Time Enough at Last

Last updated
"Time Enough at Last"
The Twilight Zone episode
Burgess Meredith Twilight Zone 1960.jpg
Episode no.Season 1
Episode 8
Directed by John Brahm
Teleplay by Rod Serling
Based on"Time Enough at Last"
by Lynn Venable
Featured music Leith Stevens
Production code173-3614
Original air dateNovember 20, 1959 (1959-11-20)
Guest appearances
Episode chronology
← Previous
"The Lonely"		Next →
"Perchance to Dream"
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series, season 1)
List of episodes

"Time Enough at Last" is the eighth episode of the American anthology series The Twilight Zone , first airing on November 20, 1959. [1] The episode was adapted from a short story by Lynn Venable, [2] which appeared in the January 1953 edition of If: Worlds of Science Fiction . [3] [4]

Contents

"Time Enough at Last" became one of the most famous episodes of the original Twilight Zone. It is "the story of a man who seeks salvation in the rubble of a ruined world." [5] The man in question is Henry Bemis ( /ˈbiːmɪs/ ), played by Burgess Meredith, who loves books but is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them. The episode follows Bemis through a post-apocalyptic world, touching on such social issues as anti-intellectualism, the dangers of reliance upon technology, and the distinction between solitude and loneliness.

Opening narration

Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself... without anyone.

Plot

Bank teller and avid bookworm Henry Bemis reads David Copperfield while serving a customer. He is so engrossed in the novel that he attempts to regale the increasingly annoyed woman with information about the characters, and shortchanges her. Bemis' angry boss, and later his nagging wife, both complain to him that he wastes far too much time reading "doggerel". As a cruel joke, his wife asks him to read poetry to her from one of his books; he eagerly obliges, only to find that she has crossed out the text on every page. Seconds later, she destroys the book by ripping the pages from it.

The next day, as usual, Henry takes his lunch break in the bank's vault, where his reading cannot be disturbed. Moments after he sees a newspaper headline, which reads "H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction", an enormous explosion outside shakes the vault, knocking Bemis unconscious. After regaining consciousness and recovering his thick glasses, Bemis emerges from the vault to find the bank demolished and everyone in it dead. Leaving the bank, he sees that the entire city has been destroyed, and realizes that, while a nuclear war has devastated Earth, his being in the vault has saved him.

Seconds, minutes, hours—they crawl by on hands and knees for Mr. Henry Bemis, who looks for a spark in the ashes of a dead world. A telephone connected to nothingness. A neighborhood bar, a movie, a baseball diamond, a hardware store, the mailbox at what was once his house is now a rubble. They lie at his feet as battered monuments to what was but is no more. Mr. Henry Bemis, on an eight-hour tour of a graveyard.

Finding himself alone in the broken world with canned food to last him a lifetime and no means of leaving to look for other survivors, Bemis succumbs to despair. As he prepares to kill himself using a revolver he has found, Bemis sees the ruins of a public library in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the books are still intact; all the books he could ever hope for are his for the reading, and all the time he could ever hope for, to read them without interruption.

His despair gone, Bemis contentedly sorts the books he looks forward to reading for years to come, with no obligations to get in the way. Just as he bends down to pick up a book, he stumbles, and his glasses fall off and shatter. In shock, he picks up the broken remains of his glasses and breaks down in tears, surrounded by books he now can never read.

Closing narration

The best-laid plans of mice and men ... and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone.

Preview for next week's story

Next week we enlist the considerable literary talents of Charles Beaumont, and invite you to join us in a strange and shocking dream. Our story is called "Perchance to Dream" and stars Richard Conte. I hope you'll be able to join next week's excursion into The Twilight Zone. Thank you and good night.

Production

Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis Burgess Meredith The Twilight Zone.jpg
Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis

"Time Enough at Last" was one of the first episodes written for The Twilight Zone. [6] It introduced Burgess Meredith to the series; he went on to star in three more episodes, being introduced as "no stranger to The Twilight Zone" in promotional spots for season two's "The Obsolete Man". He also narrated the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie , which made reference to "Time Enough at Last" during its opening sequence, with the characters discussing the episode in detail.

