All the Time reaction paper

2013-14710

BACONGUIS, Liana Isabelle T.

STS THY 7

Twilight Zone reaction paper

The Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last focuses on chirpy banker Henry Bemis, whose love for the written word impedes his work and home life. One day he gets locked in a bank vault. By the time he wakes up, a nuclear war has devastated the world and he finds himself the only human left. He finds himself succumbing to despair and is on the brink of suicide when he finds a library with every book he’s ever wanted to read. Declaring that he’s got time enough at last to read all he wants, his glasses break, leaving him blind, alone, and purposeless.

Now that nuclear war is no longer as big a threat as it was at the time of the episode’s airing, having nuclear war as the threat would seem quite outdated. If I were to adapt it to the modern day with its disasters increasing in scale, perhaps I’d use a series of national disasters to wipe out humanity. But with the resurgence in books lately, I’d perhaps have him as technologically up-to-date – he’d be addicted to gaming, for example, relating to the fictional characters in his games as Bemis relates to those in his books.

Bemis would find a video game testing facility somehow spared by the series of natural disasters, and his delight at this would only be destroyed by the realization that there’s nobody to play with anymore, reaffirming the  original story’s meaning that activities are meaningless when there’s nobody to do them with. 

Time Enough at Last also stands out as one of the more pessimistic Twilight Zone episodes, about how you can still be a decent person and still have bad things continuously happen to you. It also presents a particularly dark "be careful what you wish for" aesop, as Bemis's character continuously gripes about not having enough time for his true love, reading -- and when he finally has enough time, it is suddenly both within his reach and impossible to grasp, after all.