Exploring The Twilight Zone, Episode 45: "The Trouble with Templeton"

Can you ever really go home again, even if your director is the guy who made Tootsie?

The Twilight Zone, Episode #45: "The Trouble with Templeton" (airdate 12/09/60)

The Plot: An actor in the twilight of his life is still haunted by the loss of his one true love.

The Goods: Booth Templeton (Brian Aherne) observes a "new guest" paying attention to young Mrs. Templeton by the swimming pool on his palatial grounds. He is rueful but not surprised, accepting her indiscretions as the price he must pay for marrying such a young woman. Templeton, a renowned star of the stage, knows that he's living in his twilight years, and he's occupied by memories of Laura (Pippa Scott), his first wife and one true love, who died at the age of 25. But is the past really as he remembered?

Sydney Pollack is excellent as Arthur Willis, a new director who has been brought on to light a fire under Templeton, whose attention and focus have been fading for some time. When Willis rages at Templeton, the older man walks out of rehearsal, and straight into a time decades before, when he was at the height of his stardom and Laura was alive and well. It's one of those "transportive" episodes, wherein a character finds himself somewhere ... else, without knowing how, exactly, he got there. The ache of nostalgia and sense of loss is palpable, and Aherne delivers a moving performance as Templeton, a man who left an essential part of himself in the past and desperately wants it back. The ending is handled with dramatic flair. A top-notch episode, earning itself an A-.

The Trivia: It's somewhat of a shock to see Pollack, who died three years ago, as a handsome 26-year-old firebrand. He acted on stage and in television in the mid-50s. He directed an episode of TV show Shotgun Slade the year after he appeared in TZ, graduating to feature films in 1965 with The Slender Thread.

On the Next Episode: Three crooks get ahold of a camera that takes pictures of the future. Our friends at Film School Rejects will be covering the next five episodes next week, so set your feed reader / Twitter subscription / phasers on stun, respectively.

Catching up: Episodes covered at Twitch | Episodes covered at Film School Rejects

We're running through all 156 of the original Twilight Zone episodes, and we aren't doing it alone! Our friends at Film School Rejects have also entered the Zone, only on alternating weeks. So definitely tune in over at FSR and feel free to also follow along on Twitter accounts @ScreenAnarhcy and @rejectnation.