Description: Season 2, Episode 26
Air Date: May 5, 1961
Plot Summary: A man about to be executed claims that the entire world is nothing more than his dream.
Review: Bringing an end to the hot streak of mediocrity is a pretty decent episode. The story is like a cross between "Inception," "Groundhog Day," and a ton of other films and TV shows that have borrowed heavily from this concept. We meet a guy, named Weaver, shortly after he has been sentenced for a murder we don't get details toward. Weaver believes that the events unfolding are simply a dream he has each night; the people in this dream change positions as they are random individuals from his life that his subconscious fills in. Although Weaver is certain that the dream will eventually end, the pain of being executed is real to him, and he would rather not continue to experience it over and over. Due to the complexity of the dream, various people try to help out Weaver after he proves to them that he has imagined everything. Despite his best efforts, Weaver fails to prevent his own execution, and his dream starts anew with all the people switching their roles. And that's all she wrote.
The story is surprisingly more simplistic than you'd imagine, but I think that helps make the concepts easier to grasp. I do wish they spent more time discussing the themes and questioning reality, but I understand they wanted to focus more on the nightmarish fear a person experiences. While we have a ton of reference points to understand the episode better, this was definitely innovative for the time. I liked the notion that the nightmare could not be escaped even when the dreamer realized the situation. More so, the episode examines the age old notion of solipsism: that you, the individual, are certainly the only real person. Could the world simply be in the mind of one individual? Could our own desire to be real establish the world because the dreamer wills it so? It's some heavy shit that's for sure. All I know is that I am either the realest dream ever, or I'm someone's voice of reason or something!
I loved this episode. The main premise of "is this life all a dream?" is a very intriguing topic. People have been debating this for a very long time.
ReplyDeleteI think that the characters here do spend alot of time debating this theme and questioning reality. There's the long debate about it between the prisoner and the district attorney when he visits him in his cell, and there's the long debating of it at the DA's home when the prosecuting attorney (who kind of looks like Brad Pitts) comes over begging the DA to at least consider the option that the man should be let off on psycho. The other prisoner, the big guy in the cell across the hall also tells him how he should be let off because he has a "loose cog", and they can't burn guys with loose cogs.