One More Pallbearer

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“One More Pallbearer”
The Twilight Zone episode

Joseph Wiseman emerging from the shelter after the bomb detonates.
Episode no. Season 3
Episode 82
Written by Rod Serling
Directed by Lamont Johnson
Guest stars Joseph Wiseman : Paul Radin
Gage Clark : Mr. Hughes
Katherine Squire : Mrs. Langford
Trevor Bardette : Col. Hawthorne
Ray Galvin : Police Officer
Joseph Elic : Electrician #1
Robert Snyder : Electrician #2
Featured music Stock
Production no. 4823
Original airdate January 12, 1962
Episode chronology
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"Nothing in the Dark" "Dead Man's Shoes"
List of Twilight Zone episodes

"One More Pallbearer" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

Contents

[edit] Opening narration

“ What you have just looked at takes place three hundred feet underground, beneath the basement of a New York City skyscraper. It's owned and lived in by one Paul Radin. Mr. Radin is rich, eccentric and single-minded. How rich we can already perceive; how eccentric and single-minded we shall see in a moment, because all of you have just entered the Twilight Zone. ”

[edit] Synopsis

Radin invites three people to the bomb shelter that he has built. One is a high school teacher (Mrs. Langford), who failed him; the second is Colonel Hawthorne, who had him court-martialed; and the third is Rev. Hughes, who made a public scandal out of a woman who committed suicide over him.

Radin (with the aid of sound effects and fake radio messages) convinces the trio that an apocalyptic nuclear war will occur in just moments. He offers them refuge in the shelter if they do one thing: Apologize for their actions. All refuse, valuing honor above life, and exit.

Suddenly, the sound of a bomb detonation shakes Radin's shelter. He takes the elevator to the surface and sees that a nuclear war really has occurred, and the world is in ruins. This twist ending is given another twist, however, when we learn that Radin, devastated by his hoax's failure, has lost his mind and is only imagining that the world has ended.

[edit] Closing narration

“ Mr. Paul Radin, a dealer in fantasy, who sits in the rubble of his own making and imagines that he's the last man on Earth, doomed to a perdition of unutterable loneliness because a practical joke has turned into a nightmare. Mr. Paul Radin, pallbearer at a funeral that he manufactured himself in the Twilight Zone. ”

[edit] The Twilight Zone Links

[edit] Source

[edit] External links

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