The Twilight Zone, S1E10, "Judgment Night"

Opening: Her name is the S.S. Queen of Glasgow. Her registry: British. Gross tonnage: five thousand. Age: Indeterminate. At this moment she’s one day out of Liverpool, her destination New York. Duly recorded on the ship’s log is the sailing time, course to destination, weather conditions, temperature, longitude and latitude. But what is never recorded in a log is the fear that washes over a deck like fog and ocean spray. Fear like the throbbing strokes of engine pistons, each like a heartbeat, parceling out every hour into breathless minutes of watching, waiting and dreading… For the year is 1942, and this particular ship has lost its convoy. It travels alone like an aged blind thing groping through the unfriendly dark, stalked by unseen periscopes of steel killers. Yes, the Queen of Glasgow is a frightened ship, and she carries with her a premonition of death.

This episode is short on plot and surprises, but it’s deliciously long on atmosphere. Honestly, give me a dark night and a ship sailing through fog, and I’m happy. Sometimes just the ship will do it.

“Judgment Night,” however, gives me more than a ship. This is an effective little chiller—predictable, yes, but substantial. It also has a strong central performance from top-notch character actor Nehemiah Persoff (whose life and career make for interesting reading: he was an early student at the Actors Studio and is a familiar face from movies like Some Like It Hot).

Persoff plays Carl Lanser, who finds himself standing on the deck of a ship; it’s like he’s just woken up from a dream. He’s dazed and a little out-of-it. He has a faint accent—just faint enough that the people he talks to can’t place it with any real confidence. Another passenger guesses that he’s an old language professor, and you can see why: he radiates intelligence, and it’s easy to read as absentmindedness what actually turns out to be absences in his mind, gaps where his memory should be.

What Lanser doesn’t know is vast—“I don’t seem to recall getting on this ship. Or anything else, for that matter”—and what he does know is … troublingly specific, for a mysterious man on a British ship in 1942. He speaks up automatically on “wolf packs” and submarine strategy, almost erupting into explanation, as if saying it is inseparable from the knowledge suddenly breaking through the fog in his brain. He sounds, as someone points out, like a U-boat captain.

The British crew and passengers are amiable enough at first, but Lanser soon disturbs them. He says he was born in Frankfurt, and then reacts to the clarification—Germany?—like it’s an epiphany: ah, yes, Germany, that’s the one. Miss Stanley rallies, assembling a kind of defense for him, asking how long he’s been in England, and Lanser simply excuses himself, claiming he’s not feeling well. You can see why the captain has a sudden interest in getting checking his passport, even if it’s all handled with brisk courtesy.

We can guess, however, that there’s no official explanation for Lanser’s appearance on the ship—or his déjà vu about the other passengers or his fatalistic paranoia: “We’re being stalked. I know we’re being stalked. There’s a sub out there, a U-boat. I know. I know it’s there, I know it.”

In short order, we see why. There’s a German naval officer’s cap in his cabin, one with his name stitched into it. He fixes on the idea that something horrible is going to happen at 1:15—that when the engines break down, they’re doomed to drift until the appointed time, when the U-boat will come.

Just like that, the episode turns half-dreamlike, leaving Lanser running through the ship, frantically trying to warn everyone. There’s something especially, movingly surreal about him looking down the corridor and seeing a tight knot of passengers and crew huddled together, staring at him gravely. It’s not quite a human reaction to terror and confusion; we’ll see enough of those in a moment. It’s the revelation that they’re apart from him. Whatever their fate is, they’ll share it with each other; Lanser is alone, with nothing to do and no one to save, with the meaning sucked out of his actions.

Because, of course, he already acted. When he looks through the binoculars, he sees himself on the U-boat, wearing the same cap that hangs in his cabin on the Queen of Glasgow. A German naval officer, calmly giving the order to fire.

The episode then makes the exact right decision in turning almost brutally realistic, ripping our focus away from Lanser—either Lanser—and towards the damage he once caused and now cannot avert. We see people trying and failing to escape via lifeboat, people running around looking for escape and not finding it. A doll floats on the water. In a mini-sequence I’m startled the show got away with, Miss Stanley tries to crawl out of a burning room via a porthole and simply stays trapped there, wreathed in flame. It’s harrowing even now, let alone 1959.

We then move to the real Lanser of 1942—and he’s almost unrecognizable from the fearful husk of a man we’ve been following. He’s in his element, lively and hard-eyed, relishing his “good catch.” When his lieutenant, Mueller, broaches the idea that they should have warned the ship before they fired upon it—especially since there were women on board—Lanser criticizes him: “You have sentiment, Mueller, but no brains.”

“It makes me wonder if we’re not damned now,” Mueller says. Lanser is cool, urbane, cynical, relativistic, still viewing it all as a sentiment and philosophy: “In the eyes of the British Admiralty, we most certainly are.” Mueller side-steps him: “I mean, sir, in the eyes of God.” The Twilight Zone Podcast discussed the idea—which I lean towards—that the following speech didn’t happen in reality, at least not like this, with this level of eloquence. If so, it’s part of Lanser’s hell. He suffers, then he revisits his calm indifference to the suffering of others; then he gets the speech about why he’s condemned to this.

Damnation, Mueller says, would mean having a fate like the people on that ship—“to suffer as they suffer and to die as they die. … We could die a hundred million times. We can ride the ghost of that ship every night for eternity.” The words start repeating as we zoom in on Lanser’s face and see them begin to sink home—

And then, of course, it starts all over again. Here he is, on a foggy deck, just coming back to himself.

I don’t usually like stories about hell, but “Judgment Night¹” works for me (even though it’s more “solidly good” than “great,” as far as TZ tiers go). That’s partly because of Persoff’s performance and partly because of the perspective: putting us in Lanser’s shoes makes it feel tragic as well as vindictive, and I like tragedy even more than I like ships. Lanser gets the fate he earned, and his punishment suggests that his sin was less firing on the ship—although, given its lack of military usefulness, that’s horrific enough—and more his refusal to feel anything about it or to even admit that he could or should. Mueller at least felt the weight of their actions. Lanser viewed the senseless deaths as simply a good day’s work—and that lack of empathy condemns him to feel the suffering, over and over again, to live through what he wouldn’t acknowledge. When I talked about this episode with a friend, she pointed out that we don’t really see much of Lanser’s crew: maybe they’re not blameless in all this, but the weight of responsibility falls differently there. This is Lanser’s choice and Lanser’s fate, with Mueller as the voice of it.

The Twilight Zone would later tackle Hitler and the Holocaust very specifically, but the hint of it here—specifically mentioning the Third Reich in the closing narration—is Serling first broaching the subject. It’s a stinging little reminder that this is all tangential to a much more immense horror and that Lanser’s actions are even more troubling considering the master he’s serving.

Closing: The S.S. Queen of Glasgow, heading for New York, and the time is 1942. For one man it is always 1942—and this man will ride the ghost ship every night for eternity. This is what is meant by paying the fiddler. This is the comeuppance awaiting every man when the ledger of his life is opened and examined, the tally made, and then the reward or the penalty paid. And in the case of Carl Lanser, former Kapitan Lieutenant, Navy of the Third Reich, this is the penalty. This is the justice meted out. This is judgment night in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: John Brahm

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: And When the Sky Was Opened

1. I somehow didn’t consciously realize the “Judgment Day”/”Judgment Night” parallel here until I typed “Judgment Day” by accident in this very line. What the hell, self. ↩︎