Twilight Zone Take-Over #5 - The Shelter

"Normal? I don’t know. I don’t know what normal is. I thought I did once. I don’t anymore.”

Director: Lamont Johnson

Writer: Rod Serling

Composer: Stock music

This episode draws a clear comparison to something along the lines of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” as both feature a set of neighbors turning on each other, and both feature a massive event that could easily instill a sense of paranoia in the hearts and minds of many 1960s adults. The only reason one could place this one over that of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is that this one directly tackles the idea of prejudices and its premise isn’t so flimsy. Both have legendary performances, and while “Monsters” is well-known for its spectacular closing narration, “The Shelter” could also have one such narration and has one of the more haunting closing lines in any Twilight Zone episode.

“The Shelter” is about a small neighborhood not far from New York celebrating Bill (Larry Gates)’s birthday. All of his close friends and their families are there and it’s a nice time until Bill’s son Paul (Michael Burns) says that there’s a weird message on the radio. That message is that there was an unidentified flying object headed straight for New York, and the President has urged all those nearby into their fallout shelters. Bill, having prepared for such a thing, immediately gets to work getting his family safe, but the other neighbors don’t have shelters and beg Bill to let them in; however, Bill doesn’t have enough room.

Immediately the emotional thrust should be quite clear: Bill has room for three (and no more!) and even then they may not have long enough down there to outlast the radiation up top. He can’t fit anyone else, let alone all the families that keep barging into his house. Each character, though, kind of has their own reason for trying to get in: Jerry is Bill’s best friend, Marty has a newborn baby, and Frank…well actually Frank doesn’t have a great reason he’s just there to cause problems.

One of the more overt flaws in the episode is something that’s been discussed before, and it’s the standoffish attitude that’s directed toward the women of the episode. Now, Grace Stockton (Peggy Stewart) plays a woman that is afraid but she isn’t a damsel. She’s working hard and working fast to help Bill get the shelter ready to go. While she does have a moment of sharp panic and anxiety during the prep, it is rectified and she’s all the better for it.

Before we get to the powerhouse performance and star of the show, let’s discuss the other major performances and characters, because there are a lot and we only need to hit the highlights.

Jack Albertson (whom you may know as Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) plays the aforementioned Jerry, and while initially, it seems he is going to spearhead the massive coming mob into the shelter, he does take the high road. He is the first to beg and plead to have Bill open the shelter up but he does come to a decent understanding of the situation and does his best to hold off the mob while he still has his wits about him.

The two real pot-stirrers are Marty and Frank, who come to literal blows (rather hokey, but it was the 60s) as well as a major disagreement over who deserves to be in the shelter. Unlike "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," which handled prejudice insomuch as it pertained to our own personal judgments, this episode tackles prejudice in terms of ethnicity, as Marty is Italian (he plays the character with an Italian accent but it's never explicitly said) and Frank is quite your typical white suburban frumpy older man.

Frank deems Marty unworthy of not just being in the shelter but even in the country, to which the two come to a major disagreement, and this is where the episode gets a leg up in terms of social commentary. This is no longer about survival it's about why one person thinks they are inherently better than the other. The fact that there is ethnic profiling is merely a catalyst for all of this.

However, our hero Bill is not spared all of this. He is tortured, repeatedly, by his neighbors begging to let him in and he so desperately wants to but if he did they would run out of air and run out of food in days. There's logic behind his reasoning and he can only spare this group empathy only through the thick metal doors to the shelter.

It's also interesting commentary, for the time, about preparedness for the bomb. Nowadays such a thing probably wouldn't be relevant without changing what the major threat was, but still the idea of one family taking a little time here and there from the neighborhood cookouts to prepare for a massive enemy strike is interesting. It is difficult to tell if the episode is implying people go out and create fallout shelters right away, because, what if the attack doesn't come? The only response to that is: what if it does?

And that's really the crux of the whole episode. It would have been a perfectly fine and interesting episode to see how the United States handles a nuclear missile headed for New York, but the darkest pits of the Twilight Zone aren't found where normal people can't be found, it's right in the neighborhood, right around the block, right with the people that looked so friendly. Keeping this episode in a cramped, small house for the most part really allowed the focus to be on the situation and the characters, and as an audience, it's interesting to see where they start and end over the course of the episode. If you loved "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" you're really doing yourself a disservice by not going out and checking this one out.

***SPOILER SECTION***

As great as the buildup to the conclusion is, it is the harried ending that really sells this episode. It's so frantic and quite honestly terrifying; you forget that there is an impending strike coming and instead can only remember that these people are about to rip this family to shreds. While the irony that they are destroying the very thing that will keep them safe is not lost on me, it's still mortifying to watch the metal door get caved in. 

And Larry Gate's performance as Bill at the end is simply breathtaking. He's worn, tired, haggard, and most of all, confused. He genuinely seems like he doesn't know these people anymore like he doesn't even know where he is. Just from that performance alone, it's obvious things will never be the same again. 

One other reason that I prefer this to "Monsters" is simply the realistic element. How many false alarms were given in the real world? How many times might something like this has actually happened? This episode could have just been footage from some regular birthday party gone horribly wrong, and it's written, directed, and performed that way. There's no takeaway or silly premise about aliens, this is a real threat and, unfortunately, a real reaction. That element makes it so profound and impactful to look back on. 

But let's move away from realism for a moment and take a look at a disappearing act. You see three men were rocketed into space, were lost for twenty-four hours, and then came back. Except everyone only remembers two. Whatever happened to the third. Whatever happened to ED HARRINGTON? Find out as we dive into the mysteries of "And When the Sky was Opened." See you then! 

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