The Twilight Zone, S1E5, "Walking Distance"

Opening: Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Occupation: vice-president, ad agency, in charge of media. This is not just a Sunday drive for Martin Sloan. He perhaps doesn’t know it at the time, but it’s an exodus. Somewhere up the road he’s looking for sanity. And somewhere up the road, he’ll find something else.

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“Walking Distance” is one of my top Twilight Zone episodes. It captures so much of what makes the show special—its bittersweetness, its knack for the unsettling, its warmth—and it’s arguably the best treatment of the problem of nostalgia, something the show will return to many times.

Gig Young—best known for his Oscar-winning supporting work in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?—plays Martin Sloan, our disaffected ad executive. (Disaffected ad executives are a TZ staple; it seems to have been Rod Serling’s go-to for “prestigious but soul-crushing career.”) Martin is an interesting figure who’s on the complex side of the show’s character range. His encounter with the otherworldly doesn’t offer a simple reward or punishment, but a revelation that helps him but also leaves him shaken. If he were too good, we might want a more straightforwardly happy ending for him; if he were awful, we might want more comeuppance. What we get feels exactly right for who he is, which is a very human figure: vulnerable, tired, and a little self-centered.

When we first see Martin, he’s in a foul mood, racing into the filling station lot, driving up clouds of dust, and honking irritably for the attendant—who understandably responds to this by taking forever to come over to him. This could easily be the introduction of an asshole, but what’s key here is that Martin apologizes for how he’s acting. He’s not a jerk, he’s just frustrated and unhappy for reasons he can’t quite define, and it’s making him lash out.

Seeing that he’s close to Homewood, where he grew up, he decides to leave his car at the filling station for a fix-up and walk into town.¹ He drifts into the drugstore, where he’s incredulous to learn that not only do they still make their chocolate sodas with three scoops, they also still sell them for a dime: “You’re going to lose your shirt that way.” He then proceeds to leave three-quarters of his soda behind, which always bothers me to an unreasonable degree even though it’s a standard on-screen convention. It sounds good! Drink it!

We, of course, immediately work out what Martin (not knowing he’s a TZ character) can’t, which is that he’s walked back into his own past. The drugstore is selling three-scoop ice cream sodas for a dime—and the soda jerk is shocked to get tipped ninety cents for it—because it’s 1934.

Martin’s memories of his childhood stand out clear and bright in his mind: ice cream sodas, exact layouts of the neighborhood and who lives where, the “special names” he had for his marbles.² He’s a man lost in a dream, and that lets him shrug off the signs that things are wrong—even when he recognizes his childhood self, who is carving his name into the bandstand.

This muddled sense of revelation leads to a structural oddity. Martin goes to his childhood home and, to his surprise, actually sees and speaks to his parents. They can’t recognize him, of course, and they’re unsettled by his insistence that he’s their son; they close the door in his face. Despite this, he still doesn’t really accept that he’s in the past until he travels across the street and talks to a neighborhood kid about his “brand new” 1934 roadster with its rumble seats (amusingly old-fashioned by Martin’s time, but here the pinnacle of cool). Martin finally starts doing some double-takes here and letting the truth sink in.

To a contemporary viewer, I think this likely feels ridiculous, part and parcel with It’s a Wonderful Life’s George Bailey refusing to believe he’s been transplanted to an alternate world. Sure, the car is convincing evidence of time travel, but so is encountering your childhood self. So is speaking to your parents, when you know them to either be much older or even dead! But advertising is a product-driven business, so Martin is convinced by a product, I suppose.

More seriously, like I said above, Martin feels like he’s been swept up in a dream. Thus far, the most obvious signs of his trip to the past have also been the most personal; they’re impossible but emotional, so they work their way past his conscious mind. As long as that’s all he’s dealing with, he can work on a kind of dream-logic—but the car is so concrete, trivial, and banal that it drives home that this isn’t a product of his own imagination.

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Rare Middle Narration Rudely Throwing Off My Article Structure: A man can think a lot of thoughts and walk a lot of pavements between afternoon and night. And to a man like Martin Sloan, to whom memory has suddenly become reality, a resolve can come just as clearly and inexorably as stars in the summer night. Martin Sloan is now back in time. And his resolve is to put in a claim to the past.

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After this, we start spending more time with Martin’s dad, Robert Sloan (played by Frank Overton, who had a long career in small but memorable roles). Robert finds adult Martin in the yard, forlornly ringing the bell on his bicycle, and goes out to talk to him—and the meaning of the episode starts to emerge.

Robert Sloan is a good, ordinary man—he has compassion for someone he sees as a confused, delusional stranger, but he doesn’t want that stranger scaring his wife and child. And Martin does scare them. Martin already drove his younger self—Marty, let’s call him—away from the bandstand before he could finish carving his name, and he’s already left his parents disconcerted. Now it’s only getting worse. (It’s a nice touch that the real unease starts creeping out after the sun comes down.) When he accosts his mother and tries to show her his ID, she slaps him to get him out of her face, and he recoils, obviously stricken.

If he can’t get through to his parents, he at least wants to get through to himself. He runs back to the park, to its thriving merry-go-round³, and we get some great tilted camerawork here, emphasizing his frenetic instability. We know what Martin’s thinking, and we can feel for him, but the episode also shows us how he appears to everyone else. He’s a grown man who hops onto a moving carousel to chase down a child—a child who is, of course, scared to death of this stranger chasing him around and shouting at him. Martin scares Marty so much that the boy tries to flee off the carousel, breaking his leg in the process. Martin, too, instantly collapses with pain.

He’s heartfelt in his quiet plea to Marty before the boy is taken away: “I only wanted to tell you that this is a wonderful time of life for you. Don’t let any of it go by without enjoying it. … There won’t be any more merry-go-rounds. No more cotton candy. No more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you that this is a wonderful time of life for you now, here. That’s all, Martin. That’s all I wanted to tell you, God help me.”

That is all he wanted, but he’s already marred his own idyllic summer and given Marty a lifelong limp. Eleven-year-old Marty now has a lot more pain and terror and confusion, thanks to him.

This is already a moving look at how you can’t go home again, but it’s the next scene that really makes the episode for me and lifts it to the top tier of the show. When Robert Sloan visits the now-deserted park to tell Martin about Marty’s injury, he returns his wallet to him and explains that he looked inside, that he’s seen the far-into-the-future dates on Martin’s driver’s license and money. He accepts what he’s looking at, and that gives an odd, poignant weight to his conversations with adult Marty. This is his son—played by an actor a few years his senior. His son is older than he is, but Robert’s care for him is still paternal … but distantly so, because he has to protect his own version of Marty first.

And he knows that protecting Marty means getting Martin out of the picture:

“There’s no room. There’s no place.”

“I see that now, but I don’t understand. Why not?”

“I guess because we only get one chance. Maybe there’s only one summer to every customer.”

This is young Marty’s summer, Robert says: “Just as it was yours once. Don’t make him share it.”

“One summer to every customer” is something my wife and I quote sometimes, as a way of acknowledging those times when you have to appreciate the past without trying to recapture it; I think it’s one of Serling’s most understatedly beautiful turns of phrase. I do a lot more quoting than usual in these write-ups, and it’s all that guy’s fault for writing these kinds of lines.

There are plenty of stories about the unique magic of childhood, and Twilight Zone will explore that too, but one of the things I really appreciate about “Walking Distance” is that Robert tries to get Martin to see that he doesn’t have to relegate the magic to the past.

He asks Martin, “Is it so bad where you’re from?” and you can tell he’s almost concerned that he’s going to hear that his son will live into an apocalyptic wasteland. Martin admits that he feels that way, sometimes, but that’s because he’s living a life geared towards success, working non-stop and never having any simple pleasures. He wanted to retreat to a time when those were abundant, and Robert acknowledges the appeal of that—but he also says that Martin can probably find merry-go-rounds and band concerts in his time, too, if he looks in the right place.

Your only choices aren’t “carefree child” and “harried ad executive”; adulthood has options and its own wonders and delights, and it’s our responsibility to find them (or create them), because rooting endlessly through our own pasts will only bring about misery and pain.

Martin rides the carousel again, and the next thing we know, it’s day again, and he’s walking back into the drugstore, which is now full of fifties music. He can still get his ice cream soda with three scoops, but they no longer make it that way by default: it’ll cost extra, and the overall price is now 35 cents. This is a bittersweet, realistic bit of payoff, as is the moment when we learn that the merry-go-round—where Martin now says, with the aura of somebody remembering an old and hazy memory, he once broke his leg as a boy—was torn down years ago. “A little late for you, I guess,” the counterman says, thinking of Martin’s leg. “Very late for me,” Martin agrees.

It’s unclear how much he remembers of his experience, but he seems to have a greater sense of peace now, an ability to process the changes of time—even the unwanted changes—with a sense of wryness and grace, with a little melancholy but not a grinding depression. He goes back and picks up his car, and off he goes into whatever future he’s going to make for himself. He’s not driving like an asshole anymore, and I want to believe he finds a summer night concert or whatever else it is he needs. Maybe the reason he didn’t drink all that chocolate ice cream soda is because he didn’t miss the taste as much as he missed loving something that much. And he’ll find something new.

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Closing: Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men, perhaps there’ll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he’ll smile then too, because he’ll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.

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Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: Escape Clause

1. This leads to an unintentionally hilarious exchange I quote way too often. Martin looks at a sign that says HOMEWOOD, 1 ½ MILES, and proceeds to ask the gas station attendant, “That’s Homewood up ahead, isn’t it?” Yes, Martin. Read the sign. The attendant, more patient than I am: “Yep. About a mile and a half.” Much as it says on the sign! Martin reminisces and then asks, “That’s walking distance, isn’t it?” The attendant, somehow not bludgeoning him with a wrench or asking how he’s supposed to know Martin’s definition of “within walking distance,” replies, “Yeah. About a mile and a half.” As it says on the sign, Martin. As he told you thirty seconds ago. Martin then confirms this fact to himself, thoughtfully: “Yeah, that’s walking distance.” Glad we resolved that! (I suspect the answer here is that the sign wasn’t in the script, and Martin was supposed to simply recognize the road, which would make sense. But this late prop addition has given me so much joy.) ↩︎
2. The steel ones were steelies and the clear ones were clearies, so I’m going to guess Martin heads up the business end of his agency rather than the creative one. ↩︎
3. I’ve seen the original inspiration for this, in Serling’s hometown of Binghamton. Serlingfest always highlights it. ↩︎