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If you have at least SOME evidence on your side I agree with you!
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Here's the script for the episode if that helps:
https://thescriptsavant.com/tv/The_Twilight_Zone_1x08_-_Time_Enough_at_Last.pdf
I’ve seen the episode a couple times, and both Bemis’s wife and boss are very unsympathetic characters — his wife is in fact nasty and sadistic to him. Bemis is an absent-minded bookworm who loves reading above all else, but he’s not at all unsympathetic, and the ending feels to me like a cruel and unlucky accident, not at all something he karmically merited.
I’m all for cutting anything that makes Bemis out to be unsympathetic or deserving of what happens at the end.
Edit: I just read the linked article, and I believe anyone that uses it as a tie-in for an unsympathetic view of Bemis is really reaching, to put it kindly. Not buying this at all.
Edited by BoltDMC
Marc Zicree in his book "The Twilight Zone Companion" discusses this. I don't know if there's an online version of the book, and it's been years since I read it, so take my memory with a grain of salt, but if I recall correctly he cites Serling himself saying he meant Bemis to be unsympathetic and his wife and boss to be seen as justified, and that it was the actors (especially Burgess Meredith) and director who took it in a different direction by their performance choices. But to repeat: I'm going by a many-years-old memory of the commentary.
If there isn't enough evidence, then Bemis being unlikable might be demoted to being Word of Saint Paul, since most of this info is secondhand.
Discombobulate.
That book is available online and Zicree says the exact opposite, he says Bemis wasn’t too likable in the original short story but Serling’s script fleshed out his character so that we can sympathize with him.
Edited by Javertshark13
^ With all that, I'd say those entries should be cut and rewritten.
^^ Hm, sounds like my faulty memory only retained the remark about the short story.
I've seen some entries claiming Rod Serling intended Henry Bemis from "Time Enough at Last" to be unsympathetic and for his fate at the end to be a karmic punishment, but I'm not aware of any source for this. I found one article quoting Serling's daughter as saying he didn't like "underachievers who thought the world owed them something" and the article attempts to tie that to the ending of that episode, but that seems to be the conjecture of the person who wrote the article. I was able to find that quote in context and she was just talking about Serling's overall values and doesn't mention the episode at all. Here's a link to it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonthompson/2019/11/11/how-the-twilight-zone-created-change-and-confounded-the-ad-men/?sh=758c33dc4f67
The script also describes the episode's antagonists (the bank president and Bemis's wife) in very unflattering terms, so that makes it seem even more unlikely that this was Serling's intent. Does anyone know of a source for this, or should those entries be cut?
Edited by Javertshark13