Footage of the exterior steps of the library was filmed several months after production had been completed. These steps can also be seen on the exterior of an Eloi public building in MGM's film of The Time Machine (1960). [7] John Brahm was nominated for a Directors Guild award for his work on the episode. [8] The book that Bemis was reading in the vault and that flips open when the bomb explodes is A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving.

Themes

Although the overriding message may seem to "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it", there are other themes throughout the episode. [7] Among these is the question of solitude versus loneliness, as embodied by Bemis' moment of near-suicide. Additionally, the portrayal of societal attitudes toward books speaks to the contemporary decline of traditional literature and how, given enough time, reading may become a relic of the past. [9] [10] At the same time, the ending "punishes Bemis for his antisocial behavior, and his greatest desire is thwarted". [11]

Rod Serling's concluding statement in the episode alludes to Robert Burns' Scots language poem "To a Mouse". The poem concludes: "The best-laid schemes o' mice an men / Gang aft agley" (translation: "Often go awry"). Meredith himself had portrayed George Milton in the 1939 film adaptation of the Steinbeck novel named for that same line.

Although "Time Enough at Last" implies that nuclear warfare has destroyed humanity, film critic Andrew Sarris notes that the episode's necessarily unrealistic format may have been what allowed its production to commence: [10]

Much of the implacable seriousness of The Twilight Zone is seemingly keyed by the clipped, dour delivery of Serling himself and the interlocutor. He never encourages us to laugh, or even smile, even when the plot twist is at least darkly funny. For example, in "Time Enough at Last" ... The H-bomb is still lurking in the background of the bookworm's "accident." The point is that the bomb could never have gone off on network television were the plot couched in a more realistic format.

In the era of the Internet and eBooks, the irony depicted in "Time Enough at Last" has an Information Age counterpart, according to Weston Ochse of Storytellers Unplugged. As Ochse points out, when Bemis becomes the last person on Earth, he finally has time to read, with all his books at his fingertips and the only impediment is technology when his medium for accessing them—his glasses—breaks. In a hypothetical world where all books are published electronically, Ochse observes, readers would be "only a lightning strike, a faulty switch, a sleepy workman or a natural disaster away from becoming Henry Bemis at the end of the world"—that is, a power outage has the potential to give them time to read, yet like Bemis, they too would lose their medium for accessing their books—namely the computer. [9]

Similar episodes

The Twilight Zone often explored similar themes throughout its run. [12] "Time Enough at Last" has strong thematic ties to a number of other episodes in the series, starting with that of isolation, first explored in the series pilot, "Where Is Everybody?" It is also a prominent theme in the previous episode "The Lonely". Additionally, in a plot very similar to that of "Time Enough at Last", "The Mind and the Matter" tells of a man who uses his mind to erase humanity, only to find that existence without other people is unbearable. The notion of being an outsider, lost in a sea of conformity, was one of the most common themes of the series. [7]

Other thematic elements in this episode can be found throughout the series, as well. "The Obsolete Man" takes the episode's literary subtext—the notion that reading may eventually be considered "obsolete"—to an extreme: The state has declared books obsolete and a librarian (also played by Meredith) finds himself on trial for his own obsolescence. This notion, akin to Ray Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian" (1951), is also alluded to in the episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", in which a perfect and equal world considers works like those of Shakespeare "smut". [11]

Impact

Critical and fan favorite

"Time Enough at Last" was a ratings success in its initial airing and "became an instant classic". [13] It "remains one of the best-remembered and best-loved episodes of The Twilight Zone" according to Marc Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion , [7] as well as one of the most frequently parodied. When a poll asked readers of Twilight Zone Magazine which episode of the series they remembered the most, "Time Enough at Last" was the most frequent response, with "To Serve Man" coming in a distant second. [14] In TV Land's presentation of TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in Television", "Time Enough at Last" was ranked at No. 25. [15] In an interview, Serling cited "Time Enough at Last" as one of his two favorites from the entire series. (The other was "The Invaders", with Agnes Moorehead.) [16]

