The 25 Best Twilight Zone Episodes...#5 - "Long Live Walter Jameson"

This declaration from the title character lies at the core of "Long Live Walter Jameson," another provocative Twilight Zone effort probing life's imponderable uncertainties. The episode is #5 on this "best of" list, the result of an unscientific poll of 250 people in the New York metropolitan area who were asked to rank their favorite Twilight Zone episodes based on writing, performance, and compelling subject matter. The historic television series turned 50 this year, and to commemorate Rod Serling's masterpiece, the 25 best episodes are being chronicled here.

So what do we make of death? It is not simply a question of loss, because that evokes the human emotions of grief, pain, anger and remorse...and surfaces questions about fairness and timing concerning the passing of loved ones. No, death is another consideration, indistinct and inappreciable, but tragically final. What do we make of death?

"Long Live Walter Jameson" stars Kevin McCarthy, another long-time character actor with a handsomely-tenured career. We meet him as he lectures his history class in meticulous detail concerning the burning of Atlanta during the latter stages of the Civil War. In the classroom that day is his friend, professorial peer at this local institution of higher learning, and soon to be father-in-law. Professor Sam Kittridge, played by Edgar Stehli has heard the accolades about these all-too-realistic lectures from enthusiastic students, but he has an alternate reason for his attendance, one that defies logic.

"You're looking at Act One, Scene One, of a nightmare, not restricted to witching hours or dark, rainswept nights. Professor Walter Jameson, popular beyond words, who talks of the past as if it were the present, who conjures up the dead as if they were alive," Rod Serling narrates. "In the view of this man, Professor Samuel Kittridge, Walter Jameson has access to knowledge that couldn't come out of a volume of history, but rather from a book on black magic, which is to say that this nightmare begins at noon."

Kittridge has suspected for a while that Jameson has proceeded unnoticed through a Dorian Gray period. He hasn't seemed to age while Kittridge has aged dramatically. Piqued by the lecture, he leafs through a book containing Matthew Brady's famous photographs from the era, and astonishingly notices an officer that perfectly resembles Jameson. After dinner at home that night with his daughter and Jameson, Kittridge begins querying about the age issue and eventually confronts Jameson with the Brady photograph. It is, without question, one of the seminal Twilight Zone moments from the show's inspiring five-year run.

Confronted with the inevitable, Jameson unspools an incredible tale that took place 2,000 years ago. It is here that a rational viewer might close the plausibility window and draw the curtains, but as we've seen in many Twilight Zone episodes, Serling and his fellow script-writing peers (in this case, its Charles Beaumont) understand the parameters of believability. To go forward credibly, they must have the trust of the audience. They build it by placing the implausible in the hands of respected, educated, successful, trustworthy characters, for whom improbable situations are merely foundations for a puzzle as yet unsolved, a truth not yet reached. In "Back There," #23 of the best 25 Twilight Zone episodes, Serling handles the delicate issue of time travel similarly. He enhances the credibility of the subject matter by introducing it through a conversation among wealthy, educated men, who publicly scoff at the notion, but privately wonder...hmm, what if? In "Long Live Walter Jameson," the unlikely is debated by two professors, one of history, one of chemistry.

Jameson's story is fantastic. He claims he was unnerved by the idea of death..."When I thought of all the things there were to know, and the miserable few years there were to know them..." He sought answers. Finally, he succumbed to an experiment at the hands of an alchemist. After the procedure, however, Jameson had no further contact with him, no idea what took place, and no sense of success or failure. He learned of his fate slowly and painfully, as loved ones around him aged and perished while he continued on, and on, and on.

Kittridge deals with the incredulous events with stunned disbelief and the incorrigible curiosity of a man with extraordinary intelligence, bred to believe that an expanded mind is perhaps capable of unimaginable things. Simply put, he wants in. He's old and pleads for the secret..."It's what mankind has been waiting for." But, of course, there are no secrets to divulge. Anyway, as Jameson points out, the questions are deeper than the superficial desire. When does one want to stop aging? If you're young, you watch all around you grow old and pass on. If you're older, you might be preserved at a time when you're prone to illness. He's miserable with his everlasting life, and wishes for the death he so abhorred...the death he sought at great lengths to avoid so many years ago.

The father in Kittridge takes over at this time. How many wives have there been? What becomes of them as this folly unfolds every generation or so? Jameson decides that the complex jig is up, gathers his bride-to-be, and makes rather sudden plans to elope that night. He has no way of knowing that a former wife, played by the wonderful Estelle Winwood, is lurking outside. She confronts him in his study as he goes home to pack and eventually shoots him. Hearing the shot, Kittridge hurries across the street, and finds the mortally wounded Jameson as the 2000 years race through his body, like air from a punctured balloon.

"Last stop on a long journey," Serling concludes, "as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end."

So what do we make of death, or the unnatural preservation of life, as it were? We know this. Estelle Winwood, playing one of the many former wives of Walter Jameson, lived to be 102 years old. Edgar Stehli, playing Professor Kittridge, lived to the ripe old age of 89. As of this writing, Dodie Heath, playing Kittridge's daughter, is 72 years young and, Kevin McCarthy, Mr. Walter Jameson himself, is 95 years of age and still working! And, remarkably, he looks very much like the aging Walter Jameson after the gunshot wound robs him of his eternal life. Hmm, what if?