in the end I was also thinking a bit of “your drugstore soda fountain does still exist.” As part of the message had it, I’m quite willing to keep looking ahead.
So far as having been aware of the episode through adaptations went, that had happened in my youth. It seems quite possible that in advance of the short story adaptation, I’d read a slim digest-sized volume of black-and-white comics adaptations in the children’s section of my home town’s library. That does seem to fit in with the thought the story of a man in his mid-thirties, speeding away from a seemingly well-off yet still somehow unsatisfying life in his sports car and then walking the last mile and a half from a gas station to his home town, would have more of an impact on me now even if part of this involved thinking again about how much entertainment at hand these days seems to involve selling things people were first exposed to as children.
At first I did wonder about the episode being heavy on the “sentimentality” I saw Rod Serling accused of not that long ago, but things did start to bite harder as the man came across not just how his home town hadn’t changed from the way he remembered it, but also people from back then. The twist ending might have lingered with me from before; this time I might have toyed with thoughts of it being set up by “unconscious anticipations of how history is going to change.” There was a bit of working out the chronology and supposing this was one more example of “having been unaware of the tough parts of grown-up life,” and also a bit of thinking the message was delivered through sheer “speechifying,” but in the end I was also thinking a bit of “your drugstore soda fountain does still exist.” As part of the message had it, I’m quite willing to keep looking ahead.