In The Zone
Well, if I was going to be stuck at home for a weekend while my car was in a local garage for repairs, this July 4 weekend was the one.
Thanks to the Sci Fi Channel and the creative wonder of a man who once walked this earth by the name of Rod Serling, I didn’t need wheels and a gasoline-powered engine to go to the place I have loved since my childhood. You know it from the hypnotic first notes of the introductory theme music.
“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind…”
More than 35 years after I saw an episode for the first time, the name still brings an immeasurable sense of joy to my eyes and ears.
The Twilight Zone.
The stories, the characters, Serling’s insightful narration — these were all the elements that bound together to form one of the most unique television series to ever air. Fifty years after it was first introduced to an unsuspecting American television audience, episodes of The Twilight Zone still seem as relevant as ever to the world around us in 2009.
It is that timeless quality to so many of the stories and the grains of knowledge that can be found within that I find so endearing, over and over again, every time I watch an episode and regardles of how many times I’ve seen it. The stories still speak to me today as strongly as ever because, as Serling himself put it, The Twilight Zone “lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”
I could have done without the car breaking down earlier in the week, but as a friend and newspaper colleague of mine noted on my Facebook page, being cooped up with Sci Fi Channel’s Twilight Zone marathon during the holiday weekend was “a pretty good consolation prize.”
I didn’t stay up all night, as it were, but saw most of the episodes even the most casual Twilight Zone fan knows, the ones that might be called the “classics.” Most every fan of the show has an absolute favorite and I am no exception.
If you’re thinking that is “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” that would be an incorrect guess. Great, great episode illustrating the destructive power of fear, but not my fave.
“Time Enough At Last”? Again, great story, but that’s not it, either. “Eye Of The Beholder”? As shocking a story twist as you’ll ever find, but still not the top of my list.
No, the episode that stirs me without fail is one, surprisingly, that Serling did not write. It is “I Sing The Body Electric,” an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story about a robotic-but-lifelike grandmother that must win the hearts of three children of a widower to whom she has been assigned.
To understand why the story touches so deeply is to go the Twilight Zone itself, or rather to consider the time it first appeared. That was the time of infinite possibilities, for better or worse, and the latter end of what many consider the golden age of science fiction. It was before a man had set foot on the surface of the moon and long before the term “personal computer” was on anyone’s lips, much less one sitting on anyone’s desk.
But in The Twilight Zone, infinite possibilities become reality and that includes robotic grandmothers who will love you for eternity.
For me, though, it goes beyond that to a perhaps unintended metaphysical analogy. When the children are grown and about to start college, the robotic grandmother says she must leave them to allow them to make their own lives. She tells them she might go to another family to look after the children, but she might be dismantled.
The children-now-young-adults are worried it will mean the end for her, but she assures them by explaining that if she is dismantled, her “heart and soul” will go to a big room of voices — those of other robotic grandmothers — where everyone shares what they learned from the families they looked after.
Could there have been something more human about the robot grandmother’s existence than just her appearance, her ability to teach and learn, and her ability to love?
Again, I’ll quote from Serling: “Fable, sure — but who’s to say?”
Author’s Note: Fortunately, you don’t have to wait until the next Fourth of July holiday to take a vacation in The Twilight Zone. Thanks to online video, many episodes of the show can be seen for free at CBS.com and on various video compilation sites like Veoh and Fancast.
