It’s one of the biggest letdowns in the world when you’re a reviewer and you watch a thing, make notes, write up said review, and then find the review was eaten by demons, summoned forth by the large hadron collider, or perhaps the ghost of Rod Serling, sick and tired of hearing you berate his creation.  I get it; things happen, Mandela effects are real, and the Ghost of Rod Serling is a powerful one indeed.  Sadly, I wrote my review while overseas just as the new year rolled in and I didn’t have my notebook with me; I write using Notepad and if you don’t think you need to save it… well, let’s just say the ghost of Rod can be a mean one.  Alas, my thoughts on this are a few months old now and I don’t plan to revisit the experience.  Having said that, Rod could have rested easy: I had planned on a positive write-up.  You could say I was in praise of In Praise of Pip.

The thing that caught me right from the get-go was that this is a Jack Klugman story and honestly, I don’t think he’s a great actor but more than that, he’s so indelibly etched in my mind as Oscar Madison, that he could play Slap Happy, the town comic, and I still would see him as the grumpy old man.  News flash: that’s what he’s playing again.  Rod knew how to cast, because he got the right guy – Max Philips is a miserable cheat who hangs out with some unsavory characters.  He manages to aggravate them because he does one of the first a good deeds of his life by allowing a guy to get off light after making a bad bet.  This gets him a bullet to the gut.  Yeah, he’s the typical Jack Klugman character… except, he loves his son.  That young man is his pride and joy.  And so the two ideas come together.

This leads to the heart of the story and where I found the most to enjoy.  After Max was shot for doing his good deed, he realizes he was never able to be the father he should have been.  When he finds out that his son was injured while in Vietnam, he makes a plea, giving up his own life for that of his son.  While I was very glad that this was a 25-minute episode, because honestly a lot of this story was padded out, the fact is, I was moved by Klugman’s love for his son.  He remembers the positive times he had with Pip, taking him to the fairground and making his son smile.  It’s a lovely performance.  Maybe it’s because I lost my dad almost a decade ago, but I remember so many of those moments that this couldn’t help but resonate with me.  It’s funny because I know my dad parented me, but when I think of him, I think of all the happy moments we shared.  I always relive those last few days, all happy times.    Sure, this same story could have been told if Max were like my own dad but Klugman plays the sort of character who never amounts to that.  So be it; that’s the writer’s choice I suppose.  I guess we had to make him a character we were willing to part with in the end.  Still, what struck me was that Max may not have been a great father, but he loved his son and added happy memories to the kid’s life.  He was Pip’s best bud.  Pip will never know that his father made a deal to give up his own life so that Pip could live and maybe that wasn’t really why Pip survived, but we’ll new know for sure.  Yet, that did make me wonder.  If such a thing were possible, I know without a doubt that my dad would have made the same choice for me or my sister.  Is it possible on some level that that’s what happened while he was in the hospital, unconscious.  Could he have chosen to let go because it somehow meant he’d be with us both all the time?  (A bit like Obi-Wan now; I feel him with me more often than I can say!)   That makes me both very sad and very happy.  It reminds me to always strive to be a good man, like he was.  He was special, but I am glad to know I have some of his qualities!

Maybe this isn’t the best of the Zone, and maybe it is padded but I liked the relationship we see in Max’s mind.  And who doesn’t like Billy Mumy anyway?  He plays a very cute Pip and he never recognizes the danger his dad is in.   (You see what I did there, don’t you?)  In the end, Pip remembers his dad as a good man and has fond memories of their time together.  It’s a shame Max couldn’t be a better man during his life, but we’re all memories in the end, so at least Pip remembers the good man who loved him.  Yeah, it’s not my favorite, but In Praise of Pip was a great start to season 5.  ML

The view from across the pond:

“Very little comment here,” says Rod Serling, at the end of his first script for the fifth season of Twilight Zone. That makes a lot of sense, because there’s very little story here. We are back to the 25 minute format, and it’s a welcome return to the shorter running time, but it doesn’t stop the episode from feeling padded. I’ve always said Serling was an ideas man, more interested in the premise than the execution of the idea. This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule, because he doesn’t actually have an idea at all, but he fleshes out all the nothingness with considerable style. It helps when you’ve got Jack Klugman to play the lead. A great actor can paper over a lot of cracks.

The story here, for what it’s worth, is a man who offers his life in exchange for his son’s. In Serling’s ending narration, he talks about “nobility and sacrifice and love”, but that doesn’t really come across in his story, apart from the love that a father has for his son. Even that emotion is overwhelmed by a bigger one: guilt. Max says, “I was gonna change,” which is probably the most important message this story has for us. If you need to change, then the time to do that is right now. Leave it until tomorrow to be a better father, or whatever the problem may be that needs fixing, and you might just leave it a day too late. Lots of tomorrows become never.

Having said all that, I understand the drive to be a better father. Anyone who is content with their parenting skills is probably being foolishly hubristic. We all make mistakes, and we should all strive to be a better person tomorrow than we were today. Max actually doesn’t come across as too bad a father, considering he is one of those Twilight Zone losers who got stuck in a grimy life on the wrong side of the law. When we see him with his son he is a devoted father, and his son as an adult remembers his childhood with fondness. What’s really going on here is he wants to be a better man, in order to be a better father, and he doesn’t quite know how to do that. When he finally does something right, and tries to keep another young man out of prison, he pays for that good deed with his life. So he truly was stuck. He had the choice of being a father who set a bad example, or a dead father. That’s bleak. In the end, the latter becomes preferable.

The problem with the self-sacrifice is that’s not quite what it is. The idea of a man exchanging his life for his son’s has the potential to be a good Twilight Zone story, but not if it’s done like this. Max is dying anyway, and for all we know his son is going to live, because he came through the operation. It’s not much of a deal that he’s offering. There had to be a better way to tell this story. And all the stuff with his son at the fairground is just padding. It’s well-written and well-acted padding, but padding nonetheless. The plot of the episode is actually very simple: a man does the right thing for once in his life, gets shot, and offers his life in exchange for his critically injured son. None of that requires a dream-like reunion between the two of them, although it is touching to watch (and as soon as you see a framed photo of Billy Mumy you know it’s going to happen!).

I have to admit the “Who’s your best buddy?” thing got on my nerves, and in the hands of a different writer there could have been something important to explore there, because a father should never be his son’s “best buddy”. That kind of thing is about the father trying to feel good about himself, and it’s inherently selfish. Being a dad is about so much more than that. It’s so much bigger, and so much more important, and it includes setting an example of how to be a decent human being. Maybe that’s where Max really went wrong, in the end. He was loving and fun. He went to the fairground with his son, took him on the rides and bought him candyfloss. He was a best buddy. But he forgot to be a father, because he was too busy making a small amount of money off the misery of others. In the end, at least he found a way to set an example of how to make the hard choices in life, do the right thing, pay the price, and make a change.   RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: Steel