Speaker 1: Day two of the twilight Zone podcast Advent Calendar, and
Speaker 1: tonight we have a question from John Hayes and he says, well,
Speaker 1: it's a two part question. He says, if Charles Dickens
Speaker 1: were to write a Twilight Zone episode, what might it
Speaker 1: look like and be about? And b if Rod Sailing
Speaker 1: were to rewrite a Dickens novel, what might that look like?
Speaker 1: And how would it differ from the classic not counting
Speaker 1: Carol for another Christmas? Okay, thank you John for a
Speaker 1: great question or two questions. Emmy, I'm not a huge
Speaker 1: Charles Dickens guy. I have to admit I love a
Speaker 1: Christmas Carol. It's one of my favorite stories of all time.
Speaker 1: And I love that there's like a million versions of
Speaker 1: it and I try and you know, watch as many
Speaker 1: of them as I can. But I did read a
Speaker 1: bit of Dickens when I was a kid, but not
Speaker 1: that I have massive memories of. But I obviously now
Speaker 1: the cultural touchsdowns. What about you?
Speaker 2: So I'm the same. I don't think I've actually read
Speaker 2: any Dickens since I was at school, because you know,
Speaker 2: being British, it's kind of forced into you when you
Speaker 2: do English at school. But I'm kind of aware of
Speaker 2: the stories through various like osmosis and watching them and
Speaker 2: just general knowledge. So my answers are kind of going
Speaker 2: to come from a combination of those places. So I
Speaker 2: will apologize in advance if what I say is not
Speaker 2: one hundred percent accurate. I'm probably going to have all
Speaker 2: these sort of Dickens experts coming at me, but I
Speaker 2: apologize if I get anything a little bit wrong.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry with the caveat that neither of us well
Speaker 1: vested in Charles Dickens, apart from probably a Christmas Carol,
Speaker 1: Let's go with party, because I haven't actually got an
Speaker 1: answer for pop B myself. But Emmy knew the assignment
Speaker 1: and she's done the work. She's the geek, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna go tens a piece. So, Emmy, if Charles Dickens
Speaker 1: were to write a Twilight Down episode, what might it
Speaker 1: look like and be about?
Speaker 2: So one of the things that struck me when I
Speaker 2: was thinking about this was actually how Charles Dickens and
Speaker 2: Rod Serling both really liked a twist in the tail.
Speaker 2: You know, they both they both really really enjoyed sort
Speaker 2: of having you believe something the entire time and then switching,
Speaker 2: a switch, a rooming around it at the end. But
Speaker 2: Dickens also really liked people getting their come up, and
Speaker 2: you know, he was quite a fan of that karmic
Speaker 2: justice aspect. If somebody was a really, really horrible person,
Speaker 2: they generally got punished at the end of a book two.
Speaker 2: So I think that if Dickens ever wrote an episode,
Speaker 2: it would probably be something similar to Death Has Revisited,
Speaker 2: where someone's done this really horrible, heinous, as bad as
Speaker 2: you could possibly do thing, thinks they've got away with
Speaker 2: it for their entire life, you know, I think that
Speaker 2: what they've done was right, and that actually the gods
Speaker 2: has smelled upon them this entire time, and it's fine.
Speaker 2: But then at the very end, just when they think
Speaker 2: they've got away with it and when they least expect it,
Speaker 2: the Twilight Zone kind of comes in and presents its
Speaker 2: own style of justice. So I think something along those lines.
Speaker 2: It's not a very specific answer, but I do think
Speaker 2: that that's the thing that both of them have in common,
Speaker 2: and I think that that is how Charles Dickens would
Speaker 2: probably write a Twilight's One episode.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I've went with the only pretty much the
Speaker 1: only thing that I can, because what I do know
Speaker 1: about Dickens was he was very aware of the poverty
Speaker 1: that existed and the difference in wealth of people. And
Speaker 1: that's a very hot topic today as well. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of ripe for a twilight Zone. And I love
Speaker 1: a Christmas Carol, but let us think about Ebenezer Scrooge's office.
Speaker 1: He's got, you know, the people working in his office
Speaker 1: or whatever asking for a lump of coal to put
Speaker 1: on the fire. I probably wouldn't go with like Bob
Speaker 1: Cratchett himself, maybe that's too on the nose, but like,
Speaker 1: you know, third guy from the left, who's just sitting
Speaker 1: writing at his desk. And this guy he comes to
Speaker 1: work on Christmas Day because he needs the money, and
Speaker 1: he's sitting writing at his desk and he takes out
Speaker 1: a pot of ink from the cupboard, and it's like
Speaker 1: a you know, there's something about it, whatever that detail
Speaker 1: may be. This is a very roughly sketched idea.
Speaker 2: It's more detailed than my bigness. I'm enjoying it so far.
Speaker 2: Keep going.
Speaker 1: So he takes this pot of ink and he you know,
Speaker 1: he's got his quill and his piece of paper and
Speaker 1: he's got a list of all the debtors in the area.
