The Twilight Zone: Vol. 20
Volume 20 ofThe Twilight ZoneDVD collection opens with "Elegy," a first-season episode in which three astronauts are forced to land on an Earthlike asteroid where all of the people seem frozen in time. The only exception is an elderly "caretaker" (Cecil Kellaway), who explains that the asteroid is actually a cemetery where the dead are posed in the posthumous fulfillment of their fondest wishes.  This was the third episode written by the prolificTZcontributor Charles Beaumont, and it ends with the requisite twist."The Thirty-Fathom Grave" is from the fourth season, when episodes were expanded to one-hour length. The cast includes such TV stalwarts as Simon Oakland and Bill Bixby, but the standout is Mike Kellin, who plays Chief Bell, a crewman on a present-day Navy destroyer who's haunted by visions of crewmates who drowned in a World War II submarine 20 years earlier. When the destroyer investigates a mysterious noise heard from inside the derelict sub, Bell suffers a nervous breakdown, and it remains unclear whether the submarine specters were real or figments of Bell's survivor-guilt-ridden imagination. Although it suffers from slow pacing, the episode is redeemed by Kellin's intense performance."A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" is a fifth-season entry starring Patrick O'Neal as the aging husband of a ruthless gold digger (Ruta Lee). He's hopelessly in love with this unbearable harridan (a dreadful lapse of dramatic logic), so he begs his scientist brother to be the first human to test a dangerous youth serum. The potion works too well, however, and the shrewish wife gets an unexpected comeuppance that's as deserved as it is dramatically unsatisfying. It's far from a classic episode, butTZcollectors take note: this is one of the few episodes to be withheld from syndication, so it's a relative rarity.--Jeff Shannon