The Twilight Zone, S1E8, "Time Enough at Last"

Opening: Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but 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.

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First, let’s talk about the guy who famously breaks his glasses: Henry Bemis, played by Burgess Meredith.

Burgess Meredith is one of the all-time great recurring TZ players, and this is his first and most iconic appearance; he’d later say¹ that, even years after the episode aired, hardly a month went by that someone didn’t come up to talk to him about it. He also had a notable career outside of The Twilight Zone, one that came with two Oscar nominations.

Meredith has, as we’ll eventually see, an incredible amount of range and an almost chameleon-like disappearance into whatever archetype he’s nailing that week, from “mild-mannered bookworm” to “last, weary representative of honorable civilization” to “the actual devil.” (I’m leaving an episode out here. The day I have to cover the execrable “Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” which does not deserve Meredith’s talents, I will face that horror, but not before.)

The Twilight Zone often doles out a kind of cosmic justice to its characters, and because of that (and likely out of an instinct to make this more bearable), people will occasionally try to muster arguments that as cruel as Henry’s fate is, he invites it, that he’s being punished for reading so much that he’s neglecting the world around him. The polar opposite of this argument is that what happens to him is pointless cruelty, an ironic artistic sting just meant to shock. I don’t agree with either of these positions, but the first, I think, is especially untenable in light of the series as a whole. Rod Serling had a consistent, confirmed soft spot for meek, imaginative “weirdos.” When he calls Henry “a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers,” I think he’s bestowing a high honor on him—this is a character Serling has a lot of affection for.

I have a lot of affection for him too, with his incredibly thick glasses (so poignant in retrospect) and his desire to happily burrow into a book. He’s not antisocial; he’s not even especially introverted. When we see him really sparkle, it’s because he thinks he has a chance to share his love of books with someone else—to draw a bank customer into a discussion of David Copperfield or to read poetry aloud to his wife.

He never gets that chance, because he’s in a relentless, satirical 1950s America where the only two acceptable activities or interests are making money and keeping up a sanitized suburban conviviality. This brings us to Henry Bemis’s two principal tormentors: his wife and his boss.

Henry is a bank teller—a woefully ineffective one—so his boss is the bank manager, Vaughn Taylor’s Carsville.² When Carsville dresses down Henry for reading at work, he has a point, of course. He’s way too distracted to do his work properly; it’s hard to imagine Henry having any kind of a job if he didn’t have to. This is not a man who’s made for a capitalistic society. At most, you can picture him being the librarian in a particularly sleepy small-town.

The problem is that the people in Henry’s life have no affection for him whatsoever. When he can’t live up to their demands, they crack down even harder. Carsville doesn’t urge Henry to save his book for his lunch break; he disparages and discourages even that. (Henry doesn’t listen.) Henry is a square peg, and everyone takes positive joy in trying to force him into a round hole, even if it means shearing away fundamental parts of him.

His wife, Jacqueline deWit’s Helen, does the same thing. If she just wanted Henry to go out and play bridge with her, or if she just wanted to have a conversation with him that wasn’t all about books, that would be one thing. She goes way further than that. She hides his books from him. When she asks him to read some poetry to her—a prospect that makes him light up like a Christmas tree—it’s only so she can savor the look on his face when he sees that she’s mutilated the book, carefully crossing out every page. She radiates malicious pleasure. We see wives in The Twilight Zone who are legitimately at their wit’s end, who have simply been pushed to extreme measures. Helen Bemis isn’t one of them. The only way she would ever conceivably love her husband is if he changed so completely as to become someone else.

Taylor and deWit both give memorable performances. Taylor gets the funnier part, since Carsville’s dialogue is so weirdly, wittily stylized that he’s entertaining despite his treatment of poor Henry:

* “Now, Mr. Bemis, I shall come to the point of this interview. I shall arrive via the following route ….”

* “Unasked, I give my reaction to this.” (The internet’s collective motto!)

