The Twilight Zone Review: Person or Persons Unknown

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By William Kozy

Here’s another episode I thought would have fared better in my survey asking, “What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?” “Person or Persons Unknown” received only 4 votes, tying it with 9 other episodes for 124th thru 132nd place. It surprises me because, it seems to have all the ingredients necessary for a classic episode: a clean simple premise, a well-constructed build up of nightmarishness, good acting, and finally a nice twist.

David Andrew Gurney (played by Richard Long, much better here than in “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You”) wakes up sluggishly, fully-clothed, in bed next to his wife, after a night of mixing scotch and martinis. Late for work, he groggily gets up and looks for his razor, waking his wife with a pat on her rump to ask her where it is. She springs up with a start, and looks up at him abruptly, pulling the covers up around her as she screams. “Who are you?!” Gurney is in no mood for her joking and continues trying to get a jump on the day. She insists he leave and asks how he knows her name. She tries calling the police, but he stops her, accusing her of being “stoned” after a night of drinking as well. He can’t find any of his clothes either. He figures it is a gag being played by Pete (a buddy of his as we learn later), and he tells his wife “You can tell him for me that it didn’t come off!”

So far, so good. It feels like a logical progression: assuming that it’s all a practical joke even if an annoying one. Smartly, the script presents a time urgency in that Gurney needs to get to work quickly, so we exit this first phase of the mysterious set-up without having to go through more back and forth between him and his wife.

He takes the car and drives to work. His “good morning” greetings to his co-workers at the bank are clearly not met with reciprocal amiableness. And when he asks who that is sitting in his desk, he is similarly rebuked. The worker and everyone else show no sign of knowing who Gurney is and they call security. Now things are getting more serious. A gag? Hmm, too hard to pull off, getting every single one of those people to go along with it, especially at an office with the gravitas of a bank where you don’t want customers observing chaos. So what’s going on?

What I like about this episode is that, okay yes, we’ve seen this situation before in other shows, and even in the Twilight Zone (“A World of Difference”), but here the writing really pushes with extra effort to follow through with the course of actions a man would take in this situation. At each juncture, it offers up a logical next step for what the victim would attempt to do to either prove who he is or figure out what is going on. It feels like it carries the ball further than most stories with this premise do.

Gurney is escorted at gunpoint out of the bank, where his wife and a police car greet him. He perseveres with his claim, but no one is giving in. Aha, let’s show them his driver’s license and credit cards! Of course when he fetches out his wallet they are not there. His frustration is amping up as he yells at his wife “What have you done with them?!!” The police corral him into the squad car and take off.

Next we’re in a doctor’s office at an asylum and some good engaging dialogue plays out here between Dr. Koslenko (played very smoothly and believably by Frank Silvera) and Gurney, who is not yet babbling to the point of needing to be strapped into a gurney. No, instead what plays out is some reasoned discussion between the two men, providing some intellectual enjoyment for the viewer. It’s like a chess match as we viewers work out in our heads what Gurney should try to do to prove who he is. You can be sure that the script will have him try out whatever you can think of.

The doctor tells David that the man he thinks he is doesn’t really exist except in his mind—that David has invented him. Gurney steadfastly holds his position, so the doctor takes him to his office to show him more proof. He lets David use the phone and his first call is to his buddy Pete but of course David isn’t recognized. David next calls his mother and we watch in close-up as his face turns from relief upon hearing her voice, to anguish as without us hearing a word from the other side of the conversation, we know that again Gurney’s reality is crumbling moreso. The doctor then offers the telephone directory to David which infuses David with some hope, but when he leafs through the pages, he discovers that he’s not there. But again, we and he figure, well….anybody can rig a phone book….right?

When the doctor asks, “Now do you believe me?” we observe the first signs of Gurney’s confidence weakening. “I don’t know” he says as he retreats to the window and his eyes dart about. He thinks “Maybe I should, but I…” He tries another tack and asks “All right, if I’m not David Gurney, then who am I?” It makes us nervous though, it feels like a dangerous new position to grab onto, like giving up on one strongly held initial belief, and latching on to a weaker one—that is, challenging them prove something that would be easy to contrive. The doctor posits that sometime overnight David had “a total loss of orientation. You entered Miss Berenson’s house…” But before he can continue, David regains his tenacity, and deals the doctor an argument that forms the crux of the episode’s theme: “No, no no, no, that’s what you want me to believe, but it isn’t true. Because in spite of everything doctor, I know who I am! Now, either I am crazy or somebody’s going to an awful lot of trouble to blot me out.” And then the inspiration: “But whoever, or whatever it is, they can rig all the phone books in the world, and they can pay off everyone who ever knew me, but they can’t get inside my mind, doctor. And I’ll tell you something else they can’t do—they can’t think of everything”… “A man’s life is made up of a million details, doctor. And some of those details are private. How I’ve gone places, I’ve done things that I’ve never told to anyone, not even my wife.” In a final burst of fight, Gurney proclaims, “I’m going to go out and find one of those details. Now!” And he jumps through the window, breaking the glass in a show of breaking free from the transparency of his persecutors’ façade. He finds a van with the keys still in it, and jumps in, driving away as the asylum attendants just miss getting to him. Again, we feel like we’re right there with him, in his mind, knowing that we would try that also.

Next we see David in a bar, a haunt of his that apparently he never told anyone about, “not even his wife.” But his friend the bartender, doesn’t know who he is. David is puzzled over how “they” could have “gotten to him too.” Sam the bartender asks how David knows his name and so David launches into a list of all the other things he knows about him, ending with, “You used to be a prizefighter, Powerhouse Baker. Your picture’s right there on the wall.” And something strikes David we see from his face. It’s a solid well-devised bit of writing to have David describe a photograph which then triggers the memory of another photograph that just might provide the proof he needs.
“I think I may have found the little detail they overlooked” David tells Sam as he hurries out. Our excitement is piqued as we ourselves wonder what detail in our own lives would dig us out of this abyss.

We cut to a woman rifling through folders in a file cabinet as David looks on. And there it is. A photograph of David and his wife at the zoo. He had the picture taken secretly and was going to surprise her with it. He heads to the door with the evidence, and who should be there but the doctor and two cops. David this time, is brimming with positivity. He challenges the doctor, “But what about a photograph doctor? What about a photograph of me holding hands with a girl who claims she never laid eyes on me before this morning? How would you explain that?” David whips out the photo and shows it to the doctor…but now his wife is no longer in the photo. It’s the straw that breaks him. After all, now it’s no one else opposing what he says, it is physical reality itself. A photo that he held in his hand, suddenly betraying his senses. Gurney finally collapses onto the floor, wailing “we were together, we were together, we were together” and you get the feeling he doesn’t mean him and his wife but him and his mind.

We cut to him in bed moaning as he wakes up from his nightmare. His wife goes to the bathroom to clean her make-up off as David describes what a doozy the dream was. And yes, there might be some disappointment in that age-old finale, the ol’ “it was all a dream” denouement. But the episode makes up for it with a nice twist. As his wife comes out of the bathroom, David stares in shock as we see that she looks nothing like his wife. Cue spooky Twilight Zone music.

She is very hot though, so….maybe he breaks even?

I’ll rate this episode a 7.7

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