Original Airdate: October 30, 1959
Plot: A businessman stops at a gas station and realizes he's not far from his hometown. While his car is worked on he takes a stroll into his own past, accidentally breaking his younger self's leg and giving himself a limp in the process.
A relatively simple tale, the entire premise seems to built upon the phrase, "you can't go home again." The protagonist attempts to enjoy the things about his childhood that he enjoyed at that time, but they're in the past now and that is no longer his life to live. It's more of a parable than an actual story, but it gets the point across. Our memories are a reflection of who we were at the time, but no place remains the same.
According to The Twilight Zone Companion, the script was a hard sell. The vice-president of CBS had read the pilot script and ok-ed it on the grounds that because the bulk of the story happened in the protagonist's head, it was feasible. Here he was presented with a tale that was entirely fantasy, in which change occurred in the real world due to supernatural phenomena. This just wasn't done on television at the time. Fantasy belonged in comics and pulp magazines; a mainstream audience for fantastic stories had never been given the chance to announce itself. It took the producers many hours of meetings, but they managed to get the script approved.
This just seems ludicrous to me. Aside from comedy, there is very little entertainment that I care for that doesn't contain elements of the impossible, and I'm sure much of my generation feels the same. It's the same story of old, out-of-touch men dictating what is presented for public consumption. It makes you wonder how many truly great stories are never told because they fall on blind eyes and deaf ears.
Watching this forced me to consider how I recall my own childhood. One thing is for sure: if The Twilight Zone had been airing in prime time when I was a kid, I would have watched it at that time. I can't tell you how hard it is for me to watch anything when it airs, rather than recording it, downloading it, or pulling it up online. Hey, look at that, I just missed South Park. Ah well, I'll catch it tomorrow. I've been trying to watch these Twilight Zone episodes on the day they originally aired, but I don't think I've managed it once! Perhaps one day, when I have a family, I'll once more watch television as it happens, if conventional television broadcasting still exists then. I stand amazed at the future I've grown into. We are living in a sci-fi story.
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