The Shelter (The Twilight Zone)
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“The Shelter” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
[edit] Details
- Episode number: 68
- Season: 3
- Original air date: September 29, 1961
- Writer: Rod Serling
- Director: Lamont Johnson
- Producer: Buck Houghton
- Director of photography: George T. Clemens
- Music: uncredited
[edit] Cast
- Dr. Stockton: Larry Gates
- Jerry Harlowe: Jack Albertson
- Henderson: Sandy Kenyon
- Marty Weiss: Joseph Bernard
[edit] Synopsis
A small gathering of neighborhood friends in a typical suburban community is having a small dinner party to honor the local Dr. Stockton at his house. Dr. Stockton is well-known and liked by this gathering because he has either administered to the health and well-being of his guests or has delivered their children. Everybody is especially friendly and jovial and mention is made of his late night work on a fallout shelter that he has built in the basement. Suddenly, a Civil Defense announcement, overheard by Dr. Stockton's son, is made that unidentified objects have been detected heading for the United States. In these times, everybody knows what that means: nuclear attack.
As panic ensues, The doctor locks himself and his family into his basement bomb shelter. The same gathering of friends becomes hysterical and now wants to occupy the shelter. All of the previous friendliness has vanished and is now replaced with bitter hate, and soaring desperation as pent-up hostility and suppressed emotions boil to the surface. The end is moments away and everyone's mind is now vehemently poisoned by the clawing desire to survive, at any cost - the feelings of a neighbor, the sanctity of a friend's home, friendship itself, or the raw submission to violence. The last scene shows the once-friendly neighbors breaking down the door to the shelter with an improvised battering ram. Just then, a final Civil Defense broadcast announces that the objects have been identified as harmless, falling satellites, and that no danger is at all present. Rod Serling makes the final statement. “For civilization to survive, the human race must remain civilized.”
[edit] Significant excerpt:
JERRY HARLOWE: We could throw a nice big block party, just like old times! Anything to get back to normal! Right, Bill?
BILL STOCKTON: (dazed) ...Normal? ...I don't know what normal is. I thought I did once; I don't anymore.
JERRY: Oh, we'll pay for all the damages, Bill.
BILL: ...Damages? I wonder...if any of us has any idea what those "damages" really are. Maybe one or two is now really finding out what we're really like when we're "normal." The kind of people we really are, just underneath the skin--and I mean all of us--a lot of naked, wild animals who put such a price on staying alive that they'll claw their own neighbors to death just for the privilege! We were spared a bomb tonight, but I wonder...if we weren't destroyed even without it.
[edit] Trivia
- Aired one year and 17 days before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
- One of only a few episodes in the series which contain no supernatural or science-fiction elements. Other such episodes include “Where Is Everybody?”, “The Silence” and “The Jeopardy Room”.
- The plot is reused in The Simpsons episode "Bart's Comet", Ned Flanders builds a bomb shelter, and due to his meek nature cannot refuse anyone in town from entering, until he himself is forced out by the cramped quarters.
- The late Larry Gates is best known for such movies as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Sand Pebbles; he was also patriarch Harlan Lewis on TV's Guiding Light.
- The late Jack Albertson is best known for such films as Disney's The Fox and the Hound (he was the voice of "Amos Slade") and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (he was "Grandpa Joe Bucket").
[edit] References
- Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)
