The Twilight Zone Review: The Jeopardy Room

By William Kozy

“Alex, I’ll take “Silliest Twilight Zone Episodes” for $200 please.”

“This escape room plot of an episode received only 5 votes in a survey of fans and writers asking, ‘What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?’ tying it with 7 other episodes for 117th thru 123rd place of the 156 episodes.”

“What is, ‘The Jeopardy Room’”?

“Correct.”

So here is an episode that sounds like so much fun in theory. And you know what, as stupid as the episode is, there is just something so undeniably hard to resist about certain plot set-ups like the one in “The Jeopardy Room.” So no matter how many things that happen as you watch it that make you shake your head, you just can’t help but want to see how it turns out.

The basic plot is that Major Ivan Kuchenko (Martin Landau) is in a hotel room in an unnamed country, waiting to continue his journey to the West where he will seek asylum after spending 12 years in the Siberian prison he escaped from. But from a window across the alley from Kuchenko’s window, Commisar Vasiloff (John VanDreelen) and his henchman Boris, spy on Kuchenko, plotting a game of cat and mouse that Vasiloff intends to cause the death of Kuchenko. He will plant a bomb in Kuchenko’s room that the Major must find and disarm in three hours or else it will go off. And that’s it. Sounds worthwhile right? Would make a thematically appropriate companion piece to “The Obsolete Room”—bombs planted in rooms that will be turned against terrorists of totalitarian states.

So what is it that disappoints us so? For me I suppose it is the overly precious characterization of the Commissar. VanDreelen is a fine actor and I suppose actually well-suited to the character that was drawn up for him, but in the bigger picture, I simply find the characterization just too obviously the product of an overly ambitious screenwriter who has seen this type of bad guy in so many other clichéd stories: the overly debonair villain whose cultivated behavior and genteel conversation are a mask for a killer with a sadistic heart. I’m almost surprised the character didn’t have tight fancy leather gloves to remove and drop oh so chicly on a table when he confronted Kuchenko.

And the scenario itself is simply not believable in terms of being a cleverly worked out trap. When Kuchenko does escape it is not by anything clever he does. It was a very simple thing he could have done at any point really when you watch the scene. And what did he do? He very quickly opened the door and ran out of the room. Yes, he was fired upon by Boris, just as Vasiloff warned Kuchenko would happen if he attempted to leave the room, but when he escapes you realize that it would be so easy to time the quick exit before they could react to it. Especially when you realize that the tormentors fully expect Kuchenko to move about the room looking for the bomb—they invited him to do so in fact. It’s a source of pleasure for Vasiloff to see his victims squirming. Kuchenko even plays with the doorknob to see if there are wires connected to a device, so he could’ve probably even escaped quickly at that point. But let’s assume he didn’t think he’d really be able to pull that off. That’s a reasonable assumption.

One plot detail that gets mangled is how the bomb gets planted. In the story, Vasiloff calls up Kuchenko, waking him up and then goes over to his hotel room. Kuchenko holds him at bay with a gun during the whole visit as Vasiloff mocks the poor state of the drab room while professing to be his friend. Kuchenko recognizes Vasiloff from the many interrogations he suffered in the prison, recalling how Vasiloff smoked cigarettes from a long handle and smirked and nodded. For the record, Vasiloff made it easy for Kuchenko to recall this as he was doing all those things in the moment Kuchenko accused him. But we get the feeling Vasiloff doesn’t really care, and in fact probably even wants Kuchenko to know who he is. The truth is out, and Vasiloff tells Kuchenko that they just can’t let him leave, not with the info he has in his brain.

At this point, Vasiloff presents a bottle of Amontillado wine and offers a drink. Kuchenko of course knows better than to drink from it, but Vasiloff offers to imbibe first, and does so without any consequence. So Kuchenko goes ahead and drinks from it?! Why? For what possible reason? It’s established that this man tortured him in the prison, why would he risk even being the slightest bit tipsy? And the dogged insistence with which Vasiloff wants Kuchenko to drink should have raised a “red” flag. As it turns out, the wine was dosed with some sort of drug that as Vasiloff explains he has spent years drinking to build up his immunity to it. So Kuchenko passes out, although he does seem to have had plenty of time to shoot Vasiloff as he realized he was weakening and getting close to fainting.

So the purpose of all that was to render Kuchenko unconscious for a few hours and thus give Vasiloff time to rig his bomb. The bomb has been attached to the telephone and will go off if the phone rings and the receiver is picked up.

After Kuchenko wakes up, he sees a tape recorder on the bureau. In an eerie precursor to Landau’s future role as Jim Phelps on “Mission: Impossible” in which he would listen to countless self-destructing tapes during the run of that series, Kuchenko listens to the groundwork: he must actively search for the bomb device and disarm it within three hours, he must not turn out the light or he will be shot in the head from across the way, and he attempts to leave the room he will be shot in the head. At the end of the tape Vasiloff even gives a maniacal mad doctor laugh. And not just once. By the third “mwah hah hah haaaaaa” they might’ve well just had John Candy playing the role.

As Kuchenko, Landau does okay. He handles the accent nicely, but he does make a few too many bug-eyed faces, and does one reaction I bet he wishes he could take back: when looking for the bomb, he carefully examines some books on a table, and when one falls to the floor, he reacts like a frightened damsel, tossing his head back with his eyes closed as he sighs in relief and clutches his chest with his hand in a case of the vapors. And he was a Soviet major? If he had a hand fan he’d flutter it to revive himself.

As he continues searching, over in the other apartment, the two trackers play a game in which Boris keeps making guesses as to where Vasiloff has planted the bomb. Didn’t he watch from across the way?! What strikes me as uncharacteristic to what the writing has set up, is that for most of the time Kuchenko spends searching, Vasiloff isn’t even watching. He sits with back to the action saying things like “Wait and see” and “That would’ve been nice” to Boris’s guesses. I thought Vasiloff was supposed to be savoring the delight of his torture, but he hardly seems engaged. He even yawns as he waits.

The bomb is planted in the telephone. It will only go off however, if the phone rings and the receiver is picked up. If the receiver is lifted up without it ringing, as if to make a call, then the bomb won’t go off. Only if picked up after it rings. So when Kuchenko lifts up the receiver to examine the phone, the bomb didn’t go off because no one had called. Only if someone called would it have gone off. Now if you think my whole explanation there was completely redundant and I sounded if I was talking down to you, then now you know how it feels to watch the scene where the two thugs talk about it. The writers have Vasiloff and Boris clarify it ad nauseum.

Kuchenko actually tries to hang a blanket over the window, but Boris takes some potshots, sending Kuchenko scrambling to the floor. Exasperated, Kuchenko breaks down and cries out for Vasiloff to go ahead and shoot him as the scene fades out. With ten minutes left, we see Kuchenko pacing and its time to implement the trap. Vasiloff calls the hotel’s front desk and asks them to ring Kuchenko’s room. They do so, and the phone rings. Kuchenko is about to pick it up, but his instincts tell him not to in mid-reach. He eyes the phone suspiciously. I actually buy this because after all, he must realize that the deadline has come for him to find the bomb, so the phone ringing at this point would seem high coincidental. Frustratedly, Vasiloff tries calling again as Kuchenko very coolly, nonchalantly paces slowly, lulling the two men into complacency when he suddenly jerks to the door and opens it and escapes as a hail of bullets just misses him. Laughably unclever when you consider he could have done that anytime.

Denouement: Vasiloff and Boris are now in Kuchenko’s room, retrieving the tape recorder as Vasiloff consoles himself, “It’s all right, I’ll get him in the next city.” Suddenly the phone rings and Boris who is standing beside it absent-mindedly answers it as Vasiloff yells, “No Boris!” which triggers the world’s worst special effect of an explosion. We then cut to Kuchenko in a phone booth telling the operator, “It’s all right operator, I..I have reached them.” Kuchenko smiles as we hear the overlapping sound of a flight attendant welcoming passengers. We know that Kuchenko has found safe flight to the West.

Final Jeopardy Round: The category is TZ Episode Ratings. Answer: What is 4.8?

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