You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension,
a dimension of sun, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind.
You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance of things and ideas.
You've just crossed over into the twilight zone. At certain times in history,
there are inventions that revolutionize the way we live our lives. At the
moment of this recording, the topic on everybody's lips is one that some belief
will be the downfall of humanity, but others believe it will be our savior.
Either way, it will certainly shape how we do things in the future,
for better or for wares. And the subject is, of course artificial
intelligence or AI. But while it feels like something relatively new to us in
its current form, fiction has been reaching towards it for over a hundred years.
Even if it didn't always have the language to hand that we use now,
it was still reaching towards those concepts even as far back as eighteen sixteen,
stories were being told of automatons. The Sandman by E. T.
A. Hoffman features an automaton called Olympia who appears humanlike but lacks true consciousness.
In nineteen twenty. The story Rossum's Universal Robots by Carol Kpeck introduced the
term robot to the world, derived from the check word robota mean forced labor.
The robots in this play are artificial creations with human like qualities, raising
questions about their sentience and the consequences of their existence, and there are numerous
fascinating explorations on the relationship between human beings and artificial beings, a rich philosophical
vein to be mined. So what does all of that have to do with
this? Where are my wilking blossom? What's on your mind? Your hot
chocolate is ready. You told me you were going to take a nap sometime.
Try extending yourself, uncle, just sufficiently to let me know where you
are on occasion. Well, now, Barber of my love, I think
I'm an arrow that downfoil. If I'm not upstairs in my bedroom or in
the study, that I'm downstairs in my laboratory. Any kids, wherever I
am, you can ring the hot chocolate. And if I'm not, he
means I've dropped it on route. You can bring me a bottle for malde
hide and a rose. He was such a humorous to uncle you should have
gone into burlesque. Well, there's you ought to been more comfortable than you
tonight will ponder whether Tonight's Twilight Zone is a rich examination of the relationships between
life and artificial life or just an exercise in colorful insults. When we meet
Simon Polk and his niece Barbara Polk him an elderly man in need of care.
Here a younger woman giving it. But a harmonious household. This is
not and we'll find out why when we meet Uncle Simon dramatist persona Mister Simon
Pulk, a gentleman who has lived out his life in a gleeful rage,
and the young lady who's just beat the hasty retreat. As mister Polk's niece,
Barbara, she has lived her life as if during each ensuing hour she
had a dentist appointment. There's had a third member of the company soon to
be seen. He now resides in the laboratory, and he is the kind
of character to be found only in the Twilight Zone. First broadcast on November
fifteenth, nineteen sixty three, written by Rodd Sailing and directed by Don Siegel,
so a Pretty by the Numbers open a narration from Sailing quite ordinarily staged,
and I think the episode as a whole is quite a stagy episode,
where it does have that feeling of being very set bound, but we'll come
back to that later. It is also a Rodd Sailing penned episode and not
based on anything that I can find, and none of our main Twilight Zone
commentators offer up any inspiration that Sailing might have had for this one either.
And while I spoke briefly about the relationship between beings and artificial beings in the
opening of tonight's show, our initial focus is on the relationship between Simon Polk
and his niece Barbara. Barbara question go on, why do you stay here?
I was under the impression that I was needed. You are and explains
why I keep you here, And it doesn't even remotely suggest why you stay.
You would like me to be quite honest, I presume indeed you may
be mature on beauty, and a lack of Canada has never been one of
your deficiencies. I stay. I live for the moment when I can see
you buried, when I come back from your funeral, I'm going to open
a bottle of wine. I want to be compensated Uncle Simon, for twenty
five years of being shrieked at, insulted, be rated, humiliated, and
stepped on like an old rug. Is that sufficiently honest for you? Well?
I wish you well, my good and faithful Barbara, and I'm asked
I offer you this observation. If you had an ounce of gristle or an
inch of intestines, you have murdered me years ago. And as for your
twenty five years of abject misery nounspeakable indignation, you deserve it. Kid.
