I used to love The Twilight Zone. In fact, it’s one of the very few series my mom and I ever shared because she had watched this series in her younger years. I also shared it with my cousin, often staying up late over our summer holidays to watch it together. I have fond memories of this show, and remember liking most of the episodes. This one was no exception in my memory, but I do think watching something with your mind in an idle state is a lot different than analyzing a show. The concept of A Kind of Stopwatch stuck with me all my life. There’s a hint of Time Enough at Last in that we have a protagonist who is struck down by his own folly and left in a world devoid of life. But as I watched this episode, it took precisely 6 minutes for me to check how much time was left. 6 minutes for McNulty to make me want to turn off the television. That’s got to be a new record!
It really makes me wonder: when did The Twilight Zone go from good to annoy-the-crap-out-of-the-viewer-with-idiotic-characters? Did Rod Serling live on an island with Man Friday, that he never spoke to another human to know what dialogue was like? I’m so curious if he ever encountered a man who spoke like McNulty? Maybe he did and really hated the guy so he wrote an episode that showed what a fool the man could be. You think about that! Let’s just consider McNulty as a real person for a moment. He didn’t start life in the job where we find him; he had to be interviewed. The boss would recognize in a second that a man who has ideas about tin cans and thinks they apply to women’s clothing would never have a career with him. He’d never get the job. But even if he had managed to get the job, he surely couldn’t keep it. Between incessant chatter, no work, and occasionally hitting on the wrong women, he’d be run out of town like a common pygmy. His confidence is commendable, but his inability to read social cues on any level is just hard to watch. I wrote in my notes: “moron”, only to then have one of the characters ask him, “you want to stop there or try for ‘moron’?” You think about that!
Maybe it’s because he is forced to live in such a small apartment that his kitchen is in his bedroom, and he doesn’t even have a place for his alarm clock. Maybe it’s because he lives alone and has no one to bounce ideas off. Maybe it’s just because Serling wants to write about a guy who is so difficult to like that when he gets his just desserts, we are not sorry for him. We can all enjoy his misery because we didn’t like him anyway. But even that wouldn’t make it any better because when McNulty gets this special stopwatch and learns that it freezes time, we get a nearly interminable series of images of how time stops. Perhaps this was cool tech at the time, showing what the production crew could do with canned footage and a pause button, but it goes overboard with sharing images from all over the world. We get it, dude, you don’t have to kill the episode with an unending array of paused footage to get the point across! Rod either didn’t have nearly enough material for the whopping 25 minutes – not a great statement on its own – or he thought the audience was so dense, they wouldn’t understand that time froze everywhere unless he showed something from every corner of the earth. News flash: that’s not a good sentiment either! You think about that!
When McNulty is robbing his local bank he drops the watch and makes it where he can’t unfreeze the world. Conceptually cool but utterly inconceivable as a technology. This episode is pure fantasy, and it delights in watching a jerk fall on his face and expecting the viewer to be delighted by it. Actually, McNulty did us a favor and spared all of humanity from ever having to hear his inane ramblings again! You think about that. And yes, that line was his most endearing trait, which is horrendous because it implied the guy was capable of thought. I just don’t know why I liked this show and what’s more, I’m amazed that it has a better reputation the The Outer Limits! That show had a few jerks too, don’t get me wrong, but this series wallows in them. When the best scene in the entire episode is a tissue floating in midair over a waste basket, you know you’ve entered the lowest level of The Twilight Zone. ML
The view from across the pond:
Patrick Thomas McNulty is the latest in a long line of Twilight Zone idiots. This series specialises in showing us somebody we would hate to know in real life, and then shows them getting their comeuppance for their character flaws, often in as cruel a way as possible. Sometimes you have to search hard to find any point to that, other than offering up an unhealthy does of schadenfreude to the viewers, which doesn’t seem like a particularly valuable thing to do, but A Kind of a Stopwatch does score in two areas: it has a point to make, and it’s also an example of the rarest of Twilight Zone beasts. It’s a comedy that’s actually quite funny.
This series has attempted comedy on several occasions, almost always disastrously, but A Kind of a Stopwatch made me laugh quite frequently. It’s really silly comedy, which can be a lot of fun, but it also doesn’t know when a joke stops being funny. When we get the endless scenes of time being stopped, simply pausing the tapes of a variety of weird and wonderful stock footage, Rod Serling is like a child who keeps telling the same joke and can’t understand why nobody is laughing any more. I suppose that’s fairly appropriate, in an episode that is about a man who just keeps talking nonsense and can’t understand why nobody wants to listen to him any more.
“You think about that now.”
Nobody wants to “think about that”. They just want to be left in peace, but McNulty is one of those people who thinks he is brilliant and everyone should understand what a genius he is. A kind interpretation would be that he is actually a kind of flawed genius (why aren’t tins of beans square so they stack better, anyway?) but he doesn’t understand that a good idea is worthless if it’s not used in a sensible context. There’s no point going on about flat sausages, when your chosen audience for that idea is a company that makes ladies’ foundation garments.
