YMMV / The Twilight Zone (1959) S5E29: "The Jeopardy Room"

• Complete Monster: Commissar Vassiloff is a cruel assassin whose job is to hunt down and kill defectors from the Soviet Union. With his latest target, Major Ivan Kuchenko, in sniper range, Vassiloff refuses to have him merely shot. Instead, Vassiloff decides to give Kuchenko "the death of an artist". To that end, Vassiloff forces Kuchenko into a trap where he must find and defuse a bomb hidden in his hotel room under a 3-hour time limit. Vassiloff delights in watching his victim suffer a nervous breakdown as time runs out, and continues to leave him alive even as he pleads, screaming, to be shot. With a Complexity Addiction that defies all logic, Vassiloff cements himself as one of the most sadistic characters on the show, claiming to have killed 800 people in similar ways purely to satisfy his boredom.
• Genius Bonus: Vassiloff presents Kuchenko with a bottle of amontillado wine. A famous Edgar Allan Poe story, The Cask of Amontillado was also about someone using a convoluted plan to lure a man into his own murder. Given Vassiloff's Wicked Cultured persona, it's no stretch to believe this was an intentional Shout-Out on his part, and that he's a fan of the story.

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