The Twilight Zone (1959) -- Season 1 Episode 5 (Walking Distance)

Martin Sloan is 36 and working way too hard.  While out for a drive, he pulls in to a gas station, where he gets some gas and an oil change.  It just so happens that his home town, called Homewood, is just over a mile up the road.  Since the car will take about an hour or so, Martin decides to walk the distance.

He finds the town exactly as he remembers it.  He’s even able to get the ice cream soda he remembers and for the same price of 10¢.  Walking around, he soon realizes that it really is 25 years ago.  He meets himself at 11 and is able to visit his parents at his old house.   Granted, they think that he’s some crazy person.

It gets dark and Martin has one message for his younger self:  Enjoy your youth while you can.  However, this causes the younger Martin to have an accident wherein he hurts his leg.  He’ll be ok, but the boy will have a limp.  Martin’s father has come to realize that the adult Martin is telling the truth.  The father asks if Martin doesn’t have many of the same things the 11-year-old Martin has.

Martin comes to realize that, although he’s been given the opportunity to go back, it’s not his place to stay.  He walks back to the ice-cream parlor to discover that he’s back in his present and has a limp.  He then makes the journey back to his car and presumably goes back to his life.

This episode, like most of The Twilight Zone episodes, was 30 minutes.  It was written perfectly for that length of time. Had this episode been done during the fourth season, when stories were 60 minutes, it probably would have dragged too much.  What could you have added?  Staying was never really an option for Martin and there’s only so much he can do in a small town before it seems forced.

This seems to be a favorite among viewers of The Twilight Zone and with good reason.  The message is simple and delivered subtly.  It doesn’t try to hit you over the head with it.  It’s actually kind of odd that a series would hit one out of the park so early in its first season.

The episode has changed a little for me over the years.  When I was in high school, I got the message.  However, there is more of a connection having had points in my life that I’d like to go back to.  That’s natural.  I would think most people Martin’s age would like to go back to a time when the summer meant not having to worry about anything.

I would say that this episode is the most relatable of the series.  Everyone reaches a point where they miss being younger.  If I had to pick a few episodes to sell someone on the series, this would be one of them.   They say you can’t go home again.  It looks like you can, although it’s kind of awkward and you can’t really stay as long as you’d like.  At least we’ll always have Homewood.

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The Twilight Zone (1959) -- Season 1 Episode 1 (Where Is Everybody?)

Mike Ferris wanders into town one day.  It’s a fully functioning town, just like any town you’d expect to find in a TV show of the 1950s.  The problem is that he can’t find anyone.  The church has a bell that rings, but there‘s no pastor or congregation.  The diner has food for customers that aren’t there.  When Mike wanders into the police station, smoke suddenly starts rising from a cigar that no one placed there.  Is Mike going crazy?  Is this purgatory?  Either possibility is likely, as this is The Twilight Zone.

Specifically, this is the first episode of what would become an iconic TV show.  The Twilight Zone has become synonymous with strange or eerie, and with good reason.  The show often had a twist ending long before the movies of M. Night Shyamalan.  With this each episode, you know that there’s going to be a big twist at the end.  You’re just waiting for the main character to figure it out.

In this case, Mike stumbles upon it accidentally.  Being that he’s the only person there, he goes from building to building until his frayed mind has him pressing a button for what would seem like no reason.  Then, we find out what that reason is.

Part of the greatness of The Twilight Zone is that it takes a problem and puts it on display.  Here, we have one man.  We see his isolation.  It’s pretty much the only thing on display for most of the episode.  This episode, like many of the others, is G-rated.  There’s nothing objectionable for children in this episode, such as sex or violence.  I would say that it’s more questionable in that very young children might not understand the loneliness that Mike has to go through and the effects it has on him.

The show was an anthology; episodes were each self-contained stories with no relationship to other episodes, meaning you can view them out of order.  (For this reason, I’m not going to be as strict about grouping episode reviews by season.)  If you are watching the series on Netflix, this shouldn’t be as much of an issue.  Currently, they’re missing the fourth season.  If you’re renting the episodes on DVD, you don’t have to worry about the discs arriving out of order or one disc being checked out from the library.  You can skip that disc and come back to it.

Part of the significance of this being the first episode is that it seemed a little simpler than some of the other episodes.   There wasn’t as much of the supernatural or unexplained that I remember from other stories.  (Take Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, for instance.)  The show had yet to get established, although it did have a backdoor pilot of sorts with The Time Element.  It’s kind of difficult to think of an anthology having a pilot episode, but here it is.

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