It is therefore unsurprising that he does all the wrong things with his stopwatch. Like a good idea, used wrongly, he has a useful tool and uses it in all the wrong ways. First, he tries to pitch it to his ex-boss, although he has been sacked, and it’s not a ladies’ foundation garment. Then he tries to convince his not-friends that it works, taking an eternity to realise that they can’t actually see the things he is doing when they are frozen in time. He doesn’t seem to cotton on to the idea that he could actually create undeniable evidence, but ruffling up somebody’s hair and taking tiny sips out of a couple of drinks isn’t exactly going to meet the threshold for people to believe he has a magic watch. Finally, he realises he can use it to make himself rich, and then continues to make bad choices, messing around with bits of loose change although he has a trolley full of money, and of course inevitably smashing his watch. It’s a straight-up remake of the end of Time Enough at Last, with the broken glasses, rich in devastatingly cruel irony. All that money becomes worthless, and a man who thrives on talking all the time has nobody to talk to any more. Nobody wanted to listen to him, and now nobody ever can.
So it’s a surprisingly effective episode. The comedy works reasonably well, as does the storyline, as long as you allow for the premise that McNulty is a moron so will naturally do moronic things for the entire episode. It’s irritating at times, but without the comedy this would be almost unwatchably frustrating, because we would share the feelings of all those people in the pub and wouldn’t want to be in the company of a jerk for 25 minutes. This is therefore a rare example of a TZ episode that needs comedy to make the story palatable to the viewers. Serling attempts a moral about misusing a gift, as per his ending narration, but I think there is a metaphorical interpretation there as well. McNulty had the gift of an inventive, active mind. But good ideas are only helpful if you apply them with common sense. RP
Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: The Last Night of a Jockey
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The View from the Junkyard 
I’ve read the opinion, probably in the AV Club episode review, that this was a comedy until he broke the watch, then it became a tragedy for everyone.
Richard Erdman, who played an annoying character well, acted into his 90s, playing a recurring role on COMMUNITY. He was also funny on Dick Van Dyke’s sitcom.
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The potential comedy that suddenly becomes a tragedy is something I learned to appreciate when I first saw the movie Teachers with Nick Nolte. For this TZ though, they clearly found it in their hearts to still maintain the upbeat music at the end. My biggest question is whether the stopwatch causes everyone else to freeze in time but McNulty or just puts McNulty in some kind of time limbo (like in The Outer Limits: The Premonition). Either way it would have been interesting to see him find some kind of salvation and become a better man as a result.
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Again, I think the episode is being judged a little too harshly because you have to first realize who the lead is. Richard Erdman was a character actor primarily known for comedy roles. He has a significant role in Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” which is a comedy-drama but has a good deal of the former. He was a regular on an early 60s sitcom starring Tab Hunter as his best buddy and he also made the rounds in this era primarily in guest shots on sitcoms, including as Jon noted an absolutely hilarious role on an episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” called “Baby Fat” in which he plays an effete Broadway show costume designer. So I think what this episode first requires is an understanding that like earlier episodes with the likes of Shelley Berman and Andy Devine, this is not going to be a particularly deep episode. After all, this episode has to avoid making us think “Just where in the world did this guy Potts come up with this watch and why would he pass it off just because someone bought him a drink?” You have to sit back and “go with the flow” so to speak and see if the episode is going to land as a comedy and for the most part I think the episode at least because it’s only a half hour manages to avoid being excruciating (like “I Dream Of Genie” was the previous season at an hour. That episode was just a series of unfunny set pieces whereas this episode at least has a through-line).
I also have to, as a baseball fan, give Serling props for how when McNulty recounts the Mets game he was at, he goes for 100% authenticity by mentioning Ron Hunt and Duke Snider, who actually played for the Mets that year (1963) and since Hunt was a rookie phenom that *really* shows some baseball fan savvy (and Serling was a big fan of the game). This is the sort of thing that was common in 1950s-60s TV when baseball was still the national pastime. By the 70s that was gone and writers I’ve noticed were not baseball fans any longer who would ever work in a reference like that to real players of the moment. So on that level, “Stopwatch” gets an extra bonus point from me.
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I think that to be as fair as humanly possible, such an episode, certainly with the comedic talents of one like Richard Erdman, may work just for the sake of entertainment and even in the TZ. That doesn’t obligate you to have it on your re-watch list. You can remember the message about consequences which the TZ even in its most tedious repetitions has made memorable enough. For another sci-fi example of how actors might appeal to us for appearing motionless, it naturally deserves enough points for that. And yet this was a very clear sign that the classic TZ was finally running out of steam. Quite frankly if I wanted a karma-episode-of the-week anthology to be suitably entertained by nowadays, I’d prefer The Hitchhiker. Thank you both for your reviews.
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