November 2016 - Page 2 of 2 - Galactic Journey

by Gideon Marcus

and

by Lorelei Marcus

The house that Rod built was showing signs of decay, but, as happened last season, The Twilight Zone has gotten a little better a few episodes in. It's not perfect, mind you, but I'm still tuning in on Friday. In fact, Serling's show, Andy Griffith, and Route 66 are my strongest bulwark against the "vast wasteland" lying behind the screen of the one-eyed monster (sadly, Route 66 wasn't on this week, more's the pity).

Anyway, submitted for your approval are the next four episodes of the Third Season (descriptions followed by commentary by the Traveler and then the Young Traveler):

Jack Klugman returns for a amazing turn in A Game of Pool as a aspiring billiards shark who wants nothing more than to beat the best – a deceased legend called "Fats" (played by comedian, Jonathan Winters in a surprisingly humorless performance). Well, he gets his chance…since this is The Twilight Zone.

The writing is some of the pithiest I've seen on this show, and Klugman is an absolute scene-stealer. If there's any kind of downer, it's the ending. While logical, it also feels "safest" for the show (I understand no one was really happy with Pool's conclusion, and it was shot several ways). Four stars.

For the past four weeks I've watched another four episodes of Twilight Zone with my father! The first episode we watched was about a wannabe legendary pool player, who had a pool game with the legend of that time. I won't spoil the ending or anything, but it was very suspenseful and had great pacing. I enjoyed it very much, there was just enough mystery to keep it interesting. It was refreshing after a lot of badly paced and bland episodes. Three and a half stars.

Up next is The Mirror, featuring a Castro stand-in (played by the decidedly non-Latin Peter Falk) as the paranoid dictator of a Cuba stand-in. After Falk is notified by the captured Bautista stand-in that he has inherited a mirror that shows him his would-be assassins, the island dictator quickly dispatches his compatriots.

Did I say quickly? I meant over the course of twenty minutes of swaggering, tedious, brown-faced, fake-bearded monologues. Falk may have been nominated for the Oscar last year, but this performance wouldn't let you on to that info. On the other hand, while bad, the episode has the virtue of being memorable, at least. My daughter and I have taken to doing faux-Castro/Falk impressions whenever we see each other in the bathroom looking glass… Two stars.

Speaking of "badly paced and bland episodes," the next episode we watched was bad. It was about a new Cuban leader who ends up murdering all his friends due to mistrust. It's as boring as my father makes it sound. The worst part, is this drags on for 20 minutes! It's like they thought of one semi-interesting idea, and decided to stretch it so thin across the run time, that there was practically nothing there. Please, save yourself some time and don't watch this episode. One and a half stars.

The Grave is a Halloweeny piece set in the Old West. Lee Marvin plays a bounty hunter who has been on the trail of an outlaw for months, never quite summoning the courage to face the criminal down. The bandit's demise comes at the hands of his own kin, the people of his town resolving to finish the job themselves. But with his last gasp, the outlaw threatens to strangle Marvin from beyond the grave. After a good amount of whiskey-fueled goading, and after a little more whiskey-fueled loin-girding, Marvin visits the outlaw's burial site…and is found dead the next day. Was it a heart attack? Or the satisfaction of a death curse?

A plodding episode, but with some decent acting. Two and a half stars.

This third episode was fairly forgettable. So forgettable that I actually had to get up, halfway through writing this, and ask my father what it was about again. I found the ending to be the most interesting part, so I won't spoil it, however getting to there was painfully slow. There wasn't a setting change until the very end, and the middle was just people sitting and talking. I must admit that I almost fell asleep at times; still you may watch this if you like. As I said before, it has a decent ending, but its a matter of if you want to waste your time getting there. Two stars.

Last up is the thoroughly unpleasant It's a Good Life, starring Bill Mumy, a tyke who starred in one of last season's episodes. The boy has the psychic ability to do, well, anything. And, like most 6-year old kids with untempered power, he is a terror. His fellow rural villagers live in constant fear of being brutally murdered and then "wished into the cornfield." One brave soul decides he can't take anymore and attempts to distract Mumy with an angry outburst, entreating the adults to take the opportunity bash the kid's head in. Alas, the townspeople, while they clearly are miserable, can't overcome their fears. The rebel is slaughtered, and life, such as it is, goes on.

