In The Zone

In its day, The Twlight Zone was known as a series that each week gave you an unsettling story, but I think it has the opposite effect today.  Submitted for your approval:  "A Stop At Willoughby," which I recently watched.  It's about a harried executive who on his train ride home keeps dreaming of an old-fashioned, slow-moving town called Willoughby.  In his final dream, he gets off at that stop.

The theme is about how we long for an older age, a world of certainty and safety.  But now, with Twilight Zone being 50 years in the past, it's the world of that harried executive that looks sort of nice.  It's a black and white world of men in ties, nuclear families, rotary phones and a bedrock of decent, Western liberal values.  Maybe it's because we know the stories so well know, but Twilight Zone is more likely to calm than disturb the viewer.

PS  I live near a street named Willoughby.  It's not unusual for places and characters on TV to be named after LA streets.

PPS  A lot of Zone episodes have similarities, but this one in particular is reminiscent of the previous year's "Walking Distance," where Gig Young visits his hometown and discovers he's in his own past.  He meets himself as a child--who becomes scared, runs away and injures himself.  This gives modern-day Gig Young a limp.  Now that's a Zone twist. "Willoughby" fails on this count.  The exec on the train dreams of an old-fashioned place and finally escapes into it, while in real life he just jumps of the train and dies.  For the twist, the funeral home is named Willoughby.  The trouble with this is there's no fantasy element.  It's just a realistic story of a man retreating into his own psychosis.  A more usual Zone ending would have him escape to Willoughby somehow and disappear from the present-day world.