Time Enough at Last
(Season 1, Episode 8)
“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself – without anyone.”
All Henry Bemis wanted to do was read his books. He wanted to share his passion with the world around him. To the customers who came into his bank, to his fellow employees, even his own wife. But nobody would listen to his ramblings about the latest novels, and everyone essentially tried to silence his love as often as possible. His wife even went so far as to run a permanent marker through one of his favorite stories as a way of shutting him up. One day, however, Henry got all the time he needed to read all the books he wanted. When he took a break inside the bank vault to read his latest chapters, and a nuclear bomb went off outside killing everyone else in the world above.
This episode is home to one of the cruelest endings ever crafted on The Twilight Zone, if not throughout television history. Henry Bemis was never a brutal man, he may have let his pastime get the better of him at times, but the world around him was certainly much harsher to his hobby than he deserved. Much like our modern world, some people’s passions aren’t supported by their closest companions, but rather rejected as “time wasters.” So if “Time Enough at Last” had concluded just a couple of minutes before the infamous ending, maybe this one would be looked at as more light-hearted. Sadly, on the other hand, Bemis never got his wish to finally read all the books left in the world, as he breaks his glasses reaching down for one of his first reads.
Perhaps Bemis would have succumbed to loneliness long before his pile of books was gone through, or more likely the effects of nuclear radiation exposure. For him to break his glasses and never be able to at long last feed his passion, is by far a much more heartbreaking fate than the poor man warranted. -Donald Strohman
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