The Twilight Zone, Season 4

Narrator:
What you have just witnessed could be the end of a particularly terrifying nightmare. It isn't - it's the beginning. Although Alan Talbot doesn't know it, he is about to enter a strange new world, too incredible to be real, too real to be a dream. It's called the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
In a way, it can be said that Walter Ryder succeeded in his life's ambition, even though the man he created was, after all, himself. There may be easier ways to self-improvement, but sometimes it happens that the shortest distance between two points is a crooked line - through the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Incident one hundred miles off the coast of Guadalacanal. Time: the present. The United States naval destroyer on what has been a most uneventful cruise. In a moment, they're going to send a man down thirty fathoms to check on a noise maker--someone or something tapping on metal. You may or may not read the results in a naval report, because Captain Beecham and his crew have just set a course that will lead this ship and everyone on it into the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Small naval engagement, the month of April, 1963. Not to be found in any historical annals. Look for this one file under 'H' for haunting--in the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
You've seen them. Little towns, tucked away far from the main roads. You've seen them, but have you thought about them? What do the people in these places do? Why do the stay? Philip Redfield never thought about them. If his dog hadn't gone after that cat, he would have driven through Peaceful Valley and put it out of his mind forever. But he can't do that now, because whether he knows it or not his friend's shortcut has led him right into the capital of the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
You've seen them. Little towns, tucked away far from the main roads. You've seen them, but have you thought about them? Have you wondered what the people do in such places, why they stay? Philip Redfield thinks about them now and he wonders, but only very late at night, when he's between wakefulness and sleep--in the Twilight Zone.

Benefactor:
You must talk to them on their frequency, on their level. If they are poor, talk to them of their poverty. If they are afraid, talk to them of their fear. And if they are angry, Mr. Vollmer! If they are angry! Give them objects for their anger. Make their hate your hate. Say things like, things like... 'They say we're prejudiced! They say we're biased. They say we hate the minorities. Minorities. Understand the term, neighbors...

Peter Vollmer:
[At a rally soon after] They say, WE'RE prejudiced! They say, WE'RE biased! They say that WE HATE THE MINORITIES! The minorities. Understand the term, neighbors!

Benefactor:
He attacked you, Mr. Vollmer! He tore you to pieces! Your voice is that of a lion, but your instincts are those of a rabbit!

Peter Vollmer:
And you... what are you? You direct traffic from the darkness! You plan the battles but you're never there when they're fought! Why don't you come out in the light? Why don't you come out here alongside of me? Why don't you give me a name, and a face, and a reason WHY?!

Benefactor:
Mr. Vollmer! I was making speeches before you could read them! I was fighting battles when your only struggle was to climb out of a womb! I was taking over the world when your universe was a crib! And as for being in darkness, Mr. Vollmer.... I invented darkness! [steps into the light, revealing that he is Adolf Hitler]

Narrator:
Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare- Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive.

Narrator:
What you're witnessing is the curtain-raiser to a most extraordinary play; to wit, the signing of a pact, the commencement of a project. The play itself will be performed almost entirely offstage. The final scenes are to be enacted a decade hence with a different cast. The main character of these final scenes is Ilse, the daughter of Professor and Mrs. Nielsen, age two. At the moment she lies sleeping in her crib, unaware of the singular drama in which she is to be involved. Ten years from this moment, Ilse Nielsen is to know the desolating terror of living simultaneously in the world--and in the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
It has been noted in a book of proven wisdom that perfect love casteth out fear. While it's unlikely that this observation was meant to include that specific fear which follows the loss of extrasensory perception, the principle remains, as always, beautifully intact. Case in point, that of Ilse Nielsen, former resident of the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Picture of the spaceship E-89, cruising above the thirteenth planet of star system fifty-one, the year 1997. In a little while, supposedly, the ship will be landed and specimens taken: vegetable, mineral and, if any, animal. These will be brought back to overpopulated Earth, where technicians will evaluate them and, if everything is satisfactory, stamp their findings with the word "habitable" and open up yet another planet for colonization. These are the things that are supposed to happen . . . Picture of the crew of the spaceship E-89: Captain Ross, Lieutenant Mason, Lieutenant Carter. Three men who have just reached a place which is as far from home as they will ever be. Three men who in a matter of minutes will be plunged into the darkest nightmare reaches of the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Picture of a man who will not see anything he does not chose to see--including his own death. A man of such indomitable will that even the two men beneath his command are not allowed to see the truth; which truth is, that they are no longer among the living, that the movements they make and the words they speak have all been made and spoken countless times before--and will be made and spoken countless times again, perhaps even unto eternity. Picture of a latter-day Flying Dutchman, sailing into the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
The Twilight Zone has existed in many lands, in many times. It has its roots in history, in something that happened long, long ago and got told about and handed down from one generation of folk to the other. In the telling the story gets added to and embroidered on, so that what might have happened in the time of the Druids is told as if it took place yesterday in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Such stories are best told by an elderly grandfather on a cold winter's night by the fireside--in the southern hills of the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
To the average person, a museum is a place of knowledge, a place of beauty and truth and wonder. Some people come to study, others to contemplate, others to look for the sheer joy of looking. Charley Parkes has his own reasons. He comes to the museum to get away from the world. It isn't really the sixty-cent cafeteria meal that has drawn him here every day. It's the fact that here in these strange, cool halls, he can be alone for a little while, really and truly alone. Anyway, that's how it was before he got lost, and wandered into the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
They never found Charley Parkes, because the guard didn't tell them what he saw in the glass case. He knew what they'd say, and he knew they'd be right too, because seeing is not always believing. Especially if what you see happens to be an odd corner of the Twilight Zone.

