Twilight Zone Essay: Twenty Two (Aired February 10, 1961 Starring Barbara Nichols, Jonathan Harris and Fredd Wayne)

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By William Kozy

In a poll asking horror writers and Twilight Zone fans on Facebook, “What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?”, with 57 votes here is the episode “Twenty Two.”. My thanks first of all to all who helped so graciously with this survey. How I wish this episode came in 22nd place but alas, “TWENTY TWO” came in TWENTY-EIGHTH place.

OPENING NARRATION:

“This is Miss Liz Powell. She’s a professional dancer and she’s in the hospital as a result of overwork and nervous fatigue. And at this moment we have just finished walking with her in a nightmare; in a moment she’ll wake up and we’ll remain at her side. The problem here is that both Miss Powell and you will reach a point where it might be difficult to decide which is reality and which is nightmare, a problem uncommon perhaps but rather peculiar to the Twilight Zone.”

The PLOT:

Liz is in a hospital suffering from exhaustion due to her recurring nightmare which always goes like this: She awakens in her hospital room and reaches for a glass of water on the night table. It falls and shatters. She gets out of bed to locate the source of a loud ticking clock and some footsteps that she heard. She spots a nurse go down in the elevator. Liz decides to follow her despite quaking in an exaggeratedly nervous manner. Emerging into the basement she goes down a hall leading to ROOM 22, the Hospital Morgue. Closer and closer she creeps toward the door when suddenly, a nurse bursts out of the door and with a cool kind of balletic move and stance she says to Liz, “Room for one more, honey.”

Liz screams and runs away and the nightmare ends. Awake for real this time in her hospital room, she insists to everyone around her that the dream is really happening to her. The doctor summons the night nurse to the room and Liz admits she looks nothing like the nurse in the dream.

That night she has the dream again, with a slightly different detail, but essentially the same things happens. In the morning, she’s screaming and frustrated and they inject her with a sedative. The doctor (played by Jonathan Harris, aka Dr. Smith on “Lost in Space” so what could possibly go wrong…) does admit it’s odd that she knew the morgue was Room 22 since she’d never been down there. Camera dollies in on a meaningful close-up.

SPOILER ALERT:

If you don’t want to read the twist, skip ahead to the CLOSING NARRATION and TRIVIA. And to watch the episode for free go to the link at the end.

Okay, so after a few days rest and we’ll assume lots of sedatives, Liz is discharged and feeling good. And might I add, looking awesome. She’s at the airport ready to board her plane to Miami. The flight number is announced, and I’ll give you just one guess what the flight number is. So this unnerves her as does bumping into a woman and shattering her vase much like the water glass in her nightmares shattered, but she continues to the steps leading up to the entry of the plane. And just at the top, a flight attendant pops out of the cabin and it’s the same woman who was the nurse in her dream. “Room for one more, honey” she says. Liz bursts into hysterics as she turns around and scrambles away along the tarmac, and into the terminal. As the staff tries to calm her down we look out the window and a short moment after the airplane takes off, it explodes in midair.

CLOSING NARRATION:

“Miss Elizabeth Powell, professional dancer. Hospital diagnosis: acute anxiety brought on by overwork and fatigue. Prognosis: with rest and care, she’ll probably recover, but the cure to some nightmares is not to be found in known medical journals. You look for it under ‘potions for bad dreams’ – to be found in the Twilight Zone.”

TRIVIA:

If the general plot concept of “Twenty Two” sounds familiar that’s because it has had many incarnations previous to this episode. As Rod Serling explained in a trailer for the episode the previous week, “It’s a story that comes to us from Mr. Bennett Cerf, who describes it as an age-old horror tale whose origin is unknown. We’ve dressed it up in some hospital wrappings and enlisted the performance of Miss Barbara Nichols.”

In Cerf’s version, a young woman from New York visits a plantation that had belonged to distant relatives, and she encounters a hearse driven by a coachman. There’s no coffin in the horse-drawn hearse so he turns to her and says “There’s room for one more.” Later, back in New York she encounters an elevator and the doors split open to reveal the elevator operator who has the same face of the coachman. “Room for one more,” he says, but she wisely refuses, because the elevator cable then snaps. So that anecdote was from 1944 in Bennett Cerf’s anthology “Famous Ghost Stories” and THAT anecdote was in turn adapted from a 1906 short story by E. F. Benson called “The Bus-Conductor,” published in The Pall Mall Magazine.

And in that story, a middle-aged man named Hugh Grainger visits a friend living in London. He is spooked by a man wearing a bus driver’s uniform but driving a horse carriage hearse. A month later, he sees the same man, driving a bus this time, and the bus gets into a terrible accident. Now, in 1944, the same year as Cerf’s book was published, the film “Dead of Night” came out; it was a fright anthology feature film, and it featured as one of the segments, an adaptation of the bus driver version with Hugh Grainger. Nothing new under the Sun , right folks?

In “Twenty Two” the actress playing the morgue nurse of Liz’s nightmare was Arlene Martel, more often credited as Arlene Sax. The makeup job they did was pretty cool. Attractive yet sinister. If she looks familiar it might be because you saw her play Mr. Spock’s fiancée in the original Star Trek episode “Amok Time.” Or…in another “Twilight Zone” episode called “What You Need.”

Despite this episode being so positively received by voters in this poll, it apparently was not a favorite amongst the Twilight Zone creative team. Even its director Jack Smight said, “I just didn’t think it had the quality of some of the others.”

Watch it here for FREE

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