Headscratchers / The Twilight Zone (1959)

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• "Mr. Garrity and the Graves"
  • — Adjusting the dollar value in 1964 for 1890, one dollar is worth about $30. What are the odds the TOWN DRUNK has $15,000 on his person?!!?!
    • In fact everyone seems to be carrying thousands of dollars with them. That's insane, especially in the Old West: anything more than $10 would be kept in a bank, and the bank was surely closed at the time the townsfolk were paying Garrity.
    • Perhaps not if the banker was also trying to get the money to pay Garrity not to resurrect someone.
  • Mr. Garrity's partner disguises himself as the bar owner's brother and walks up the main street of the town toward the bar. After the bar owner pays Garrity, the partner literally disappears into thin air.
    • How did he know when the bar owner would pay off Garrity so he could know exactly when to disappear? The whole trick requires split-second timing to work, with no explanation how they pulled it off.
    • How exactly did he disappear the way he did? There was a mist on the street partially obscuring him, but he clearly disappeared in a way an ordinary human couldn't. It's possible that he used some kind of magic lantern device to create an illusion of himself, but the episode doesn't say a word about how he did it or that he did it at all.
    • Well the expression "smoke and mirrors" exists for a reason. He could be using a mirror to create the illusion, that would also explain how come he knows when to disappear as he's much closer and listening to what's happening in the bar.
• From "I Shot an Arrow in the Air"- Was it at some point considered plausible that the first astronauts would need to bring along guns?
  • The Soviets always did, but their space programs opted for actual landings (rather than splashdowns) in the middle of Siberia, wolves and all. A lot of classic sci-fi automatically assumed that space explorers needed guns through analogy to terrestrial explorers of Borneo and Africa—most of the writers were exploring ideas, and didn't (or simply couldn't) know what they were talking about.
  • The ol' "if you don't understand it, shoot it" philosophy. Though, ironically, the episode "People Are Alike All Over" might actually make it seem more understandable.
• In "The Man in the Bottle" the couple wishes for a million dollars. Then a man from the IRS shows up and says that the taxes will be over $900,000. What kind of messed up world was the 1960s if people had to pay 90+% income tax? For that matter, why would the IRS show up that same day instead of waiting until, you know, they filed their return?
  • That was part of his Jerk Ass Genie personality. The wife mentions that they had given a lot of money away to the neighbors before the IRS man showed up.
  • People in the US in the 1950s really did face a 90% tax rate on income above a certain (large) dollar amount, after deductions. This tended to be hardest on people with incomes that could change a lot from year to year, like musicians and actors. The Beatles song "Taxman" famously complained about this happening in the UK.
  • The genie could also have been even worse - if the taxman had shown up later or not at all, they could have gotten in trouble for not reporting their windfall as income or ended up with a tax debt they no longer had the money to pay.
• About the family that ended up rich but disfigured by the magic masks they had to wear as a condition of receiving their inheritance - rich people can afford plastic surgery, can't they?
  • Plastic surgery in the 50s wasn't as advanced and given the level of deformity of their faces is very unlikely that any real change could be done.
• In "Time Enough at Last", couldn't he try to find out other glasses? If things like books and food cans survive the nuclear blast most likely glasses can be found somewhere else.
  • He was practically blind without his glasses he'd never be able to find anything
  • He might have just jumped to conclusions and he could find some. Of course, he'd probably Go Mad from the Isolation eventually anyway.
  • It's also distinctly possible he really couldn't find anymore if he had prescription glasses. The number of people who'd randomly have the same prescription as someone else isn't a large one, and the number that'd be undamaged in such an event is even smaller.
• For the ending of "Escape Clause"... why the hell would anyone find an eternity of being tortured in hell preferable to a life prison sentence? Especially when life in prison wouldn't really last forever in a practical sense once they figure out he's immortal?
  • Prisons in the 50s were horrible if you think going to prison today is bad it was like a 100 times worst then, and it would take like some 50-60 years for them to realize he's immortal. On the other hand not everyone believes in the existence of hell, nor even those who believe in the Devil, Jews, and Jehova's Witness, for example, do not believe in Hell but they do believe in the Devil, so he maybe was from one of those religions or he just didn't though hell was a real place even if the existence of a Satanic Archetype does exist as an entity.
  • If he doesn't have to worry about dying or being injured, why doesn't he try to break out of the prison?
