The Twilight Zone Review: Ninety Years Without Slumbering

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By William Kozy

With only two votes “Ninety Years Without Slumbering” remained asleep near the bottom of the list that asked writers and Facebook fan page Twilight Zone members for their favorite episodes. It is tied with 11 other episodes for essentially 149th place out of 156 episodes.

We open on Sam Forstmann, played by Ed Wynn (also seen fighting off harbingers of Death in the Season 1 episode “One For the Angels”) winding a grandfather clock while singing the song “My Grandfather’s Clock” written in by Henry Clay Work in 1876. Downstairs, his granddaughter Marnie is troubled. She knows he has to have a talk with him, and tells her husband Doug as much. His support amounts to this: “Honey, I know how much you love him. And I love you. But we’re going to have to face facts.” And for that grand pep talk, she tells him, “You’re good for me.” It gets worse. He then says, “Well, someone’s got to take care of the homely women of the world” and he swats her playfully on her back side with his newspaper.

Marnie enters Sam’s room, and sets his milk and snack down before approaching him. We learn that he used to be a clockmaker, and Marnie asks him if he’s all right, because he didn’t come downstairs for dinner. He hasn’t been out of his room all day because he’s been having trouble regulating his clock. (Hey, he should count his blessings that’s the only irregularity plaguing him at his age). He’s got the clock running now, though he informs her that with clocks this old “you’re bound to run into problems” and he pauses as he comes to grip with what is on the back of his mind, “just like old people.” Marnie is pregnant, and Sam tells her not to worry about him—she and the baby are more important. He promises her that he’ll eat, and she leaves. As he lies in bed that night, he frets and discovers that he hasn’t wound the clock properly. He gets up and promises the clock he’ll never forget to wind it again.

At breakfast the next morning Marnie and Doug discuss, with some tension, the plight of her grandfather whom her husband refers to as “not a well man.” His foundation for that assessment is Sam’s constant tinkering with the clock—“Til 4 am last night.” Doug wants Sam to meet with Mel Avery, a psychiatrist friend of theirs, just to make sure nothing’s very wrong with Sam. Sam enters the room having heard the suggestion to and he balks at the idea, asking them why. Marnie tells him it’s because of his preoccupation with the clock. Giving in, he agrees though to see the psychiatrist, confident though, that the doctor will find nothing wrong with him.

At Avery’s office, we open with Sam telling him the background story of the clock, how it was presented to Sam on the day of his birth. The conversation continues and it’s a rather unproductive scene with circuitous debating and dialogue less clever than the show imagines. Before leaving, Sam pauses by the door with the doctor and delivers this line with seriousness: “Oh there is one thing doctor…when me clock stops ticking, I’ll die.” It makes little sense to me that Sam would tell something like that to the doctor, knowing full well that it would only lead to doubts about Sam’s mental state. The next few lines construct a nonsensical contrivance whose sole purpose is to outline the narrative’s conflict: that either Sam must go or the clock goes. Trying to figure out how the doctor arrives at that deduction is a head-scratcher.

Back home, two handymen are hauling the clock down the stairs and Sam has them place it against the wall at the bottom of the steps. And then he faints dead away. We don’t know why. It’s just basically a cheap fake out on the audience. But he wakes up when the show is back from commercial, and he muses wistfully, “Not yet I guess, not yet.” When Marnie and Doug arrive home, she interprets this new place for the clock as Sam’s trying to compromise. Doug is displeased, telling Sam the clock sticks out like a sore thumb—Sam did after all place it in front of a painting hanging on the wall. I’m not even sure by what logic Sam thought bringing the clock out of his bedroom where it was out of sight, and then moving it to a MORE visible location would solve things. Marnie and Doug apparently have been told by Avery that the clock should go because Sam is obsessed with it. Sam yells at them that he’s not senile and he’s not going to a loony bin, which Marnie says was never their intention. Sam resolves to sell the clock! And he stomps up to his room. Huh? This man who insists on keeping a watchful eye on the clock to keep it from stopping which would kill him, decides that selling the clock where it will be out of his care is the answer to the situation? I don’t get that.

Their neighbor Carol has come for a visit and she, Marnie and Sam have tea together. The subject of the clock comes up and Sam asks if she knows anyone who would be interested in buying it. Turns out she is, being the aficionado of antiques as she is. Well, that was easy. I do like the hint of irresponsibility though when Carol asks the rude and indelicate question, “Mr. Forstmann, where will you be living after the baby comes?” Marnie tells Carol, that he’s staying right there with them. But we do wonder, “Gee is the clock going to be okay under her supervision?” But they strike a deal in which Sam can go over to their house every other day to maintain the clock’s condition.

Sure enough, a snag ensues. Two weeks later Carol and her husband are away on vacation, thwarting Sam’s ability to pay his visit. Restless in bed that night, he gets up and makes his way in the middle of the night to Carol’s house. Peering through the window he can see the pendulum slowing. In a panic he breaks the window, but a police car comes right at that moment. Yeah, there are a lot of timing coincidences in this episode. The officer escorts Sam back to his house.

Lying in bed, Marnie tends to Sam who appears run down. “Its better this way” he says and she kisses him goodnight. He lies in bed muttering about “it has to come sometime.”

He falls asleep and the clock pendulum shows the passage of time until it comes to a halt.

In a wide shot, we see Sam in bed and then his transparent spirit rises up out of bed and stands at the foot of the bed, addressing Sam. The corporeal Sam awakens, puts on his glasses and demands to know how this spirit got in his bedroom. His spirit tells him that the time has come. But out of nowhere, with no explanation Sam has a complete reversal of character—he has adapted a defensive and aggressive refutal of the rules he’s been going by this whole time. The spirit tells him, “Have you forgotten what your father told you? And your grandfather?…Didn’t they always tell you that when the clock winds down you’ll die?” Um…really? What a mean couple of men. Who would do that to their own child?

But now Sam defies the stupidity of that belief, fortifying his stance with: “I’ve been to a psychiatrist!” Sam accuses the spirit of being from a different generation whereas Sam lives in the present. The writing is full of mumbo jumbo as they banter. Flighty words with little relation to logic. Even the story’s brand of logic.

Marnie comes into his room to see how he’s doing and all is well. They walk downstairs together to get some cocoa, and Sam assures Marnie that when that clock stopped ticking…”I was born again.”

I rate this episode a 3.

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