Back in 2011 or so, I was re-watching Spielberg's Amazing Stories on Netflix and this was one of my thoughts on the show: "I think Spielberg filled a notebook with 2-3 sentence story ideas and told a bunch of other writers to flesh them out." I'd forgotten that but my brain reused the same basic theory for The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling. Apparently my view on sci-fi anthology shows is that they tend to feel like one simple idea taffy-pulled out into an extended story. Sometimes the character presented in the story fleshes it out in a way that makes the story more appealing and less like a one-note concept. The best ones, I believe, are ideas like "What if a person with X personality found themselves in Y situation." Because then the story doesn't have to rely on one twist moment or one speculative plot point. And then there's episodes like Episode 10 of Season 1 of The Twilight Zone, "Judgment Night."
This episode tells the story of an amnesiac German man aboard a British ocean liner. He only knows who he is and that something terrible is about to happen. Eventually he realizes the boat will be sunk by a U-boat at 1:15 in the morning and he freaks the fuck out more and more as time goes on. Nobody will listen to him and then the U-boat's spotlight hits the boat! They're all going to die! He gets out some binoculars and looks at the U-boat, seeing the captain of the U-boat standing on top directing fire when he realizes: the captain is him! Then the boat sinks and he drowns.
If that were the entire story, audiences would have discussed this episode for decades. What does it mean? How could he have been in both places? What sort of spooky nonsense took place here?! But, alas, Rod Serling decided the story needed to be explained explicitly in a short epilogue that takes place on the U-boat. Based on the beginning narration by Serling which seems inordinately long for a typical The Twilight Zone episode, it didn't surprise me that the end was just another long monologue to explain the point of the story.
Just when the audience is most confused by what happened, they're met with a scene where the main character, now acting as the German U-boat commander, sits in his submarine office proud of the murder he's just done. The first officer comes aboard sweaty and upset and full of pangs of conscious. He's all, "Are we the baddies?" And the commander is all, "We're at war! We had to kill everybody on board! Even the stupid kid with the stupid doll! Heil Hitler!" But the first officer isn't convinced. He's all, "Shouldn't we have at least warned them we were going to kill them?" And the commander is all, "Ah ha ha! You naive dolt!" And then the first officer looks at the camera and winks and says, "Don't worry! I'm going to explain my view of the universe and the afterlife right now and it's going to be spot on, according to the story you just watched! Because I believe the afterlife is where we have to reenact the terrible things we did in life but as the victims of those terrible things! Over and over and over again! That's what I think!" And you know what? The kid was right! He was like that one character in The Good Place whose image hangs in Ted Danson's office because he's the only person to ever figure out how it all actually works. Or like the woman in the coffee shop in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (unless it was one of the sequels!) who suddenly figures it all out and knows her plan to fix everything will work and then she is vaporized as the Vogon's destroy Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
I'm not going to complain too much about the tacked on explanation of the story. Did Rod Serling even know in 1959 that a writer and director could be Lynchian?! You know what I mean! I know he didn't "literally" know he could be Lynchian because what was David Lynch doing in 1959? Getting his eagle scout masturbation badge? You know what I meant was, "Did Rod Serling even know he could write a story that didn't explicitly tell the audience exactly what was going on and just leave it a mystery for them to philosophize and theorize on?" Maybe in later seasons! But he was still finding his Twilight Zone legs by episode ten.
This episode wasn't terrible but it loses something in the tension it tries to build because there's no mystery to what's going to happen. The ship is going to be sunk by a submarine. Why everybody isn't as paranoid as the German guy is the bigger mystery! They should be running around flipping the fuck out the way everybody does in Airplane when they realize they're out of coffee and the "Okay, panic" light goes on. And the tacked on explanation at the end just seems like a CBS executive saw Serling's episode and was all, "What the fuck was that?" And Serling was all, "Pretty evocative, right? So crazy! What's going on?!" And the producer was all, "In your show notes, you wrote, 'German U-boat commander punished for all eternity to be victim of his own surprise murder.' Can you just stick that in there at the end explaining it?"
Maybe I'm being too hard on television executives and not hard enough on Serling! He just didn't work the script long enough to come up with a natural way of portraying that this night was just one of an endless string of identical nights in the U-boat commander's eternal Hell. He probably had a few packs of cigarettes to smoke and couldn't be bothered with it.
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