"Room for one more, honey."
Director: Jack Smight
Writer: Rod Serling
Composer: Stock music
Twenty-Two is one of the scariest and most frightening episodes of the original Twilight Zone (on a personal level) and has a concept easily repeated but rarely executed as well. It’s based on a short story called “The Bus-Conductor” written by E.F. Benson in 1906 and has seen itself even be mimicked in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark first volume (if you’re a kid that grew up in the 90s/early 2000s, you know what book I’m talking about).
It features a one Liz Powell (played by Barbara Nichols), a dancer who has been sent to the hospital due to the sheer amount of stress she’s been feeling of late. But every night, she has the same dream where she hears footsteps outside of her bedroom, and she follows a mysterious night nurse (played by Arline Sax) down to the basement, toward Room 22…the morgue! Except, Liz doesn’t think these are dreams, and she thinks these events are very real, and that someone in the hospital is trying to have her killed.
This is an odd episode. It’s not the greatest by any means and has quite a few flaws within it, but it sort of makes up for that in how unsettling it is. Not only is the premise a rather terrifying one, where someone’s dreams are so real that it’s hard to distinguish the dreamworld and real-world, but this episode, like “Long Distance Call,” was shot on video due to budgetary constraints, and similar to “Long Distance Call,” this method of filming is cheaper but with a good director it’s easy to overlook that, and Jack Smight is one such director in this case.
It’d be interesting to compare the original story from 1906 to this one from 1961. Serling and Smight no doubt had an interesting time adapting that story to the screen and to a modern audience (just the fact that it’s called “The Bus-Conductor” likely means it didn’t even take place in the same setting). This story feels timeless in how it’s executed and how simple the premise is.
And it’s timeless in how it’s told. Smight does an excellent job of keeping the shadows pressed against the far sides of the room when the camera is in Powell’s room, but when the nighttime comes and Liz has to follow the night nurse, the shadows suddenly curl up around the rooms from the edges. It doesn’t necessarily create a dream-like feel to the episode, but it’s more like it’s shrouding everything in darkness and shadow to create that mysterious air that dreams often have, where the dreamer can’t make out all the details except for what’s most important. In this case, what’s most important is that night nurse that Liz is following.
The night nurse herself doesn’t really have much of a character outside of her unsettling walk into the morgue and then sudden return, and that horrifying delivery of “Room for one more, honey.” Arline Sax does well enough in the room, managing to keep a straight face, one that just tells you how it is. It is interesting, though, how she is essentially a Greek Siren: a beautiful woman (or, in the legends, a mermaid, but whatever) that would tempt anyone to them before they would kill them. This night nurse does a similar thing, except she isn’t singing to Liz nor is she really doing anything besides instigating the dream to continue on like normal.
That is one thing that the episode has going against it: the reasoning for Liz’s dream. Why does she follow the night nurse down to the morgue? Why doesn’t she just stop and turn back around into her room? It could be interpreted that she just follows the natural pattern of the dream, but that implies that she’s awake. If she’s asleep, then isn’t it her mind that does all the moving for her? The episode, in that regard, manages to tow the line of whether or not Liz is awake or if she’s asleep. If she’s awake, then she would theoretically have full agency over her movement, but as the episode implies, she’s under a lot of stress and anxiety and this isn’t going to make it better, so her body is just rolling with what feels normal to her, despite how terrifying it clearly is for her.
Barbara Nichols does an solid job as Liz Powell, a woman riddled with fear and anxiety. It’s not quite as bad as the woman in “Eye of the Beholder,” but that’s because it’s a different kind of fear. In that episode, the fear comes with not being able to fit in; in this episode, it’s both the fear of death and the anxiety of not knowing what’s real or not. In that regard, Nichols plays Liz quite well. She has a few good line deliveries and shows that she’s a woman with conviction that just falls prey to some pretty terrifying nightmares.
Fredd Wayne plays Barney Kramer, Liz’s sleazy manager that only sees her every few months. He’s mostly there to give backstory on Liz’s occupation and just what the hell a dancer is doing in the hospital without a physical injury. Could be that she had an injury and got stressed from it, but it’s never brought up. He plays the role just fine; he’s basically a poor man’s Moe Green from The Godfather.
The only other major character (with more than a single speaking line) is the doctor, played by Jonathan Harris. Now this guy is a sleaze-ball. He doesn’t believe a thing Liz has to say and runs his eyes over her more times than the episode has minutes. He also barely gives her the time of day to speak her mind and while he does offer the good suggestion of lucid dreaming, it’s only after a ridiculous revelation that he starts to turn toward her side.
But, the strength of the episode lies not with the characters and more with the hair-raising tension that comes with the dream sequences and the ultimate scare of the night nurse beckoning Liz to her death. And because it’s all such a simple sequence of events (breaking a glass, hearing footsteps, following footsteps, then going down an elevator) it almost feels as if this could happen to anyone in any given hospital. It’s also the fear of almost dying that makes it a little more unsettling. It’s that idea of “what if I did go?” or “that could’ve been me” that pervades the repetitive nature of the dream and makes it all the more sinister.
“Twenty-Two” isn’t going to break any ground for new fans of the series, but it is a good scary one for the Halloween season. It’s got an unsettling atmosphere, an interesting premise, and some very good tension all around to keep you on the edge of your seat to the very end. And just remember: there’s never room for one more.
***SPOILER SECTION***
Alright let’s talk about how bad that effect on the plane at the end of the episode is. I mean I’m pretty sure they just had the model of the plane and then some dude from behind a black curtain just lit it on fire. I get that they were on a low budget, but it’s painful to watch and removes almost ALL of the tension that comes with an otherwise horrifying reveal.
Still, the idea is there. She wasn’t dreaming all along…right? Tough to say. On first watch I thought that she was totally not dreaming, and that the night nurse was trying to somehow have her killed in the morgue (let your imagination run wild to get freaked out just by that concept). But on second watch it’s possible that she just had a premonition of sorts, although, to the bad doctor’s credit, that doesn’t necessarily explain how she knew that the morgue was Room 22. I suppose it can be left of to interpretation.
One of the things that I do love about the ending is how cheeky and how sly the night nurse is when she watches Liz run away and then she just seals the door. It’s like she’s Lady Death who just sealed the fate of all those on-board; very Final Destination of this show, in a way. She just seems so evil and happy about what she’s about to do, Arline Sax nailed that response and that final moment.
Normally when I think about this episode I think about the second dream, the lucid one, and then this revealed ending. Both are built up to very well and both are riddled with tension. The moment the glass breaks in the airport, you, like Liz, know what’s going to happen, and as she goes through the motions, you can’t help but feel that string of tension tighten and tighten until it’s revealed that the night nurse is still there!
It haunts me.
Like I said earlier, this isn’t one of the “great” Twilight Zone episodes but it is one of the scariest for me, but it’s one I do enjoy watching because I prefer this style of horror, where it’s not about the gore or the monsters, it’s about what you think you know but don’t, about what’s real and not, and about that existential dread of inevitability.
However let’s leave horror behind for a few episodes and focus on something even more relatable than attractive killer nurses: gambling. Specifically, gambling one’s own voice. How much would you bet to not talk for a full year? Find out what some would do in “The Silence”!
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