I mentioned that this is quite a stagey feeling episode. The set feels quite
close, not quite claustrophobic, but you never get the impression that you're in
anything but a set. The entire thing was filmed on Stage eighteen at MGM
Studios, but I do think occasionally with some of the movements of the camera
you get the impression. At least it has a director who is trying to
put a little bit of most and not just have the camera bolted down in
this quite small space. So the man who is making the best of what
he has is the director Don Siegel. In a season that has already seen
the Twilight's earned debut of one superstar director, Richard Donner. We now have
another, the great Don Siegel, and he was born in nineteen twelve in
Chicago, Illinois, and studied at Cambridge University in England and also in Paris.
He began his career as an editor and a second unit director at Warner
Brothers, where he directed two Oscar winning shorts, Starr in the Night and
Hitler Lives in nineteen forty five, and his first feature film as a director
was The Verdict in nineteen forty six, and come the nineteen fifties he made
a series of well crafted and influential B movies such as Riot and Cell by
Eleven, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Lineup. And he also directed
Elvis Presley in Flamingo Star in nineteen sixty and then in nineteen sixty two he
made the Steve McQueen movie Hell Is for Heroes. Now, quite often when
we come across these superstar directors or even actors who go on to great things,
the twilight zone is one of the early entries in their career, or
perhaps they've been in the business for a decade or more but not really had
their big break, but with Don Siegel. He had already had some notable
success in the movie business, so I was quite surprised to see him directing
The Twilight Zone at this point in his career. He'd already learned his trade
as an editor and second unit director in the late thirties and early forties,
so by the time the late forties arrived, he was already directing mainly features,
although he did direct three episodes of a TV series called The Doctor in
the early fifties, and one of the episodes had the suitably sailing esque title
No Gods to Serve and another was called Those Who Wait, and both of
them were written by Rod Sailing, which may explain why he eventually ended up
on The Twilight Zone. So when I think of Don Siegel, my mind
generally goes to his more tough, cynical kind of action adventure films that he
made in the seventies. He had a long and fruitful collaboration with Clint Eastwood,
who considered him his mentor and dedicated his film Unforgiven to Don Siegel,
and they worked together on five films, including Coogan's Bluff, Dirty Harry,
Two Mules for Sister Sarah, Guild an Escape from Alcatraz and Don Siegel also
directed John Wayne's final film, The Shooterest in nineteen seventy six, and Siegel
died on April twentieth, nineteen ninety one, in California at the age of
seventy eight. And while I don't think this is the best look and Twilight
Zone episode you're ever going to see, the occasional movements of the camera maybe
give us a clue that this is a director who is more than just a
journeyman picking up his next paycheck. Now in our story, one of the
threads that runs through the start of the episode is just what is in Uncle
Simon's laboratory? Well? What have we here? I was looking for looking
for what I But perhaps you might show me what you were building. I'd
like to know. And John, that's the only character trade you share with
normal women. Curiosity, He never will curiosity. Well, one day you'll
know what I'm building, But until then, you'll night crawling imitation of a
female gender. I can't you see? He rights my door? Break ahead,
Now gone upstairs and engage yourself in a nerve wrecking game of dominoes.
We spend a large portion of this episode listening to the insults that Uncle Simon
directs towards Barbara, what we notice is that they aren't just a direct attack
on hair, but a lot of his insults are attacks on hair femininity.