The episode has been referenced many times in popular culture. For example, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, a theme park ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios and formerly Disney California Adventure Park, displays a replica of Henry Bemis' broken glasses in the lobby. It is noted that, while they are indeed reading glasses, Burgess Meredith wears them the entire episode to make Bemis look more bookish. [17] On one appearance of the TV show Futurama's show-within-a-show "The Scary Door", a parody of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits , a man like Bemis is presented in a library as "the last man on earth". After he loses his glasses, the show pokes fun on the fact that he can still read books with large print and even in braille, so he successively loses various body parts until the scene ends. [18] The PC game Fallout Tactics (2001) includes a librarian in a desolate world who wants the player to find his missing glasses so he can read his books. [19] In a 2022 expansion for the game Fallout 76 entitled “the Pitt”, players may come across a small room featuring a pair of glasses, a gun, and a note called “Time Enough at Last”, containing lines of dialogue from the character of Bemis.

Related Research Articles

<i>The Twilight Zone</i> Media franchise based on an American television anthology series

The Twilight Zone is an American media franchise based on the anthology television series created by Rod Serling in which characters find themselves dealing with often disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone". The episodes are in various genres, including fantasy, science fiction, absurdism, dystopian fiction, suspense, horror, supernatural drama, black comedy, and psychological thriller, frequently concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist, and usually with a moral. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans to common science fiction and fantasy tropes. The first series, shot entirely in black-and-white, ran on CBS for five seasons from 1959 to 1964.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rod Serling</span> American screenwriter (1924–1975)

Rodman Edward Serling was an American screenwriter and television producer best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his anthology television series The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen, and helped form television industry standards. He was known as the "angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues, including censorship, racism, and war.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Where Is Everybody?</span> 1st episode of the 1st season of The Twilight Zone

"Where Is Everybody?" is the first episode of the American anthology television series The Twilight Zone and was originally broadcast on 2 October 1959, on CBS. It is one of the most realistic Twilight Zone episodes, as it features no supernatural elements and is based on fairly straightforward extrapolation of science.

"Mr. Denton on Doomsday" is episode three of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on October 16, 1959, on CBS. It was the first Twilight Zone episode to be rerun.

"Walking Distance" is episode five of the American television series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on October 30, 1959. The episode was listed as the ninth best episode in the history of The Twilight Zone by Time magazine.

"What You Need" is the twelfth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone, airing on Christmas Day, 1959. It is based on the short story of the same name by Lewis Padgett, which was published in the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

"I Shot an Arrow into the Air" is the fifteenth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A Stop at Willoughby</span> 30th episode of the 1st season of The Twilight Zone

"A Stop at Willoughby" is episode 30 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling cited this as his favorite story from the first season of the series.

The Chaser (<i>The Twilight Zone</i>) 31st episode of the 1st season of The Twilight Zone

"The Chaser" is episode 31 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

"A World of His Own" is episode thirty-six of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It was the last episode of the show's first season and essentially comedic in tone. It originally aired on July 1, 1960, on CBS.

"The Night of the Meek" is episode 47 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on December 23, 1960, on CBS. It was one of the six episodes of the second season which were shot on videotape in a short-lived experiment aimed to cut costs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Obsolete Man</span> 29th episode of the 2nd season of The Twilight Zone

"The Obsolete Man" is episode 65 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone, starring Burgess Meredith as Romney Wordsworth, the accused, and Fritz Weaver as the Chancellor. It originally aired on June 2, 1961, on CBS. The story was later adapted for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas starring Jason Alexander as Wordsworth.

"It's a Good Life" is the eighth episode of the third season of the American television series The Twilight Zone, and the 73rd overall. It was written by series creator/showrunner Rod Serling, based on the 1953 short story "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. The episode was directed by James Sheldon, and is considered by some, such as Time and TV Guide, to be one of the best episodes of the series. It originally aired on November 3, 1961. The episode was one of four from the original 1959 series which formed the basis of the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie.

"The Midnight Sun" is episode 75 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone, first shown in November, 1961.