Smith:
Well, for the sake of argument, let's say I'm something of a connoisseur, and you have a very choice soul, and as the vintners say, it's a good year.

Narrator:
Exit the infernal machine, and with it his satanic majesty, Lucifer Prince of Darkness, otherwise known as Mr. Smith. He's gone, but not for good, that wouldn't be like him. He's gone for bad. And he might be back, with another ticket to the Twilight Zone.

Driscoll:
I will now tell you as succinctly as possible how I classify the times. We live in a cesspool, a septic tank; a gigantic sewage complex in which runs the dregs, the filth, the misery-laden slop of the race of men. His hatreds, his prejudices, his passions and his violence. And the keeper of this sewer? Man. He is a scientifically advanced monkey who walks upright and with eyes wide open into an abyss of his own making. His bombs, his fallout, his poisons, his radioactivity. Everything he designs as an art for dying is his excuse for living.

Hanford:
[at dinner] So what are your world views, Driscoll?

Paul:
I don't have any, Mr. Hanford.

Hanford:
Of course you do, man. We ALL do! Like all this nonsense about giving the Indians land. What we need are twenty General Custers and a hundred thousand men! What we should have done is swept across the prairie, destroying every redskin that stood before us. After that, we should have planted the American flag deep, high and proud!

Abigail:
I think the country is tired of fighting, Mr. Hanford. I think we were bled dry by the Indian Wars. I think anything we can accomplish peacefully, with treaties, we should accomplish that way.

Hanford:
Now, I trust this isn't the path you spoon-feed your students. Treaties, indeed! Peace, indeed! Why, the virility of a nation is in direct proportion to its military prowess. I LIVE for the day when this country SWEEPS AWAY...

[notices Driscoll's disapproving look]

Hanford:
You some kind of a pacifist, Driscoll?

Paul:
No, just some sick idiot who's seen too many boys die because of too many men who fight their battles at dining room tables... and who probably wouldn't last forty-five seconds in a REAL skirmish if they WERE thrust into it.

Hanford:
I take offense at that remark, Mr. Driscoll!

Paul:
And I take offense at "armchair warriors," who don't know what a shrapnel, or a bullet, or a saber wound feels like... who've never smelled death after three days on an empty battlefield... who've never seen the look on a man's face when he realizes he's lost a limb or two, and his blood is seeping out. Mr. Hanford, you have a great affinity for "planting the flag deep." But you don't have a nodding acquaintance of what it's like for families to bury their sons in the same soil!