Speaker 1: He you know, he's writing his list of Okay, so
Speaker 1: and so, ow is this much? So and so ow
Speaker 1: is this much? And there's just a strange quality about
Speaker 1: the writing on the on the page. And what he
Speaker 1: discovers is that and this is a mechanism that I'm
Speaker 1: not quite aware of yet, but he needs to discover
Speaker 1: that if he writes like their debt is lower, then
Speaker 1: it actually becomes lower. You know, maybe he could write
Speaker 1: about his own debt and you know, as a bit
Speaker 1: of a joke, he writes that it's zero when all
Speaker 1: of a sudden his clothes are better, or something like that,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. So what he does is
Speaker 1: all the people that he knows in the town, he
Speaker 1: reduces their debt to zero with this twilight Zone, inc
Speaker 1: This is a couple of hundred people. You know, Scrooge
Speaker 1: has a lot of people in his book, so it
Speaker 1: could be two, three, four hundred people that he does
Speaker 1: this too. And he writes it down. He writes down
Speaker 1: the debt of everyone around in this squalid area of London,
Speaker 1: and he thinks this is going to be great, and
Speaker 1: he goes home that night there's nobody around, and he
Speaker 1: comes out the next day and he thinks that the
Speaker 1: streets are going to be empty because all these people
Speaker 1: have no debt and their lives will have been different
Speaker 1: now and they're in better places. But what he finds
Speaker 1: is that the streets are just as full as they
Speaker 1: wear before he'd done this, and the faces of the
Speaker 1: people are slightly different. You know, it's not quite the same,
Speaker 1: you know, the guy on the fruit and veg stall
Speaker 1: is a different guy. He might be similar, but it's
Speaker 1: not the same guy anymore. And what he realizes is
Speaker 1: that you can solve the problem for those people, there's
Speaker 1: always going to be more poor people to kind of
Speaker 1: take their place, if you like. The gap between poverty
Speaker 1: and wealth is huge, and it's a system that is rigged,
Speaker 1: so the cards are always stacked against you, you know,
Speaker 1: so that you can pull out as many poor people
Speaker 1: as you like, but there's always going to be another
Speaker 1: one to replace them, because the deck is stacked against you.
Speaker 1: And that's why he realizes when he walks out into
Speaker 1: London on Boxing day, and it's a you know, so
Speaker 1: it's a bit of a sad kind of realization for him,
Speaker 1: but that's my Charles Dickens Twilight. There.
Speaker 2: Wow, that is it's brilliant and depressing. That is intense.
Speaker 2: But I can see it. I can see this sort
Speaker 2: of this guy coming and thinking he's doing this really
Speaker 2: amazing thing. And actually it doesn't necessarily change things, it
Speaker 2: shifts things. I really like it.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, you're the only one who answered pop peage.
Speaker 2: Okay, again, my Dickens fairly limited, right, so I only
Speaker 2: had maybe about a handful of stories that I knew
Speaker 2: well enough to kind of tweaking to do things with.
Speaker 2: But I thought that if Rod Serling were to rewrite
Speaker 2: a Dickens novel, something like The Old Curiosity Shop would
Speaker 2: be good. But I'd like the ending to be more ambiguous.
Speaker 2: So for those who aren't as aware. In the novel,
Speaker 2: we have a young girl and our grandfather. They run
Speaker 2: a shop called the Old Curiosity Shop. It is a
Speaker 2: very Dickenzian shop, like Victorian London. And essentially one day
Speaker 2: they get booted out of their shop by this horrible
Speaker 2: man and they have to travel the country to try
Speaker 2: and escape the guy that took the shop from them.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's very much in a nutshell. There's a
Speaker 2: lot more to it. So there's a couple of things
Speaker 2: with this. So the end is really horrible and tragic
Speaker 2: when you know spoilers, Nell dies, the little girl dies
Speaker 2: in it. But I have liked to more ambiguous ending
Speaker 2: where we don't really know what happened because the way
Speaker 2: this was written. There was a huge backlash when it
Speaker 2: was published because it was done in serial form, so
Speaker 2: it was kind of like watching episodes of a very
Speaker 2: long drawn out story, and people had got really attached
Speaker 2: to Nell and that it was probably one of the
Speaker 2: first sort of big literary cliffhangers that existed in the world.
Speaker 2: There were people waiting on the docks in America for
Speaker 2: the newspapers and things to come from London to find
Speaker 2: out what had happened. And I think that that's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing that Rod Serling could probably, you know,
Speaker 2: do very very well. I actually liked the idea of
Speaker 2: him doing a long drawn out story where you're only
Speaker 2: finding out about it in tiny little segments and chunks.
Speaker 2: But I like the idea that he might have given
Speaker 2: us a bit more of an ambiguous ending. Now we
Speaker 2: know he liked a bit of a bleak ending. You know,
Speaker 2: things were not always happy enjoy in the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 2: But I think that he probably could have done something
Speaker 2: even more frustrating, you know, even instead of actually just saying, yeah,
Speaker 2: she died, the world's horrible, that's the end. I feel
Speaker 2: like rod Serling probably could have and would have given
Speaker 2: us a little element of hope there where we could
Speaker 2: have thought, you know, yes, the world is awful, but
Speaker 2: maybe Nell escapes this horrible awfulness, unlike the book where
Speaker 2: she absolutely does not. The entire the entirety of the
Speaker 2: Old Curiosity Shop is just depressing moment after depressing moments,
Speaker 2: so as is most Dickens. To be fair, you know,
Speaker 2: he wasn't a happy, jolly guy when it came to
Speaker 2: what he was writing most of the time. But I
Speaker 2: like that idea. I like the idea that a Rod
Speaker 2: Serling could have written something that's a bit drawn out
Speaker 2: and we're only finding out about it in little chunks
Speaker 2: at a time, like individual chapters. I think he could
Speaker 2: have pulled that off really well. And I do I
Speaker 2: wish that instead of it being yeah, Nell died through
Speaker 2: horrible circumstances, he had you know, almost kind of like
Speaker 2: a Willoughby situation maybe where you just you don't really
Speaker 2: know what's happened at the end. Has she gone to
Speaker 2: a better place? Has she not? I quite like that
Speaker 2: sort of magical Rod Serling spin on it.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's beautifully pot and thankfully we've ended
Speaker 1: done a more hopeful now than my Christmas Boxing Day
Speaker 1: tragedy Dickens episode. Thank you, Amy, Melida