This is another of the posts I have not been able to return to complete for quite some time – more than is decent. Actually, it should have come soon after the first one, so also as to explain the modification in the title.
In the initial post, I had quoted some dialogues… which I had contended were an example of captivating language but without any hint of their provenance. Some might have seen through the deception even when I tried to mask the source by removing the capitalisation. They were from various episodes of the Twilight Zone. Well for those who don’t know about it, it was a long running (over 40 years in various incarnations) American TV show, a mixture of self-contained fantasy, science fiction, suspense, or horror, often concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist.
I first became aware of the series sometime during the summer of 1993. It used to be telecast around midnight, after the reprise of the days’s episode of M*A*S*H* 4077, (which is still one of my all-time favourites) … the temptation of seeing a particular episode twice a day was too good to miss as well as being a backup for some episodes I happen to miss the first time around (this used to be quite rare as normally wherever I was, I used to get home and in front to the TV at 1730 as that sound of helicopters and that familiar tune (“Suicide is Painless“) began. But lets not digress again and return to the Twilight Zone.
It was one fine night when I decided to catch an episode and was hooked to it. As I said, the opening narration was so compelling that anyone could get drawn in…. and the story was so captivating especially the twists and turns and the final big twist and that final narration….. it left an impression that lingered long after the images had died away.
It was much later that I found that the series I had seen was actually the from the three seasons of the first revival (1985-1989). The intitial series had run for five season from 1959-64 and then gone into a twilight zone of its own kind, before a movie came in 1983. This sparked off the first revival, of which I saw a quite a few. Some of these were excellent and I shall introduce them to you. But let me start with a few entrancing examples from the earlier series – particularly the ones I feel some kind of affinity for….. lets take ”The After Hours”, the 34th episode in the first season (1959-60) and telecast June 10, 1960.
It opens with this narration: “ Express elevator to the ninth floor of a department store, carrying Miss Marsha White on a most prosaic, ordinary, run-of-the-mill errand. ”
and
“ Miss Marsha White on the ninth floor, specialties department, looking for a gold thimble. The odds are she’ll find it, but there are even better odds that she’ll find something else, because this isn’t just a department store. This happens to be the Twilight Zone.
Marsha White, browsing for a gift for her mother in a department store, decides on a gold thimble. She is taken by the elevator man to the 9th floor, a floor beyond that shown by the elevator gauge. She gets out and turns to complain to the elevator operator that there is nothing there, but the door closes abruptly. Marsha is approached by a saleslady who guides her to the only item on the floor—the gold thimble Marsha is longing to possess.
As she buys it, Marsha grows increasingly puzzled by the comments and actions of both the elevator operator who transported her to the barren, seemingly deserted floor, and the aloof salesclerk behind the counter who sells her the thimble. As Marsha rides the elevator back down from the 9th floor, she notices that the thimble is scratched and dented; she is directed by the elevator operator to the Complaints Department on the 3rd floor.
When she tries to convince Mr. Armbruster, the too-far energetic sales supervisor, and Mr. Sloan, the store manager, that she bought the item on the 9th floor, she is told that this floor doesn’t exist. Marsha then becomes distraught after she spots the back of the salesclerk who sold her the thimble, and is shocked to discover that the woman isn’t really a salesclerk at all; she’s one of the department store’s display mannequins. While resting in an office following her frightening discovery, Marsha finds herself accidentally locked inside in the now-closed store. She attempts to find a way out, and becomes alarmed by mysterious voices calling to her and by some subtle movements made by the supposedly lifeless mannequins around her. Moving about aimlessly, she topples the sailor mannequin, who was the somewhat frustrated elevator operator in earlier scenes.
To be continued…..
