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The Twilight Zone Review: Valley of the Shadow

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By William Kozy

Burdened by dim-witted logic, and a pacing as slow as moss growing, “Valley of the Shadow” received only 3 votes in the survey asking “What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?” This put it in a tie with 6 other episodes for 133rd thru 139th place. Reporter Philip Redfield (Ed Nelson) stops his car along a backwoods road to consult a hand drawn map that one assumes did not give him whatever answer he was looking for, so he crumples it up and chucks it out of his 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible onto the ground. Oh that is strike one for you fella! That’s a pet peeve of mine whenever I see it in the movies. When a character litters with impunity.

It tells me immediately that the filmmakers haven’t a sense of decency themselves unless they actually did want us to dislike the offending character. But I saw no reason for them to want that here. And almost immediately after that, as Redfield pauses at a sign pointing to “Peaceful Valley POP. 981” Redfield tells his dog Rollie, “Well you just earned yourself a steak!” and turns left on the road heading toward Peaceful Valley. Why did Rollie earn a steak? What did he do? It’s never explained.

One can go on and on citing these weird inexplicable things about the dialogue, character motivations, acting, story-telling—all of them not making sense, but this essay would be 15 pages long. Trust me, I’m sparing you a lot of dumb stuff.

As a lead actor, Ed Nelson leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a journeyman’s performance, not quite terrible, but oh so uninteresting. And oddly obnoxious in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s just an instinct you get watching his character. You don’t like him, and that’s not the type of character you can get excited about following along in a story. If he were a villain, that would be different. One might argue, well aren’t characters more interesting if they have a mix of traits? Yes, that’s true, but I suppose what I’m saying is that in watching this I just get the feeling he’s too tightly wound up in a way that doesn’t serve the story well. It feels as though the actor was directed to pinpoint every negative or unpleasant moment in the plot and exaggerate his annoyance with that issue no matter how miniscule it was. But the episode is not a character study about this guy, no, this episode is an examination of a fantastical little town with immense powers bestowed upon it and what the town’s responsibility is with those powers.

The first sign of the town’s abilities come when Redfield stops for gas. His dog jumps out to chase a cat, but then a little girl (Morgan Brittany! From “Caesar and Me”!) takes out a strange device and makes the dog vanish which Redfield was able to see as he got to them. She runs away, but then her father comes out and Redfield and argue, using amateurishly written dialogue. But look closely and you’ll see that the father is played by none other then James Doohan, Mr. Scott of Star Trek fame. He’s hiding his accent, but watch the scene again and you can hear it buried in there. They both go looking for the dog, and when the father rounds the corner and is out of sight, he pulls out the same sort of device and makes the dog reappear. So something’s afoot. Redfield asks the gas station attendant where he can get something to eat, but he’s told there’s no place, everything’s closed. The pig-headed Redfield drives up ahead anyway, and the attendant gets on the phone to tell someone named “Dorn” that there’s an intruder and “he saw something.”

Redfield enters a hotel to inquire about food, and here we meet the romantic interest, Ellen the proprietor, whom Redfield interrogates with some nifty bits of deduction to shoot down all her explanations about the town’s oddities. He is a reporter though, a smart choice by the writers, since this keeps him very curious, and eager to dig around. Except that’s not what the story has him do next. No, he gets in his car and in a huff yells out to the attendant and father, “Thanks for everything!” As he’s leaving town on the dirt road, suddenly his car crashes into an invisible wall. As it turns out, the town leaders put up a force field to prevent him from leaving, which doesn’t make the most sense since we discover later they would have liked nothing more than for him to have never found the town. It felt to me like they had satisfactorily dissuaded him from thinking anything more about the little girl’s device, so they should have been relieved he was leaving. So why keep him there? I suppose I can buy that they just couldn’t take the chance. He is brought to Dorn and two other men and they interrogate him about his his background. But they’ve really only made things worse with their force field, since at this point he really knows something is screwy. And this interrogation sealed the deal. To the script’s credit it does have Dorn admit he panicked.

After using the phone at the hotel and checking in with the car mechanic who has done nothing about his car, Redfield returns to Mayor Dorn who gives him the bad news that they are not going to let him leave. They narrate the town’s back story, starting with a demonstration of the device that makes things vanish and then reappear elsewhere. Hey, maybe Scotty got this idea from Peaceful Valley! Dorn goes on to describe how a man came to Peaceful Valley 104 years ago with “equations the likes of which no one had ever seen or dreamt of”. A lot of the mysterious energy this man entrusted to the town are similar to those you can see on Star Trek—food replicators, transporters, etc. They have something else though that the Enterprise didn’t: a device that can actually reverse time in a way, make things go backwards as though they never happened.

Here’s my imitation of you as you’ve read that: “But then, why didn’t they just use that device on Redfield instead of keeping him prisoner?”
Exactly.

The mayor continues to show many more of the town’s secrets to Redfield, content perhaps that there’s no way he can get away. Redfield then starts questioning the men about why they don’t share this advanced technology with the world. Their rebuttal, and it’s not an altogether illogical one, is that the world would just use it to weaponize themselves and seek domination and destruction. Redfield argues that they could stop hunger, disease, but they counter that “the same power that can cure sickness can also be used to destroy the innocent.” Dorn follows that up accusatorily with, “What did you do with professor Einstein’s primitive calculation E equals Mc squared? It could have been used to bring water to the deserts, feed starving millions. Was it? It was used to destroy countless thousands of human beings!”

Redfield is given the choice to be killed, or to assimilate and live there. He chooses the latter. Next thing you know Ellen is showing him his new house. Redfield tells her that he won’t be staying. It seems a risky thing to confess since the two have had zero time to develop a trust. How does he know she won’t report that to Dorn? And anyway, how did they expect him to stay since they only put up the force field in emergencies?

Later, Redfield fills Ellen in on the facts of life, how disease and starving afflicts people the world over. And he tells her the town’s technology could prevent all that suffering, and he plays to her guilt over having anything she could possibly want. It’s such a drab little nothing town, it seems impossible to imagine that no one has dreamed up a little amusement part, or casino, or even a beautiful park with glorious gardens. But anyway, Redfield tells Ellen he’s going to bust outta there and do something about it. Ellen then puts the moves on and tells him that when he was first leaving town, her feelings for him were crushed. She tells him that she wants to be with him. He tells her that they must have freedom from this place for that to truly happen. She leaves, sadly.

But in a little while she shows up again, this time with a car! She said she wants to go with him. Now that he has a way out with her, he inexplicably goes back to the unguarded mayor’s office to replicate a gun. He sets off an alarm and when the three heads of state, burst in, he shoots them dead! Like a murderer would! He runs back to Ellen and they start driving off. Just as they leave town, he pulls over to tell her what he did back at the office to see if she still wanted to come with him. She then takes out a device and makes him disappear and reappear back at the mayor’s office. It was all a test of his intentions. The mayor tells him that he will be executed, but not in the usual way. He has given it some thought, studied the laws, and has come up with a different approach. They point an imposing machine at him. In an act of sheer genius Dorn has used the time reverser to take Redfield back to before his dog jumped out of the car. Duh.

It’s an episode that for my money had a very promising premise, but lousy execution.

I rate it a 3.

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