The Twilight Zone: A World of Difference
Jan. 6th, 2026 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter returning from Christmas vacation, I started another Blu-Ray disc of Twilight Zone episodes (although it was merely the last disc to be watched from the first of six “sides” stacking and overlapping discs in the case). Whatever Rod Serling had said about the first episode of that disc in his preview hadn’t stuck in my mind. Even the title, “A World of Difference,” didn’t feel quite familiar any more. I was willing to be intrigued by not expecting anything specific, and when an opening twist hit I was downright amused. At the same time, though, I was conscious all over again of a familiar feeling that to make a big deal of being surprised is to deny that surprise to anyone else. As ever, the most I can do is put some of my content behind a “cut” for now and hope that someone running across this later won’t take everything in with a single glimpse.
As the episode set up an apparently successful businessman with a secretary outside his own personal office I did take brief note of his desk not being anything fancier than a table with folding legs. That preceded the twist I’d alluded to before, when all of a sudden his office is open on one side, with a movie studio beyond where the wall used to be. A little part of me did suppose that even with a large “crew” around, it was still an economical environment to film in. One thing I do have to admit was that as the protagonist got worked up I kept imagining possible ways of proving he wasn’t just an actor beyond calling information for phone numbers he couldn’t quite remember all of a sudden, but I was always conscious of how I’ve come to not quite like nitpicking, “it could have been done this way” insistences from those perhaps secure in their own detachment as of that moment.
I might have distracted myself from that by thinking of how I once read an anthology apparently of genuine Star Trek “fanfiction,” where one of the stories had William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley set up on the transporter set only to all of a sudden find themselves on the starship Enterprise itself. My understanding was that this story was somehow a response to a previous fanfic that had Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Doctor McCoy finding themselves on a set, but I’m not quite sure I’ve ever managed to find the original. A number of years after that but still some time ago, I did happen on a directory of later Star Trek fanfics in a computer lab at high school (which was before Internet access was available in my home town), and one of the stories there had Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, and Brent Spiner find themselves all of a sudden on the Enterprise-D, where Stewart related how he’d once been told of a peculiar incident that had never quite got beyond the sets of the original series... the problem there was that the file was only the beginning of the story.
What’s been making The Twilight Zone interesting to me, anyway, is that in the space of these half-hour episodes the stories manage to go beyond mere “situations,” or even great displays of self-awareness, to more universal explorations of character. I pondered the actor in question being established as not quite a pleasant person, which only made things worse for the protagonist. There was a neat note of ambiguity to the resolution. I managed to take note of the episode being written by Richard Matheson, and also tried to hold in my mind Rod Serling’s promise of the episode ahead being written by Charles Beaumont.
As the episode set up an apparently successful businessman with a secretary outside his own personal office I did take brief note of his desk not being anything fancier than a table with folding legs. That preceded the twist I’d alluded to before, when all of a sudden his office is open on one side, with a movie studio beyond where the wall used to be. A little part of me did suppose that even with a large “crew” around, it was still an economical environment to film in. One thing I do have to admit was that as the protagonist got worked up I kept imagining possible ways of proving he wasn’t just an actor beyond calling information for phone numbers he couldn’t quite remember all of a sudden, but I was always conscious of how I’ve come to not quite like nitpicking, “it could have been done this way” insistences from those perhaps secure in their own detachment as of that moment.
I might have distracted myself from that by thinking of how I once read an anthology apparently of genuine Star Trek “fanfiction,” where one of the stories had William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley set up on the transporter set only to all of a sudden find themselves on the starship Enterprise itself. My understanding was that this story was somehow a response to a previous fanfic that had Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Doctor McCoy finding themselves on a set, but I’m not quite sure I’ve ever managed to find the original. A number of years after that but still some time ago, I did happen on a directory of later Star Trek fanfics in a computer lab at high school (which was before Internet access was available in my home town), and one of the stories there had Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, and Brent Spiner find themselves all of a sudden on the Enterprise-D, where Stewart related how he’d once been told of a peculiar incident that had never quite got beyond the sets of the original series... the problem there was that the file was only the beginning of the story.
What’s been making The Twilight Zone interesting to me, anyway, is that in the space of these half-hour episodes the stories manage to go beyond mere “situations,” or even great displays of self-awareness, to more universal explorations of character. I pondered the actor in question being established as not quite a pleasant person, which only made things worse for the protagonist. There was a neat note of ambiguity to the resolution. I managed to take note of the episode being written by Richard Matheson, and also tried to hold in my mind Rod Serling’s promise of the episode ahead being written by Charles Beaumont.