Narrator:
Incident on a July afternoon, 1881. A man named Driscoll who came and went and, in the process, learned a simple lesson, perhaps best said by a poet named Lathbury, who wrote, 'Children of yesterday, heirs of tomorrow, what are you wearing? Labor and sorrow? Look to your looms again, faster and faster fly the great shuttles prepared by the master. Life's in the loom, room for it--room!' Tonight's tale of clocks and calendars--in the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Meet Mr. George P. Hanley, a man life treats without deference, honor or success. Waiters serve his soup cold. Elevator operators close doors in his face. Mothers never bother to wait up for the daughters he dates. George is a creature of humble habits and tame dreams. He's an ordinary man, Mr. Hanley, but at this moment the accidental possessor of a very special gift, the kind of gift that measures men against their dreams, the kind of gift most of us might ask for first and possibly regret to the last, if we, like Mr. George P. Hanley, were about to plunge head-first and unaware into our own personal Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Mr. George P. Hanley. Former vocation: jerk. Present vocation: genie. George P. Hanley, a most ordinary man whom life treated without deference, honor or success, but a man wise enough to decide on a most extraordinary wish that makes him the contented, permanent master of his own altruistic Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Martin Lombard Senescu, a gentle man, the dedicated curator of murderers' row in Ferguson's Wax Museum. He ponders the reasons why ordinary men are driven to commit mass murder. What Mr. Senescu does not know is that the groundwork has already been laid for his own special kind of madness and torment--found only in the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
The new exhibit became very popular at Marchand's, but of all the figures none was ever regarded with more dread than that of Martin Lombard Senescu. It was something about the eyes, people said. It's the look that one often gets after taking a quick walk through the Twilight Zone.

Feathersmith:
...Something that'll turn this two-bit toolshed into a factory: a SELF-STARTER...What do you mean, enlarge on it? It's a thing you press with your foot that starts an engine with an electric motor. What is it used for...!? It's used to make $200 million, that's what it's used for...!! Listen, are you all there!!? It's a storage battery, a motor, and a do-hickey that starts the motor! I've given you the principle; now all you have to do is build it...! Now look, I am not a crummy draftsman or a two-bit blueprint boy; I am a PROMOTER, a FINANCIER. I'm gonna give you the backing; I've already given you the principle; so all you have to do is BUILD IT...!! There's everything under the sun, and you sit around fixing tricycle pedals! There's radio, aluminum, airplanes...YOU FOGGY-HEADED CARRIAGE BUILDERS; WE COULD MAKE OURSELVES $8 BILLION DOLLARS!!!

Narrator:
Mr. William J. Feathersmith, tycoon, who tried the track one more time and found it muddier than he remembered--proving with at least a degree of conclusiveness that nice guys don't always finish last, and some people should quit when they're ahead. Tonight's tale of iron men and irony, delivered f.o.b. from the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Mr. Horace Ford, who has a preoccupation with another time, a time of childhood, a time of growing up, a time of street games, stickball and hide-'n-go-seek. He has a reluctance to go check out a mirror and see the nature of his image: proof positive that the time he dwells in has already passed him by. But in a moment or two he'll discover that mechanical toys and memories and daydreaming and wishful thinking and all manner of odd and special events can lead into a special province, uncharted and unmapped, a country of both shadow and substance known as... the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
Exit Mr. and Mrs. Horace Ford, who have lived through a bizarre moment not to be calibrated on normal clocks or watches. Time has passed, to be sure, but it's the special time in the special place known as--the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
This is William Benteen, who officiates on a disintegrating outpost in space. The people are a remnant society who left the Earth looking for a Millennium, a place without war, without jeopardy, without fear--and what they found was a lonely, barren place whose only industry was survival. And this is what they've done for three decades: survive; until the memory of the Earth they came from has become an indistinct and shadowed recollection of another time and another place. One month ago a signal from Earth announced that a ship would be coming to pick them up and take them home. In just a moment we'll hear more of that ship, more of that home, and what it takes out of mind and body to reach it. This is the Twilight Zone.

Narrator:
William Benteen, who had prerogatives: he could lead, he could direct, dictate, judge, legislate. It became a habit, then a pattern and finally a necessity. William Benteen, once a god--now a population of one.

Narrator:
You've just witnessed opportunity, if not knocking, at least scratching plaintively on a closed door. Mr. Julius Moomer, a would-be writer who, if talent came twenty-five cents a pound, would be worth less than car fare. But, in a moment, Mr. Moomer, through the offices of some black magic, is about to embark on a brand-new career. And although he may never get a writing credit on the Twilight Zone, he's to become an integral character in it.

Narrator:
Mr. Julius Moomer, a streetcar conductor with delusions of authorship. And if the tale just told seems a little tall, remember a thing called poetic license--and another thing called the Twilight Zone

Rod Serling:
Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. The something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth. But in just a moment Peter Vollmer will ply his trade on another kind of corner, a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone.

Peter:
You… you picked me! You picked me!

Hitler:
I did not pick you, Mr. Vollmer; you picked me! You chose my ideas, you invoked my name, you stole my slogans. So now, you must take whatever else comes with it. In the past, I have given you suggestions! Now, I give orders!!

