The Lateness of the Hour

"The Lateness of the Hour"
	The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 2; Episode 8
Directed by	Jack Smight
Written by	Rod Serling
Production code	173-3662
Original air date	December 2, 1960
Guest appearance(s)
	Inger Stevens as Jana; John Hoyt as Dr. Loren; Irene Tedrow as Mrs. Loren;

"The Lateness of the Hour" is episode 44 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on December 2, 1960 on CBS. One of six episodes shot on videotape in a short-lived experiment aimed to cut costs.

Opening narration

The residence of Dr. William Loren, which is in reality a menagerie for machines. We're about to discover that sometimes the product of man's talent and genius can walk amongst us untouched by the normal ravages of time. These are Dr. Loren's robots, built to functional as well as artistic perfection. But in a moment Dr. William Loren, wife and daughter will discover that perfection is relative, that even robots have to be paid for, and very shortly will be shown exactly what is the bill.

Plot

Jana, the sensitive daughter of a creative genius, Dr. William Loren, is distraught over her parents' reliance on her father's five seemingly perfect servants. After Jana pushes one of the maids down the stairs, who then gets up without injury, it becomes apparent that the servants are robots built by Dr. Loren, complete with programmed memories and personalities. Jana feels trapped, and wishes to go out; her father believes he is protecting her from the outside world. Even the windows are kept perpetually shut. The dismayed Jana repeatedly looks at the family photo album and asks her parents questions about the pictures.

She implores her father to dismantle the robots before he and her mother become completely dependent on them. Dr. Loren feels that doing so would destroy his work, which he believes is a form of life. When her request becomes an ultimatum, Dr. Loren complies in an effort to save his relationship with his daughter. Using a remote control he keeps in his pocket, he orders the robots to his basement workshop, where they are to wait to be disassembled. The machines express concern, asking how it could be that their service was substandard; each of them articulates their certainty about their abilities and accomplishments as perfect servants. Dr. Loren again orders them downstairs.

Once the robots are out of the picture, Jana is thrilled and begins looking forward to a new life with travel, parties, friends and the prospect of finding a man, marrying and having children. Her parents react strangely to these happy goals and this, combined with a series of sudden realizations (including the fact that the family photo album contains no picture of her as a child) prompts Jana to arrive at the shocking awareness that, while she is much more emotionally sophisticated than the robots, she is, in fact, also a robot. Like the servants, all of her past memories were created by Dr. Loren.

Dr. Loren tries to explain that he and his wife were childless and wanted someone to love, and that they see her as their daughter. Jana is convinced that she was built not to be a beloved daughter, but to be merely a prop. She exclaims "I'm a machine" and repeatedly bangs her arm against a railing while yelling "No pain". She becomes conscious of the fact that she cannot even feel love. This discovery causes Jana such anguish that her "father" recognizes it is not possible for her to go on this way. At some point later, the Dr. and Mrs. Loren are seen relaxing as before, but it is revealed that Dr. Loren has erased the Jana's identity and memory and now utilizes her as a replacement for the maid known as Nelda, who wore a blank expression while skillfully giving Mrs. Loren daily shoulder massages.

Closing narration

Let this be the postscript — Should you be worn out by the rigors of competing in a very competitive world, if you're distraught from having to share your existence with the noises and neuroses of the twentieth century, if you crave serenity but want it full time and with no strings attached, get yourself a workroom in the basement, and then drop a note to Dr. and Mrs. William Loren. They're a childless couple who made comfort a life's work, and maybe there are a few do-it-yourself pamphlets still available... in the Twilight Zone.

End credits

Directed by Jack Smight
Written by Rod Serling
Produced by Buck Houghton
Inger Stevens as Jana
John Hoyt as Dr. Loren
Irene Tedrow as Mrs. Loren
Tom Palmer as Robert
Mary Gregory as Nelda
Valley Keene as Suzanne
Doris Karnes as Gretchen
Jason Johnson as Jensen

Production

"The Lateness of the Hour" was one of six Twilight Zone episodes shot on videotape instead of film in an attempt to cut costs. By November 1960, The Twilight Zone's season-two had already broadcast five episodes and finished filming sixteen. However, at a cost of about $65,000 per episode, the show was exceeding its budget. As a result, six consecutive episodes were videotaped at CBS Television City and eventually transferred to 16-millimeter film ["kinescoped"] for syndicated rebroadcasts. Total savings on editing and cinematography amounted to around $30,000 for all six entries, not enough to justify the loss of depth of visual perspective, which made the shows look like stage-bound live TV dramas (e.g. Playhouse 90, also produced at CBS). The experiment was deemed a failure and never attempted again.[1]

References

Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion Silman-James Press; 2 edition (December 1992) ISBN 978-1879505094

Sources

DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0
Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[1] Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion Silman-James Press; 2 edition (December 1992) ISBN 978-1879505094

The Twilight Zone (1959) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgment Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"
Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander with Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"