I grant you that I’m not into sports, but if there’s one that I think should be outlawed, it’s boxing. I mean, we’re better than the gladiators, right? Haven’t we grown since those days when bloodsport was the order of the day? At least outlaw it so the aliens watching us don’t think we’re mindless savages, for goodness sake. At least Rod Serling thought it was archaic enough that by 1974 we’d be fighting with robots instead of man. That’s certainly a step in the right direction, although one might assume it’s little more than Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots… just on a bigger scale. And hey, what kid didn’t love that game?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t offer much watchable material for a Twilight Zone episode; there’s not enough punch, pardon the pun, for this story. Through most of the tale, I was busy picking nits with the fact that the “robut” is breathing while under its blanket, or that the manager, Paul, was a total moron, loudly speaking about how defective their robot was while outside the ring-managers office. But at the end, somehow, Serling turns a very weak episode into a message about human perseverance and tenacity. That’s not a bad message but effectively it’s a retelling of Rocky, or more accurately, a pre-telling several decades before Sly Stallone donned the gloves.

The plot has Lee Marvin stand in for his own robot, because before the big fight his robot breaks. He goes up against a working robot and nearly dies, but his Rocky-ishness, aka tenacity, perseverence, and resilience ends up being what Serling is interested in. Shame he didn’t have an “Adrianne” he could call out to at the end of the story. Might have added a layer of fun. But wait until I tell one of my coworkers, who loves the Rocky franchise, that The Twilight Zone got there decades earlier!

Little did I know, some time in 2024, an episode could be written about me. I showed plenty of tenacity and perseverence sticking with this show, getting knocked down more times than I can count, but I kept coming back for more. Eventually, it may throw the knockout punch but I think I can go the full 156 rounds. I’ve made it 122 so far. Not much more to go now, is there? ML

The view from across the pond:

Steel takes place in the far flung future of 1974. In the 11 years between the year this was broadcast and the year the story takes place, a lot has happened. Boxing has been made illegal, unless the competitors are robots. Somebody has invented androids that are sophisticated enough to replicate the range of human movements necessary to fight in a boxing ring. That happened so long ago that some models of the boxing androids are obsolete and considered to be so old-fashioned that you can’t even buy parts for them any more. They mainly work with springs and buttons. I have to be honest: I’m not entirely sure writer Richard Matheson thought that all through terribly well.

The boxing ban would have seemed realistic enough at the time, though, following a controversial brutal match in 1962 which ended with the death of one of the fighters, and that was all televised nationally. Sadly, boxing never did get banned, but Matheson makes a strong case for showing why it should have been. By the end of the episode, Steel Kelly’s decision to pretend to be his robot has resulted in serious injury, in front of a crowd who were shouting out things like “kill him”. Apparently the bloodlust didn’t end when the ban did. The spectacle of two men fighting is enough to turn the crowd into animals, even if the men are supposedly made of metal.

This is one of those stories with a paper-thin plot. Steel has a B2 robot, which has had its day. He takes its place in the ring, to fight a B7, trying to get enough money from the fight to do some repairs on the B2. The inevitable happens. There is no twist ending. Once Steel has decided on the deception, the rest of the episode plays out exactly as expected. Twilight Zone has started doing this kind of thing more and more, abandoning the twist ending, and instead showing us an idea and its consequences. It’s an odd kind of storytelling, and pretty much pointless, unless you consider the acting talents and the idea being explored are sufficient. If so, fair enough, but I’m struggling to understand the purpose of making something like this, especially as these episodes tend to be so miserably bleak.

I can see how there could be a point to the twist-less TZ variety of story. They could function like an Aesop’s Fable, showing us somebody doing something silly, and then offering up a moral. It feels like that is what Matheson is trying to do with Steel, but the problem that keeps happening with these fable-type TZ episodes is that the writers don’t really have a moral to offer us. It’s as if they don’t quite know what they are trying to say, or if they do, then they say something that seems to indicate that they don’t really understand their own story. It keeps happening. Take the ending narration for Steel as an example:

“Portrait of a losing side, proof positive that you can’t out-punch machinery. Proof also of something else: that no matter what the future brings, man’s capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any and all changes made by his society, for which three cheers and a unanimous decision rendered from the Twilight Zone.”

Nonsense. Utter, dribbling nonsense. That’s not what we just watched. We watched an idiot who wouldn’t face up to the truth that his toy robot was broken, took a stupid risk for the sake of money, and got his comeuppance. Steel is like one of those people who have a 15 year old car, take it to the garage, get told that £1000 of work is needed and the car is only worth £500, and go ahead and pay for the work anyway. 5 years later, they are still doing the same thing, and have spent thousands on a heap of rust. He’s a deluded fool, and he learns nothing at all from the experience. He’s a nasty, violent thug, who threatens to beat up his mechanic when things aren’t going his way. He thinks he can solve his problems with his fists, and asks for exactly what he gets, when he tries to actually do that. Somebody with stronger fists smacks him down. Tenacity and optimism, my arse. Stubbornness and delusion. Give us a moral at the end that actually reflects what we just watched. How about the sunk-cost fallacy? How about the stupidity of solving problems by fighting? How about cheating not paying off? So we have to construct our own moral, in order to make sense of the fable. When we do that, the story actually becomes quite interesting, albeit rather depressing. But how many more episodes are going to require the viewer to do the writer’s job for him?   RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet