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scioscribeElegy (Season 1, Episode 20)
Directed by: Douglas Heyes
Written by: Charles Beaumont
Based on: “Elegy,” by Charles Beaumont
Opening: The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They're looking for home. And in a moment, they'll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt.
Spoilers abound. Episode summary available here.
“Elegy” makes me long for human drama of “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air.” The astronauts in this episode may not be quite as slow on the uptake, but they lack survival instincts, purpose, and any sense of individual characterization. There are two blond astronauts (played by Kevin Hagen and Don Dubbins) and one dark-haired astronaut (played by Jeff Morrow), and I have to cling to hair color because it doesn’t feel like there’s any other way to distinguish between them. Kevin Hagen’s character is technically the captain, but he doesn’t radiate any sense of command, authority, or concern for his men, and he’s not tasked with making any important decisions, so his rank is meaningless to both his character and the plot.
The plot, such as it is, involves our three astronauts running out of fuel and landing—seemingly via autopilot?—on an asteroid with identical conditions to Earth. Before we can even start speculating that they’ll once again be right outside Reno, they discover an old-fashioned—to them—barn and tractor outside, complete with a frozen-in-place farmer and barking dog. Have they somehow traveled into Earth’s past? No, because—as one of them says solemnly—Earth never had two suns, and look, this place does. The fact that two of them completely failed to notice that an extra sun in the sky makes me despair of the whole profession.
The astronauts wander all over town, discovering other set-pieces like a mayor’s inauguration party, a man raking it in at a poker game, a couple dancing to the music of their own private string quartet, and a conventionally plain woman winning a beauty pageant. On the way, with some of the most stilted line deliveries imaginable, they theorize about all these statue-like people they’re encountering.
Is someone deliberately creating illusions for them? If so, why would they be drawing off Earth history two hundred years before the astronauts’ own time? My separate but related question: if this is two hundred years in the future and, as we eventually learn, after a nuclear war, isn’t it a little much for the opening to call it “the day after tomorrow”?
The best wrong solution they bring up—one that would have made for a better episode and did in fact make for a pretty good Star Trek episode—is the possibility that they’re somehow out-of-sync with everyone around them, and that all these still people are moving, just too slowly for them to perceive. Unfortunately, this interesting theory is capped by the comparison to the slowly moving hands of a clock, and one of the astronauts looks at a nearby grandfather clock and exclaims in horror, “This clock has no hands!” Gasp!
(The problem with this episode that honestly wouldn’t matter if it were a better episode overall is that all the posed bodies are real actors standing as still as they possibly can, and let’s just say that some of them are better at it than others. This is distracting to an extent, but I would completely breeze over it if there were more effective storytelling involved. It does entertain me that it’s like the fake freeze-frame endings at the end of Police Squad!, which are comedic gold.)
Eventually, the astronauts encounter Jeremy Wickwire (Cecil Kellaway), an affable old man who introduces himself as the caretaker. Wickwire makes the episode vastly more bearable. He has twinkling eyes, a sense of humor, and a sense of gravity, and his priorities are both very clear—eventually—and satisfyingly alien.
Wickwire explains that this is Happy Glades, a cemetery for the ultra-rich that lets their preserved bodies live out their happiest fantasies for all eternity. The fantasies are more diverse than what we’ve seen so far—one man explicitly changed his mind about the elaborate Victorian mansion he originally requested and opted to be “buried” in the medieval section, where he can wear a suit of armor and fight a dragon—but Wickwire says that this 1950s-era Earth was very popular with the people who originally built this asteroid cemetery in 1973. It’s a little odd that the astronauts are so wildly unfamiliar with preservation and AI technologies that were apparently mastered two hundred years ago, but they do have the excuse of a devastating nuclear war in the meantime, so I’ll cut the episode some slack on that point and assume that a lot of their progress got lost and had to be reconstructed.
There’s an important survival lesson in all this, which is to never drink anything handed to you by someone who proposes a toast “to everlasting, eternal peace.” The “twist” ending of Wickwire killing them—“Because you’re here, and you’re men, and while there are men, there can be no peace”—is easy to predict once we get to the cemetery revelation. Then there’s the toast, the not-so-casual question about what their dearest wishes would be, Wickwire’s stated purpose to make sure the “guests” aren’t disturbed … it’s not hard to figure out what direction this is going in, but Kellaway gives this last encounter a pleasant but subtly unsettling vibe that works almost despite the best efforts of the rest of the cast. There’s no impact to it all, but the occasional fillips of horror and unease make this parlor scene by far the best in the episode.