More often than not, they aren't just about her as a person boy hair
as a woman, and early on, she very much has that look of
someone who has gradually had all of the confidence stripped away from her. She
has this very dowdy, plain look about her, and sure she is clean
and well kept, but there's no hint of her doing anything to make herself
feel good or glamorous. She dresses for function because when is the last time
someone told her that she looked nice? That part of her life just doesn't
exist. So while she receives yet another onslaught from Uncle Simon, let's meet
the woman who played her. Barbara is played by Constance Ford and she was
born in nineteen twenty three in the Bronx, New York City, and she
first came to prominence as a model, becoming the face of Elizabeth Arden lipstick
in nineteen forty one. And Ford's journey into acting began in the world of
theater, where she honed her skills and This led to her breakthrough role on
Broadway in the play The Innocent Voyage in nineteen forty three, and this early
success laid the foundation for what would become quite a long career. Her television
career began in nineteen fifty with a string of roles in the anthology series of
the Day like The Inner Sanctum, The Pepsicolla Playhouse, and also Craft Television
Theater, where she first worked with Rod Sailing on a nineteen fifty three episode
called The Blues for Joey Manotti, which he wrote. Now, I was
unable to track that one down, so I'm not quite sure if it still
exists, but the one line IMDb description says it's about a sad but talented
honky Tonk piano player who reflects his mood in his music. Now, knowing
how Sailing would revisit certain characters and rewake them down the line, I do
wonder whether that's a proto passage for trump it. So by the time she
hit the Twilight Zone, Constance Ford was a thirteen year veteran of television,
and apparently she had wanted to be on the Twilight Zone for some time,
and Martin Graham's junior documents in Unlocking the Door to a television classic that on
September twenty seventh, nineteen sixty she sent a telegram to Sailing asking him to
watch Thriller that evening, and it's this that then prompted Rodd Sailing to cast
in this episode. Now, strangely, Constance Ford only had six credits to
her name after The Twilight Zone, five of them beginning in the nineteen sixties
and then a one off in nineteen seventy four. But this wasn't because she
quit acting, but because she became the hardest working type of TV actor of
them all, a soap opera actor, and she joined the show Another World
in nineteen sixty seven, where she played the character of Ada Hobson, who
would go through various name changes through the years, as she was presumably married
on the show. But once she was on the show, that became her
primary work between the years of nineteen sixty seven to nineteen ninety two, for
a staggering two thousand, three hundred and ninety nine episodes, and it was
a role that would take her almost to the end of her life, because
she died on February twenty sixth nineteen ninety three when she passed away at the
age of sixty nine in Los Angeles. But how is she in this?
I think it is worth noting the evolution of the viewer sentiment towards her character.
Initially we find her to be quite sympathetic as she endured the Verbel abuse
while she cared for Uncle Simon, But then as the true motives behind her
presence are revealed, that sympathy starts to wane. So Fords skillfully portrays Barbara
as emotionally norm having chosen to sacrifice any semblance of personal happiness for the allure
of wealth. But at times you see that the armor that she's built up
only protects her so much. Some of Uncle Simon's barbs still gets through,
and in the scene outside his lab at about seven minutes into the episode,
you can see that as words really do still hate a times. So it's
a character who pays a high price for her decisions, which renders her hauntingly
devoid of inner life. Who came here twenty five years ago when you were
crippled and sick and couldn't move? Who came here and Nurse do keept you
alive? You? Did you did you scouting female ape? No, let's
get down the cases. Why did you come? Was it that a love,
Barbara? Was he that helpitating a passion or a flag boast of loyalty?
I'll tell you why you came. You stayed on month after month,
year after year, because every prayer that came out of your mouth was a
supplication that I die before the next morning. So don't go maun to your
sweetness is of me, you thin lipped toothpig nigged tonither. Everything you did
for me you did for greed. Greed greathe so big, so thick,
so heavy that it brought it out even the hatred inside you. Well,
let me tell you something. You money seek drone. You get paid off
in you course, but before that payoff, you pay through every pot in
your body. You pay you are the harby you. So here's the point
in the episode where the crux of the relationship is revealed. Barbara came to
care for her sake uncle all of those years ago, but he seems to
have gotten the impression that this wasn't a truly altruistic act. She did it
because she knew one day he would die, and if she cared for him,
his fortune would likely come to hair, so he is hanging on for
as long as he can. But now the gloves are off, and after
a particularly vicious verbal assault from Uncle Simon, he raises his cane as if
to hit her, and when Barbara stops it with her hand, Uncle Simon
takes a fatal fall down the stairs. Now, as originally scripted and originally
filmed, there was an extra scene here that didn't make the cut. After
Uncle Simon falls down the stairs, we cut to a scene in the study
upstairs where a plane closed police officer is asking Barbara questions about what's happened.
She says that she heard a crash, went to open the basement door and
found Uncle Simon dead, and Martin Graham's junior documents in Unlocking the Door to
a television classic that the officer says, I can imagine how close you two
were, and she looks up as if searching for another meaning, then,
seeing the sympathetic face, remarks, you have no ideal, lieutenant, And
after the officer leaves, Barbara smashes up Uncle Simon's ashtrays and pipes. And
the actor who played the officer was John mcleam and this would have been his
second and twilight own episode after playing one of the neighbors in the episode The
Shelter. But there is also a rather strange bit of business that would have
featured in this part of the episode two that didn't seem to make the cut.
Because this episode was sponsored by the American Tobacco Company and because there was
this scene where Barbara smashes up Uncle Simon's pipes. The company wrote to the
producer, Bake Granite, and they were saying that the episode had scenes which
make tobacco and pipe smoking appear on savory and at times Barbara says the lines
get rid of your ugly smelling pipe ashes and other things to do with smoking,
And they go on to say, we hope you will make every effort
to alter these so that the American Tobacco will have no objection. Now,
Bare Granite responded dramatically, speaking, it seems to me that there is a
misinterpretation of the meaning of the pipe and tobacco in the story. First,
I would like to point out that the prototypes of the character are many nuclear
physicists and scientists who are preoccupied pipe smokers. What untidiness accrued in their nature
was and is a preoccupation with the more important things in their lives. It
is Barbara, his niece, a partial psychotic who objects to his smoking,
which is obviously a joy to him since there are so many pipes present.
Barbara then, of course, is adverse to a symbol that gives him constant
happiness. The pipe serve as a positive reminder of what he loved and she
hated. Now, irrespective of Granite's explanations, it seems that these things would
either never filmed or hit the cutting room floor because they aren't really present in
the episode. So, after Uncle Simon dies, Barbara proclaims to the world
that she's back. But now it's time to see where the hair plan to
inherit. Uncle Simon's fortune comes to fruition, but she's faced with some quite
strict conditions for hair. Uncle's well will very explicitly requires that you throw away
nothing. You keep everything intact. I see the house, it's furnishings.
Everything goes to you in perpetuity. The proviso is, of course that you
remain here. Where would I go? This is my home, of course,
of course, But the document is quite clear and it's intent everything will
remain in your name so long as you're on the premises. The same thing
applies to the various securities and the cash, which is quite siteable. It's
been set up in trust for you. You to draw all the interest accruing
so long as you remain in the house. Entertainment over the years has made
great use of this device, the device of a will having some kind of
condition attached to it that a character has to follow to the letter, otherwise
they won't be able to keep their inheritance. A couple of prime examples or
the films Brewster's Millions, the nineteen forty five original starring Denis O'Keefe and the
nineteen eighty five remake starring Richard Pryor. In each version, Monty Brewster has
to spend a particular amount of money in a short time in order to get
his main inheritance. But do these type of conditions hold water? Do the
conditions imposed on Barbara by Uncle Simon hold water? Are they actually enforceable?
So I of course embarked on some light research, but please, if there
are any lawyers out there who can shed more light on it, then do
let me know. There are certain rules in British law, and I'm assuming
in US law as well, to govern what kind of conditions you can and
can't put on a will. For example, a universal one is that you
can't put a condition on that a person must commit a crime in order to
get inheritance, which sounds reasonable enough. So there are conditions that are classified
as uncertain conditions, and these are conditions that may be void if they are
too uncertain to be enforced, if the wedding of the condition is too vague,
or a court would actually have difficulty in applying the condition. And one
of these uncertain conditions is that you can't apply a condition to a will terminating
a beneficiary's interest in a house if the beneficiary is not residing there personally.
