The 25 Best Twilight Zone Episodes...#9 - "Walking Distance"

Perspective. It's one of those characteristics so vital to everyone's state of mind, yet it's so elusive, so difficult to harness. Even though we all know the big-picture view is clearer, we allow our minds to dilute memories, to alter situations and events so as to render them less painful, perhaps, or more joyous. Selective memory, one labels it...an efficient way to promote self-satisfaction, or to validate our interpretation of life's episodes, but it is often not completely accurate.

Gig Young takes us on a tour of this phenomenon in one of the most powerful Twilight Zone teleplays, "Walking Distance," #9 on the list of the 25 best Twilight Zone episodes based on writing, performance, and compelling subject matter as judged by a group of 250 people in the New York metropolitan area. This survey and compilation celebrates the program's 50^th anniversary.

"Martin Sloan, age thirty-six" Mr. Serling begins. "Occupation: vice-president, ad agency, in charge of media. This is not just a Sunday drive for Martin Sloan. He perhaps doesn't know it at the time, but it's an exodus. Somewhere up the road he's looking for sanity. And somewhere up the road, he'll find something else."

"Walking Distance" is an early Rod Serling Twilight Zone script, only the fifth program aired in this extraordinary five year series. Like many Serling-penned efforts, it captures so eloquently and precisely the human condition. Gig Young's character, Martin Sloan, is an ornery, worn-out, high-strung, relentlessly-driven advertising executive who has become all too familiar with success and results at all costs. His car breaks down on a country road and the mechanic's suburban/rural pace doesn't match Sloan's need for immediacy. His bluster abates when a sign informs him he's merely "walking distance" from the town in which he grew up. He decides to visit while waiting for the repair.

Perhaps the walk, probably the only unstructured non-business related function in which he's participated in a while, clears his head and thoroughly transports him, but he arrives in his hometown at the time of his youth. Most improbably, he has arrived to witness and observe his OWN youth. He has escaped. The mile-and-a-half promenade crossed a gap of some 25 years, and what a gap it was. Imagine progressing in life so dramatically, you need a street sign to remind you of your proximity to an existence you so clearly embraced. But there it is for Martin Sloan - a chance to speak to his younger self, an opportunity to warn him of the jagged road up ahead that leads one away from the merry-go-rounds and the band concerts of childhood summer, an opportunity to plead with him to enjoy the moment.

"A man can think a lot of thoughts and walk a lot of pavements between afternoon and night," continues Serling's narration. "And to a man like Martin Sloan, 'til memory has suddenly become reality, a resolve can come just as clearly and inexorably as stars in the summer night. Martin Sloan is now back in time. And his resolve is to put in a claim to the past."

Who hasn't fantasized about this scenario? We all know there are things we'd do differently, and wouldn't an instructive word or two from your older self help immeasurably. And who doesn't dream of a life less cluttered...a time in which there is little responsibility and less pressure? Twilight Zone visits these situations memorably in several episodes, such as "A Stop at Willoughby," in which the path one travels in life seems inexorable, with events compounding daily, heaping upon each other, until the person on the merry-go-round becomes unrecognizable. It isn't uncommon to yearn for simpler, to crave the uncomplicated and unstructured, to long for the childhood life.

Martin Sloan speaks for all of us in "Walking Distance." He is at once the person we uniformly dislike in his arrogance, and the person we see in the mirror at least occasionally. He is stripped of his baggage when he confronts himself at age 12, and even more so, when he meets his parents. Whether your parents are alive and older or have passed on, there is an emotional impact to these scenes. Wouldn't most of us want to re-visit the parents we knew as children? What were they like when they were our age now? We should know. We were there. But we didn't focus day to day. We were too busy being unstructured and unencumbered. We were consumed with ourselves as we should have been.

There are multiple moments in Twilight Zone lore when identity-challenged characters reach out to parents who don't know them. This is accomplished with great effect in one of the most beloved films of all time, "It's A Wonderful Life," and countless others. But here, Martin Sloan and his father can converse, both knowing and, at least partially understanding, the situation into which they have been thrust. My goodness, what a wonderful dream.

Serling brings it all back to reality at episode's end. The father instructs Martin that it is not his time. He must go back. He knows things that have already happened. Some are sure to be painful. "Maybe when you go back, Martin, you'll find that there are merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are," his father says. "Maybe you haven't been looking in the right place. You've been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking ahead."

Many times, we don't, of course. Ahead is uncertain. Behind, we can relive that, or reshape it, at least. It makes one contemplate if at any time when we were young, we wondered about our older self. Did we see him or her peering at us from our future perch? Did we hear any words of wisdom or caution? If we did, we likely ignored them.

"Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media," Serling concludes. "Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives-trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone."