The Twilight Zone: The Chaser
Mar. 9th, 2026 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs a title in the list of Twilight Zone episodes “The Chaser” might not have stood out all that much. Rod Serling’s on-set appearance in the next-episode preview for it amused me, but for a reason distinct from what I then understood the episode to be. As it turned out, things were a bit different again.
The general sense of “things were different then” got a bit stronger with a young man monopolizing a phone booth dialling and redialling, although I did wind up gathering he got his coin back each time rather than “emptying his pockets trying to connect.” This had to do with him being head-over-heels in love with a young woman only just willing to talk to him every so often, and I guess his take on that went against certain expectations of “what things are like for guys” even if I might have thought just a little bit of “what could get on TV then” too. In any case, he wound up being directed to the library of sorts with excessively high bookshelves that had been in the preview to meet with someone selling magic potions.
After an amused thought of the series returning to the apartment of “A Nice Place to Visit,” the potion the main character had purchased took just long enough to take full effect to make things interesting. That the full effects palled after time did bring the previous episode just mentioned to mind again. Following up on a certain promise at the time of the first purchase explained the title, and the unfortunate twist at the end did add to the amusement for me. It also managed to get my attention that the episode hadn’t been written by Rod Serling, or by Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson; it had, though, been adapted from an existing story.
The general sense of “things were different then” got a bit stronger with a young man monopolizing a phone booth dialling and redialling, although I did wind up gathering he got his coin back each time rather than “emptying his pockets trying to connect.” This had to do with him being head-over-heels in love with a young woman only just willing to talk to him every so often, and I guess his take on that went against certain expectations of “what things are like for guys” even if I might have thought just a little bit of “what could get on TV then” too. In any case, he wound up being directed to the library of sorts with excessively high bookshelves that had been in the preview to meet with someone selling magic potions.
After an amused thought of the series returning to the apartment of “A Nice Place to Visit,” the potion the main character had purchased took just long enough to take full effect to make things interesting. That the full effects palled after time did bring the previous episode just mentioned to mind again. Following up on a certain promise at the time of the first purchase explained the title, and the unfortunate twist at the end did add to the amusement for me. It also managed to get my attention that the episode hadn’t been written by Rod Serling, or by Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson; it had, though, been adapted from an existing story.