It’s still plagued by radiation poisoning from the nuclear war that destroyed everything a decade ago. There’s this very complicated, very human need for proof at the heart of “Old Man,” and that gives the episode its very elemental power and provides for the horror that animates the climax, where our hero walks through the valley of the shadow of death, not even his god to comfort him.Īs written by Rod Serling from a short story by Henry Slesar, “Old Man” opens in a very familiar way for this show: A fellow named Goldsmith (frequent Zone actor John Anderson, in his last role on the show) comes down to the people of a little town to tell them the Old Man has told him the canned food they long to eat is no good.
This story would have had a very different moral: Blind faith is bad.
But look at it from the perspective of French-the leader of some army regiment or self-styled militia-and assume that, for whatever reason, his plan had worked. On the surface, this is a rather leisurely story of a man, his mysterious benefactor, the townspeople who’ve listened to them this long, and the new man who comes to town and sets about blowing up the old system to benefit himself. I’m not precisely sure that everything about this episode works, but it, nevertheless, belongs to my favorite class of Zone episodes: ones where the story has so many things going on and so many themes running through its head that there are several it barely stops to consider.
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