The Twilight Zone, S1E6, "Escape Clause"

Opening: You’re about to meet a hypochondriac. Witness Mr. Walter Bedeker, age forty-four. Afraid of the following: death, disease, other people, germs, draft, and everything else. He has one interest in life, and that’s Walter Bedeker. One preoccupation, the life and well-being of Walter Bedeker. One abiding concern about society, that if Walter Bedeker should die, how will it survive without him?

“Escape Clause” is an episode in search of unity. It almost feels like the two halves were written on their own and they were only belatedly knitted together.

The opening is a solid deal-with-the-devil setup. Walter Bedeker (David Wayne¹) is gleefully, venomously detestable—not just self-centered but monstrously selfish. He’s a bully who uses his imaginary ailments as a cudgel, especially against his wife, Ethel (Virginia Christine²), who—for reasons surpassing human understanding—actually seems to care for him. He’s worn her down to the bone … and then, of course, he’s obnoxious about the fact that his doctor noticed her exhaustion, felt compassion for her, and dared to prescribe her vitamins. She would be better off living with asbestos or black mold.

Once Ethel has retreated to try to gather up the scraps of her self-esteem, Walter gets a visit from the devil himself: Thomas Gomez’s³ jovial Cadwallader.

This is the best scene in the episode. Gomez is fantastic, with Cadwallader’s expansive-but-evil twinkly bonhomie swallowing up any jabs Walter tries to throw his way; this is a devil who is really getting a kick out of his job, and who humors Walter as indulgently as an adult might humor a toddler. There are several nice touches here:

– It takes Walter a moment to notice Cadwallader is there, even with Cadwallader talking to him—because Cadwallader is agreeably affirming and seconding everything Walter’s saying, and Walter presumably takes any support from the universe as nothing more than his due. Poor Ethel would have noticed much faster.

– It’s a genuinely uncanny note when Walter asks how Cadwallader got in, and Cadwallader simply says, “I’ve never been gone.”

– “What did you say your name was?” / “What’s in a name, Mr. Bedeker, really?”

– Walter also often slightly mispronounces Cadwallader’s name. Even the devil himself can’t get past his force field of self-absorption.

– I am not above being amused at Cadwallader’s stamp of approval a) smoking and b) being marked with pitchforks. Sometimes I’m a simple person with simple pleasures.

Walter has zero problems trading his soul for immortality and indestructability—he’s presumably not using it anyway—but he bargains for his appearance to stay the same, avoiding the most obvious and predictable immortality-related twist ending. That fate—trapping a hypochondriac in a body that’s eternal but desperately unhealthy all the same—would have been an appropriate if horrifying bit of just deserts, but the episode has a rarer (and less appalling) outcome in mind. It’s actually more of an AHP idea, wherein Walter is hoist by his own petard rather than stomped on by the cosmos itself.

The contract does come with an escape clause: whenever Walter gets tired of living, he can call on Cadwallader, and Cadwallader will give him a quick and easy death. (Quicker and easier than I’d prefer he get, at this point.)

So—solid opening. Time to rapidly go downhill.

The whole problem with this episode is that the consequences Walter faces aren’t really tied to any part of his established characterization. If anything, you might think that immortality and invulnerability might start to chafe at him because it takes away his chosen method for hogging all the attention. Maybe it’s even taking away his favorite obsession.

Nope! Instead, we get Walter immediately becoming an adrenaline junkie—one who, of course, can’t actually get much of an adrenaline charge out of any of his death-defying stunts since he knows in advance that he’ll come through just fine. A different character gaining this ability and using it to bilk people—throw yourself on the train tracks and threaten to sue the railroad, for example—might make sense.⁴ With Walter, it feels out of the blue. Nevertheless, there’s a nice comedic beat with two insurance company lawyers meeting in Walter’s doorway—one going out and the other coming in, both recognizing each other with weary humor—and that’s the kind of low-key humor the show can do very well.