So not to spoil the party here, but these conditions that Barbara must live
by, from the sounds of it, might not necessarily be enforceable. But
again that's me with my limited knowledge of the law, and perhaps at this
time the law was different, who knows. But just for any of you
out there in this kind of situation, take heart, because there may be
a way out, unless, of course, you're being forced to care for
your robost uncle. I'm not quite sure where the law sits on that one,
but in the Twilight turne it seems to be just fine, because one
of the stipulations of the will is that Barbara needs to care for one of
her uncle's experiments, and this will be checked upon each week to make sure
that she is doing it. Mechanical man built by your late uncle, Simon
Pope. Your opening the door has activated all of my upper rating relays.
Be patient with me, because according to plant, according to plant, according
to plant, according to it will be several days before I can function at
maximum capacity. I bid you greeting Hello, barbar Rock. Now, of
course we all recognize the distinctive shape of this robot as Robbie, the robot,
famous for being in Forbidden Planets, The Invisible Boy, and several other
movies and TV shows where he was generally voiced by an actor called Marvin Miller,
But on this occasion he's voiced by the actor Vic Perron, who has
appeared in the Twilight Zone before in People Are Alike All Over and The Trade
Ins, but also voice to control voice for that other famous anthology, The
Outer Limits. But for this episode, Robbie has some other alterations too,
his chess place has been changed from the one who wore in Forbidden Planet,
but he also no longer has all of those wonderful moving parts within the dome
that forms his head. For this appearance, the internal wakings were replaced with
this book at like headpiece within the dome, possibly to differentiate him from his
Forbidden Planet look, but I also think it has the effect of making him
look like a blank canvas, a canvas waiting to be imprinted on. So
notice the change in Barbara now that Uncle Simon is dead. She wears make
up, Her hair is made up nicely. She wears this glamorous outfit which
does look a little like the drapes that she's standing in front of in the
scene. But still she has transformed, no longer subject to the abuse of
Uncle Simon, and with a healthy bank account, she has started to become
the woman that she wanted to be. But while Robbie the Robot tries to
gain his faculties, lets meet the man whose faculties he's gaining. Uncle Simon
is played by Cedric Hardwick in one of the final roles he ever played,
as he would sadly pass away a year after this episode was released, and
he only played three roles after this one, and this episode has yet another
link to the Outer Limit because one of those roles was in the episode The
Form of Things Unknown, which has a curious kind of history to it that
had come back to in a moment. So Hardwick was born in Lye,
England, in eighteen ninety three, so would have been about seventy years old
at this point. In his younger years in England, after failing to achieve
the necessary grades to become a doctor, he attended the Royal School for Dramatic
Art, but the outbreak of World War One halted his acting career for many
years when he saved King and Country between nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty one.
But when he retained and began his acting career on stage, he received acclaim
for playing Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, and it was this success that opened
the door for him to tread the boards in London, where he became successful
both on stage and in films, and he was knighted by King George the
Fifth for his acting career in nineteen thirty four, before he had even scratched
the surface of what he would end up doing on screen, and his early
screen career is a glorious mix of genres, with films like nineteen thirty five,
Slemiser Arb and universal horror movies like The Invisible Man, Retains, The
Ghost of Frankenstein and The Invisible Agent. And apparently he faced hit the American
stage in the mid thirties and eventually decided to move there permanently in the late
nineteen forties, and he continued to work steadily throughout the rest of his career,
with parts in films around the world in Eighty Days and The Ten Commandments.
