The Lateness of the Hour

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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:

  1. King Nine Will Not Return
  2. The Man in the Bottle
  3. Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room
  4. A Thing About Machines
  5. The Howling Man
  6. The Eye of the Beholder
  7. Nick of Time
  8. The Lateness of the Hour
  9. The Trouble With Templeton
  10. A Most Unusual Camera
  11. Night of the Meek
  12. Dust
  13. Back There
  14. The Whole Truth
  15. The Invaders
  16. A Penny for Your Thoughts
  17. Twenty-Two
  18. The Odyssey of Flight 33
  19. Mr. Dingle, the Strong
  20. Static
  21. The Prime Mover
  22. Long Distance Call
  23. A Hundred Yards Over the Rim
  24. The Rip Van Winkle Caper
  25. The Silence
  26. Shadow Play
  27. The Mind and the Matter
  28. Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
  29. The Obsolete Man

“The Lateness of the Hour” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

[edit] Details

  • Episode number: 44
  • Season: 2
  • Original air date: December 2, 1960
  • Writer: Rod Serling
  • Director: Jack Smight
  • Producer: Buck Houghton
  • Director of photography: none [first of six episodes consecutively recorded on videotape—see "Episode notes"]
  • Music: none credited

[edit] Cast

Starring

  • Inger Stevens as Jana [second of two TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]
  • John Hoyt as Dr. Loren [first of two TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]
  • Irene Tedrow as Mrs. Loren [second of two TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]

with

  • Tom Palmer as Robert (the butler)
  • Mary Gregory as Nelda (the maid utilized for massaging Mrs. Loren's shoulders) [second of three TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]
  • Valley Keene as Suzanne (the maid who tumbles down the stairs and emerges with a smile)
  • Doris Karnes as Gretchen (a maid) [second of two TZ appearances—see "Episode Notes"]
  • Jason Johnson as Jensen (the handyman) [second of two TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]

[edit] Rod Serling's opening narration

At the foot of the staircase in the Loren mansion—as Dr. Loren and the servants walk out of camera range, Rod Serling walks into view behind them:

  • "The residence of Dr. William Loren, which is in reality a menagerie for machines. We're about to discover that sometimes the product of man's talent and genius can walk amongst us untouched by the normal ravages of time. These are Dr. Loren's robots, built to functional as well as artistic perfection. But in a moment Dr. William Loren, wife and daughter will discover that perfection is relative, that even robots have to be paid for, and very shortly will be shown exactly what is the bill."

[edit] Synopsis

Jana, the sensitive daughter of a creative genius, Dr. Loren, is distraught over her parents' reliance on her father’s seemingly perfect robot servants. She implores her father to dismantle the robots before he and her mother become completely dependent on them. After he complies, she reveals to them her plans to start a new life by leaving the confines of the house, getting married and having children. Seeing her parents' dismayed expressions, she comes to the shocking realization that she, too, is a robot, albeit quite a bit more sophisticated than the ones that were dismantled. The discovery causes Jana such anguish that her "father" is forced to erase the memory of her former "identity" and ultimately use her as a replacement for Nelda, the maid skilled at giving Mrs. Loren her most pleasurable activity, a shoulder massage.

[edit] Rod Serling's closing narration

  • "Let this be the postscript: should you be worn out by the rigors of competing in a very competitive world, if you're distraught from having to share your existence with the noises and neuroses of the twentieth century, if you crave serenity but want it full time and with no strings attached, get yourself a workroom in the basement and then drop a note to Dr. and Mrs. William Loren. They're a childless couple who made comfort a life's work, and maybe there are a few do-it-yourself pamphlets still available—in the Twilight Zone."

[edit] Episode notes

By November 1960, The Twilight Zone's second season had already broadcast five episodes and finished filming sixteen. However, at a cost of about $65,000 per episode, the show was exceeding its budget. As a result, six consecutive episodes were videotaped and then transferred to 16-millimeter film for TV transmission. Total savings on editing and cinematography amounted to around $30,000 for all six entries, not enough to justify the loss of depth of visual perspective, which made the shows look like stagebound live TV dramas. The experiment was therefore deemed a failure and never attempted again.

Even though the six shows were taped in a row, through November and into mid-December, their broadcast dates were out of order and varied widely, with this, the first one, shown on December 2, 1960 as episode 8. The second one, Static was shown on March 10, 1961 as episode 20; the third, The Whole Truth appeared on January 20, 1961 as episode 14; the fourth was the Christmas entry Night of the Meek shown as the 11th episode on December 23, 1960; the fifth, Twenty-Two was seen on February 10, 1961 as episode 17; and the last one, Long Distance Call was transmitted on March 3, 1961 as episode 22.

  • This was the second of two TZ starring roles for TV's Swedish Farmer's Daughter, Inger Stevens, who had a busy schedule of television guest appearances during her final decade, the 1960s. Her earlier performance was in one of the first season's most unsettling episodes, The Hitch-Hiker, in which she played another tormented character, a lone driver who meets her inexorable fate.
  • Familiar character actor John Hoyt's other TZ appearance, twenty episodes later, was as one of the most memorable personalities in the history of the show—the dismayed Martian who is one-upped by the diner-counterman-turned-Venusian in the rival-Earth-invasions surprise ending of the season's penultimate episode, Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up.
  • Doris Karnes appears to have had no acting career other than small non-speaking roles in two TZ episodes. Here, she's the third maid and in the first season's What You Need, she has the unbilled part of one of sidewalk salesman Ernest Truex's customers.

[edit] External links

[edit] Twilight Zone links