The Twilight Zone: A World of His Own
Apr. 21st, 2026 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe Twilight Zone’s first season wrapped up with “A World of His Own.” In aggregate the show has been appealing to me. While thinking of reasons for that I’ve wondered if it has something to do with getting a new and complete story in under thirty minutes with every episode. I can get to contemplating the handful of volumes of “The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction” from the 1950s I managed to find at used book sales, for all that The Twilight Zone is more “fantasy” than “science fiction.” There’s also the recurring thought that there’s a bit more to each episode than just “an element of the fantastic,” much less “the concluding plot twist.” In any case I’d noticed from the next-episode preview this concluding story would involve a writer; I did think of that old saw “write what you know.”
It registered a little more on me than with some episodes that the star was Keenan Wynn, although this comes in small part from having watched Dr. Strangelove, where he has a small yet memorable role, and in larger part from him having appeared (over a decade older) in two movies included in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon. Complication set in after the domestic bliss glimpsed to start with when it just so happened the woman serving him a martini wasn’t his wife. That got my attention; maybe I’m a bit too ready to assume what “you couldn’t get on television back then.”
The explanation worked out with three characters and a reasonably spacious one-room setting (with one big surprise in the hallway outside it) was that since “characters can do things their writer doesn’t expect,” the playwright played by Wynn can bring characters to life. The audiovisually appealing way of doing this is dictating into a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and the characters can be removed from existence in a hurry by cutting off the length of tape their description is recorded on and burning that piece in the setting’s convenient fireplace.
From the musical cues I did get a sense this episode wasn’t to be taken altogether seriously. There was a concluding twist, but I have to admit that after being amused by Wynn’s character flouting the dictates of period morality to start with I was left wondering about him “getting away with things,” even if this involved Rod Serling appearing on screen in the middle of the action. I also had a chance to remind myself Serling hadn’t written this episode; Richard Matheson had done that instead.
Noticing there were general bonus features on this disc in addition to the familiar episode-specific extras, I took special note of an episode of another show I’ve read about as “Serling’s immediate precursor to The Twilight Zone”; however, I did get to thinking I could save it until I’ve finished the actual series, at least conscious of comments things were wearing a bit thin by the end. Going forward, anyway, I have been contemplating having to do without a handy list of episode names as I prepare these posts, given I’d been referring to the back of an old first-season box set; in the end I was able to copy episode names from Wikipedia to some plain text.
It registered a little more on me than with some episodes that the star was Keenan Wynn, although this comes in small part from having watched Dr. Strangelove, where he has a small yet memorable role, and in larger part from him having appeared (over a decade older) in two movies included in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon. Complication set in after the domestic bliss glimpsed to start with when it just so happened the woman serving him a martini wasn’t his wife. That got my attention; maybe I’m a bit too ready to assume what “you couldn’t get on television back then.”
The explanation worked out with three characters and a reasonably spacious one-room setting (with one big surprise in the hallway outside it) was that since “characters can do things their writer doesn’t expect,” the playwright played by Wynn can bring characters to life. The audiovisually appealing way of doing this is dictating into a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and the characters can be removed from existence in a hurry by cutting off the length of tape their description is recorded on and burning that piece in the setting’s convenient fireplace.
From the musical cues I did get a sense this episode wasn’t to be taken altogether seriously. There was a concluding twist, but I have to admit that after being amused by Wynn’s character flouting the dictates of period morality to start with I was left wondering about him “getting away with things,” even if this involved Rod Serling appearing on screen in the middle of the action. I also had a chance to remind myself Serling hadn’t written this episode; Richard Matheson had done that instead.
Noticing there were general bonus features on this disc in addition to the familiar episode-specific extras, I took special note of an episode of another show I’ve read about as “Serling’s immediate precursor to The Twilight Zone”; however, I did get to thinking I could save it until I’ve finished the actual series, at least conscious of comments things were wearing a bit thin by the end. Going forward, anyway, I have been contemplating having to do without a handy list of episode names as I prepare these posts, given I’d been referring to the back of an old first-season box set; in the end I was able to copy episode names from Wikipedia to some plain text.