I confess I have no memory of seeing this episode before, but I know what to expect in the cave.  What I was hoping was that there would be a guy named Tom.  Why Tom?  T. O. M.  The Old Man.

Ok, all kidding aside, I’ve recently gone back to an older game because Apple is about to release it as a television show.  That game is Fallout 4.  In it, the world has been wiped out by mankind’s stupidity and the bombs have been dropped.  Food is scarce and radiation is everywhere.  Some animals are mutated, and store fronts are just that: fronts.  The rest have been blasted to smithereens.  Go swimming for just a moment and you’re irradiated.  It’s a bleak game, really.  And the moment The Old Man in the Cave started, I felt like this was a story right out of the Fallout series.  That probably helped my enjoyment of this episode.

What struck me is that this is what I expect from The Twilight Zone: there’s a social commentary here despite it having Serling’s trademark jerks to move the story along.   It only fails to get the year right, placing this in 1974, but it gets the warnings right.  Even the punchline spoken by Goldsmith (John Anderson) about faithlessness being the downfall of man seems very plausible.  I’m far from a religious person but fully appreciate the value of faith.  I’m not saying people need religion to have faith, but we should have something that we place our faith in because the absence of faith in our world could very well be why we’re living on the brink.  This is a very prescient episode even if we remove the titular cave dweller.  The fact that I’m watching this about a computer as the cave dweller just around the time that AI is getting so much publicity is just another way The Twilight Zone gets things alarmingly right.

The episode is gifted with a strong cast and it’s a far cry from the last few we’ve seen.  Let’s face it, we had one episode recently with only one actor in it, and another with only 3.  This has a large cast including the aforementioned Anderson, along with John Marley and James Coburn, the last of which was an actor I always liked.  And that says nothing of the rest of the townspeople.  Interestingly, this is a story that focuses on a jerk but doesn’t have the same effect on me as the previous ones.  We have Coburn’s Major French come into town and question the information provided by this unseen man in a cave.  The allegory is hard to miss.  He’s a bit like the biblical Satan, bringing temptation to the world and getting all the townspeople to ignore the words of “the old man”, which has always protected them up until now.  Just because it ends up being a computer, doesn’t change that it has saved them before.  That it’s a computer is only significant when we consider that humans think very human-centrically.  Once they realize it’s a computer, they do the other thing humans are so good at: they attack that which is not like them despite it having been responsible for keeping them alive.  The one man who retains his faith is Anderson who French referred to as “father” when he first arrived.  The allusion to the bible is complete: we have a priest who speaks to an all-knowing god.  We have the serpent in the garden who offers temptation and destroys the social order.  We have the people turning on their god and only those faithful few (1!) survives.  It’s a bleak tale and yet it feels more real than most of the episodes I’ve watched lately.

I don’t know why this isn’t one that shows up in those yearly marathons…. Actually wait, I probably do.  This is the very sort of thing that gets people thinking and then they realize they don’t like what they were thinking so they end up turning off the source of that thought.  So the networks probably figure it’s better to keep the thing out of circulation during those marathons.  Why get people to hate your show just because you tried to give them something to think about, right?

Yes, I’m being feisty.  This is exactly what people should be watching as a reminder that we need to ignore the serpent in the garden before it’s too late.  James Coburn gets his just comeuppance which I can accept, but so does the entire town.  If only they remembered their lessons… if only they had a show that would periodically remind them so they could avoid calamity.  Sometimes, I think I live in the Twilight Zone.  ML

The view from across the pond:

Today on The Tosspot Zone, another nasty piece of work gets his comeuppance. This seems to happen almost every episode, and it has long since stopped being fun, if it ever was. This week’s moron is Major French, one of those people who power-trips on wearing a uniform and thinks it gives him the right to wield power over everyone else. Those people exist in real life. I’m not sure what percentage of people go into jobs that involve wearing a uniform because they want to feel like they are big men who can boss around the little people, but my guess is it’s probably quite a high number.

The townsfolk are all jerks as well. A man comes along whose first act is to punch their chosen leader and place his foot on his chest, and they decide this is the man who they should follow from now on. Here’s a stand-up guy, who is obviously clever enough to understand more about their situation than the man who has predicted almost everything correctly since the apocalypse. But this shows the strength of the impulse to believe something, however unlikely, if it’s what you really want to be the truth. It’s why far right media is so popular in many Western countries, despite being so obviously full of lies. It’s why people believe the charlatans who make money from telling us aliens are among us. It’s why people pay psychics. We are desperate for somebody to come along and tell us exactly what we want to hear, however absurd and illogical our innermost desires. That’s why French has it so easy when he walks into town. He tells them what they want to hear: have a feast.

Odd, then, that the whole message of this episode is about the value of faith. Once again, Rod Serling displays absolutely no understanding of his own story (although he did borrow it from somebody else, so maybe he has a bit more of an excuse than usual). The townspeople don’t lose their faith. They simply transfer it from one person to another. Their faith just becomes more blind. Instead of believing the man who has a track record of getting things right, they believe a man who tells them what they want to hear. Their abandoned god isn’t a deity. It’s a computer. They all abandon logic and common sense, not faith. They smash up the technology that’s calculating the right answers for them, and instead believe the man who is guessing about whether some food is poisonous or not. These are desperate, starving people, so I’m not saying it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just that Serling writes a fable and then picks a moral that is entirely the opposite of the story he just showed us.

The computer is a textbook example of sci-fi showing us magic and pretending it’s technology. That filing cabinet with flashy lights couldn’t do jack, let alone be an all-knowing oracle. Where does it even plug in? The big box of nonsense is in a cave! Some of what it does sounds quite prescient, like the weather predictions, which is a bit like looking stuff up on the internet, but how would it know whether the food in the tins were safe to eat, or which fields would be the right ones to grow the crops? What are we supposed to take from that? It really was a god, disguised as a box with pretty lights? Whatever the case may be, the townsnumpties choose to believe the thug in uniform who tells them to eat the poison, and predictably they all drop dead. There’s little viewing pleasure in seeing the uniforms among the corpses. That kind of schadenfreude in Twilight Zone has long since worn thin. Instead we are invited to ruminate upon “man’s imperfection”, his “greed, desire and faithlessness”, none of which actually cause the downfall of these townspeople. Instead, it’s their desperation to believe somebody who is telling them what they want to hear. It’s the way they turn away from common sense and logic. So that provides us with a very uncomfortable answer to the question asked: does this have to be “the destiny of man”?   RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: Uncle Simon