Technically, it makes sense that Carsville is a less horrifying figure than Helen. An unyielding boss isn’t as awful as a home life completely lacking in comfort or pleasure, and a spouse’s vindictiveness is more personal. And DeWit, like I said, is amazing in the part—both vicious and imperious. But it does mean that Henry and Helen fall into a tired, sexist pattern. Women are social and their concerns are trivial. Women rule the home, and they just want to grind men down. Men are special, and women are ordinary. He’s our likable dreamer, and she’s a coldhearted bitch. It’s a portrayal that’s fine and justifiable in a vacuum—even interesting as a rare depiction of badgering emotional abuse, complete with destruction of personal belongings—so I don’t blame Serling for it at all, but in the context of the broader entertainment landscape, I also don’t blame anyone for being sick of it. In fact, I think a lot of the anti-Henry takes stem partly of the understandable desire to make Helen a more sympathetic, well-rounded character.

So … Henry Bemis is besieged at work and at home. He has to take his book down to the bank vault to steal a little bit of reading time.

And then, of course, the world ends.

Within the bounds of what you could put on television in this time period—the Blu-ray commentary track for this episode gets into the details of what they were allowed to show, and how they got away with as much as they did—this is a fairly harrowing apocalypse. The logistics don’t remotely hold up—although I guess in a way, it’s comforting that Henry won’t have to live without his glasses for long, since he’s going to die of radiation poisoning—but it still packs a punch. Henry’s book blowing open and the glass on his pocket watch shattering right before the impact of the bomb are nicely eerie. Mostly we have rubble instead of bodies, but the hint of a body we do get is a powerful one: a dead hand clasped around a recorder/player, with the bank manager’s dictated speech now playing out to no audience but an overwhelmed Henry.

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Mid-Episode Narration: Seconds, minutes, hours—they crawl by on hands and knees for Mr. Henry Bemis, who looks for a spark in the ashes of a dead world. A telephone connected to nothingness. A neighborhood bar, a movie, a baseball diamond, a hardware store, the mailbox at what was once his house and is now a rubble. They lie at his feet as battered monuments to what was but is no more. Mr. Henry Bemis, on an eight-hour tour of a graveyard.

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For a long time, this was the part of the episode I tended to forget about. A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, and what happens to Henry Bemis and his glasses still means more to me than what happened to his fictional world. I often thought about this as the episode where the end of the world is great—so much time to read!—and the only twist of the knife comes at the end. And for us, I think that’s mostly true. Henry is who we care about, who we identify with, who we’re rooting for. But it’s notable that Henry doesn’t feel that way, which is another point against him being concerned with reading to the exclusion of all else, humanity included. His loneliness and grief are a part of the episode that often gets elided.

He stands in the ashes of his home, calling out for his dead wife. He spends hours touring the devastation. Even when he gets around to projecting a future for himself, it’s hard for him to find any faith in it. He has more faith in the handgun he liberates from a sporting goods store, and he holds onto it not to fight off roving cannibals—the usual reason, in post-apocalyptic literature, to acquire a gun—but to take his own life.

Henry’s despair is heartbreaking and delicately crafted:

* “The thing of it is … I’m not at all sure I want to be alive.”

* “I’m really very fortunate. Yes, I’m really, extremely fortunate.” This lasts only a second or so before he breaks into open, desperate pleading: “Someone, please! Someone, please!”

* “If it just weren’t for the loneliness. If it just weren’t for the sameness. If there were just something to do, do, do. Oh, I’m sure I’ll be forgiven for this, the way things are. I know I’ll be forgiven.”

It’s only after he raises the gun to his temple that he sees the fallen pillar of the public library and discovers a reason to live. He makes stacks for what he’ll read each month, ticking off time—“This year, the next year, and the year after”—and he’s excited and hopeful. “There’s time now.”

We all know what happens next. Henry bends down, and his glasses fall off and shatter on the ground. The lenses fall out as he picks them up.

Burgess Meredith is absolutely heartbreaking here, baffled and quietly stunned at this devastating reversal: “That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed. It’s not fair.” He stands alone in the rubble, crying, surrounded by a blurry landscape that’s now not only destroyed but stripped of all meaning.

