The best part of New Years, for me at least, has become the SciFi Channel’s annual 48 hour Twilight Zone Marathon (if only for proof that the SciFi Channel can actually program beyond horrible fifth rate horror films).
My favorite episode of TZ is still “The Obsolete Man” featuring Burgess Meredith whose four appearances in the series were all above par (my wife says I’m gradually becoming Henry Bemis). Anyway, “The Obsolete Man” is interesting for two reasons.
First, is its riff on totalitarian states. Meredith’s character, Romney Wordsworth, is proclaimed obsolete by a faceless but powerful bureacracy and sentenced to death. By the end of the episode, Wordsworth achieves a pyrrhic victory against his oppressors — managing to take along his primary persecutor but not, apparently, effecting any real change in the system (which is, perhaps, accurate with respect to the difficulty in altering totalitarian systems, but not, alas, a message of hope). The episode concludes with a Rod Serling voice-over saying,
Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the dignity, the worth, the rights of man . . . that state is obsolete.
But the reality, of course, is that totalitarian states and ideologies can survive for extraordinarily long periods of time without becoming strictly obsolete.
The second, and even more shocking, aspect of the episode is Wordsworth’s explicit Christian faith. Wordsworth is declared obsolete because there he is a librarian and there are no more books. His persecutor compares being a librarian to being a priest — the state has proven there is no God, so there is no need for priests. Wordsworth responds that there is a god, prompting his presecutor to yell,
The State has proven that there is no God!
Wordsworth replies,
You cannot erase God with an edict.
Later, when luring his persecutor into a trap, Wordsworth reads from a Bible he has hidden and treats his persecutor to Psalm 53:1.
I don’t think you’d ever see anything like that anywhere near network television these days (I certainly don’t remember ever seeing anything like it in my decades of obssessive-compulsive television watching). The universal pop culture shibboleth is that the religious person is generally the enemy of freedom — or granola enough not to actually hold any ideas that might make the audience uncomfortable.