The Twilight Zone: A Stop at Willoughby
Mar. 3rd, 2026 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWatching “A Stop at Willoughby” finished the fourth of four Blu-Ray discs stacked and overlapped on the first of the six “pages” inside my Twilight Zone set. Beyond that mere bookkeeping detail, I’d been anticipating the episode. Distinct from the handful of episodes I’d read adaptations of years ago and from the further handful episodes that seem part of “general cultural knowledge,” I’d happened not that long ago to see it brought up with a suggestion it showed people at the beginning of the 1960s might have been as inclined to dwell on “a kindlier past” as people at any other time. That, though, might have led to certain anticipations of my own.
It got my attention when the episode opened with a boardroom meeting. I managed to sort out that the executives were “ad men.” Before “Mad Men” came to prominence (even if it’s one more TV show I’ve never quite got around to watching) I’d been aware, if through more peculiar sources like the science fiction dystopia The Space Merchants and old cracks in retrospective anthologies of MAD magazine, of advertising executives having a certain prominence back around when the episode was made. As things focused in on one of the younger executives, I got a clear sense of how his present was grating on him.
The element of the fantastic that marks The Twilight Zone showing up in a dream did surprise me a bit, though, for all that I know by now the series tries in general to offer explorations of character beyond just “reactions to the fantastic.” After the shift from a commuter rail car to the old-fashioned coach Rod Serling had been in during his next-episode preview, one bit of the past was a “penny-farthing” bicycle, which pushed a little further back into the past than I’d been imagining if still within the outer bounds of living memory when the episode was made. I suppose I’d let my own thoughts settle in advance on Pierre Berton’s Klondike, first written in the 1950s, where he’d mentioned nostalgia for the 1890s before making a point of hardships in their own measure then. That might have had me imagining some similar point being made in the episode itself. Things wound up more ambiguous than that, even if there was a certain punch to one last-second glimpse contrasting what appeared to happen for one person to what that amounted to for everyone else.
It got my attention when the episode opened with a boardroom meeting. I managed to sort out that the executives were “ad men.” Before “Mad Men” came to prominence (even if it’s one more TV show I’ve never quite got around to watching) I’d been aware, if through more peculiar sources like the science fiction dystopia The Space Merchants and old cracks in retrospective anthologies of MAD magazine, of advertising executives having a certain prominence back around when the episode was made. As things focused in on one of the younger executives, I got a clear sense of how his present was grating on him.
The element of the fantastic that marks The Twilight Zone showing up in a dream did surprise me a bit, though, for all that I know by now the series tries in general to offer explorations of character beyond just “reactions to the fantastic.” After the shift from a commuter rail car to the old-fashioned coach Rod Serling had been in during his next-episode preview, one bit of the past was a “penny-farthing” bicycle, which pushed a little further back into the past than I’d been imagining if still within the outer bounds of living memory when the episode was made. I suppose I’d let my own thoughts settle in advance on Pierre Berton’s Klondike, first written in the 1950s, where he’d mentioned nostalgia for the 1890s before making a point of hardships in their own measure then. That might have had me imagining some similar point being made in the episode itself. Things wound up more ambiguous than that, even if there was a certain punch to one last-second glimpse contrasting what appeared to happen for one person to what that amounted to for everyone else.