If you wanted someone with an aristocratic, snooty presence, he was your
man. And when television started to become the thing in the fifties and sixties,
he didn't shy away from it, and he clocked up appearances and shows
like Alfred hitch Hook Presents and Climax, even becoming a regular on The Gertrude
bag Show, a one season wonder about a middle aged widow who enrolls in
college. So it's interesting to see an old British actor like this in the
Twilight Zone. Maybe he was attracted to it because of certain things and Martin
Graham's junior quotes them as saying, it's increasingly difficult if you've got a name
to find character parts that are sufficiently important. The older dramatists wrote plays that
made demands on actors. Today they don't. The idiot to write to day
would be very happy to do without actors. I have trouble finding plays that
are even readable, let alone actable. I think more playwrights have been saved
by inarticulate actors than you can imagine. In the movies, you hear everything
they say. Now. Sadly, Hardwick had been a heavy smoker for his
whole life, which began to catch up with him. So by the time
we meet him in the Twilight Zone, his health was deteriorating. But following
his appearance in the Twilight Zone, his next role was in a TV movie
called The Unknown, where I believe he played a doctor who invented a time
machine. Now, this was intended to be a pilot for an anthology show
from the writer Joseph Stefano, but when that didn't fly, it was repairposed
into an episode of The Outer Limits called The Form of Things Unknown, which
I mentioned earlier. But how is he in this? I think Hardwick is
clearly ailing. At this point in his life. It seems quite difficult for
him to say these words sometimes, and I think a few years prior he
would have been able to spit out these insults with a razor sharp tongue.
But he doesn't do too badly. Consider him because at the end of the
day, he's a sick old man playing a sick old man. And if
they wanted a cantankerous, unlikable old man to be believably cruel to his niece
on screen, then they certainly got their man. So Robbie the Robot begins
to take on the characteristics of Uncle Simon, first by asking for his favorite
drink or chocolates, but then in a more obvious way, after you bring
me my hot chocolate, would you please close all the windows and all the
drapes. I don't like the light, I don't like the draft. What
is the matter? Barbara? Tell me? Please? What is the matter?
What is the matter? What is the matter? You've been up Avery,
sample of nature's carelessness, Barbara, Barbara, help me, help me.
And after Barbara gets mad and shoves him over, Robbie even gets Uncle
Simon's limp, bringing things full circle. Barbara now has to care for a
robot which has the voice and cruelty of Uncle Simon, but also his disability,
And it's very telling that by the end of the episode she's now returned
to the plain, unglamorous look that she had earlier, resigned to the fact
that this is her life now now. Mark Zikry in The Twilight Zone Companion
says, although directed by Don Siegel, Uncle Si remains talky, badly acted,
and badly staged. It's a sordid story about two sordid people, both
of whom make it a point to say everything that's on their minds to the
point of simple minded absurdity. Neither character is terribly likable. Consequently, the
fact that Barbara never escapes the clutches of her uncle doesn't seem very important.
Now. I don't necessarily disagree with all of that, but I don't necessarily
agree that it's badly acted. I do think it suffers from the staging of
it. Like I said, it is very set like and boxed in,
but I suppose it is set in one house, so unless they used a
real house, what else was it going to be. But at times this
stagey atmosphere does make the performances seem a bit bigger against this backdrop, and
constance forward especially does get at quite bigger times. But I don't necessarily agree
that it's bad acting, neither character being very likable. Sure, I can
get behind now, But after finishing Uncle Simon, which I had seen many
years ago, I took a moment, as I always do, to gather
my thoughts on the episode. Some people find amusement in the insults that are
exchanged between the two main characters, which is fine, but it wasn't really
enough to carry the episode for me at its core. I think I can
grasp what Rod Sailing was trying to convey. It's a portrait of a person
who finds herself in this situation not out of any genuine sense of duty to
care for a sick uncle, but rather because you would ultimately benefit financially from
it. And you wonder whether this was evident to Uncle Simon from the beginning,
thus leading him to become the cantankerous old man that he was. If
she had approached him with genuine warmth and a sincere desire to take care of
him, would he have treated her differently? Will never really know the answer
to that, but regardless, she chose to remain enduring her uncle's constant erosion
of her humanity when she could have left and built a life for herself,
a life without the prospect of inheritance, where she would have needed to wear
a regular job, but at least it would have been a life. Now
she's trapped like a robot herself, just going through the motions every day,
devoid of happiness, devoid of emotion, and without any foreseeable end. So
Sailing does have something meaningful to say here, and I appreciate it. However,
when the story hinges on two leads who are thoroughly unlikable, constantly spewing
rotten words at each other, the question arises is it enjoyable to watch?
