A Thing About Machines

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The Twilight Zone original series Season two (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) Fall 1960 – Summer 1961 List of The Twilight Zone episodes
Episodes: King Nine Will Not Return The Man in the Bottle Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room A Thing About Machines The Howling Man The Eye of the Beholder Nick of Time The Lateness of the Hour The Trouble With Templeton A Most Unusual Camera Night of the Meek Dust Back There The Whole Truth The Invaders A Penny for Your Thoughts Twenty-Two The Odyssey of Flight 33 Mr. Dingle, the Strong Static The Prime Mover Long Distance Call A Hundred Yards Over the Rim The Rip Van Winkle Caper The Silence Shadow Play The Mind and the Matter Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? The Obsolete Man

“A Thing About Machines” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

[edit] Details

Episode number: 40
Season: 2
Original air date: October 28, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: David Orrick McDearmon
Producer: Buck Houghton

[edit] Cast

Richard Haydn
Barbara Stuart
Barney Phillips

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

[edit] Opening Narration

"This is Mr. Bartlett Finchley, age forty-eight, a practicing sophisticate who writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He's a bachelor and a recluse with few friends, only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He has no interests save whatever current annoyances he can put his mind to. He has no purpose to his life except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhors. In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley is a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century, and who in just a moment will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings. Next stop for Mr. Bartlett Finchley - the Twilight Zone."

[edit] Synopsis

An ill-tempered writer who reviles and constantly abuses machines starts to think machines are conspiring against him. The people he tells about this write him off as paranoid, but eventually every machine in his house (including his car) turns on him. His typewriter types, "GET OUT OF HERE, FINCHLEY." The TV shows the same message, as does the phone. Finchley runs from the house to be confronted by his car. The car chases him to his pool and pushes him in. He sinks to the bottom and drowns. When the police pull him out of the water, they can not explain how he could sink to the bottom when he was not weighted down (normally, a body would float). They figure he may have had a heart attack.

[edit] Closing Narration

"Yes, it could just be. It could just be that Mr. Bartlett Finchley succumbed from a heart attack and a set of delusions. It could just be that he was tormented by an imagination as sharp as his wit and as pointed as his dislikes. But as perceived by those attending, this is one explanation that has left the premises with the deceased. Look for it filed under 'M' for machines in the Twilight Zone."

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Trivia

The late Richard Haydn made one of his final appearances in the TV pilot The Hugga-Bunch, as an appropriately-sharp-tongued (yet much more likeable than Finchley) bookworm-librarian...who is, literally, a giant worm. "There's nothing more to say, except Goodbye. You'll never come back. Have a nice trip."