This episode gave me an interesting thing to consider.  I’ve been struggling recently with this series because I remember liking it a lot more than I do now.  My chief complaint is that so many episodes deal with jerks.  But along comes Living Doll and I realize I have to rethink things.  There are jerks and there are JERKS, if you catch my meaning.  Some are just annoying, and you want to get away from them, go shopping, or head off to your proctologist just to get away from them.  But then there are the ones who you despise.   That’s a different kettle of fish when you’re asked to watch 25 minutes of those kinds of jerks getting what’s coming to them.

I think Serling is trying to stimulate a revenge desire with most of his jerks, but this is a Charles Beaumont story, and he has a different tactic in mind.  He wants us to dislike the person so much that we’ll want to see something bad happen to them.  The problem with most of Serling’s stories about jerks is that they are usually just small people doing things that we don’t want to see.  They’re annoying but they are rarely “evil”.  But Erich (Telly Savalas) in Living Doll is a different kind of jerk.  He’s a monster.   He’s a monster to his wife, and he’s a monster to his stepdaughter.  This is a man who treats them like an enemies since he can’t have kids of his own.  Hey, I get it: he wanted to be a dad to someone, but given the chance, he fails horribly, and we do want to watch this guy get his just desserts.

Talky Tina is a pretty average child’s toy.  It blinks when picked up and it has a windup mechanism on the back that makes it speak, and it loves Christie very much.  However, when it sees how Christie’s stepdad treats her, it develops some new language.  “My name is Talky Tina and I’m going to kill you.” The idea of a small child’s toy killing a grown man suddenly becomes very scary (and explains why someone thought to make the Chucky movies).  Surely, Erich can break it, burn it, crush it, or saw it in half… unless he can’t!  So that brings up a big question: why can’t he do it?  Is it really possessed?  The final moment gives some indication that it might be, when it tells Annabelle, Christie’s mom, “you’d better be nice to me”.  We are met with a surprisingly bone-chilling slow motion drop as she realizes something is very wrong here.  But… is it?  I mean, Erich had been telling her it’s alive and then she finds her husband dead with it right next to him, but is that the power of suggestion?

I have read that some people have noticed the similarities between the names Tina and Christie – both variations on Christina.  This gives indication that perhaps Talky Tina Killer Doll is really Christie manifesting her rage towards her dreadful stepfather until she eventually kills him.  Sure, that would make some sense, even if it is very bleak turning a child into a murderer.  But that wouldn’t explain why Erich couldn’t destroy it.  Surely a blowtorch or a saw would work regardless of Christie’s rage.  What if instead the Doll is less Christina and more his own self-loathing?  I’m sure it’s bit demoralizing when a man is told he can’t have children.  Maybe he starts to question his manhood and the latest doll is just one reminder too many.  It says that he’s not able to be the man he wants to be and it pushes him over the edge… and down the stairs.  That’s actually pretty sad too but I could accept that more than a child becoming the murderer!

As deaths go, Erich’s is weak.  If it was self-loathing made manifest by the doll, his final act is to end it, and dying next to the doll might have instilled in Annabelle more fear around the doll thanks to that power of suggestion.  Suddenly, she thinks, her husband was right.  Maybe Talky Tina does have some evil living inside her.  But that’s not likely.  I don’t think she really does say anything more than she’s programmed to say and everything we see is just in the minds of a deeply disturbed and sad family.  It’s all very trippy stuff.  And speaking of trippy: the voice for this doll is the same that was used by the real life Chatty Cathy doll range.  How freaky would it be for a child to see this episode and realize that same voice was in their own doll.  Or perhaps the biggest takeaway is far more surprising: Talky Tina is Chucky’s grandmother!  Now that is scary…    ML

The view from across the pond:

Toys can be scary things, taken out of context. When I was a toddler, I had a large toy monkey, and I can remember looking up at that thing on the top of my wardrobe in the dark and being terrified of it. Luckily for me, it never started threatening anyone, and of course these fears are always unfounded, often triggered by the uncanny valley response, which applies particularly to dolls. Was Twilight Zone the first example of a killer doll on television? I don’t know, but it certainly inspired an entire industry of killer doll films, and deservedly so.

A recent example is M3GAN, which is completely magnificent. If you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for? M3GAN shares something with Living Doll, which is surprisingly effective: the viewer is on the same side as the doll. This obviously takes away a lot of the fear factor. We are too busy cheerleading the doll, approving of its mission to protect a child and stand up for the child’s rights, to be frightened. Mild spoiler for M3GAN follows: both examples of the genre only really get frightening when the doll turns on one of the good guys. In the case of M3GAN this is taken a step further than Living Doll, because the robot doll ends up threatening the little girl she has been protecting. In Living Doll, the moment we realise this is actually really dangerous and scary is saved for right at the end, when Talky Tina threatens Christie’s mother Annabelle, having just killed Christie’s stepfather, although Annabelle is supposed to be on the same side as Tina. But crucially the threat is about being nice to Tina, not Christie. This is the moment that the doll demands respect for herself, not the child.

Of course, the reason we are firmly on Tina’s side is that her enemy is the latest in a long line of Twilight Zone jerks. Superficially, this is simply yet another iteration of the story this show does almost every episode: a bad man gets his comeuppance. Roll up! Roll up! Come and marvel at the spectacle of cruel fate! Come and indulge in the dark delights of schadenfreude! Erich is a textbook example of the evil step-parent trope. The writer conveys a lot of backstory very efficiently, sketching in important details with a beautifully light touch. In just one quick line of dialogue, we learn that Christie has been seeing a psychiatrist because she feels rejected by her new dad. We also learn that there is a lot of acrimony between Annabelle and Erich over their inability to have a child together, and Erich has dealt with his shame of his own literal impotence by wielding power over his new family. He’s a revolting man. The episode almost loses credibility, because it’s difficult to understand why these people are even still living together, when they clearly dislike each other, but that’s slightly ameliorated by Erich’s attempts to make everything right when Annabelle is packing her suitcase. There must actually be some love there.

Erich is a pathetic, nasty man, and I don’t think many people watching this would be too disappointed in his fate. However, the true monster here is Annabelle, so I was cheerleading Tina right to the end, even her final threat. To save repeating myself, I’ll quote something I wrote for my Buffy the Vampire Slayer review of the episode Ted:

“This episode has a message for single parents that is not just important, it’s vital. If you’ve got children, they come first. If you’re ever going to put your own happiness above that of your daughter for one single second, you don’t deserve to have one.”

Living Doll is a similar cautionary tale. Annabelle has remarried, and Christie has no choice but to be part of that new family too. Even allowing for the terrible judgement Annabelle showed in choosing Erich, or perhaps allowing for the possibility that his personality changed dramatically when he couldn’t have his own children, the second he started bullying Christie she should have packed her suitcase and taken her daughter to safety, away from that revolting excuse for a human being. Nobody should ever be allowed to treat a child like that, and a mother who allows her child to be mistreated shares the culpability. Talky Tina, the killer doll, is the hero here.

The choice of name for the doll is interesting, as Tina and Christie are both shortenings of the same name. Serling doesn’t acknowledge that in his ending narration, when he describes Tina as “friend, defender, guardian”, but she could equally be a manifestation of Christie’s own fears: the victim fighting back. It’s one possible theory, but I’m not sure it quite fits, as Christie seems like far too gentle a soul to seek revenge, even subconsciously. Instead, it’s probably a simple case of the universe providing help for a bullied child in need, and angry help, at that. If only that extended beyond the Twilight Zone.   RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: The Old Man in the Cave