The Twilight Zone is a nationally syndicated radio drama series featuring radio play adaptations of the classic 1959–1964 television series The Twilight Zone. The series was produced for the British digital radio station BBC Radio 4 Extra airing for 176 episodes between October 2002 and 2012. In the United States, it aired on nearly 200 radio stations including WCCO, KSL, KOA, WIND, XM Satellite Radio channel 163 and Sirius XM Book Radio. Most of the stations aired two episodes each week, usually on the weekends and many times back to back.

<i>The Twilight Zone</i> (1959 TV series) American TV anthology series (1959–1964)

The Twilight Zone is an American fantasy science fiction horror anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from October 2, 1959, to June 19, 1964. Each episode presents a standalone story in which characters find themselves dealing with often disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone", often with a surprise ending and a moral. Although often considered predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show much closer to fantasy and horror. The phrase "twilight zone" has entered the vernacular, used to describe surreal experiences.

"The Old Man in the Cave" is a half-hour episode of the original version of The Twilight Zone. It is set in a post-apocalyptic 1974, ten years after a nuclear holocaust in the United States. The episode is a cautionary tale about humanity's greed and the danger of questioning one's faith in forces greater than oneself.

"Mr. Garrity and the Graves" is an episode of the American anthology television series The Twilight Zone.

"Come Wander with Me" is the 154th episode of the American television series The Twilight Zone. It was the last episode produced in the original run, although two episodes were broadcast after this one. This episode introduced Bonnie Beecher in her television debut.

Marilyn "Lynn" Venable is an American writer.

References

  1. ↑ "Time Enough At Last". The Twilight Zone. Season 1. Episode 8. 20 November 1959. CBS.
  2. ↑ Hill, Angela (Oakland Tribune) (December 30, 2012). "Give 'Em Hill: El Cerrito woman lends 'Twilight Zone' inspiration". San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved October 14, 2013.
  3. ↑ Venable, Lynn (January 1953). "Time Enough at Last". IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.
  4. ↑ Venable, Lynn (January 1953). "Time Enough at Last". IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.
  5. ↑ Serling, Rod. Promotional spot for "Time Enough at Last". Original airdate: 13 November 1959.
  6. ↑ "Time Enough At Last: Twilight Zone Story read by Bill Mills". Fictionwise eBooks. Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition).
  8. ↑ "Directors Guild of America".
  9. 1 2 Weston Ochse. "The End of Books: The Bemis Condition". Storytellers Unplugged. Archived from the original on 2006-05-06. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
  10. 1 2 Sarris, Andrew. Rod Serling: Viewed from Beyond the Twilight Zone.
  11. 1 2 Stanyard, Stewart T. & Gaiman, Neil (2007). Dimensions Behind the Twilight Zone: A Backstage Tribute to Television's Groundbreaking Series. Ecw Press.
  12. ↑ "Twilight Zone, The". Nostalgia Central. 22 June 2014.
  13. ↑ Presnell, Don & McGee, Marty. A Critical History of Television's the Twilight Zone, 1959–1964. p. 41.
  14. ↑ Gordon Sander. "Twilight Zone: A Serling Performance". The Sander Zone. Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
  15. ↑ "TV Guide and TV Land presents The 100 Most Memorable TV Moments". TV Land. Archived from the original on 2007-07-04. Retrieved 2007-08-17.
  16. ↑ Cohen, Jon (2012-12-14). "In lost interview, Serling reveals his favorite Twilight Zone eps". Syfy Wire . Retrieved 2017-06-08.
  17. ↑ Bruce A Metcalf & Ronnie O'Rourke. "Twilight Zone Tower of Terror or, Iago & Zazu Learn the Ups & Downs of the Hotel Business". Iago & Zazu's Attraction of the Week. Archived from the original on 2007-09-28.
  18. ↑ Zachary, Brandon (5 June 2021). "Futurama's Pitch-Perfect Twilight Zone Parody, The Scary Door, Explained". CBR. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
  19. ↑ "Fallout Tactics". Game Banshee. Retrieved 2007-08-30.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.