50 Years of The Twilight Zone: “Time Enough at Last”

The Twilight Zone Original Series Episode 8
Time Enough at Last
Original airdate: 20 November 1959
Story by: Lyn Venable
Adapted by: Rod Serling
Director: John Brahm
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: Leith Stevens
Cast:
Henry Bemis: Burgess Meredith
Mr. Carsville: Vaughn Taylor
Helen Bemis: Jacqueline deWit
Woman in bank: Lela Bliss

Hello Ghouls and Boils,

Thank you for joining us in celebrating the 50-year anniversary of The Twilight Zone. Every Monday, for the rest of the year, I will be showcasing one episode I love. A few guest writers and some of the crew will be contributing as well. We hope you will join in and discuss! Today I am going to talk about my absolute favorite episode, “Time Enough at Last”. I won’t keep you waiting. Enjoy my fiends!

Abstrusely,
Sarah L. Gerhardt

Brief Synopsis:

“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.”

Henry Bemis is a banker by profession, but his true love is for the written word. He is brow-beaten by his boss and henpecked by his wife about his indulgence in books and reading. One day he sneaks into a vault at the bank to read in peace when a shockwave hits and he is knocked unconscious. When he finally comes to he discovers that everything is destroyed. He wanders the rubble and ruins for a while and just as he determines to end it all he spots a library.

“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. Bemis… in the Twilight Zone.”

Full episode recap and thoughts:

WARNING SPOILERS (I will talk about the ending of the episode. If you have not seen it and you would like to be surprised come back after viewing. See the full episode on CBS >here< !

Henry Bemis is a banker and a husband, but he is also a dreamer and a reader – who isn’t allowed to time to read by anyone in his life. It is a tortured existence. He steals time with the written word at any opportunity. He reads labels and buttons… he hides out in the vault at the bank on his lunch hour and reads the paper or a book… anything for a little time with the printed page.

In the opening scene he is reading David Copperfield on his lap while dealing with a customer at the bank. He accidentally short changes the customer and this earns him a stern talking to from his employer. When Henry arrives home he attempts to read a little only to be given the same treatment by his shrill-voiced wife — but worse. As a cruel joke she asks him to read her poetry from a book he had hidden. He opens the book to find the pages scratched out.

Burgess Meredith (brilliantly) plays the role of Henry Bemis. Burgess is tied with Jack Klugman for starring in the most episodes of The Twilight Zone – four. He also was the narrator of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). For those of you unfamiliar with Burgess from TZ (what do you live in a cave?) – you may also remember him as Rocky Balboa’s trainer Mickey in the Rocky films. More than half the episode it is just Burgess on the screen… but that is never a problem. You believe him. And if you are a dreamer, a reader – and maybe just a little like him – you feel everything right along with him. I think to this day this is my favorite role of his.

The next scene begins the following day at the bank. Bemis is going on his lunch break and he decides to sneak in some reading time in the vault. He pops open the paper and the headline reads: “H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction”. The camera pans down to the book Henry brought with him and the pocket watch beside him; a shockwave hits breaking the glass on the watch and knocking Henry out. When he wakes up and climbs through the demolished bank he quickly becomes aware that the world which he knew was destroyed.

Henry goes out into the world to see that there is nothing left but rubble, ruins, and scorched earth. Rod tells us:

“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 and is now 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.”

The set design of the bank and outside world after the bomb drops is rich and well-planned. There are little bits of debris everywhere, cracked walls, bits of buildings jutting from the ground, distant fallen bridges, and so many fine details. The props are incredible and lend to the sense of destruction… from the battered mailbox to the random skis to the canned foods… all beautifully designed and perfectly placed. The art department for this episode is owed a lot of credit for making it so compelling.

Eventually Bemis is overtaken by the emptiness, the loneliness and it eats away at his sanity. Just as he is about to end his own life, he finds the remnants of a Library. He gathers all the undamaged books and stacks them in piles, laying out his reading for the next several years. Now he has all the books he could ever desire and all the time in the world to read them. I feel his surge of happiness along with him as he comes to this realization.

As Henry reaches for the first book he stumbles and his reading glasses fall off, shattering on the ground. He picks up the remnants of his spectacles and says (through his sobs), “That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed… ! It’s not fair!”

As I told my Henry when I was talking about this episode, I have seen it four times this week and the ending still gets me every time. It’s not fair! I feel poor Henry Bemis’s heartache on some sort of primal level. As a reader, a bookworm, a dreamer… I understand his plight… even more, I think we can all understand not having enough time to do what we love. I think that is a big part of what makes this a truly horrifying episode.

This episode has long been my favorite. I have seen it dozens of times and with each screening I love it more. I often spot some new subtle nuance I had missed in previous viewings. It is visually meaty and the story and dialogue/monologue are wonderfully written. As I mentioned before, this is my favorite performance of Meredith’s career (which was long and prolific). Some credit should also be given to the director, who obviously put a lot of love into this episode. It is no wonder that John Brahm was awarded a Directors Guild award for his work on “Time Enough at Last”.

This script was adapted from a short story by Lyn Venable, which had been published in the January 1953 edition of the science fiction magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction. (A couple of her stories are available online for free.) I haven’t been able to find it in original short story form yet… but I hope to some day.

If for some bizarre reason you haven’t seen this episode (and you read through anyway because you don’t care about spoilers), please do me a personal favor and watch it. You won’t regret it. I promise. I will own this someday so I can watch it again and again and again.

Fun Fact:
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 1960 version of The Time Machine.