Ultimately that became the crux of the matter for me. Did I enjoy watching
it? While I could depreciate saying aspect of it on an academical level,
it wasn't really enough to make it an enjoyable experience. I don't actually have
that many complaints about its quality. It had a message to convey and it
was pretty well written. However, it almost became too successful in presenting such
unlikable lead characters because it makes it challenging to find anything enjoyable about it.
I've often said I don't need to like characters to enjoy a story, but
I do need to be interested in them, and I'm just not sure that
I was really interest stood in these ones. Dramatis personi A metal men will
go by the name of Simon, whose life as well as his body has
been stamped out for him, and the woman who tends to him, the
Lady Barbara, who's discovered belatedly that all bad things don't come to an end
and that once a bed is made, it's quite necessary that you sleep in
it. Tonight's uncomfortable little exercise in avarice and automatons from the Twilight Zone.
So, as you know, I throw it out to the patrons over in
the afterhours claud Patreon dot com Slice Twilight Zone podcast to let them vote as
to whether this is a top, middle, or bottom tier Twilight Zone episode.
Now the patrons voted, and nine percent said it was a top,
thirty seven percent said middle. I'm fifty three percent said bottom. So not
a particularly popular episode of the while I turned this one, but I do
appreciate the comments from the patrons because there's some great food for thoughty here.
You know. I pondered this one a lot because it was like, you
know, there's some interesting stuff here, but they're just such horrible characters that
really where do I sit on it? And I think reading the thought of
the members of the after Hours club really helped me out on that one.
Brian Cake says, I usually love any story that includes a robot as part
of the plot, but in this case, the two league characters are both
so irritating and unlikable that I couldn't root for either of them. Thank you,
Brian, I think I agree with you on that. One. Great
friend of the show, Brian from Phoenix said, it's always good to see
Robbie the robot. Constance Ford's performance is fantastic. She easily goes from jaded
zombiesque from peecaretaker to angry, gorgeous, spiteful minx ready for a night out
on the town said, your Hardwick is no slouch either, with him spewing
sailings piercing insults as if they were his own vitriol, you forget how great
TV actors used to be. Michael Fainback says, I'll admit that some of
the insults are amusing, but not enough to lift it up out of the
bottom tier. And it's not really tragic. Sure, she already spent twenty
five years there. One can argue she should have left a lot sooner.
No amount of money is worth that kind of living hell. But now she
doesn't have to spend the rest of her life there. She's free to leave
and start over. And that's it, isn't it. It's about that kind
of balance. Is it better to be wealthy but trapped in that hellish environment,
or is it better to go and be poor somewhere but at least be
free. Our French Chad Boykin says, I can see the argument for bottom
Tea, but expores a very real human issue, the depths of abuse we
will allow ourselves to be subjected to for various complex reasons. It's not something
I've seen in other shows. It was bold and dark, it was uncomfortable,
but real, and I'll go out on a limb and call it top
tier, bottom of the top, but top The robot was a stretch,
but it's part of the charm, and the prison of our own mind is
the real hell. Our friend al Shadesma says, how can you not love
the robot's transition into Uncle Simon. It's both amusing and creepy, sometimes downright
chilling. Unfortunately, the characters are too broad and too dimensional. I think
Rod rushed this one to make it a top tier episode, but it's a
solid middle tier. Our friend Steve Badger says, an episode occupied by miserable
humans and a miserable robot. I see the parallel it's making with many people
living awful lives just for some money to gain, but what we put up
with on a daily basis brings us down and makes life a pointless, uninspe
hiring journey. This episode could be a lesson to most, but for me,
it's dull, unpredictable. It's a long time since I've seen this one,
but maybe a better ending would have been some change in behavior, some
hope that we don't have to be on the treadmill. She should have walked
away into a financially poorer but mentally and physically brighter future. Bottom tea for
me. Our friend Zach Moore says, one of the worst episodes of the