    • Presumably, Walter realized that if survived the guards shooting at him, a Broken Masquerade scenario would occur. If the world at large suddenly knew that he was indestructible and immortal, he'd presumably be swooped up by government agencies and subjected to a myriad of tests (and God knows what else). Remember that Walter's major flaw is only caring about himself—he's a miserable hypochondriac whose only concern is his own comfort. The thought of being subjected to countless uncomfortable situations without end drove him over the edge, so he invoked the clause.
• In "A Game of Pool" Jesse Cardiff beats Fats Brown, and in doing so became a legend...but he and Fats were alone when it happened, and I doubt anyone would believe his story of playing pool with a ghost. How did he become a legend with something no one else would know about?
  • I think is something on the line of "history resetting button", in the sense that as from then Cardiff would be regarded as the greatest player ever and all history will be rewritten to match that. It was like a playing for your soul kind of game.
• in "The Hitchhiker," if Nan Adams really died in the accident in Pennsylvania, how was she able to continue to interact with people on the drive to Los Angeles, and pay for and eat food? Was she in some kind of purgatory, and were all the other people also dead? Or were they all interacting with a ghost?
  • They were interacting with a ghost. Not believing she was dead giving her spirit enough power to take corporeal form for a limited time.
    • Or, in the case of the sailor and old man, they may have been ghosts too interacting with another ghost.
• In "The Lonely," why didn't they just take out Alicia's memory bank for the trip and install her in a new body back on Earth? Or, if time constraints prohibited that...well, a head-shot can kill her, so her seat of consciousness is probably in her head, and being mechanical she doesn't need to breathe and can't bleed out, so why not just saw her head off and take that back to Earth?
  • Probably has something to do with 50s people's idea of both robots and computers. Computers were immense room-size machines that would not fit inside a humanoid's skull, they probably did not have our concept of microchips and portable memories, whilst robots/androids for them worked as a unit, as a whole mechanical system, like a clock.
  • The characters may also simply not have had a chance to think of it. Corry had just found out, after years of being stuck alone on an asteroid, that he gets to go home. At virtually the same moment, he finds out that the woman he loves has to be abandoned on the asteroid. Given he thought of her as a woman, not as a machine, it's unlikely that the idea of extracting a memory bank would occur to him, let alone in the minute he had between getting the news that she had to be abandoned and her being killed. Allenby's crew weren't exactly sympathetic to Corry and it's unlikely they'd have thought of doing this to help him. Allenby is the only character who could plausibly have thought of it but he was under time constraints and his priority was getting everyone back to Earth safely, so he had to act fast rather than waiting to think of a better plan. It's also unclear if he would have had the technical knowledge to detach a robot's head without damaging its memory in under 20 minutes (less if he had to talk Corry into it), or even the equipment (especially considering the ship had been stripped and Corry didn't exactly have a lot of supplies). We also have no reason to assume that the head-shot killing her means that her consciousness is in her head (it would be analogous to conclude that a human's consciousness lay in their heart if stopping their heart killed them). Even if we assume her memory was in her head, the average human head weights 10 to 11 pounds. It's completely possible that a robot's head could be heavier than that and would therefore exceed the weight limit of 15 pounds.
• In "When The Sky Was Opened" if the crew of the space-plane wasn't meant to come back from whereever they disappeared to for 24 hours while in space, why were their entire lives being erased from existence, and not just everything they did after they reappeared? If I had to guess, I'd say that the other place, or something inhabiting it, liked them, and decided to steal everything about them from our plane of existence, but that's not what the episode implies.
  • Well it's obviously hard to answer that question when we have no idea why it even happened. Perhaps whoever or whatever was behind it thought that the question of where they disappeared to and, more importantly, the loss of those men motivating the search to find out what happened to them would have the same consequences as just letting them return, or something?
• In "Mr. Denton On Doomsday", Mr. Fate explicitly tells Denton that the potion will make him very fast and accurate on the draw...for ten seconds. But the first time he drinks the potion and shoots out the streetlamp, about 14 seconds goes between drinking the potion and drawing his gun. The second time he drinks the potion (and sees the man he's dueling with has just drank from an identical bottle) over half a minute goes by before they draw.
  • Movies and TV shows tends to operate on what I like to call "flexible timing". Basically, unless there's a visual or audible countdown, things hardly ever take place in real time - a shot/reaction shot could be happening almost simultaneously in-universe; we as the audience just see them one after the other, thus drawing out the length of time. In-universe, both occasions were ten seconds from when he drank the potion, it's just taking longer for us to actually see it.
