Time Enough at Last

The eighth episode of the sci-fi series The Twilight Zone is basically just one big irony.

The story begins by introducing the bookish Henry Bemis and his rather dreary life brought on by his wife, who sees reading as something that’s pointless and ridiculous and will stop at nothing to prevent Henry from doing so, and the strict boss he has at his bank job who’s only interested in efficiency and not education. So naturally, Henry would try to sneak a peek at anything he could read every chance he got, like how he goes into the bank vault every lunch break to go read his book. This particular habit of his is what saved him one day when the earth gets wiped out by a nuclear event which shook him unconscious in the safety of the vault. When he came to and realized that no one around him had survived the blast, he considers committing suicide until he sees a library. Like the “suffocated” bookworm that he is, he’s ecstatic about his discovery and proceeds to organize his ambitious reading list for the months to come only to be made useless when his glasses accidentally broke.  Quite a tragic turn of events, yes, and I think that’s just part of the message/idea of the episode. That message, I’m guessing, is that whoever you are, life rarely works out the way you want it too. Take Henry Bemis for example, a relatively decent man who wanted nothing more but the freedom and time to read his beloved books and after surviving the blast and discovering the library, it was like he was finally blessed with the two things he’s been wishing for only to be taken away by a cruel “plot twist” that was thrown his way. Life really is just like that I guess.