I’ve said I don’t think the episode implies that Henry deserves what happens to him, even in a “cruel cosmic justice” way. Now I want to get into why I also don’t think this is just a brutal punchline intended to make a shocking, memorable ending. I think Rod Serling deliberately created the kind of character he personally found extremely emotionally affecting in order to make a point about nuclear war. But Serling was, at his best—and this is certainly Serling at his best—a powerful dramatist with a gift for creating very human stories, and the episode’s story winds up leaving a much greater impact than its point. Which is probably how it should be … but the point still bears examining.

Over the course of the series, Serling kept coming back to the possibility of nuclear war, and it’s in the background of a lot of the show’s best episodes. This is arguably the best of the bunch: Serling’s version of John Varley’s “The Manhattan Phone Book, Abridged,” a (highly recommended) story that deliberately strips away the idea that there’s a version of nuclear war that “we” don’t have to worry about.

Varley’s short story points out that “after-the-bomb” stories are, by definition, about the survivors. The people we’re led to identify with the most are the people who make it through; there’s a kind of oddly joyful post-apocalyptic fantasy about all the stuff that’s just lying around, all the chances for reinvention, all the sudden freedom of a blank slate. That’s fine, it’s fiction, and I like a lot of those stories–but The Twilight Zone specifically wanted to use SF to tell stories with some kind of social impact. It wanted to encourage its audience to potentially think about certain things in certain ways while there was still time for that thinking to matter.

And I do think this is the true nuclear war, along with “The Manhattan Phone Book, Abridged” and Threads. It’s one that’s emotionally true even if it’s not at all accurate, and it’s a powerful vision.

It’s hard to really take in what it would mean for you to be dead, because it’s hard for consciousness to conceive of a lack of consciousness. “Time Enough at Last” works around that. It gives you an lovable, relatable survivor and an aftermath; it even gives you the chance to believe that this destruction wouldn’t be catastrophic for him personally. We have the statistic of all that death, but when it comes to Henry Bemis, who matters the most to the story, we could have a happy ending.

But the episode says no, there’s no happy ending after the bomb. There’s no way to make it so that all this death and horror only happens to other people, no way to tell yourself that you’ll be safe because you’re prepared, or lucky, or good, or the protagonist. It was 1959, near the height of the Cold War, and people were obsessed with making sure that they could survive the seemingly inevitable nuclear war.³ “Time Enough at Last” suggests that survival isn’t salvation. Sooner or later, your glasses always break. The fallout always sweeps in. There’s not even anyone to help poor Henry feel around for the gun.

What happens to us happens to all of us. There’s no escape hatch to get us out of universal tragedy, and when people don’t understand that, they risk blithely causing the universal tragedy. They do things like, say, twice vote into office a man who always seemed one off-kilter tweet away from starting a nuclear war. They don’t take pandemic precautions, because they think they’ll always be fine. Climate change? Don’t even worry about it. In that light, this episode remains all too relevant.

But I don’t actually want to make this solely about how someone who isn’t me is wrong about something, because this is really more universal than that. It’s a kind of empathetic cheat code, a valuable way to get around a certain amount of innate self-centeredness by playing straight into it. If I can’t wrap my head around the fate of the world, maybe I can just think of Henry weeping over his broken glasses, and I can try to avert that.

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Closing: The best-laid plans of mice and men…and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone.

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Directed by: John Brahm

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: Perchance to Dream

1. I don’t have access to the magazine this piece is talking about, alas, so I can’t pull from a primary source, but I tend to trust The Night Gallery. ↩︎
2. Not precisely a villainous name—or at least not as good a one as Murdstone—but still a telling one, a mash-up of two factors of the society that has left Henry Bemis out in the cold. ↩︎
3. I’ll cover Rod Serling’s personal anecdote about a planned shelter when we eventually cover “The Shelter,” but it’s one of my favorite stories about him. ↩︎