I don’t know why I dreaded this episode for so long.  It’s a weird thing that somewhere in the past, I had gotten it in my head that Ring-a-Ding Girl was a bad episode and I have absolutely no idea why because I’d never seen it before.  I don’t mean to say it’s a great episode, but it’s certainly a very good one.

Recently, I suggested there are only a handful of categories for episodes of The Twilight Zone and the biggest batch goes in the “Just Desserts” category, where some jerk gets what’s coming to him.  There are also the fables; those morality tales… the modern parables that stick with you because they had a meaningful message.  To my mind, the smallest batch is the good, old-fashioned story.  While the parable might be my favorite, the good, old-fashioned story works well too, if you hit the right criteria. My preference is a story with a bit of sci-fi, mystery, or horror.  As surprised as I was when I realized this, Ring-a-Ding Girl actually has all of those traits.

Bunny Blake (Maggie McNamara) is a movie star.  All of her friends back home in Howardsville chip in and buy her a ring.  When she tries it on, it gives her the ability to see the faces of friends and family, all of whom ask for her – they want her to come home or they want her help.  It’s a small dose of science fiction, but whoever said we needed a truckload?  Rather than flying to her next film shoot – which will fly over her hometown – she goes to visit her sister for a day, where she has this weird obsession with calling off the town picnic.  We don’t know why, but she spends the episode going around getting people to lose interest in the picnic.  Again, we’re not talking about a big mystery here, but we’re also only dealing with a 25-minute episode.  Why is she so interested in turning people away from the picnic?  Was it something she saw in the crystal-ball-like ring?   The sounds of thunder might be indicative of something, but we just don’t know and the buildup seems to work just about perfectly.  And then the horror: the storm was too much for the plane and it took it’s final flight just as it flew over Howardsville.  It crashed right into the place the picnic was to be, but no one went because Bunny had convinced them all to go to the playhouse to see her perform a one-woman show!  To compound the supernatural element, her body is found in the wreckage as a passenger even though many of the townsfolk saw Bunny that very day.  The mystery returns as the episode ends… how was Bunny in two places at once!?  And what happened to the one who was visiting???

It’s actually a very effective story and the high society, fur-coat wearing Bunny is so atypical of these scripts because she has the background to be a jerk but is instead very likeable.  Ring-a-ding!  Ok, I could have done without that turn of phrase.  Boy howdy, was that old fashioned… (Yeah, you know I did that on purpose!)   One thing that really did stand out to me was the cast: this has one of the biggest casts I’ve seen in a while.  I’ve been watching these on Amazon Prime and usually pop over to the cast list as I watch.  Typically, there’s a list of anywhere from 3-5 people, including Serling.  This had a dozen or so actors and actresses in it.  For such a simple episode, it manages to feel big.  There’s an entire town that manages to appear in the story.

Strangely enough, this episode managed to squeeze in a bit of introspection at the end.  Serling’s closing narration says, “We are all travelers. The trip starts in a place called birth, and ends in that lonely town called death.”  This is a thought I’ve had many times in my life: life is a lonely journey.  You meet people who will take the trip with you; some for a short while and others for a long haul, but rarely ever from start to finish.  There’s a sadness to that, in my opinion.  Yet this has a happy note; it even defies it.  You see, just at the point that Bunny should have died, she managed to be with her friends and family one more time and even saved them all from a terrible fate.

Maybe the trick is to go into these with very low expectations.  Whatever the trick, to my delight, I really enjoyed this episode.  Ring-a-ding!!  ML

The view from across the pond:

Ring-a-ding! It’s been a while since I could say this about an episode of Twilight Zone, but I thought this was excellent. For most of the time, it works like a very effective mystery story, and it kept surprising me. At first, it seems to be a story about a magic ring that works like a kind of precursor to a Zoom call. Bunny gets a message from Hildy, asking her to come home. Things start to get really confusing when Bunny does actually return home, and Hildy clearly has no idea about the ring having any kind of magical properties, and no memory of sending a message.

Things keep getting stranger and stranger, with the ring sending messages from more people, none of whom have any knowledge of what’s going on. There is clearly some kind of disaster looming, and Bunny has to stop everyone from attending a village picnic, but the nature of the danger is a mystery. The twist, when it comes, is superb.

I have to temper this praise by acknowledging that I’m not sure it all makes sense. I found it a hugely thought-provoking episode, but I tied myself in knots trying to figure out exactly how it all works. The basic premise is simple enough: Bunny is a ghost, who is trying to save the lives of everyone who would have been killed by the plane crash that ended her own life. And yet, it’s all very complicated, because at the point she’s trying to save everyone, she’s still actually alive and on the plane, so she’s effectively in two places at once. She’s completely corporeal, so everyone who meets her in the town remembers her, creating a paradox, because in their reality she also dies on the plane. That’s necessary, in order for the premise to work: she saves them by getting everyone to attend a performance, rather than go to the picnic. Then there’s the question of the ring, how that works, and how that fits into things. How is it sending messages from people in the town? Are those the spirits of the dead townsfolk, travelling back in time to prevent their own deaths, by sending messages via a magic ring? Is Bunny travelling back in time? I think this works best if you (a) don’t think about it too much, or (b) accept the concept that time doesn’t actually mean anything in the afterlife, and there’s no contradiction with somebody who is about to die being in two places at once. If you can just accept that premise, the whole episode works brilliantly, and it’s a very fresh take on a ghost story.

Bunny’s characterisation is fascinating, too. Writer Earl Hamner, Jr. eschews all the obvious and lazy approaches to his subject. Bunny could easily have been written as a monstrous diva, just the latest in a long line of Twilight Zone idiots to get their comeuppance. Instead, she’s so much more than a celebrity, and there’s a great moment when she justifies her decision to leave her friends and family behind very convincingly: if she had stayed, her potential would have been unfulfilled, she wouldn’t have given herself a fair chance, and she would have ended up bitter. I think there’s an interpretation here that this is about life balance. She did the right thing to go off and pursue her dreams, but staying away for five years solid was the betrayal. She owed it to her nephew to come back sooner, if nothing else. Five years is a very long time in the life of a child. I also liked how the caretaker isn’t remotely impressed by her fame, which shows how something that feels like a huge achievement for one person might not even be remotely significant for another. We each have our own standards to meet, our own measure of success, and our own dreams to chase.

But the cleverest aspect of this whole story is the way Bunny has got used to the world revolving around her, and yet she can’t save herself. She is always the most important person in any room, but on her final day in the world of the living, it’s all about saving everyone else except herself. In the final reckoning, it’s not about what the world can do for Bunny, it’s about what Bunny can do for her family and friends. And if that isn’t a perfect statement of what really matters in life, I don’t know what is.   RP