This episode is bad. Real bad. Inexplicably bad. Especially when you consider that at it's best, the Twilight Zone was groundbreaking television. A show that despite heavy doses of 1950's science fiction campiness still holds up in terms of innovation and storytelling. This particular story follows two children named Jeb (the son) and inexplicably, "Sport" (daughter) whose parents are having marital problems and are on the verge of divorce. Now, if you know the Twilight Zone, you'd expect a twisted, yet somehow insightful tale that skews the 1950's ideas of divorce and family into strange directions.
Instead, you get writing that seems like it was written in between lines of cocaine and constant strikes to the head with a sock full of lead pesos. But what makes this stand out from the infinite mass of bad television are a number of strange production and directorial choices. Here is the short list:
1. The parents are portrayed as shallow, uncaring WASPs, yet both their children speak with weird country bumpkin "Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn" accents that seem to come from nowhere.
2. The daughter's voice sounds like it was dubbed by an older actress who smoked throughout her teen years, up through her forties, and up to the recording date for most of her lines here. I'm 99% sure the voice was dubbed, but have zero idea why anyone would think this was a good idea.
3. The old woman who presides over the Neverland-like world on the other side of the "Bewitchin' Pool" is completely unintelligible. She is more difficult to understand than Lando's co-pilot in "Return of the Jedi", though she does bear a striking resemblance.
4. Instead of doing kid-stuff in what is supposed to be some kind of kid's Utopia, Grandma Mumbles has them do chores.
I guess the reason I even bothered to blog this is because of the whole "fall 8 times, get up 9" factor. If the show could survive a trainwreck like this, or the hour-long "Jess Belle" episode, maybe we can all avoid drowning in our own personal "Bewitchin' Pools".
