The Twilight Zone, S1E19, "The Purple Testament"

Opening: Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Philippine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear yellow-white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.

This makes interesting back-to-back viewing with “The Last Flight.” Both, in one way or another, deal with close wartime friendships and the acceptance of death, but “The Last Flight” is ennobling and optimistic while “The Purple Testament” is more fatalistic. Our previous episode hinged on Decker’s choice; here, there are very few choices to make. It’s less about courage and more about exhausted resignation.

That may have something to do with the fact that Serling also served in the Philippines, and his wartime experience was a harrowing one¹ that we’ll see him revisit from several different angles as the series goes on. Here, the approach is simple but poignant. How do you accept the constant possibility—sometimes even the certainty—of sudden, violent death? It hangs over everyone in war—including your closest friends, including you. How do you grapple with that?

You can’t, but you do, because you have to. There is, again, no real choice.

As if to emphasize that, we start the episode with Lt. Fitzgerald (William Reynolds²) already in possession of his grim prophetic ability and already understanding it. He sees a brief, mysterious light on the faces of men who are about to die, and he’s had time to work out what that means and time to gather enough proof to convince himself of it.

A lot of episodes would have Fitz’s working-out of his unwanted gift as part of the narrative; here, it’s swiftly delivered back-story, which fits better thematically. We’re not invited into a world of curiosity, deduction, and a kind of empowering temporary uncertainty, because there’s a sense of power in resolving a mystery, no matter how the dark the solution is. We just get the established facts, and it emphasizes what we technically always know when watching an episode: the outcome has already been decided. This wouldn’t work at all in “Third from the Sun,” where the tension is a huge part of the appeal, but again, it fits here. The episode is arguably inert, but there’s a meaning to its stillness, and that meaning is doom.

Fitz tries to convince his superior officer and friend, Captain Phil Riker (Dick York³), of his ability, but what Phil takes away from it is isn’t belief but a real concern for Fitz’s mental well-being. It’s a nice, delicate scene, with Phil easily picking up on Fitz’s more-severe-than-usual reaction to their four combat deaths; he’s a good, empathetic leader. There’s also a nice touch here about the banality of tragedy and horror in war, when Fitz briefly but unconvincingly tries to claim that he’s only upset because all four of the dead men were under twenty-one. Phil admits that’s reason enough to be horrified, but he’s still buying it—that’s a level of background radiation awfulness they’ve all accepted by now. In this milieu, that’s more or less normal.

Fitz confesses that before the mission, he wrote down the names of the four men who would die on it. He saw a peculiar light shining on them: “I looked into their faces and I knew. I knew this was their last day.”

It’s one thing, Fitz implies, to accept the general possibility of death in action, but it’s another thing to look into a man’s face, know that he will die, and send him off to combat anyway.⁴ He’s a lieutenant; he’s supposed to be responsible for the people underneath him. Under these circumstances, he can’t be—because what goes almost without saying, in this episode, is that while Fitz has a moral responsibility to the men, he doesn’t have the authority to hold them back from a mission. In a very real way, Phil doesn’t have it either. They’re both acting on orders that have already been handed down, and outright defying them never feels like a real option. Their sense of duty makes that choice invisible, so we’re back to resignation again.

Phil appeals to a medical officer, Captain Gunther (Barney Phillips of Dragnet, whom we’ll see again in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”), to give Fitz some relief or even pull him from duty for a while. To the extent that we have a conflict in this episode, it’s an internal and philosophical one, so there’s no real antagonist, so Gunther, too, is concerned about Fitz.

He soon gets even more reason to be, because Fitz is also at the hospital then, visiting his wounded friend Smitty (Michael Vandever). Again, the camaraderie is convincing—lightly handled but palpable—and the two men have a nice rapport. Smitty is weak, but there’s no sign that he’s about to die … except for the light that briefly shines on his face, the light that only Fitz can see.

The light, by the way, is a beautifully done effect—just a brief glare that momentarily obscures the person’s features. It’s nicely uncanny, and it’s all the better for not requiring complicated camera tricks or makeup. The sheer simplicity of it somehow makes it feel more convincing, and if you were to tell me that there was a real bit of military folklore about this haunting death-light, I would believe it.

There’s an especially good bit here about the skewed perspective of war, where the supposedly unreal is less “odd” than the fleeting bits of relief or good fortune: “Odd is when you go thirty days on the line and you don’t lose a man. That’s odd! Odd is when you walk twenty-five miles and you don’t get a blister. This isn’t odd, Captain. This is nightmare.” It’s not unusual, it’s the commonplace amplified until it’s devastating. Fitz can’t take it; he would rather they blindfold him or poke his eyes out than leave him this way.