And more credit where credit is due: the episode does make an attempt to tie everything together by having Walter muse that even opening a window used to constitute a risk, and now he can’t even get a charge out of leaping on the third rail. Still, I’m unconvinced: nothing we saw earlier implied that he cared about that. It works well enough, and Wayne’s performance is consistent enough to hold it together, but even a little bit more bridging material would help here.

Ethel panics at Walter drinking an ammonia cocktail—which he complains tastes like “weak lemonade”—and he finally explains the situation to her. She doesn’t believe him, and when he tries to jump down the light well of the apartment—a fourteen-story drop—she tries to stop him. (You know what, Ethel? Maybe don’t.) She falls instead, and her husband’s response is to calmly light a cigarette: “I wonder what it felt like.” Meanwhile, I admire the stylish shot of the light well, with Ethel’s scream lighting up a pattern of windows all down its dark length.

Ethel’s death lets Walter seize on the chance to give the electric chair a whirl. Why does he think that will give him a rush when nothing else does? He calls the police and confesses to murder and does his best—with no regard for his lawyer’s⁵ impending ulcer (this man’s professional despair is another good comedic beat the episode finds)—to be found guilty. What does he think will happen when the electric chair doesn’t work? Does he think he’ll immediately get a settlement and be released from prison? That they’re not going to try again? That this wouldn’t somehow end with him with him in a lab somewhere? I don’t know how he expects this to work out!

The ”twist,” such as it is, is that he’s found guilty but sentenced to imprisonment “without hope of parole” for “the rest of his natural life.” Good job, sad lawyer! The guard at the jail encourages Walter to think of this as just forty, forty-five years, but Walter flashes back to Cadwallader laughingly talking about thousands of years. He summons Cadwallader, glumly utilizes the escape clause, and dies of a heart attack.

This is just a tad too muted for my taste, though I do like that it means he’s ultimately paying for his continual disregard of Ethel with his life. A bit of bracing meanness might improve it, like if Walter had previously not only disdained the escape clause but actually insisted on its removal, and Cadwallader reappears to reassure him that, well, eventually civilization itself may fall, and he’ll be free then. Walter’s been obnoxious all episode, and an additional twist of the knife here would amplify the payoff.

Ultimately, while “Escape Clause” is in the shape of a cosmic justice story—something the show is usually good at—its bones are actually closer to a “perfect crime gone wrong” story. Neither Walter Bedeker’s dissatisfaction nor his eventual use of the escape clause feel like they have to do with who he is as a (terrible) person; the last part is clever but plays more as the neat solution to a riddle or the punchline of a joke (good things in themselves, to be fair) than the end of a tale. Maybe it is best to think of this one as a joke, where characterization matters less than keeping things moving. If it is, it’s honestly one of the more effective comedy episodes, and I have to give it points for that even that’s not my favorite mode of the show.

Closing: There’s a saying, “Every man is put on Earth condemned to die, time and method of execution unknown.” Perhaps this is as it should be. Case in point: Walter Bedeker, lately deceased. A little man with such a yen to live. Beaten by the devil, by his own boredom, and by the scheme of things in this, the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Mitchell Leisen

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: The Lonely

1. Wayne had a substantial theater career, plus a major role in The Andromeda Strain (and a wide variety of other film and TV work as well–long live Anthologized, and we’ll eventually see him again over on AHP and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Night Gallery). ↩︎
2. Christine has arguably the most impressive career of any of the episode’s leads: she worked a lot, even achieving a kind of memetic pop culture fame via Folgers commercials. She does excellent supporting work in a film I wrote up last Noirvember, Nightmare. ↩︎
3. We’ll see Gomez again in the later Twilight Zone episode “Dust.” I also know him from the noir film Ride the Pink Horse. ↩︎
4. And then his inability to net much profit from any one “accident,” since he’s never even scratched, would be more entertaining. ↩︎
5. The great Wendell Holmes! I discovered him through old episodes of X Minus One, but he had another wide-ranging career, including AHP and Perry Mason. ↩︎