"Zoning" Out, Volume III: Time

"TIME ENOUGH AT LAST" - November 20, 1959

Futurama had lots of fun lampooning Twilight Zone with their "Scary Door" segments, as seen above. One of the more famous Twilight Zone episodes is "Time Enough at Last", a practical one-man show starring the legendary Burgess Meredith, which contains one of the more well-known plot twists in the series. It's also one of the more frequently screened episodes, often airing in prime-time during the marathons shown on SyFy and various other channels that try to ride the Zone Wave. I wound my way back to this episode after skipping ahead to cover something else so I could get something off my mind with regards to the episode: I don't really like it.

Henry Bemis is a bookish man who wears Coke-bottle glasses and is a voracious reader. Problem is, in his world, reading is for squares and everyone treats him terribly because he enjoys it. Even his wife - meeting one of Twilight Zone's unfortunate outdated tropes of being a mean, selfish shrew - picks on him. The one time she explicitly asks him to read, she gives him a book where she crosses out all the words so there is nothing to read. Seems nice! I will grant that sometimes he goes overboard - before this, he gets admonished by a customer at the bank he works at for being too busy reading to perform the task he is paid to do. So, I guess maybe he's a little too obsessed and needs to tone it down a bit.

Anyway, Henry takes his lunch in the vault of the bank he works at, a quiet place where he can read without being harassed by his peers. On this particular day, this becomes a life-saving decision: the bombs have dropped and have wiped the world away while he stated safe in the vault. One might say he was the original Vault Dweller. He doesn't know this yet, but once he escapes the vault and gets outside, he realizes there is nobody left and he is the last man on earth. He can now hang out with Mike Ferris if he wants to, I guess?

Bemis wanders his new post-apocalyptic reality, and as you can see he was pretty close to going to Willoughby, and who could blame him? The world is gone, he has nobody to talk to about what book he is reading... and oh no, no books? Can't even read the side of cereal boxes during breakfast like kids did pre-smartphones. However, right when he was at his lowest point, it appeared like an oasis - a library. A library full of books that he never has to worry about being checked out already, or taken out of circulation, or return late. He is now the Library King and can read for years and years and who cares if there's nobody around, he can hang out with his friends in the stories.

In a just world, this should have been the ending - a man who has been given grief his whole life apparently for enjoying reading, all alone to enjoy his riches. Alas, he forgot one important thing - there are no optometrists in hell, apparently. Well, two important things, because I didn't see him planning his meals. Anyway, he leans over, his glasses slip, and comically fall apart like it was a rifle found on top of a rim in the Arizona desert after laying around a hundred years. Since he needs those glasses to see, well, anything, this is a real big problem for his future plans. As he notes, he finally had time to read, and now he no longer has the ability. Then his eyes fell out and his hands fell off and then his tongue followed suit, but that's just the Futurama episode.

The episode is fine in that it has a great story, well-acted, and has the bog-standard twist. Still... I just don't find this episode to be worthy of being considered one of the best Twilight Zones. TZ episodes are about irony, yes, but until the show went off the rails in Season 5, they were (almost) never about good people getting caught up in cruel ironies. "Time Enough at Last" does just that. Bemis means well, is on his face a good person who just likes to read, got lucky after the bombs dropped, and finally had a chance to do what he loved without pushback. Then, pardon my French, he got fucked. How is this satisfying? It just feels mean-spirited and I've felt that way ever since I first saw the episode as an impressionable kid just watching and waiting for the Chicago Cubs rain delay to be over on WGN.

(I like to think Bemis found another world to live in, but ran into the wrong people and ultimately became "obsolete" if you get my drift)

In general I agree with most people when they make lists of the truly great, legendary Twilight Zone episodes. However, when I come across this episode, I groan. A plot twist just to have a plot twist doesn't make it great, unless it's being used as a parable for something they can't outright say due to the standards and practices of television of the times. "Time Enough at Last" does not do this at all, and instead falls back on a twist for the sake of a twist, and is a rare time when Serling didn't realize this and instead went for shock value. It's unfortunate because what's here is great for the majority of the episode, but it just lands with a massive dud.