Z-View Twilight Zone: “Walking Distance” [Season 1, Episode 5]

Twilight Zone: “Walking Distance” [Season 1, Episode 5]
Original Air Date: October 30, 1959

Director: Robert Stevens

Writer: Rod Serling

Starring: Gig Young

The Overview:  Beware of Spoilers…

Martin Sloan [Young] is a 36 year old New York business executive.  Everything for him is rush, rush, rush.  While on a drive back to the city Sloan finds himself at a gas station one and a half miles from the little town he grew up in.  He decides to take a walk to the town while the gas attendant services his car.

Once in the town Sloan finds nothing has changed.  The prices are the same… the people are the same.  Somehow he has gone back in time.  He goes to his home and his parents seeing a grown man claiming to be their son and send him away.  Sloan decides to find himself as a boy to give himself advice.

You know that old saying, “You can’t go home again” — Sloan finds out it is true.

Final Thoughts:  This episode doesn’t work for me.  When Sloan meets his parents his efforts to convince them of who he is are weak.  When his father does learn that somehow his son has come back to the past, dad basically tells his son to leave and go back to the future [not the movie, but the time he came from].  Sloan getting a limp because of something he caused to happen in the past is a nice touch.  Ron Howard has a brief cameo in one of his first acting roles.

Rating: