Well, that’s it then: Rod is back to his old habits giving us another household full of jerks.  Was this really what people wanted to watch at night?  I mean, no wonder people drank and smoked.  Uncle Simon is about another monster who talks to his monster niece like one would expect of a monster.  Cedric Hardwicke plays the titular Uncle Simon who is a dreadful old inventor who likes his hot chocolate brought to him and wants all the windows closed.  His niece Barbara is played by Constance Ford who does nothing without the desire to be rewarded.  These two are a pair and I had to sit with them for 25 minutes.  If I met them on a plane, I’d change seats or request the parachute.  But for some reason, Rod Serling felt this sort of person made for good entertainment.  Interestingly he says Barbara lives “her life as if during each ensuing hour she had a dentist’s appointment”.  I say that’s interesting because I’d rather have been in the dentists office!

“I live for the moment I can see you buried!”  So Barbara is accosted by her nightmare uncle while arguing on the stairs.  He attempts to whack her with his cane, she grabs it and causes him to fall and break his back.  She leaves him there to die because, hey, people are nice and that’s what they do…   Then she listens to the will reading from the lawyer who she decides not to face while talking to him.  Ah yes, a nice woman…. Part of the will stipulates that she must take care of her uncle’s invention: Robby the Robot.  Oh, look, he’s basically the uncle reincarnated; didn’t see that coming.  She even causes Robby to fall down the stairs so he’d break his leg and have to walk with a cane, just like uncle Simon did.  Barbara can’t get out of her personal hell.  Oh, so sad.  Her life is doomed to be repeated forever.

Except, it’s not sad.  It’s totally ok because he was a monster and she’s got no spine or decency.  She could have handled life differently, and Serling could have painted a better picture.  Barbara could have been a good woman who did what she did selflessly, and we could still have the same outcome, but we’d care more.  Or she could just have walked out, left the place without a care in the world.  But that’s not what Rod considered for his little drama.

In an episode with only 4 people (and one is the briefly-seen lawyer, the other is Robby), we needed someone to care about.  Why would anyone write a tale about people we would utterly dislike?  I know I wanted to be done with them within the first few minutes of the episode starting.

I will say one thing, this episode does bear watching just to hear the litany of foul-mouthed things Simon says to his niece.   I wouldn’t say these to an enemy, despite some being rather funny.  Here goes:

• Well, my angular turnip, what else is new with you?
• Keep your spindle-shanked carcass out of my laboratory, and your long thin probing nose out of my business.
• You may be short on beauty, but a lack of candor has never been one of your deficiencies.
• …you night-crawling imitation of the female gender, if I catch you sneaking around outside my door, I’ll break your head.
• I have you to live for, you crooked-seamed grubber.
• …you scrounging female ape.
• …you thin-lipped, toothpick-legged conniver.
• But let me tell you something, you money-sick crone.
• You’ll pay, you ugly harpy…
• What is the matter, you peanut-headed sample of nature’s carelessness?
• Barbara, my dear, if you could prevail upon that raggedy Ann carcass of yours to exert itself, I’d like a cup of hot chocolate.
• Speak up, you lint-headed clod.
• Move, you torpid lotus-eater.
• What does it take to make you move, you bovine crab?

I don’t know about the rest of you but this isn’t my idea of good writing. This is more like what happens when Andrew Dice Clay asks Rod Serling for some stage material.  Oh, sure, many did make me laugh, especially the “bovine crab” and my personal favorite, “you peanut-headed sample of nature’s carelessness” but if this is what we have to spend our evenings with, I’d sooner watch the news.  ML

The view from across the pond:

I have been fairly critical of Rod Serling, while reviewing his Twilight Zone episodes. His work has rarely lived up to the hype, and he seems to have been a great ideas man, with little sense of how to develop those ideas into a well-structured story, and one that actually has any point to it beyond schadenfreude. Watching Uncle Simon, I think I have finally found his forte as a writer: he is amazing at scripting insults.

I knew we were in for a treat when Simon started calling Barbara things like “my angular turnip”, and then I tried to furiously start scribbling down some of the best choice morsels, unable to keep up with the lightning fast wit on display, and spoilt for choice. You’ve got to love a good insult. Whole comedy shows are built on them, but here are a couple of my favourites:

• “Keep your spindle-shank carcass out of my laboratory and your long, thin, probing nose out of my business.”
• “You thin-lipped, tooth-pick-legged conniver.”

All the while, Cedric Hardwicke’s dentures dance for joy, while he delivers such expertly-crafted lines, beautifully expressing the disdain he has for his niece. She deserves every word of it, too. She’s a gold-digger who has dug so deep that she has trapped herself in a dark pit of her own making.

Twilight Zone is often about showing us idiots or evildoers getting their comeuppance. The fifth season in particular has done little else. Here we get two for the price of one, with the episode very neatly divided into two halves, each with a cautionary tale of the consequences of being a wrong ’un. Uncle Simon has made it his life’s work to destroy his niece emotionally, and when he tries to take that a step further and attack her physically, he ends up at the bottom of the stairs with a broken back. It’s a pitiful spectacle to see this hubristic, forked-tongued monster begging for mercy, and it’s understandable that Barbara will give him no words of comfort at the end. In fact, she wants him to live long enough for her to really wallow in her triumph and moment of freedom.

The cruel irony is that she isn’t free after all. Simon has made a robot, and programmed it to be the new Uncle Simon, continuing his life’s work of belittling his niece. This series has shown us some nasty pieces of work over the years, but that might just win the prize for being the most sick and twisted way to spend a life of all of them. The man’s obviously a genius, because he managed to invent a cross between Robby the Robot and Beaker from The Muppet Show, but he used his genius to destroy the rest of his niece’s life, having destroyed the last 25 years himself.

All that being said, she destroyed it herself. She waited for that long to get her hands on her uncle’s money, and her greed imprisoned her forever. When we were watching this one, my wife asked why Barbara doesn’t just walk out, but the answer to that is straightforward: it’s the sunk-cost fallacy. She can’t handle the reality of having wasted the last 25 years of her life, waiting for something she could never have, so she just keeps waiting, and will waste the next 25 years listening to the same insults.

By now it should come as no surprise that Rod Serling offers up the wrong moral for the story he just told. He does that nearly every week anyway. His idea that, “once a bed is made, it’s quite necessary that you sleep in it”, is entirely wrong. Barbara could have walked away at any point in the last 25 years, and could still walk away, if she weren’t still paying in more to that well of sunk cost. At least he mentions “avarice”, because that’s the true cautionary tale here: make your own money. Don’t wait for somebody else’s. You may never get that feast you are waiting for, and if you finally do, it might taste very bitter.   RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: Probe 7, Over and Out