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The Twilight Zone (1959) S5E19: "Night Call"
(aka: The Twilight Zone S 5 E 139 Night Call)

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Night Call

The Twilight Zone (1959) S5E19: "Night Call" Recap

Rod Serling: Miss Elva Keene lives alone on the outskirts of London Flats, a tiny rural community in Maine. Up until now, the pattern of Miss Keene's existence has been that of lying in her bed or sitting in her wheelchair, reading books, listening to a radio, eating, napping, taking medication — and waiting for something different to happen. Miss Keene doesn't know it yet, but her period of waiting has just ended, for something different is about to happen to her, has in fact already begun to happen, via two most unaccountable telephone calls in the middle of a stormy night, telephone calls routed directly through the Twilight Zone.

Air date: February 7, 1964

Elva Keene (Gladys Cooper), an elderly, paralyzed invalid, lives a largely solitary life in the countryside, where the only person who regularly comes by her house is her nurse Margaret Phillips (Nora Marlowe), as well as receiving an occasional letter from her sister. On one stormy night, however, the phone on Elva's nightstand rings, but when she answers it, there's only static on the other end. These calls keep coming again and again the following nights, changing from the static to the moaning voice of a man, who repeatedly says hello to Elva and tells her that he wants her to come visit. Becoming steadily unnerved by her anonymous stalker, Elva eventually loses her temper and yells at the voice to leave her alone and never call again. She then calls the local telephone company to have the calls traced. It's soon shown that the calls are coming from Brian Douglas, Elva's late fiancé, after a telephone line snapped in the previous night's storm and came to rest on his grave in the local cemetery. Now knowing who the caller is, Elva waits with bated breath to see if Brian calls again, only for the assertive and demanding demeanor she once had to put an end to it.


Tropes:

  • 555: Elva's phone number is KL5-2368.
  • Adaptational Alternate Ending: The short story "Long Distance Call" by Richard Matheson ends with the unidentified caller telling Elva "I'll be right over." In the episode, the caller, revealed to be Elva's late fiancĂ© Brian, tells her that he'll leave her alone and never call again, since she had previously told him to do just that. Back when Brian was alive, Elva, by her own admission, had been quite dominating towards him, and he had always done what she said without complaint, revealing that this remains the case even in death.
  • Adaptational Backstory Change: In the short story, the caller is never identified, and what it was that caused Elva's paralysis is not revealed. In this version, the caller is Elva's fiancĂ© Brian, who was killed in 1932, a week before they were to be married. Elva is revealed to have demanded to take control of the car she and Brian were riding in from him, and thus lost control of the vehicle and crashed it into a tree. While she was only paralyzed in the accident, Brian died after flying through the windshield. This is also a rare instance where Matheson felt the changes actually improved the story.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: Before she realizes who the harassing caller is, Elva screams at them to never call her again. After she learns that the caller is Brian, who died because of her domineering nature causing their car to crash back in 1932, she wants him to keep calling her, but Brian continues doing what she wants him to do without question, squandering her chance to stop being lonely.
  • Chromosome Casting: With the exception of Brian's voice over the phone, this episode has an all-female cast.
  • Downer Ending: As Rod Serling so puts it, Elva and Brian are both in their own personal hell, left alone and unable to speak to one another until the former dies.
  • Drives Like Crazy: Shortly after Elva got behind the wheel of the car because she ordered Brian to switch places with her, she crashed into a tree, killing Brian and leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
  • Extreme Doormat: Brian is shown and mentioned to have blindly obeyed everything Elva told him, including letting her take the wheel of their car and cause the fatal crash that killed him. When she learns that he was the caller who kept phoning her house night after night and wants him to keep doing it, he instead tells her that he'll never call again, just as she told him to do earlier.
  • It's All About Me: Elva admits upfront that in her youth, she was a borderline tyrannical woman who loved ordering Brian around, which ultimately got herself paralyzed and Brian killed when she caused the car accident in 1932, after demanding that Brian let her drive.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: What happens to Elva is definitely a tragic turn of events, but it only happened at all because she wanted nothing more than for her fiancĂ© to be completely under her thumb instead of letting him have his own say in certain matters.
  • Minimalist Cast: This episode features only three credited actors, all of which are female.
  • Phone Call from the Dead: On a stormy night, Elva begins receiving strange phone calls. She initially hears static at the other end of the line, but she later hears moaning, and then a man saying "Hello" over and over. When she calls the phone company to investigate, they discover that the phone lines were damaged during the storm, with one wire resting on the grave of Elva's fiancĂ© Brian in the Valley View Cemetery.
  • The Shut-In: Elva spends most of her life either in bed or her wheelchair, trying to pass the time by waiting for something out of the ordinary to happen. Her only regular visitor is her nurse Margaret, and outside of bills and advertisements, the only mail she receives is an occasional letter from her sister. This has left her desperately lonely and feels as if no one cares about her, which is why it hurts so much when she discovers that the caller who kept harassing her is actually her fiance's spirit, who promises to leave her alone forever as she told him to do.

Rod Serling: According to the Bible, God created the Heavens and the Earth. It is man's prerogative – and woman's – to create their own particular and private Hell. Case in point, Miss Elva Keene, who in every sense has made her own bed and now must lie in it, sadder, but wiser, by dint of a rather painful lesson in responsibility, transmitted from the Twilight Zone.

Alternative Title(s): The Twilight Zone S 5 E 139 Night Call

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