series, Short and Sweet. Our friend Joe Brown says, when I cast
my vote I based her upon my memory of this episode versus a recent viewing
while I watched it tonight, and my vote hasn't changed. It's basically two
Don Rickles insulting each other in sailing speak. Both characters are not likable people,
and each way they speak spews more ugliness. I couldn't figure out why
Barbara would wait all this time to get the fortune her stays in the most
degrading atmosphere. Sailing is better than this, and so am I. I
sat through all twenty six minutes and could have shut it off, but I
didn't. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment too. Thank you. Joe
Roger Moore says, I believe it was Harold that left feedback on the last
episodes, comparing Goldsmith to Moses in The Old Man in the Cave. I
can't remember if Harold mentioned the Ten Commandments or no, but Cedric Hardwick played
Setti in the Ten Commandments, and I just thought that was a cool connection
and ware to mention. As far as Uncle Simon goes, this episode is
just two family members in a chess match while being mean and hateful to each
other while we the audience watch it unfold. I can rarely sit down and
watch this one all the way through. There's not many Twilight Own episodes I
will place in the bottom tier. I'm sad to say, just like the
bottom of the stairs, this is where I think Uncle Simon belongs. Our
friend Champagne Drum says, love seeing the robots, but all in all a
bit overdone in terms of acting. Our friend Jay Howard says, I enjoyed
the over the top performances. Joseph Lacino says, I know this episode is
cheesy, but the sailing insults and genuine love my family has for this episode
elevates it for me. And then finally, my good friend Uncommon Naser says,
So there are two ways to look at this one. If you watch
it to be a serious Tez episode, it's bottom tier and pretty awful,
and I've viewed it that way for a long time. But if you look
at it as a comedy episode, a dark comedy in this case, it's
at least closer to mid tier, if not in the lower mid tier.
I view it that way now as I've seen it a law and I will
give them credit for tackling elder care in an abstract way. It's something most
of us will face but is never talked about a media. So some great
thoughts from our friends over in the Afterhours Club. And speaking of the After
Hours Club, I want to thank new members Squatch arch Stanton, Look for
the Grave Marked arch Stanton and David Trimbolie. Thank you for joining over at
the Afterhours Club. Now if you want to join the Afterhours Club, it
so patreon dot com slash twilight Zone podcast. Now. One of the shows
I do over there is talking about the eighties twilight Zone and then that moved
onto the two thousands twilight Zone, and we are at the end of the
two thousand's twilight Zone. Next month it will be the last episode looking at
that. So all of the eighties and two thousand show is there to hear
the thoughts of me and my co host Emmy on those episodes. So just
to cap things off, we decided that we are going to return to Jordan
Peel's twilight Zone and go through those two seasons. Well, now that we're
not really in the either storm anymore, I thought it would be an interest
and exercise to revisit those so if you want to, So, if you
want to hear our thoughts on those, then head over to Patreon dot com
slash Twilighttone podcast. I just want to give a quick plug as well to
Law give up a Planet of the Apes podcast, which is now live.
You can look at it on iTunes or any of your other podcatchers. And
at the moment it's only going to be occasional while I finish up the Twilight
Zone, but I'm starting to build it up so that when the twilightone podcast
ends, that podcast will be in full flow. Rod Serling, creator of
the Twilights On We'll tell you about next week's story after this message. If
you want to get your thoughts onto the show, then email Tom at the
Twilight Zone podcast dot com with a clip of about five minutes or less on
an upcoming episode, on an episode that we've discussed already, and I will
play your clip. So let's go over to Rod Sailing to find out what's
coming up next now, mister Surling. Next on Twilight Zone an eminent performer
of stage in screen, mister Richard Bayside in an otball excursion that we call
Probe seven over and out. On occasion, we'll come up with a wild
and Willie danim Wile. But this particular opus has an unpredictable ending that we
doubt if even the most seasoned TZ fans will be able to pick up before
it happens on your screen. Next on Twilight Zone, Probe seven over and out.