Games - Time Enough at Last

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	Games - Time Enough at Last

Cast

Henry Bemis: Burgess Meredith
Helen Bemis: Jacqueline DeWitt
Mr. Carsville: Vaughn Taylor

Synopsis

Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) is a bookish little man who can never find the time to read. He can't read at home or at work because both his wife and boss think reading is a waste of time. Henry takes his lunch breaks in the vault at the bank where he works. During one of these lunch breaks, a super hydrogen bomb is tested, ending mankind. Henry is the only one left. He loses hope and is about to commit suicide when he finds the public library. All the books he could ever hope for are his for the taking. He finally has all the time in the world to read. Unfortunately, as he is about to pick up a book, his reading glasses fall off and shatter.

Trivia

In 1960, John Brahm was awarded a Director's Guild award for his work on this episode.
Rated #25 on TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in Television".
Spoofed in the Futurama episode "A Head In The Polls": the man's glasses fall off, but he says he can read the large print books. His eyes fall out, but he can read Braille. Finally, his hands fall off. He screams, only to have his tongue fall out. Then his head falls off. Bender, who is watching this on TV (presumably in an updated version of the original episode), comments: "Cursed by his own hubris."
Spoofed in the Family Guy episode "Wasted Talent" where Peter's last brain cell is a nerdish bookworm who is relieved to be alone with his books, but breaks his glasses.
Spoofed in The Simpsons episode Strong Arms of the Ma. The mailman is (not fatally) run over by Marge's car. He tells Marge to take her time in getting help and that he has plenty to read. Just as he picks up a copy of "Twilight Zone Magazine" (which has a picture of Meredith on the cover), he discovers his glasses are broken.
Spoofed in an episode of The Drew Carey Show in which title character is left alone in a bomb shelter to look at adult magazines. Unfortunately, he sneezes, causing his glasses to fall off and break.
Spoofed in the "The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" episode Return of the Nanobots in which Hugh thinks that he's the last man on the Earth so he starts piling up pie in stacks for every month only then to have them burned up.

Themes

Compare A Nice Place to Visit, The Man in the Bottle, The Trouble With Templeton, The Last Night of a Jockey, Escape Clause, The Mind and the Matter, and I Dream of Genie.

Critical Response

:"It is as fine a piece of theatrical bitter irony as has been constructed. Greek playwrights would look at that and go, 'Pretty Good!'" Keith Olbermann on TV Land's presentation of TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in Television".

:"Much of the implacable seriousness of the Twilight Zone is seemingly keyed by the clipped, dour delivery of Serling himself and the interlocutor. He never encourages us to laugh, or even smile, even when the plot twist is at least darkly funny. For example, in 'Time Enough at Last' (November 20, 1959), written by Rod Serling from a short story by Lynn Venable, a frustrated bookworm played by Burgess Meredith hides in a bank vault to finish David Copperfield in privacy. He emerges to find himself the only survivor in a nuclear holocaust, and looks forward to a lifetime of reading books. Unfortunately, his glasses slip off his nose and crash, leaving him forever unable to sample the literary treasures all around him. C'est a rire, n'est-ce pas? Well, not exactly. The H-bomb is still lurking in the background of the bookworm's 'accident.' The point is that the bomb could never have gone off on network television were the plot couched in a more realistic format." Andrew Sarris, excerpt from Rod Serling: Viewed from beyond the Twilight Zone

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Time Enough at Last ]

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