Episode no. Season 1Episode 8 Original air date November 20, 1959 | Production code 173-3614 | |
Written by Rod Serling (teleplay)Lynn Venable (short story) | ||
"Time Enough at Last" is the eighth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. The episode was adapted from a short story written by Lynn Venable (pen name of Marilyn Venable). The short story appeared in the January 1953 edition of the science fiction magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction about seven years before the television episode first aired. "Time Enough at Last" became one of the most famous episodes of the original Twilight Zone and has been frequently parodied since. It is "the story of a man who seeks salvation in the rubble of a ruined world" and tells of Henry Bemis /ˈbiːmɪs/, played by Burgess Meredith, who loves books, yet is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them. The episode follows Bemis through the post apocalyptic world, touching on such social issues as anti-intellectualism, the dangers of reliance upon technology, and the difference between aloneness (solitude) and loneliness.
Contents
Plot summary
Henpecked, far sighted bank teller and avid bookworm Henry Bemis (Meredith) works at his window in a bank, while reading David Copperfield, which causes him to shortchange an annoyed customer. Bemis's angry boss (Taylor), and later his nagging wife (deWit), both complain to him that he wastes far too much time reading "doggerel". As a cruel joke, his wife asks him to read poetry from one of his books to her; he eagerly obliges, only to find that she has inked over the text on every page, obscuring the words. Seconds later, she destroys the book by ripping the pages from it much to Henry's dismay.
The next day, as usual, Henry takes his lunch break in the bank's vault, where his reading will not be disturbed. Moments after he sees a newspaper headline, which reads "H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction", an enormous explosion outside the bank violently shakes the vault, knocking Bemis unconscious. After regaining consciousness and recovering the thick glasses required for him to see, Bemis emerges from the vault to find the bank demolished and everyone in it dead. Leaving the bank, he sees that the entire city has been destroyed, and realizes that a nuclear war has devastated the Earth, but that his being in the vault has saved him.
Finding himself totally alone in a shattered world with food to last him a lifetime but no one to share it with, Bemis succumbs to despair. As he prepares to commit suicide using a revolver he has found, Bemis sees the ruins of the public library in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the books are still intact and readable; all the books he could ever hope for are his for the reading, and (as he gazes upon a huge fallen face of a clock) learns that he has all the time in the world to read them without interruption.
His despair gone, Bemis contentedly sorts the books he looks forward to reading for years to come. Just as he bends down to pick up the first book, he stumbles, and his glasses fall off and shatter. In shock, he picks up the broken remains of the glasses he is virtually blind without, and says, "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was—was all the time I needed…! It's not fair! It's not fair!" and bursts into tears, surrounded by books he now can never read.
Production
"Time Enough at Last" was one of the first episodes written for The Twilight Zone. It introduced Burgess Meredith to the series; he went on to star in three more episodes, being introduced as "no stranger to The Twilight Zone" in promotional spots for season two's "The Obsolete Man". He also narrated for the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie, which made reference to "Time Enough at Last" during its opening sequence, with the characters discussing the episode in detail.
Footage of the exterior steps of the library was filmed several months after production had been completed. These steps can also be seen on the exterior of an Eloi public building in MGM's 1960 version of The Time Machine. John Brahm was nominated for a Directors Guild award for his work on the episode. The book that Bemis was reading in the vault and that flips open when the bomb explodes is A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving.
Themes
Although the overriding message may seem to be "careful what you wish for", there are other themes throughout the episode as well. Paramount among these is the question of solitude versus loneliness, as embodied by Bemis' moment of near-suicide. Additionally, the portrayal of societal attitudes towards books speaks to the contemporary decline of traditional literature and how, given enough time, reading may become a relic of the past. At the same time, the ending "punishes Bemis for his antisocial behavior, and his greatest desire is thwarted".
Rod Serling's concluding statement in the episode—that Bemis has become "just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself"—alludes to Robert Burns' Scots language poem "To a Mouse" (1785, for which John Steinbeck's book, Of Mice and Men (1938), was also named). The poem concludes: "The best-laid schemes o' mice an men / Gang aft agley" (translation: "Often go awry").
Although "Time Enough at Last" implies that nuclear warfare has destroyed humanity, film critic Andrew Sarris notes that the episode's necessarily unrealistic format may have been what allowed its production to commence:
In the era of the Internet and eBooks, the irony depicted in "Time Enough at Last" has an information age counterpart, according to Weston Ochse of Storytellers Unplugged. As Ochse points out, when Bemis becomes the last person on Earth, he finally has time to read, with all his books at his fingertips and the only impediment is technology when his medium for accessing them—his glasses—breaks. In a hypothetical world where all books are published electronically, Ochse observes, readers would be "only a lightning strike, a faulty switch, a sleepy workman or a natural disaster away from becoming Henry Bemis at the end of the world"—that is, a power outage has the potential to give them time to read, yet like Bemis, they too would lose their medium for accessing their books—namely the computer. This analogy has been taken further by those who suggest that today's technology-dependent world, where books have become passé (cf. Bradbury's "The Pedestrian"), could render an outage both a liberator and an executioner: As the gateway to both work and entertainment (be it a computer, video games, or television), removing electricity from the equation presents Henry Bemis' heaven but modern society's hell.
Similar episodes
The Twilight Zone often explored similar themes throughout its run. "Time Enough at Last" has strong thematic ties to a number of other episodes in the series, starting with that of isolation, first explored in the series pilot, "Where Is Everybody?". It is also a prominent theme in the previous episode "The Lonely". Additionally, in a plot very similar to that of "Time Enough at Last", "The Mind and the Matter" tells of a man who uses his mind to erase humanity, only to find that existence without other people is unbearable. The notion of being an outsider, lost in a sea of conformity, was one of the most common themes of the series.
Other thematic elements in this episode can be found throughout the series, as well. "The Obsolete Man" takes the episode's literary subtext—the notion that reading may eventually be considered "obsolete"—to an extreme: The state has declared books obsolete and a librarian (also played by Meredith) finds himself on trial for his own obsolescence. This notion, akin to Ray Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian" (1951), is also alluded to in the episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", in which a perfect and equal world contradictorily considers works like those of Shakespeare "smut".
Critical and fan favorite
"Time Enough at Last" was a ratings success in its initial airing and "became an instant classic". It "remains one of the best-remembered and best-loved episodes of The Twilight Zone" according to Marc Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion. When a poll asked readers of Twilight Zone Magazine which episode of the series they remembered the most, "Time Enough at Last" was the most frequent response, with "To Serve Man" coming in a distant second. In TV Land's presentation of TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in Television", "Time Enough at Last" was ranked at #25.
Amusement park attractions
Comics
The comic book version of The Simpsons, Simpsons Comics, published a story called "The Last Fat Man", based partially on "Time Enough at Last", and includes a short scene where Homer Simpson shoos a bespectacled man who is reading a book out of a nuclear bunker so he can eat in it, unintentionally taking shelter in it.
Film
Games
Music
Television
Adaptations
"Time Enough at Last" has been released in numerous formats over the years.