The Old Man in the Cave

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

The Twilight Zone original series
Season five (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5)
Fall 1963 – Summer 1964
List of The Twilight Zone episodes

Episodes:

  1. In Praise of Pip
  2. Steel
  3. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
  4. A Kind of a Stopwatch
  5. The Last Night of a Jockey
  6. Living Doll
  7. The Old Man in the Cave
  8. Uncle Simon
  9. Probe 7, Over and Out
  10. The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms
  11. A Short Drink From a Certain Fountain
  12. Ninety Years Without Slumbering
  13. Ring-a-Ding Girl
  14. You Drive
  15. The Long Morrow
  16. The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross
  17. Number 12 Looks Just Like You
  18. Black Leather Jackets
  19. Night Call
  20. From Agnes—With Love
  21. Spur of the Moment
  22. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
  23. Queen of the Nile
  24. What's in the Box
  25. The Masks
  26. I Am the Night—Color Me Black
  27. Sounds and Silences
  28. Caesar and Me
  29. The Jeopardy Room
  30. Stopover in a Quiet Town
  31. The Encounter
  32. Mr. Garrity and the Graves
  33. The Brain Center at Whipple's
  34. Come Wander With Me
  35. The Fear
  36. The Bewitchin' Pool

“The Old Man in the Cave” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

[edit] Details

"The Old Man in the Cave" is a half-hour episode of the original version of The Twilight Zone. It is set in a post-apocalyptic 1974, ten years after a nuclear holocaust in the United States. The episode is a cautionary tale about humanity's greed and the danger of questioning one's faith in forces greater than oneself.

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In a sparsely populated town set ten years after a nuclear war, the townspeople have discovered a supply of canned food but are waiting for "the old man" to tell them whether it is contaminated with radiation. Some of them want to take their chances and eat the food, but they refrain from doing so after seeing the disastrous harvest yielded when they did so with their choice of land rather than taking the old man's advice about which areas were contaminated. When their leader, Mr. Goldsmith, returns, he informs them that the old man has declared the food contaminated and that it should be destroyed.

Opening narration:

"What you're looking at is a legacy that man left to himself. A decade previous he pushed his buttons and, a nightmarish moment later, woke up to find that he had set the clock back a thousand years. His engines, his medicines, his science were buried in a mass tomb, covered over by the biggest gravedigger of them all: a bomb. And this is the Earth ten years later, a fragment of what was once a whole, a remnant of what was once a race. The year is 1974, and this is the Twilight Zone."

When a group of soldiers enter the town, they try to dispel the townspeople's strange beliefs about the man in the cave. It is ultimately revealed that in reality they have been listening to a computer the whole time. In a fit of rage at being deceived, the town destroys the computer and eat the canned goods it claimed were contaminated. However, as Mr. Goldsmith had insisted, the "old man" was correct; without an authority figure to tell them which foods are safe, the entire town (including the soldiers) dies.

Closing narration:

"Mr. Goldsmith, survivor, an eye witness to man's imperfection, an observer of the very human trait of greed and a chronicler of the last chapter—the one reading 'suicide'. Not a prediction of what is to be, just a projection of what could be. This has been the Twilight Zone."

[edit] Production information

Film critic Andrew Sarris noted in his review of "Time Enough at Last" that, at the time The Twilight Zone was produced, depicting an atom bomb explosion or its aftermath on network television would likely have been prohibited if it was "couched in a more realistic format".[1] Hence, in both this episode and "The Shelter", Serling makes a point of noting that the story is intended to be fictional, particularly given both are set in the United States.

[edit] Themes

In the post-apocalyptic world presented in the episode, humanity has destroyed itself, but does so again through "greed, desire and faithlessness".[2] It is thus a warning not to ignore faith, which often serves an important purpose in society. The events in the episode show that myths and beliefs are often based on fact or necessity, as is the case with the "old man" who, despite being a computer, was ultimately keeping his "followers" alive. According to Valerie Barr of Hofstra University, it also "turns the usual notion of overreliance on technology on its head" by suggesting an interdependence with machines when it is revealed that a man-made computer has been keeping the townspeople alive.[3] A suggested learning plan accompanying this episode for the Sci Fi Channel's participation in Cable in the Classroom provides a platform for exploring ideas about war, faith, and the question of whether humans control computers or visa-versa.[4]

The head soldier paraphrases Julius Caesar at one point, saying, "Friends, Romans, farm animals..." The latter was originally "countrymen", but there are several possibilities for its inclusion in the script: he may have been insinuating that his countrymen had been led blindly like sheep, or simply conveying the level of respect he had for them (as he was asserting his self-proclaimed authority at the time); conversely, he may have been driving home the fact that virtually no one was left to listen to his words by that point. His example of a group near what was once Chicago idolizing a statue is, in his view, meant to discredit the "old man" and the townspeople's faith.

[edit] Similar episodes

Several Twilight Zone episodes have touched upon similar themes. For instance, in "The Howling Man", another "old man" warns a stranger not to release a prisoner—who turns out to be the Devil—although its main theme concerns the ambiguity of evil. Contrast this with "The Jungle", which confronts the logic of those who laugh at magic and witch doctors yet believe in the power of rabbit's feet and knocking on wood: "A multi-billion dollar corporation run by witches. Warlocks. In a 40-story building that doesn't even have a 13th floor!"

A view opposing the theme of "The Old Man in the Cave" is explored in "Nick of Time", in which a couple become dependent on a fortune-telling machine to dictate their course of action. On the topic of technology, "The Brain Center at Whipple's" posits a view that humanity must not become overly dependent on machines: "[T]oo often man becomes clever instead of becoming wise, he becomes inventive and not thoughtful—and sometimes, in the case of Mr. Whipple, he can create himself right out of existence."

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sarris, Andrew. Rod Serling: Viewed From Beyond the Twilight Zone.
  2. ^ Warren, Jason. "Twilight Zone: 'Time Enough at Last'". Scifilm -- TV Files. http://www.scifilm.org/tv/tz/twilightzone1-8.html. Accessed 20 July 2006.
  3. ^ Barr, Valerie. "Movies Involving Computers (or raising interesting issues for a computer ethics course)". http://www.cs.hofstra.edu/~vbarr/movies.html. Modified 8 January 1999. Accessed 30 July 2006.
  4. ^ Blass, Laurie and Elder, Pam. "LESSON PLAN". Twilight Zone: Cable in the Classroom. http://www.scifi.com/cableintheclassroom/twilightzone/tz.109.html. Accessed 30 July 2006.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../t/h/e/The_Old_Man_in_the_Cave_4114.html"