[Peter has just executed Ernst]

Hitler:
What did you kill just now? A man?

Peter Vollmer:
No, not a man. A disease, one which had to be cured.

Hitler:
Indeed. And so, how did it feel to cure this disease?

Peter Vollmer:
It felt like I was immortal.

Hitler:
Mr. Vollmer!! WE ARE IMMORTAL!!

Miss Frank:
[about Ilse] In many ways, the fire was the blessing of her life.

Frau Werner:
She's going to be all right, for now she is loved.

Ossie Stone:
What did you pay her with?

Jess-Belle Stone:
My flesh and blood... my soul... my brain... my dreams... my hands.

Mrs. Parkes:
[after his return from the mental institution] Did they hurt you, Charley?

Charley:
Well, I heard they were gonna use shock therapy, and I hear that hurts quite a bit, but they decided not to when I got well.

Rod Serling:
Take away a man's dream, fill him with whiskey and despair, send him to a lonely bridge, let him stand there all by himself looking down at the black water, and try to imagine the thoughts that are in his mind. You can't, I can't. But there's someone who can - and that someone is seated next to Douglas Winter right now. The car is headed back toward town, but its real destination is the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling:
Major Robert Gaines, a latter-day voyager just returned from an adventure. Submitted to you without any recommendation as to belief or disbelief. You can accept or reject; you pays your money and you takes your choice. But credulous or incredulous, don't bother to ask anyone for proof that it could happen. The obligation is a reverse challenge: prove that it couldn't. This happens to be... the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling:
Witness a murder. The killer is Mr. William Feathersmith, a robber baron whose body composition is made up of a refrigeration plant covered by thick skin. In a moment Mr. Feathersmith will proceed on his daily course of conquest and calumny with yet another business dealing. But this one will be one of those bizarre transactions that take place in an odd marketplace known as the Twilight Zone.

Feathersmith:
...It seems like only yesterday that you called me into your office and said, "Bill Feathersmith. I like your style, boy. I want you in with me." You remember that day?

Diedrich:
I've cursed myself for it ever since. I've found you to be - from the moment I made you a junior partner, increasingly as the years have gone by, even by the cutthroat standards of our mutual trade - a predatory, conniving, grasping, acquisitive animal of a man...Without heart, without conscience, without compassion, without even a subtle hint of the common decencies. Shall we continue from there?

Al:
Isn't living tough enough here we shouldn't have to go by the book? Isn't it hot enough and miserable enough there shouldn't be rules? We shouldn't have to suffer by the numbers? Will somebody please make the simple comment there's more happiness going into that grave? More peace of mind than all the mourners put together. Nothing but anguish here. Captain Benteen, let us live with it our own way. Or let us die from it - in our own way!

Captain Benteen:
[addressing the crowd] Young Mr. Baines would have us lie down in the sun. Young Mr. Baines would have us give in to death, while there is still life. He'd end the rules. Throw away the regulations. No more standing in line for water. We'll let the strong take away from the weak. And no more food rationing. Let the young steal from the old. And when that ship does arrive, it won't find a society. Just a pack. Not one human being left alive. Only animals.

Rod Serling:
Portrait of a honeymoon couple getting ready for a journey – with a difference. These newlyweds have been married for six years, and they're not taking this honeymoon to start their life but rather to save it, or so Eileen Ransome thinks. She doesn't know why she insisted on a ship for this voyage, except that it would give them some time and she'd never been on one before – certainly never one like the Lady Anne. The tickets read 'New York to Southampton,' but this old liner is going somewhere else. Its destination – the Twilight Zone.

Millie McKenzie:
Love has its own particular point of view. It sees everything larger than life. Nothing is too ornate, too fanciful, too dramatic. Love demands the theatrical, and then transfigures it. It turns the grotesque into the lovely, as a child does. With it, we can see what we wish to see in other people. Without it, we can't see anything at all. We can search forever, and never find.

Rod Serling:
The Lady Anne never reached port. After they were picked up by a cutter a few hours later, as Captain Protheroe had promised, the Ransomes searched the newspapers for news - but there wasn't any news. The Lady Anne with all her crew and all her passengers vanished without a trace. But the Ransomes knew what had happened. They knew that the ship had sailed off to a better port - a place called The Twilight Zone.

Note:
This season's episodes were an hour in length.