[Trigger warning: suicide theme discussed.]  If I knew then what I know now, when I started watching The Twilight Zone, I would have setup categories.  I didn’t realize just how few varieties there were.  We have the fable, which tends to go down well and be remembered on all the marathon showings.  They have a point and a moral core.   We’re talking the Eye of the Beholder, The Invaders, He’s Alive, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street… stories that are cautionary tales.   There are others, but I’d say they make up around 20% of the series off the top of my head.  5% might be those stories that have no point at all, like The 7^th is Made Up of Phantoms, which are little more than attempted stories to engage a sense of wonder but the only wonder they actually manifest is the wonder of how anyone thought it was a good idea.   Maybe there is another 5% that are actually good stories, but don’t have a moral core like Nightmare at 30000 Feet.   The remaining 70% – the percentage that I wish I had tracked – is about some low life getting what’s coming to them.  I’d argue that even the popular Time Enough At Last falls into this category but that early in the series, it was the oddity, not the norm.  By season 5, it seems that’s all Serling really focuses on.  Granted, not exclusively, because I really did enjoy Probe 7, Over and Out, but in most cases, we are introduced to some absolute jerk and then watch them get what’s coming to them.  Serling must have been angry with someone!

I imagine the idea is sound.  There are jerks in life and knowing that they get what’s coming does have a certain reward to it. Speaking for myself, I try to live a very honest life, bolstering those around me where I can.  I don’t always succeed, but I try.   When I find out someone backstabs me, it’s nice to know that the ghost of Rod Serling can be summoned and maybe he can mete out a bit of poetic justice on the backstabber.  Here’s the thing:  I don’t want to watch for entertainment what could actually be my real life.  Honestly, it’s what put me off Breaking Bad during season one.  Watching Walter White go through cancer treatments and seeing what it was doing to him was heartbreaking.  I’m glad someone realized that was a major downer for season one because I nearly bailed and would have lost out on a great show.  But that’s the thing: I don’t want to watch real life as a form of entertainment.  (I don’t mean I don’t want to watch documentaries, but a drama is different.)  Personally, I want things that make me wonder.

There’s nothing to wonder about here.  Anna Nicole Smith marries “Big Daddy”.  He’s rich and she’s beautiful.  He’s basically willing to pay for the gorgeous woman and both benefit from it.  Got it.  That’s not just basic, it’s happened in real life with the real aforementioned blonde bombshell.  In the episode, Anna Nicole Smith is named Flora Gordon, Big Daddy J. Howard Marshall is Harmon Gordon.  What should I wonder about?  Why she accepted marriage to a man 40 years her senior?  No, we got that – money, power, opportunity.  You name it, but that’s not surprising.  I doubt Anna treated her husband as badly as Flora treats Harmon, but I only feel that way because I always liked Smith but if I found out she was nasty to her husband, it wouldn’t really shake the foundations of my world.  Does that mean she got what she deserved?  I’m going with “no” because I don’t think she deserved what happened to her.  Similarly, Flora is another in a long line of people no one will ever like but that doesn’t mean I want her miserable.  I’d rather the outcome that warms her heart like Scrooge; she realizes his value and loves him, but that’s not Serling’s MO.  I get it: actress Ruta Lee is beautiful but there’s a lot more to love and marriage than looks and she would make God sick.  Harmon is a wealthy man but Flora could have declined the marriage proposal if she really wasn’t ready to engage with someone that much older than her.   So, when Dr. Raymond Gordon was able to reverse the aging process on his brother, it’s no wonder at all what’s going to happen.  It was broadcast in the title.  What is despicable is that it gets so ethically questionable.

Raymond tells Flora she’s going to have to look after her husband who has now been regressed to a young child.  He’s not quite a baby, but he’s under 10 years of age, and that’s assuming by tomorrow morning he won’t be a fetus.  What’s she supposed to do, breast feed her husband?  I’m not saying that to be crude but what does Raymond think this woman, who has not a motherly bone in her body, is going to do?  Chances are she’s going to do something horrible like run out leaving the child alone.  Raymond makes sure she understands that he will leave her with nothing, but he can’t be there watching her all the time.  What’s to stop her running out one night leaving young Harmon alone in their apartment?  More horrifically, what’s to stop her tossing him off the balcony and saying he was playing and slipped?  And even on the off chance that she stuck it out, he’s not likely to fall for her as he ages naturally again.  He was in love with her looks and they are going to wither as he ages.  By the time he’s old enough to be with her again, he’ll lose the very thing he wanted most.  He’s shallow and lacking in a backbone.  Once again we have two terribly people for different reasons and they get what’s coming to them.   What’s the point of it all?

