physics - Time Enough at Last

Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) is a bookish little man who can never find the time to read. He can't read at home or at work because both his wife and boss think reading is a waste of time. Henry takes his lunch breaks in the vault at the bank where he works. During one of these lunch breaks, a super hydrogen bomb is tested, ending mankind. Henry is the only one left. He loses hope and is about to commit suicide when he finds the public library. All the books he could ever hope for are his for the taking. He finally has all the time in the world to read. Unfortunately, as he is about to pick up a book, his glasses fall off and shatter.

Trivia

In 1960, John Brahm was awarded a Director's Guild award for his work on this episode.
Rated #25 on TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in Television".

Themes

Seemingly a comment on the cosmically thin line between heaven-on-Earth and living hell, which is also explored in A Nice Place to Visit. Also suggests a "Be careful what you wish for" message, a theme repeated in The Man in the Bottle, The Trouble With Templeton, The Last Night of a Jockey, Escape Clause, The Mind and the Matter, A Nice Place to Visit and I Dream of Genie .

Critical Response

"It is as fine a piece of theatrical bitter irony as has been constructed. Greek playwrights would look at that and go, 'Pretty Good!'" Keith Olbermann on TV Land's presentation of TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in Television".

"Much of the implacable seriousness of the Twilight Zone is seemingly keyed by the clipped, dour delivery of Serling himself an the interlocutor. He never encourages us to laugh, or even smile, even when the plot twist is at least darkly funny. For example, in "Time Enough at Last" (November 20, 1959), written by Rod Serling from a short story by Lynn Venable, a frustrated bookworm played by Burgess Meredith hides in a bank vault to finish David Copperfield in privacy. He emerges to find himself the only survivor in a nuclear holocaust, and looks forward to a lifetime of reading books. Unfortunately, his glasses slip off his nose and crash, leaving him forever unable to sample the literary treasures all around him. C'est a rire, n'est-ce pas? Well, not exactly. The H-bomb is still lurking in the background of the bookworm's "accident." The point is that the bomb could never have gone off on network television were the plot couched in a more realistic format." Andrew Sarris, excerpt from Rod Serling: Viewed from beyond the Twilight Zone

External link

TV Tome episode page

References

Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)

Categories: The Twilight Zone