The Twilight Zone: Mr. Bevis
Mar. 23rd, 2026 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmer“Mr. Bevis” might have stood out a bit in the list of Twilight Zone episode titles. I can wonder, though, if that had to do with the thought that if there’d been one extra vowel in the title, the resemblance to an “edgy” cartoon from the early 1990s would have been that much stronger... (Even if the best efforts of others to promote that particular animated series just made me edge away from it, though, I did wind up delving into a late-1990s spinoff from it.) The next-episode preview did pique my interest for it, anyway.
I do have to admit it got my attention when there was a different opening credit sequence (I’ll have to wait and see if this was a one-off occurrence reflecting the episode being “prepared to blend in for syndication” and then not put back the way it had first been on Blu-Ray) and again when kids playing in the street at the beginning the episode were racially integrated. After that, I noted Mr. Bevis was indeed eccentric in a safe sort of way, well-groomed even if his outfit was loud even in black and white and trying to hold down a normal job even if he commutes to work in a 1920s car and has a desk in a room filled with others less cluttered than his and noisy with mechanical calculators and typewriters but without cubicle walls in the way.
The touch of the fantastic arrived in a modern sort of guardian angel showing up after Mr. Bevis had lost his latest job, had his car tipped on his side, and been evicted. All of it didn’t affect the feeling that this episode was played more as a comedy than most of the Twilight Zone that I’d seen so far. Things could be put back the way they’d been, the angel insisted, but it required Mr. Bevis discarding most of his eccentricity even if he got a sports car out of it rather than something sensible for its time. The conclusion was easy enough to anticipate, but stil appealing.
I do have to admit it got my attention when there was a different opening credit sequence (I’ll have to wait and see if this was a one-off occurrence reflecting the episode being “prepared to blend in for syndication” and then not put back the way it had first been on Blu-Ray) and again when kids playing in the street at the beginning the episode were racially integrated. After that, I noted Mr. Bevis was indeed eccentric in a safe sort of way, well-groomed even if his outfit was loud even in black and white and trying to hold down a normal job even if he commutes to work in a 1920s car and has a desk in a room filled with others less cluttered than his and noisy with mechanical calculators and typewriters but without cubicle walls in the way.
The touch of the fantastic arrived in a modern sort of guardian angel showing up after Mr. Bevis had lost his latest job, had his car tipped on his side, and been evicted. All of it didn’t affect the feeling that this episode was played more as a comedy than most of the Twilight Zone that I’d seen so far. Things could be put back the way they’d been, the angel insisted, but it required Mr. Bevis discarding most of his eccentricity even if he got a sports car out of it rather than something sensible for its time. The conclusion was easy enough to anticipate, but stil appealing.