Frankly, this is another in a long line of episodes that just disgust me more than anything else and it’s a clear indicator of why I believe that The Outer Limits is the better show, even if this has a better reputation.  A review of two specific words is probably the worst review one could receive: who cares?.  That was how I felt after watching this travesty.  If there was anything to wonder about at all it was the anti-aging serum.  I want to know how it made Harmon’s shoes regress to childhood too.  Now that is one special serum!  ML

The view from across the pond:

The “certain fountain” in the title of this episode is of course the fountain of youth, and who wouldn’t want to drink from that? Well, it depends. As we know from other Twilight Zone episodes, whenever something seems too good to be true, it probably is. There’s usually a catch.

I think most people would jump at the chance to be young again. It’s why plastic surgery is so popular, even though it almost always ends up looking like a freakish distortion of a human face rather than actually looking younger. People are that desperate not to lose their youth. Partly that’s because of the value society places on appearance. Partly it’s probably also about fear of getting old and dying. I would love to shave a few years off my physical age, but how about if the mental age was affected too? Would I actually want to be a few years younger, losing my recent memories, wisdom (don’t laugh) and experience? I don’t think so.

That should be a key part of the narrative in this episode, but don’t look to Rod Serling for those kinds of dots to be joined. Instead he kind of fudges the issue. Eventually, Harmon does pay that price, literally becoming a child again. It’s pretty clear from the performance of the child actor that it’s not the Harmon we know any more. He has literally reverted back to childhood, in body and mind. And yet, that doesn’t quite work, because the interim stage, where we saw him partially de-aged, robbed him of none of his memories. This was the same Harmon, in a younger version of his body.

The reason Serling probably didn’t bother thinking this through is his attention was obviously focussed elsewhere. It’s all about finding a way to punish Flora. She’s the latest in a long line of thoroughly nasty Twilight Zone characters, who get their comeuppance. As Raymond says, “she’s a predatory little alley cat,” and that’s going gently on her. In some respects, the episode is a replay of Uncle Simon, with a young gold-digger trapped by her own greed. The sunk cost fallacy prevents her from abandoning the toddler Harmon, just like it prevented Barbara from walking out on the robot. If she leaves, she leaves with nothing. But here again, Serling has such a laser-like focus on the schadenfreude that he abandons any logical character motivation. Would Raymond really want this monster of a woman caring for his brother? She was a dreadful wife, so how does he think she will shape up as a mother?

An aspect of this episode that gets criticised a lot is Raymond agreeing to use his own brother as a guinea pig, but I think that actually works very well, and that’s because of this line:

“We’ll see who reaches the side-walk first: the man in the elevator or the free-falling body.”

Harmon is clearly suicidal, so given the choice of a 90% chance of losing his brother or a 100% chance, it makes sense that he would go for the risky option that at least has some chance of working. He clearly cares for his brother, as evidenced by his deep hatred of the woman who has broken him. The bad writing is elsewhere in the episode, such as the absurdity of a scientist immediately leaving his human experiment and going home to bed. Then, when he arrives in the morning, he says, “I’ll wait for him to get up.” To put into perspective how dreadful that writing is from Serling, at that point for all Raymond knows his brother could be dying, mutated or dead.

This almost comes across as a cautionary tale about the dangers of an age-gap marriage, although those can, and do, work very well. It’s love that matters, not age, and there is clearly no genuine love between Harmon and Flora, certainly not from Flora. Serling stops short of giving us a cautionary tale of an age-gap marriage, simply because Flora is such a piece of work. She would be the poison in any relationship. Instead, the moral of the story is to be careful what you wish for. We are all the sum of our memories, so if Harmon is truly rendered an infant again, mentally as well as physically, then he actually pays for his foolish endeavour with his life. As Raymond says, Harmon should have been enjoying the evening of his life, not trying to recapture the morning. Live in the moment.   RP

If you are affected by any of the issues mentioned in this article, help is only a mouse click away. For readers in the UK, a good place to start is https://www.samaritans.org. In the US, there is a National Suicide Prevention hotline, that can be reached at 1-800-273-8255.

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: Ninety Years Without Slumbering