But despite a good scene, a good performance, and a relatively Twilight Zone-ish feel, there’s just way too much about this episode that flops for me. The truly atrocious line deliveries, the flat characterization, the bad pacing, etc. ... not to mention the questionable business model. I can’t buy that this many people would want to spend a fortune on installing their corpse in elaborate fantasy scenarios. We tend to care what happens to our bodies and even want to retain certain possessions or qualities in death—bury me in this outfit, don’t buy me that tombstone, etc.—but I have trouble believing in the popularity of this particular extreme. Even Pharaohs wanting their servants to be killed and buried with them make more emotional sense to me than this, but maybe I’m the odd one here. Please comment if this actually sounds appealing to you, because I’m really curious if this actually is a more universal fantasy than I realize.
Onward to “Mirror Image,” a deeply uncanny favorite of mine!
Closing: Kirby, Webber, and Meyers, three men lost. They shared a common wish—a simple one, really. They wanted to be aboard their ship headed for home. And fate—a laughing fate—a practical jokester with a smile stretched across the stars, saw to it that they got their wish with just one reservation: the wish came true, but only in the Twilight Zone.
MVP(s): Cecil Kellaway as Wickwire. This is an airless, plodding episode until he shows up and injects some much-needed humor, pathos, and actual decision-making, and Kellaway just has a sense of liveliness and character the other actors don’t provide. If it weren’t for him, this episode would be all the way down in the Dismal to Poor basement for me. As producer Buck Houghton said (qtd. The Twilight Zone Companion), “You couldn’t really feel too depressed about these fellows in the care of such a fine old fellow, I think.”
Astronaut Survival Rating: Zero stars.
Most Baffling Moment: When one astronaut accidentally knocks over the posed fisherman, we briefly cut to a still photograph of the other two astronauts on the bridge. Why someone decided that their reaction shot was so necessary that it needed to be included despite having apparently not even been filmed is beyond me. I assume this happened in post, because Heyes feels like too good a technical director for that--The Twilight Zone Companion goes into some detail about the smart choices he made here and the mistakes he learned from, and he directed great episodes like “And When the Sky Was Opened,” “The After Hours,” “The Howling Man,” “Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Invaders.” Bizarre.
Personal Tier: Weak to Average.
Up Next: Mirror Image.
Directed by: Douglas Heyes
Written by: Charles Beaumont
Based on: “Elegy,” by Charles Beaumont
Opening: The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They're looking for home. And in a moment, they'll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt.
Spoilers abound. Episode summary available here.
“Elegy” makes me long for human drama of “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air.” The astronauts in this episode may not be quite as slow on the uptake, but they lack survival instincts, purpose, and any sense of individual characterization. There are two blond astronauts (played by Kevin Hagen and Don Dubbins) and one dark-haired astronaut (played by Jeff Morrow), and I have to cling to hair color because it doesn’t feel like there’s any other way to distinguish between them. Kevin Hagen’s character is technically the captain, but he doesn’t radiate any sense of command, authority, or concern for his men, and he’s not tasked with making any important decisions, so his rank is meaningless to both his character and the plot.
The plot, such as it is, involves our three astronauts running out of fuel and landing—seemingly via autopilot?—on an asteroid with identical conditions to Earth. Before we can even start speculating that they’ll once again be right outside Reno, they discover an old-fashioned—to them—barn and tractor outside, complete with a frozen-in-place farmer and barking dog. Have they somehow traveled into Earth’s past? No, because—as one of them says solemnly—Earth never had two suns, and look, this place does. The fact that two of them completely failed to notice that an extra sun in the sky makes me despair of the whole profession.
The astronauts wander all over town, discovering other set-pieces like a mayor’s inauguration party, a man raking it in at a poker game, a couple dancing to the music of their own private string quartet, and a conventionally plain woman winning a beauty pageant. On the way, with some of the most stilted line deliveries imaginable, they theorize about all these statue-like people they’re encountering.
Is someone deliberately creating illusions for them? If so, why would they be drawing off Earth history two hundred years before the astronauts’ own time? My separate but related question: if this is two hundred years in the future and, as we eventually learn, after a nuclear war, isn’t it a little much for the opening to call it “the day after tomorrow”?
The best wrong solution they bring up—one that would have made for a better episode and did in fact make for a pretty good Star Trek episode—is the possibility that they’re somehow out-of-sync with everyone around them, and that all these still people are moving, just too slowly for them to perceive. Unfortunately, this interesting theory is capped by the comparison to the slowly moving hands of a clock, and one of the astronauts looks at a nearby grandfather clock and exclaims in horror, “This clock has no hands!” Gasp!
(The problem with this episode that honestly wouldn’t matter if it were a better episode overall is that all the posed bodies are real actors standing as still as they possibly can, and let’s just say that some of them are better at it than others. This is distracting to an extent, but I would completely breeze over it if there were more effective storytelling involved. It does entertain me that it’s like the fake freeze-frame endings at the end of Police Squad!, which are comedic gold.)
Eventually, the astronauts encounter Jeremy Wickwire (Cecil Kellaway), an affable old man who introduces himself as the caretaker. Wickwire makes the episode vastly more bearable. He has twinkling eyes, a sense of humor, and a sense of gravity, and his priorities are both very clear—eventually—and satisfyingly alien.
Wickwire explains that this is Happy Glades, a cemetery for the ultra-rich that lets their preserved bodies live out their happiest fantasies for all eternity. The fantasies are more diverse than what we’ve seen so far—one man explicitly changed his mind about the elaborate Victorian mansion he originally requested and opted to be “buried” in the medieval section, where he can wear a suit of armor and fight a dragon—but Wickwire says that this 1950s-era Earth was very popular with the people who originally built this asteroid cemetery in 1973. It’s a little odd that the astronauts are so wildly unfamiliar with preservation and AI technologies that were apparently mastered two hundred years ago, but they do have the excuse of a devastating nuclear war in the meantime, so I’ll cut the episode some slack on that point and assume that a lot of their progress got lost and had to be reconstructed.
There’s an important survival lesson in all this, which is to never drink anything handed to you by someone who proposes a toast “to everlasting, eternal peace.” The “twist” ending of Wickwire killing them—“Because you’re here, and you’re men, and while there are men, there can be no peace”—is easy to predict once we get to the cemetery revelation. Then there’s the toast, the not-so-casual question about what their dearest wishes would be, Wickwire’s stated purpose to make sure the “guests” aren’t disturbed … it’s not hard to figure out what direction this is going in, but Kellaway gives this last encounter a pleasant but subtly unsettling vibe that works almost despite the best efforts of the rest of the cast. There’s no impact to it all, but the occasional fillips of horror and unease make this parlor scene by far the best in the episode.
But despite a good scene, a good performance, and a relatively Twilight Zone-ish feel, there’s just way too much about this episode that flops for me. The truly atrocious line deliveries, the flat characterization, the bad pacing, etc. ... not to mention the questionable business model. I can’t buy that this many people would want to spend a fortune on installing their corpse in elaborate fantasy scenarios. We tend to care what happens to our bodies and even want to retain certain possessions or qualities in death—bury me in this outfit, don’t buy me that tombstone, etc.—but I have trouble believing in the popularity of this particular extreme. Even Pharaohs wanting their servants to be killed and buried with them make more emotional sense to me than this, but maybe I’m the odd one here. Please comment if this actually sounds appealing to you, because I’m really curious if this actually is a more universal fantasy than I realize.
Onward to “Mirror Image,” a deeply uncanny favorite of mine!
Closing: Kirby, Webber, and Meyers, three men lost. They shared a common wish—a simple one, really. They wanted to be aboard their ship headed for home. And fate—a laughing fate—a practical jokester with a smile stretched across the stars, saw to it that they got their wish with just one reservation: the wish came true, but only in the Twilight Zone.
MVP(s): Cecil Kellaway as Wickwire. This is an airless, plodding episode until he shows up and injects some much-needed humor, pathos, and actual decision-making, and Kellaway just has a sense of liveliness and character the other actors don’t provide. If it weren’t for him, this episode would be all the way down in the Dismal to Poor basement for me. As producer Buck Houghton said (qtd. The Twilight Zone Companion), “You couldn’t really feel too depressed about these fellows in the care of such a fine old fellow, I think.”