As horror, Life is effective if overwrought. I take it as allegory, however. Life depicts the discomfort humans will endure to avoid a worse fate, even when these same humans have the power to eliminate the source of their discomfort. As such, I found it effective. Three stars.

Finally, today's episode. I really don't have much to say about it honestly. The story was very straightforward, and there was no real message or conflict. I kept waiting for something to happen that would change the course of the story, but no, it was just a boy with mind powers who didn't feel empathy. I felt it went on a little too long, like most Twilight Zone episodes do, and could've used another element to help keep the story interesting. Two and a half stars.

In total I give all these episodes a mean of 2.5 stars. They were fairly average, and I really only recommend the first one to watch. The fourth one might be good to see as well, just to be literate (as I imagine "wishing people into the cornfield" is going to become a popular phrase); however I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

This is the Young Traveler, signing off….

…and the less-Young Traveler, also signing off. Next stop…Japan! Stay tuned for pictures and articles from the Land of the Rising Sun.

War is still a ripe subject for fiction. It has been a constant part of the human existence since there were nations. For six thousand years, we've glorified it, hated it, resolved ourselves to it. There's no reason to expect it will go away any time soon, and it's no wonder that war is a common theme in science fiction.

A couple of years back, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers made a big splash with its interesting take on interstellar combat and the character of patriotism. It was a jingoistic piece that I'm sure resulted in a small spike in enlistments. Gordy Dickson's war novel Dorsai also came out in in 1959. Dorsai was a fairly straightforward war story of a genius mercenary with the temperament and training to become a renowned general. Like Troopers, it was a runner up for the 1960 Hugo (Troopers won).

Both are what I'd call "typical" of the genre. I find it interesting how often war is positively portrayed: exciting, filled with tales of cunning, guts, and derring-do. I suppose it's because World War Two was a "good" war. Democracy vs. Tyranny with clear villains to fight. Sure, we lost some of our boys, but we made the world safe again. And so we have a stream of war movies which are by turns dramatic, gripping, even comedic, but rarely overtly anti-war. A Walk in the Sun, a candid film that even included a portrayal of battle fatigue in the midst of action, is one of the few exceptions.

Pacifist sci-fi novels have been similarly rare. Given the nature of Dickson's Dorsai, I was thus surprised (and delighted) to see that his recent Naked to the Stars, serialized over the last to months in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is a thoughtful and engaging anti-war book.

A few hundred years in the future, humanity is rapidly expanding throughout the local part of the galaxy. At Stars' beginning, we've already conquered one sentient race in our quest for stellar real estate, and a war is in progress against a second, the Lehaunans of Arcturus. We meet Lieutenant Cal Truant, whose traumatic (but, at first, unexplained) experience on the Lehaunan home planet causes him to wound himself out of the army.

He is then enlisted into the Contact Service, a subsidiary, non-combatant branch of the military whose role is to liaise with alien races. Dickson only hints at the nature of this service for much of the book. In fact, the author's style is provocatively oblique rather than expository, a refreshing experience. We get to see Truant's second run through Basic Training, as interesting an episode in Stars as it was in Troopers. Then we follow Truant as he is dispatched to the site of humanity's third wave of expansion: the planet Bellatrix, inhabited by the humanoid Paumons.

It is there that Truant's disillusionment with warfare peaks. Unwilling to watch the Paumons be brutally subjugated, Truant takes matters into his own hands, ultimately maneuvering the situation into a resolution in keeping with his morality. It's an honest book; Truant's actions are not completely laudable, and he knows it. But, given the situation and his beliefs, it's what he has to do.

War is Hell. We can sugar-coat it all we want, but at its core, it is mass murder. It is suffering. Stars delivers this message without being overly histrionic or mawkish. In fact, if there is anything wrong with Stars, it is that it is too short. Like Troopers when it first appeared in F&SF, and like the more recent Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, Stars was hacked down a bit to fit in two issues of a small digest. I understand that an expanded version will be out next year. I hope that, when this fine novel is nominated for a Hugo (which it inevitably will be), it will the full version that is evaluated.

I give this serialized edition 4.5 stars, and I can imagine that the longer book will garner 5.

Galactic Journey

Monthly Archives: November 2016

[Nov. 5, 1961] Settling in (The Twilight Zone, Season 3, Episodes 5-8)

[Nov. 3, 1961] Study War no More (Naked to the Stars, by Gordon Dickson)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction