A Thing About Machines
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“A Thing About Machines” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
[edit] Details
- Episode number: 40
- Season: 2
- Original air date: October 28, 1960
- Writer: Rod Serling
- Director: David Orrick McDearmon
- Producer: Buck Houghton
[edit] Cast
- Richard Haydn
- Barbara Stuart
- Barney Phillips
[edit] Opening Narration
"This is Mr. Bartlett Finchley, age forty-eight, a practicing sophisticate who writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He's a bachelor and a recluse with few friends, only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He has no interests save whatever current annoyances he can put his mind to. He has no purpose to his life except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhors. In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley is a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century, and who in just a moment will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings. Next stop for Mr. Bartlett Finchley - the Twilight Zone."
[edit] Synopsis
An ill-tempered writer who reviles and constantly abuses machines starts to think machines are conspiring against him. The people he tells about this write him off as paranoid, but eventually every machine in his house (including his car) turns on him. His typewriter types, "GET OUT OF HERE, FINCHLEY." The TV shows the same message, as does the phone. Finchley runs from the house to be confronted by his car. The car chases him to his pool and pushes him in. He sinks to the bottom and drowns. When the police pull him out of the water, they can not explain how he could sink to the bottom when he was not weighted down (normally, a body would float). They figure he may have had a heart attack.
[edit] Closing Narration
"Yes, it could just be. It could just be that Mr. Bartlett Finchley succumbed from a heart attack and a set of delusions. It could just be that he was tormented by an imagination as sharp as his wit and as pointed as his dislikes. But as perceived by those attending, this is one explanation that has left the premises with the deceased. Look for it filed under 'M' for machines in the Twilight Zone."
[edit] Trivia
The late Richard Haydn made one of his final appearances in the TV pilot The Hugga-Bunch, as an appropriately-sharp-tongued (yet much more likeable than Finchley) bookworm-librarian...who is, literally, a giant worm. "There's nothing more to say, except Goodbye. You'll never come back. Have a nice trip."