Astronaut Survival Rating: Zero stars.
Most Baffling Moment: When one astronaut accidentally knocks over the posed fisherman, we briefly cut to a still photograph of the other two astronauts on the bridge. Why someone decided that their reaction shot was so necessary that it needed to be included despite having apparently not even been filmed is beyond me. I assume this happened in post, because Heyes feels like too good a technical director for that--The Twilight Zone Companion goes into some detail about the smart choices he made here and the mistakes he learned from, and he directed great episodes like “And When the Sky Was Opened,” “The After Hours,” “The Howling Man,” “Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Invaders.” Bizarre.
Personal Tier: Weak to Average.
Up Next: Mirror Image.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-01 09:06 pm (UTC)Okay, this is based on not having watched the episode but rather having read a ton of contemporary-era SF short stories, but I feel like this is the dumbest possible twist for an episode involving astronauts landing somewhere weird! Do they not have instruments. What. Things that would have been cool here: weird time effects, time travel, being out of sync with reality, general variations on "traveling through space very fast does Weird Shit!"
The situation in which this might possibly have been a weird and cool twist would be someone on Earth finding themselves in this bizarre wax-museum simulation somehow and having to struggle to get out of it while trying to figure out what's going on and wondering if/when it's going to start affecting them, like a "trapped in a weird small town" kind of situation, as opposed to just *waves hands at space capsule* HAVING A CONVENIENT EXIT THE WHOLE TIME. AND ALSO INSTRUMENTS. TO TELL YOU. WHERE YOU ARE. And presumably would've heard of this if it's a common thing??
Leaving aside the evidently lackluster execution, these two things just don't go together! As an explanation for a mystery involving space and astronauts, this is both banal and stupid. As an explanation for a more limited-in-scope earth-based mystery, I think you could make it weird and creepy and horrific like it's probably supposed to be, a Madame Tussaud's with real people.
(Even creepier twist: some of them are a limited handful of rich people who wanted the fantasy, and the rest are props - bodies of poor people who were taxidermied into props for the rich as a free/cheap burial option.)
However, on a brighter note, I have now clicked on the link to the Police Squad end credits and you're right, those are great.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-01 09:18 pm (UTC)(Even creepier twist: some of them are a limited handful of rich people who wanted the fantasy, and the rest are props - bodies of poor people who were taxidermied into props for the rich as a free/cheap burial option.)
This would have been a great detail. Instead, while the episode does at least clarify where all the, say, losers in the beauty pageant and guests at the inauguration party are coming from, they turn out to just be models. I would also totally take this asteroid as a kind of weird Venus fly trap where the occasional crash-landers are killed to be taxidermied props! Almost anything other than what we get!
There are several Charles Beaumont-scripted episodes I really like, but when they fail, like this one does, it tends to be because he tries to rest too much on an idea hook and doesn't flesh it out ... and in this case the idea itself is also just not a good one. It's an uncanny image that never really builds into anything other than that.
However, on a brighter note, I have now clicked on the link to the Police Squad end credits and you're right, those are great.
I love them. That show is also responsible for one of my favorite random jokes; "Who are you and how did you get in here?" "I'm a locksmith, and I'm a locksmith."
Anyway, this episode totally flatlines, but I would really recommend the Biggles-adjacent episode "The Last Flight," which makes much more sense and has much more heart.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-01 10:14 pm (UTC)I liked the freeze-frame scenarios and the living people wandering through them, but then nothing interesting happened with any of it. If it was time slowed or stopped at the moment of greatest happiness, that would have at least made some sort of sense, but... everyone's just corpses? What?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-01 10:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-02 02:09 am (UTC)Agree 100% about Kellaway. He’s so twinkly and charming—and if there’s any surprise at all to the ending, it’s only possible because he seems so pleasant.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-02 02:21 am (UTC)The astronauts running around boggling at the same phenomenon over and over again is so fatal to the pacing. The visuals are suitably eerie, but it still goes on way too long.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-02 02:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-02 02:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-02 03:21 am (UTC)I know one of the Twilight Zone runs adapted “I Sing the Body Electric,” which is Bradbury, but I think it’s the one from the 80s. I watched episodes of both growing up so I have a hard time prying the two versions apart sometimes.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-02 03:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-02 10:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-04 02:47 am (UTC)