The Twilight Zone: Time Enough at Last
Sep. 10th, 2025 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter a week’s break due to a day trip to my extended family’s annual picnic, I got back to my Twilight Zone set and moved on to its second Blu-Ray disc. Extracting that disc from where it had been stacked behind the first and overlapped over more did have me wondering whether I ought to disperse the set into more regular cases. In moving on, though, I was heading from “episodes I was aware of through their adaptations” and “episodes I hadn’t really known about before” alike to one of “the episodes you can pick up on through cultural osmosis,” and wondering just what I’d made of it myself...
In picking up on the twist ending of “Time Enough at Last,” I’d also formed the impression it could be treated with varying shades of condescension as not really saying anything coherent enough to be important. Before I began watching the episode myself, I at least asked if getting “an explosive end of the world” on the TV screen at the time it was made amounted to something in itself, even if I was aware written science fiction had been dwelling on the subject for close to fifteen years by that point.
As for the episode involving “trying to catch up on your reading,” I did wonder about the main character being introduced as something of a compulsive reader, something I can recognise problems with from personal experience, rather than just “an intellectual in a philistine world.” (It also catches my attention when an episode has characters speaking before Rod Serling provides his opening narration.) A bit later on, though, the main character’s wife blacking out the pages of a poetry book, putting it back where the main character thought he’d hidden it, and then tearing pages out of the book when she catches him with it seemed to skew more towards my early assumption.
When things did get to the end of the world, I was struck by things detouring towards “the terrors of loneliness” for some time before the main character recovered from holding a gun to his head (which I’d picked up on before seeing the episode) on sight of the ruins of the public library. All of this still might not have altogether counterbalanced that awareness of the condescension, but it was something to be aware of at the time. I also noticed the episode appeared to be based on a short story. How it compared to the story itself was a question, but the idea perhaps starting somewhere other than Rod Serling was also a thought to consider.
In picking up on the twist ending of “Time Enough at Last,” I’d also formed the impression it could be treated with varying shades of condescension as not really saying anything coherent enough to be important. Before I began watching the episode myself, I at least asked if getting “an explosive end of the world” on the TV screen at the time it was made amounted to something in itself, even if I was aware written science fiction had been dwelling on the subject for close to fifteen years by that point.
As for the episode involving “trying to catch up on your reading,” I did wonder about the main character being introduced as something of a compulsive reader, something I can recognise problems with from personal experience, rather than just “an intellectual in a philistine world.” (It also catches my attention when an episode has characters speaking before Rod Serling provides his opening narration.) A bit later on, though, the main character’s wife blacking out the pages of a poetry book, putting it back where the main character thought he’d hidden it, and then tearing pages out of the book when she catches him with it seemed to skew more towards my early assumption.
When things did get to the end of the world, I was struck by things detouring towards “the terrors of loneliness” for some time before the main character recovered from holding a gun to his head (which I’d picked up on before seeing the episode) on sight of the ruins of the public library. All of this still might not have altogether counterbalanced that awareness of the condescension, but it was something to be aware of at the time. I also noticed the episode appeared to be based on a short story. How it compared to the story itself was a question, but the idea perhaps starting somewhere other than Rod Serling was also a thought to consider.
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Date: 2025-09-11 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-11 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-12 12:18 am (UTC)The cultural osmosis version of the episode ignores a good bit of how much Bemis's thoughts after the apocalypse are about finding other people, especially his wife. And it'd be very easy to have set up the story to where Bemis didn't love her, or didn't love her anymore, and found her death as much a relief as anything else. I know not much time is spent on it (maybe a minute even counting Serling's narration?) but they chose to put that time on that.
It's easy to read the episode's narrative as ``Bemis ignored everyone to be with his books, and left with his books, didn't even have those anymore'' but I feel like that's missing something important. I think Bemis's searching for his wife matters. Also that before The End Of The World he's trying so hard to invite people into sharing these books, and not just trying to get through dealing with uninteresting people. You can imagine a version of this story where the viewer comes away sneering ``good!'' at Bemis's broken glasses.
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Date: 2025-09-12 10:31 pm (UTC)So far as "cultural osmosis" goes, while I'd been thinking of Futurama's dig at the episode, I went and found an issue of a magazine from the turn of the millennium where five Canadian science fiction authors were holding a roundtable. Robert J. Sawyer mentioned "punchline endings" while referring to "those Twilight Zone situations."