Plot: A woman driving cross country becomes increasingly paranoid as she repeatedly sees the same hitch-hiker. She finally stops running when she realizes that she was in a fatal accident, and the hitch-hiker is Death, come to claim her.
Although I've made no apologies for giving away the endings of the episodes in my plot summaries, I always feel a tinge of guilt upon doing so. Lately, though, I have to ask myself, "who doesn't guess every ending five minutes in?" Knowing the nature of the show with its ever-present "twists," I wonder if I'll ever be surprised by it again. I'm not complaining, but the foreshadowing was so thick in this episode that you could spread it with a butter knife. "Fixing your flat comes to $29.43. Cheaper than a funeral, anyway." Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk.
Serling adapted the script from a radio show he'd heard nearly twenty years earlier, in which Orson Welles was the nervous traveler. I personally think the story works much better with a female lead. Maybe I'm overestimating the machismo of the average man, but I feel like most guys would have just stopped the car and questioned the hitch-hiker with clenched fists. With a female, she seems much more prone and her situation comes across as helpless.
Which brings me to the one element that seemed unrealistic in the episode: the reaction of the gas station owner to the protagonist's predicament. She tells him that it's the middle of the night, she's alone, and she's being pursued by a drifter. He couldn't care less. I've heard that you didn't have to lock your doors at night in the 60's and that the world was generally a better place, but who wouldn't help this lovely, distraught woman? Maybe it's my acute case of Bad World Syndrome brought on from watching too much local news, but she could be in serious trouble! Of course, I also thought that the sailor was going to attempt to molest her. Did anyone else feel that to be the subtext of that scene, before she drove him away with her abundant crazy?
Terrific episode in terms of visuals and performances. Most episodes have that one iconic screenshot that everyone remembers, but here nearly every scene is composed masterfully. Into-the-mirror shots, paranoid close-ups, and a startling close encounter with a train keep you uneasy while not overdoing it. The hitch-hiker's dopey smile only enhances his creepy factor. Inger Stevens, the lead, has such a wealth of expressions that she says much when saying nothing, yet somehow also manages to deliver Serling's elongated monologues in a manner that seems genuine – a feat that has proven troublesome for many an actor thus far. I feel confident in saying that her's is the best performance we've seen to date.
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