Saw a terrific episode of The Twilight Zone this evening

[Orrex]

Nick of Time, based on a story by Richard Matheson. A young newlywed couple are stuck in a small Ohio town while their car is repaired. During their stay, they come upon a penny-operated fortune telling machine, and the man quickly becomes fixated upon its seemingly dead-on answers about their future. The man is played, incidentally, by a young William Shatner, and there's no man on the wing of the plane.

The episode is great because it demonstrates the ease with which a successful, ambitious person can be roped in by the seductive promise of "psychic" phenomena, but it's also surprising because it's the woman who acts as the tether to reality and tries to keep her new husband from spiraling into obsession. For an episode from 1960, that's a remarkably modern storytelling choice.

The story is also a bit disheartening, though, because it dramatizes how people 50 years ago could be ensnared by the same tricks used today, in much the same way that 1939's Wizard of Oz gave a spectacular (and spectacularly concise) dismantling of psychic cold reading.

We could use more of this in today's entertainment!

[laconicsax]

1. I've noticed that a lot of things in older TV and film seem 'modern...'

and I'm not sure if it's because it was forward thinking for the time, or because society has regressed somewhat in the intervening time.

In "Paint Your Wagon" (1969), no one questions or objects to Lee Marvin's anti-Christian stance, religious people are portrayed as morons and/or crazy, and there's a stable 3-way marriage. While it's a film, it's hard to imagine this happening today.

In Star Trek: TNG's "Who Watches the Watchers" (1989), Picard equates to the idea of leading a rational society towards religion as "[sending] them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear."

Contrast that from the Voyager episode "Sacred Ground" (1996) where Janeway decides to undergo a religious ritual, and concludes that the solution to the problem of the week is blind faith, and after her faith "works" is depressed to learn that there was a rational explanation for what happened. (The entire series treats religion with kid gloves and fawns over it at times.)

[salvorhardin]

4. You have to discount Star Trek prior to Roddenberry's death

He was a staunch humanist and I think a bit of a closet anti-theist too. Although in other matters he was into some kind of goofy stuff IIRC.

But I've noticed the same thing in older film and television (1940s-1970s anyway) and it's not just confined to religion. For instance, it seems to me that women were often portrayed in very strong roles in the 1940s before we got to Lucy Ricardo acting more like Ricky was her father than her husband. On the other hand, I have a older friend who worked in a large corporation in the 1960s and he says it was exactly like Mad Men portrays it, so maybe my perception is built on confirmation bias.

[Dr. Strange]

2. There WAS a man on the wing of the plane!

You don't GET it! Spock, explain it to him!

[onager]

3. I always thought T.Z. depicted God as...

...this little guy, in the famous episode "It's A GOOD Life!" (From a short story by Jerome Bixby.)

At least he behaved just like the Judeo/Xian/Islamic God...arbitrary, jealous, hateful. Fond of throwing tantrums and condemning you to The Cornfield for eternity, if you committed the slightest violation of his baffling and ever-changing rules:



(Off-topic - that kid actor, of course, is Billy Mumy. I read an interview with him once, where he talked about working with Alfred Hitchcock as a kid. Like most kids, Mumy liked to fidget. For one scene, he kept moving off his "mark" on the set.

Finally, Mumy said, Hitchcock heaved himself out of his chair, lumbered over to Mumy like a big old bear, stood right over him, and said: "Young man - if you move off that mark one more time, I shall nail your feet to it."

Mumy said: "After that, I didn't move unless somebody told me to for a MONTH.")