History Headscratchers / TheTwilightZone1959

** 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".

* If Marsha White from "The After Hours" was a mannequin all along, who is the mother she was buying a thimble for?

* 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.

* 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.

* In "When The Sky Was Opened" if the crew of the space-plane wasn't meant to come back from where ever they dissapreared 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.

** 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.

** Plastic surgery in the 50s wasn't as adavance and given the level of deformity of their faces is very unlikely that any real change could be done.

** 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 believe 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 SatanicArchetype does exist as an entity.
** If he doesm't have to worry about dying or being injured, why doesn't he try to break out of the prison?
* 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 whould now about?
** I think is something on the line of "history resetting buttom", 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 pergatory, and were all the other people also dead? Or were they all interacting with a ghost?
** They were interacting with a ghost. [[YourMindMakesItReal Not believing she was dead gave her spirit enough power to take corporeal form for a limited time.]]

** 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 had our concept of microchips and portable memories, whilst robots/androids for them worked as a unit, as a whole mechanical system, like a clock.

* 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?

*** Or, in the case of the sailor and old man, they may have been ghosts too interacting with another ghost.

** They were interacting with a ghost. [[YourBeliefMakesItReal Not believing she was dead gave her spirit enough power to take corporeal form for a limited time.]]

** They were interacting with a ghost. [[YourBeliefMakesItReal Not believing she was dead gave her spirit enough power to take corporeal form for a limited time.]]

* 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 pergatory, and were all the other people also dead? Or were they all interacting with a ghost?

** I think is something on the line of "history resetting buttom", 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 "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 whould now about?

* 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?

** He was practically blind without his glasses he'd never be able to find anything

* 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.

* 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?

** 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.

** That was part of his JerkAssGenie personality. The wife mentions that they had given a lot of money away to the neighbors before the IRS man showed up.

* 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?

** 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.

* 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?