It gets worse, of course, when he sees the light shine on Phil’s face. (Phil reflexively touching his face when Fitz says, “Captain, you’d better not go” is a lovely, painful detail.) Phil is the first person Fitz has been able to warn in advance, but it changes very little: Phil won’t stay back from a mission he’s sending other men out on; he can’t afford to officially believe Fitz’s cautions, and encouraging the rest of the platoon to believe them—as they’re clearly beginning to—will only end in misery and terror.

It’s unsurprising but heartbreaking that, despite Phil’s official stance on the matter, he believes Fitz enough to leave behind his wedding ring and family photos. They’re clustered together on the command tent table like a small memorial to him, and when Fitz wearily comes back from the mission and adds Phil’s dog-tags to the humble little heap, it’s quietly moving.

It’s also handled with a great deal of restraint, which helps. Fitz has his grief bottled-up so far inside that he’s barely acknowledging it; he has the stunned stiffness of a sleepwalker, which is much better than if he were crying or raging. If we were holding out hope that his minor intervention would change things, we’re disillusioned as soon as we hear Fitz talking to the sergeant, giving the same kinds of orders Phil previously handled in the aftermath of missions. The only awkward touch here is the older officer—after some sincere and naturalistic mourning alongside Fitz—saying, with great conviction, “Man, war stinks!” You don’t say, sir!

Fitz doesn’t have to spend long in his friend’s shoes, because he’s been ordered to rest at division headquarters after all. Warren Oates⁵ plays the driver who comes to pick him up, who cheerfully admits to his own penchant for avoiding catastrophe and sticking to duties as far from the front as possible. Even when he hears that engineers have reported unexploded mines on the road he has to take, he’s sanguine about it. Sure, he’ll stay close to the shoulders. Don’t worry about him: “Sergeant, you’re looking at the most careful driver in the U.S. Army.”

But in packing up his things, Fitz has seen the gleam on his own face in the mirror. We get some perfect, painful lines here as he gets into the jeep and sees the light flare up on the driver’s face too:

“Well, Lieutenant, you may as well get comfortable. I guess we’ve got about a four-hour drive ahead of us.”

“Do we?” Fitz says flatly. “I doubt it.”

I think it’s a misstep to take us back to camp after this just to give us the sergeant and the decompressing soldiers’ reaction to the distant boom they want to believe is thunder. The shot of the broken shards of Fitz’s mirror is pretty good, but it can’t top the icy, bitter perfection of that final exchange between Fitz and the driver. This time, Fitz doesn’t try to change anything—he writes off his own life and the driver’s because he’s now too weary, grief-stricken, and fatalistic to do anything else. It hurts, but it’s the right note to end on—bleak and sharp-edged. Sometimes TZ gains something from cushioning those edges—I think that’s the case in “Eye of the Beholder,” for example—but here, as with “The Hitch-Hiker,” it would be better to stay in the moment of doom.

Closing: From William Shakespeare, Richard III, a small excerpt. The line reads, ‘He has come to open the purple testament of bleeding war.’ And for Lieutenant William Fitzgerald, A Company, First Platoon, the testament is closed. Lieutenant Fitzgerald has found the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Richard L. Bare

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: “Elegy”

1. Among other things, he saw a close friend get decapitated right in front of him in a freak supply drop accident, and he was unable to get leave near the end of the war to attend his father’s funeral. The National WWII Museum and Anne Serling’s memoir As I Knew Him have this and other stories of Serling’s wartime service. ↩︎
2. Probably best known for his work on the long-running The F.B.I., but since I haven’t seen that, his standout other role for me is being one of the annoying adult children in All That Heaven Allows. ↩︎
3. The first Darren on Bewitched! I probably saw him first there, since I watched a lot of Bewitched as a kid, but that honor might actually go to Inherit the Wind. We’ll see him again in “A Penny for Your Thoughts.” ↩︎
4. It’s like a more supernatural take on The Dawn Patrol. ↩︎
5. An excellent actor and eventual Peckinpah favorite. He’d see the height of his career a few years after this, with material like In the Heat of the Night, The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Two-Lane Blacktop (I can’t even list all the highlights here) He’ll return to TZ for another war story, “The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms.” ↩︎