Yeah, the hypocrisy is pretty rich here. Then again, they wouldn't be the first genocidal conqueror to adopt noble-sounding language.

In the first three seasons Serling, Matheson, and Beaumont were very charged up and doing their best work, with some assist from George Clayton Johnson. The fourth season almost didn't happen, and while they managed to pull it out for the most part, the switch to hourlong episodes seems to have taken it out of…

I respectfully disagree. "Black Leather Jackets" has big spots of ineptitude, sure, mainly in the aliens' clueless choice of aging delinquents as their subversive agents. But because of its serious tone, when it goes wrong it's still a source of healthy unintentional laughs. Other times there's a surreal paranoia to…

In The Twilight Zone Companion Marc Scott Zicree calls From Agnes with Love pretty well. It's a story about a supercomputer - or from our perspective, a giant pocket calculator - ruining a man's love life. Problem is, his what now? Jim has no love life and really no prospects for getting any. (Read that as you…

Well, I guess that's the closest we're going to get to a happy ending in this particular fictional world. Still, poor Marilyn.

The standard models might have been a budget move, so they could limit the number of actors they had to cast.

Ah, so someone else did get the Dr. Evil thing.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a great novel. But really you can't go wrong with one of his short story collections. They all have gems in them. If you can find one with "Fever Dream" grab it. That is one great creepy story.

Could also have been just a matter of talent, that the guy who had the best audition was fairly handsome but didn't hit the gym that much. Now that we have Daniel Craig Bond instead of Sean Connery Bond I suspect the story if shot now would have to be recast.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's a genetic impulse to shun partners with faulty eyesight. If there is, I don't have it, and most of my friends don't seem to.

I just did an online price check. Apparently lucite chairs still have a certain cachet with people who have more money than sense.

That's an interesting question. Can you buy compassion? Is Salvadore Ross a good man when the guy who REALLY doesn't want to be his father-in-law shoots him, or does he just think he is? In this episode it's kind of thrilling to watch him dodge karma for all this time, even as you know it's going to bite him in the…

"Number 12 Looks Just Like You" affected me deeply the first time I saw it. Pretty sure I was a teenager then. Not a teenage girl, but still, that's the time of life when the feelings that everybody wants you to be something you're not are strongest. It remains effective on that level, if maybe a little heavy…

Lansing also played Dann Florek's rabbi (in police, not Judaic terms) on an early Law & Order. Inevitably, he was on the take.

Well if you credit the idea that his coworker was in danger of being convicted - which I don't, really, but I know the episode is trying to sell it - it's better for Andrews to confess and exonerate him than get run down in the street.

"Do you have any openings" is on the list of Least Romantic Pickup Lines.

Working in Hollywood Serling probably knew some guys with wives 40 or at least more than 20 years younger than them. Bogey was a quarter century older than Bacall, after all.

I thought of that, actually. They could still be two oldsters in love, given the right amount of cryonic preservation.

The actors in "The Long Morrow" do a fairly good job of selling the love story that drives the action. Mariette Hartley is someone I know from only a couple of places (flirting Spock when he was acting like a caveman, some Polaroid commercials she did with James Garner in the 70s) but she gives a convincing…

Oh, another thing to praise about "You Drive" is the score by Jerry Goldsmith. There's a bit of a modern jazz influence. It's jaunty, but adds to the tension rather than diluting it.