The View From Planet Kerth: A New Year’s journey into the Twilight Zone

I spent New Year’s Eve binge-watching “The Twilight Zone” on the Syfy channel.

Oh, I know, that’s not what most people think of as a rockin’ New Year’s Eve. Most people want a night on the town that would cause them to wake up in the morning (or afternoon), rub their aching head and moan: “Never again” — behavior that probably involves copious amounts of alcohol and so many drinking games they could make an Olympics out of it.

But good Irish whiskey, to me, is no game — it’s a lifestyle. And New Year’s Eve is amateur night when it comes to drinking.

That’s why, for me, New Year’s Eve is the one night of the year that I am certain to refrain from the juice of the barley.

And so my New Year’s Eve involved no party hats, no confetti, no lampshade on the head. (For those of you younger than 30, that’s the kind of thing my generation used to do on New Year’s Eve. For you, it might mean no drunk dialing, no sexting, no hooking up at closing time.)

New Year’s Eve was none of that for me, because I didn’t want to be one of those amateurs who wake up in the morning and say: “Never again.”

And so it was just Rod Serling and me, spending the night (in Rod’s words) “traveling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind…. a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into — The Twilight Zone.”

Watching “The Twilight Zone” stone-cold sober was a revelation, in part because of how many episodes revolve around alcohol. The episodes were all in black and white — or maybe they were just too drunk to be colorful.

There was the one called “Person or Persons Unknown,” about the guy who wakes up after a boozy bender only to find that he doesn’t exist. His wife doesn’t recognize him, his co-workers at the bank don’t know him, he’s not in the phone book, his mom claims not to have a son, and — most shocking of all — Sam the bartender doesn’t know his name.

And there was the one called “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” about the couple who wake up after a boozy car accident only to find themselves in a town that isn’t real. The houses are empty, the trees are props, the grass is made of papier mache. They spend most of their time arguing over who was at fault for the accident — the husband for being too drunk to drive, or the wife for taking the wheel and being too drunk to find a real town to crash in.

And there was the one called “A Kind of Stopwatch,” about the guy getting fired from his job because he’s an irritating chatterbox, so he goes to his favorite bar, where a stranger gives him a stopwatch that freezes time. That’s fun for a while, until he accidentally freezes all of his bar buddies permanently, which means he has nobody to drink with and chatter to anymore.

Still, the booze is just the vehicle to deliver the characters to the real point of each Twilight Zone episode — that they live in a world gone mad, in which being sane makes the protagonists (and the viewer) the outcasts. Binge-watch them back to back for several hours some stone-cold sober New Year’s Eve, and you’ll see what I mean.

I finally dozed off during an episode called “It’s a Good Life,” about a 6-year-old boy who controls a town utterly with his supernatural powers. He eliminates everything he dislikes — cars, dogs, playmates, singing. If he frowns upon anybody or anything, it vanishes and is sent to the corn field. Out of fear of their own elimination, everybody kowtows to him — even his own parents — telling him that everything he does is “good, very good,” for fear of what might happen to them if they try to teach him logical, responsible behavior.

Finally, one man (fueled by brandy, of course) stands up to the little monster. But the kid says to him, “You’re a bad man, a very bad man, and you keep thinking very bad thoughts about me.”

The kid turns him into a jack-in-the-box monstrosity and sends him to the corn field while horrified adults in the room stand by and watch, too fearful to reason with the boy and too cowardly to stop him.

But it had been a long night of binge-watching, so I fell asleep before finding out if the kid got his well-deserved comeuppance. I awoke in the morning to find that it was 2018 — a new year.

But — call it a “Twilight Zone” hangover — I learned the answer to what happened to the spoiled kid when I opened the morning newspaper:

He got older and became president! But he never grew up — he was still an infantile twit tweeting to any grownup clear-sighted and principled enough to oppose him: “You’re a bad man, a very bad man, and you keep thinking very bad thoughts about me.” A petulant preadolescent calling for the elimination of anybody or anything that doesn’t praise and please him (federal judges, football players, James Comey, the press), supported by fawning toadies (Jeff Sessions, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and dozens of others) who trade their integrity just to keep from being sent to “the cornfield.”

Thanks to their self-serving cowardice, we are all now traveling through another dimension — a dimension of sight and sound that is more shadow than substance.

And if the adults in the room won’t stop coddling their septuagenarian brat, then it’s time for Rod Serling (or maybe Robert Mueller) to step in and bring this this horrifying Twilight Zone episode to an end.

And then for all of us to wake up, rub our aching heads, and say: “Never again.”

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The author splits his time between Southwest Florida and Chicago. Not every day, though. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Why wait a whole week for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Get T.R.'s book, 'Revenge of the Sardines,' available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine online book distributors. His column appears every Saturday.