MINI-EPISODE #5 (REMIX) – THE TWILIGHT ZONE with Michele Mantynen & Josh Chambers

**Dan Fisher** (0:23)
Welcome to this remixed episode of Let's Talk Ten. I'm Dan Fisher.
One of the great things about being a pop culture nerd is that it's a really nice way to make friends. Do you like movies? I like movies. Let's be friends. Michele Mantynen and Josh Chambers have been my friends for years now. They're our mutual appreciation of the late Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast. And then it was my pleasure to have them both as guests in the early days of Let's Talk Ten. As we talked about stuff like Drinking Tranya from Star Trek, or what it might be like to drive the Batmobile. It was so much fun. They came back a number of times, including this early mini episode. The mini episode phase, by the way, was brief as each one took a lot of time and effort to put together, and always had me behind schedule with the regular full length episodes. But anyway, I chose to remix this one, a panel discussion on The Twilight Zone, because Josh and Michele will be returning for a new episode soon. A full length one, so I thought this would be a cool way to reintroduce them to my friends and our listening audience. And even though I've seen a lot fewer episodes than they have, we all really love The Twilight Zone.
You are about to enter another dimension.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:38)
A dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into The Twilight Zone.

**Michele Mantynen** (1:56)
I actually changed from The Midnight Sun to a different episode, because Midnight Sun was so bleak, it doesn't really have a message other than we're doomed.

**Josh Chambers** (2:08)
Yeah, mankind is screwed for no reason other than we exist and we deserve to be screwed over. Yeah. So this was tough.
As I know, it was probably difficult for Michele. Had to narrow down three, and you had to kick out a lot of favorites, and the list is insane. I've been teaching The Twilight Zone in the classroom. This is year 24 starts next week, so 24 years plus I think student teaching, I was probably throwing Twilight Zones in there, so a quarter century.

**Dan Fisher** (2:38)
When Josh proposed this topic, my first thought was, well, gee, is Twilight Zone kind of a niche topic for Let's Talk Ten? And I realized, well, no, it's always on New Year's Eve shows, That and the Honeymooners. I know it was on Netflix for a long time because I started catching up to my Twilight Zone during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 When we all had that question, what do we do with our free time? I did, in fact, choose to watch Twilight Zones.
And the first one I'd like to bring up as one of my personal favorites, is Nothing in the Dark, which was in season three.
And that's most famously known as the Robert Redford episode. It's set on IMDB. In fact, it's the most downloaded of the Twilight Zone episodes, which I don't necessarily know if that means it's the most fondly remembered, more than it just brings curiosity. What did Robert Redford look like when he was a very young actor? And the answer is obvious. He was gorgeous. He's Robert Redford. But I do like that, by the way. I like with The Twilight Zone and some of the other 1950s and 60s TV shows is seeing that generation of young actors like Redford or Robert Duvall, Jack Klugman, or even Jonathan Winters before his career as a stand-up or improv performer, seeing them on The Twilight Zone. But for all the attention everybody pays to Redford, it's Gladys Cooper as the old woman who's trying to keep death from literally entering her door. She's not aware that Redford is in fact Mr. Death. He is disguised as a police officer who was injured. So she brings him in and takes care of him. And eventually she learns that he is death, the one thing that she had tried with all of her might and all of her will to resist.
And Redford convinces her to take his hand and walk out that door into the beyond. And it's a beautiful, beautiful performance by this actress, Gladys Cooper, who started out in silent films. The whole episode is shot really well. It's all that one stage, all that one set. It's well lit. The darks and the lights are just gorgeous. It's like film noir. It's just a beautiful piece of 30-minute art to watch. Very life-affirming, very death-affirming.

**Michele Mantynen** (5:05)