• In "What You Need", the woman who receives the cleaning fluid comes to the aid of the ex-pitcher who just received a job offer in Scranton, which is some distance away. The ex-pitcher's needed item is a bus ticket to get there for his job interview, a ticket he couldn't otherwise have afforded. The implication is that he and the woman will become involved in a romantic relationship ... except he's leaving town, and presumably can't afford to pay her fare, either. Not much of a first date, if all they're doing is walking to the bus station and then saying goodbye until the end of baseball season.
  • Headcanon: The lady received a lot of money through an inheritance. She now has plenty of money but no family and a string of men have been using her for her money. The ex-pitcher wants money, but to come by it honestly. The lady decides on a whim to buy her own ticket and go to Scranton with him.
  • He got a good job and Pedott can tell the future quite well so he knows it's for the best. He could've asked someone to borrow money, gotten the contact information from them, and repay the person in a few weeks.
• If Marsha White from "The After Hours" was a mannequin all along, who is the mother she was buying a thimble for?
  • As department-store mannequins, the only facet of human life and culture which the "After Hours" characters would have observed would be our shopping habits. Possibly when Marsha first set out to pose as human, she made up an "act like a human" list in her head, which mainly consisted of 1) items to buy and 2) whom to claim she was buying each item for. Once she stepped out of the store and had the chance to experience the human condition, she broadened her interests and tried doing other things, but she kept reverting to her "act [shop] like a human" list, which included "buy a thimble for mother".
• In He's Alive, how the hell did Peter become a Neo-Nazi when his surrogate-father figure was a Jewish Holocaust survivor?
  • Unfortunately, it’s all too common for people to take an unsavory path, even if they have good parental figures to follow. After all, many school shooters have completely non-violent parents.
  • Also, even if a loved one was a Holocaust survivor, Peter may have been brought into Nazism by history books or his friends. After all, as much as we like to think Hitler was the creator of nationalism and racial elitism, Hitler was very much inspired by the USA and its racist, homophobic and eugenic past, so there wouldn’t be any shortage of inspiration for Peter.
    • WHAT? anti-semitism, racism, and patriotism existed in the world, and Germany, far longer than the USA even was a Country. To imply that Hitler became the way he did because he was "inspired" by the US, even though that guy literally hated America so much that he banned American media is not only horrible, but also stupid and not true.
    • Yeeeeah, about that...
    • Well, of course America isn't the be-all-end-all of racism. However, Hitler definitely was exposed to American media, especially as a young man long before he rose to power, since, you know, he wasn't in charge yet and therefore could not ban it, and had as much access to it as any other German man in his social standing. He was very much influenced by the prolific form of racism that America had as the above articles clarify. From my own research, I can't find any sources citing how Hitler might have hated America more than any other country Nazi Germany fought against at the time, at least for any more nuanced reasons than the obvious anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic ones. Don't get me wrong, this stuff certainly existed in Germany as well (after all, so many wouldn't have fallen to Nazi ideology if that wasn't the case), but Hitler did explicitly find inspiration from America's distinct brand of racism and it's consequences. Also, regardless of Nazism's source, there were plenty of people in America before and during the Twilight Zone's run who were hard believers of Nazi ideology. Peter definitely has resources to learn it from, whether it be from his Nazi friends or from reading books written by American Nazis in the aftermath of World War 2.
    • The above objection is probably because the initial response makes it sound like Hitler wouldn't have decided to be racist or xenophobic had it not been for the US, therefore Hitler and his Third Reich would not have existed without the US. It would be more accurate to say that Hitler approved of the industrial and economic advantages of the US, and he definitely enjoyed the movies, but nonetheless considered the US to be weakened and degenerate due to racial/ethnic/religious mixing— And he didn't need to cross the Atlantic to see examples of how to segregate and legally oppress minorities, as pointed out by one of the linked articles. Saying "Hitler was inspired to be Hitler because of the US" is inaccurate at best, intentionally misleading at worst.
  • More relevant to the original Headscratcher: Boomerang Bigot is a thing, so it's not unheard-of, for example, someone of Jewish descent to become anti-Semitic, a citizen of a nation to join a terrorist group targeting that nation, and so on. As Peter himself wasn't Jewish, there would have been even less of a reason for him not to buy into it, especially on a broader scale, i.e. "This one Jewish man is okay, but Jewish people in general are bad." It's also possible that Ernst didn't discuss his past with Peter to any real extent, which isn't uncommon for people who lived through traumatic situations, so Peter might not have made any real association between the hate he's promoting and his father-figure until he was too radicalized to care.