The Storm
VIDEOGRAPHY, NOTES, AND SOURCES
Episodes of The Storm that Rod Serling wrote for WKRC-TV
All episodes 30 mins.; produced and directed by Bob Huber; associate producer Robert McHendrix
“Keeper of the Chair,” July 10, 1951
“The Air Is Free,” July 31, 1951
“Vertical Deep,” September 25, 1951
“Phone Call from Louie,” September 30, 19513
“The Pitch,” October 7, 19511
“Grady Everett for the People,” October 14, 1951
“No Gods to Serve,” October 21, 1951
“The Guest,” October 28, 19513
“Pandora’s Box,” November 6, 19513
“Mr. Finchley vs. the Bomb,” November 13, 1951
“The Sands of Tom,” November 20, 1951
“Aftermath,” November 27, 19513
“The Last Performance,” December 4, 1951
“The Time Element,” December 11, 1951
“Ward 8,” December 18, 1951
“Law Nine Concerning Christmas,” December 25, 19511
“Sight Unseen,” January 1, 195223
“Those Who Wait,” January 8, 1952
“All the Little People,” January 15, 19523
“The Twilight Rounds,” January 22, 19521
“No Gods to Serve” (repeat performance), January 29, 1952
“No Gods to Serve” (repeat performance), February 9, 1952
“The Mind’s Eye,” February 16, 19523
“Exodus,” February 23, 19523
“The Steel Casket,” March 1, 1952
“The Blues for Joey Menotti,” March 8, 1952
“No Language but a Cry,” March 15, 19523
“The Cause,” March 22, 1952
“The Night Cry,” March 29, 1952
“As Yet Untitled,” April 5, 19523
“Train West,” April 12, 19523
“The Mission Is Murder,” April 19, 19523
“A Machine to Answer the Question,” April 26, 1952
Sources: Cincinnati Enquirer; Cincinnati Post; Cincinnati Times-Star; TV Dial (a regional precursor to TV Guide); Rod Serling Papers, 1943–1971, Wisconsin Historical Society; Rod Serling Papers, 1945–1969, Department of Special Collections, UCLA Library; “The Life of Rod Serling.”
“Keeper of the Chair”
Synopsis: Paul Rierdon has worked as an executioner on death row for ten years and he can remember the name of every inmate who spent his final moments strapped into the chair, waiting for Paul to flip the switch. Well, every name except one. He cannot seem to recall the name of the first man executed under his watch, and this memory lapse has begun to trouble him. George Franks has been working as a guard on the block for only a few weeks and has spent most of this time tormenting Paul about his inability to recall the man’s name and stoking his guilt by asking whether he has ever executed an innocent man.
The only other person with whom Paul socializes is a mentally deficient inmate, Louie, who is fascinated by the electric chair. Paul indulges Louie by letting him flip the switch that would activate the chair if Paul had not turned off the power; sometimes, Paul even sits in the chair so that Louie can pretend he is executing the snitch who sent him to prison.
When George’s tormenting becomes unbearable, Paul offers Louie a chance to make their game more authentic: Paul will strap himself into the chair and wear a hood when Louie flips the switch. Louie eagerly agrees. Paul plans to trick George into sitting in the chair and to leave the power on. He tells Louie to pay no attention to the protests of the man in the chair—they’re only part of making the game more authentic.
As expected, on Louie’s next visit, he finds Paul hooded and strapped into the chair. He warns Louie that the power is on and begs him not to throw the switch. As instructed, Louie ignores him, and Paul then begs George for help. But not only does George ignore Paul’s pleas, Louie claims that no one else is in the room. He throws the switch, inadvertently performing an actual execution.
When prison authorities investigate, Louie tells them the whole story, including Paul’s obsession with George Franks. They discover that he was the first man Paul executed and that two months after Franks’s death, new evidence proved his innocence.
Louie executed Paul Rierdon, but he had help—from the ghost of an innocent man and the conscience of a guilty one.
Notes: Decades later, Serling still remembered “The Keeper of the Chair” as “The best idea I ever had that I couldn’t sell.”1 While much of the story is preposterous, the core idea is intriguing. It is surprising that the better elements of the piece never found their way into The Twilight Zone, especially considering how often Serling reused his early ideas. Charles Beaumont’s excellent Twilight Zone script, “Shadow Play,” utilized the same setting, but the similarities do not extend much further, so Serling could have returned to this arena if he had wanted to.
“The Air Is Free”
Cast: James Dixon, Paul Laumann, Sylvia Lemonek, William Buckovich, Norman Valodin
Synopsis: See chapter 1
Notes: After The Storm ceased production, Bob Huber had still not given up on the idea of creating a network series with Serling as head writer. He used “The Air Is Free” as the basis for a filmed pilot for this series, tentatively titled The Window, to be shopped to national networks, but it, too, did not sell.
“Vertical Deep”
Cast: Jay Overholts, George Brengel, Esther Panntages, Paul Laumann, Bobby Swigart
Synopsis: “Vertical Deep” is an early draft of “To Wake at Midnight,” which aired on Climax! on June 23, 1955.
“The Guest”
Cast: Reuben Lawson Jr.
Synopsis: “The Guest” (a few sources mistakenly identify the title as “The Quest”) is a science fiction story involving a physicist who is visited by a physicist from another planet. No copy of the script has been retained in the various Serling collections.
Cast: Jay Overholts
Notes: On November 1, 1951, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that The Storm had been canceled because it had failed to find a sponsor. Days later, however, a sponsor was found, and the series received a temporary reprieve. “Pandora’s Box” was the first sponsored episode. During rehearsal of a scene in which Jay Overholts’s character was shot, the prop gun inadvertently expelled its blank wad, striking the actor in the chest with enough force to penetrate the sweater he was wearing and draw blood, prompting a trip to the emergency room. During the live performance, the gun was not loaded—not even with blanks—and a sound effect was used for the gunshot.2
“The Sands of Tom”
Cast: Charles Eckerle, Ruth Bailey
Synopsis: Newspaper descriptions suggest that “The Sands of Tom” is a rewritten version of an early radio script, “The Dust by Any Other Name,” that Serling submitted to the Dr. Christian radio series while a student at Antioch College.
“Law Nine Concerning Christmas”
Synopsis: When the atheistic communists conquer America, the first law they institute forbids speaking against the government. Each subsequent law chips away another sacred right. After Law Nine has abolished observance of Christmas, five children are arrested for decorating a Christmas tree, prompting a revolt. But this uprising is neither armed nor violent: citizens gather spontaneously at a church to sing Christmas carols and refuse to stop until the children are released. In response, the commissar threatens to execute the children.
After the town’s mayor fails to convince the townspeople to stop, he visits the children and suggests that they ask their neighbors to end the protest. Although the children will still be punished for observing Christmas, they will avoid execution The children decide that the singing must continue. They are willing to martyr themselves, just like Christ.
As the commissar prepares to order the executions, he learns that one of the imprisoned children is his daughter. He immediately rescinds his order and has the children released. With a traitorous daughter and unable to quash the uprising, the commissar is ousted from his office, leaving the mayor and townspeople at least temporarily in charge of their own fate.
“The Steel Casket”
Cast: Jay Overholts
Synopsis: The USS Swordfish, an American submarine under the command of Captain Borg, has received a troubling message while patrolling the waters near North Korea: a spy is aboard the Swordfish. However, the message is incomplete, and all that can be decoded is that a bomb has been planted somewhere aboard, it is set to detonate in less than five hours, and the saboteur’s last name seems to end in -er.
Lieutenant Stevens, the Swordfish’s second in command, finds four crewmen with surnames that qualify: Baker, Connacher, Manter, and Halper. Instead of interviewing the men, however, Captain Borg orders a surreptitious search of the sub, insisting that they will have a better chance of finding and defusing the bomb if they can find it without tipping off the spy.
After a fruitless search of the ship, Borg and Stevens interrogate the four men, all of whom deny any knowledge of a plot. With little time left, Borg says that all they can do is hope that the message was a false alarm. As they wait, Borg talks about his long naval career, his experience working on warheads, his accolades while a student at the US Naval Academy, and his dissatisfaction with having not risen higher in the ranks. Stevens becomes increasingly suspicious. He lifts up a nameplate reading “Captain Borg, Commander” and covers all but the last two letters.
Recognizing that Stevens has solved the mystery, Borg confesses: “For the last ten years, I’ve been working for someone else’s navy—one which is considerably more appreciative than ours.” He reaches for a gun, but Stevens draws faster, killing Borg. The captain’s mention of his experience working on warheads has told Stevens exactly where to search, and the explosives are defused in the nick of time.
“No Language but a Cry”
TV Dial described this as “the story of a receiving hospital and the action that takes place on a Saturday night.”3
“The Night Cry”
Synopsis: A house near Cincinnati has a well-earned reputation for being haunted. Over the past two decades, several families have been driven from the house, frightened away by nightly cries so horrible that they could only come from a ghost trapped inside and crying to be let free. Not until one man has the courage and the common sense to trace the cry to its source is the mystery finally solved: beneath the house is a narrow sewer, and trapped in this sewer is a pig. It had apparently gotten stuck down there when it was just a piglet, and as it has grown its cries have echoed through the house, sending family after family fleeing, terrified of a harmless farm animal.
Notes: A review published in the Cincinnati Enquirer implied that “The Night Cry” was influenced by (or adapted from) an episode of a Cincinnati-based radio series, The Old Rhineland, that featured a narrator referred to as the Old Rhinelander.4 Over-the-Rhine is the name of a neighborhood in Cincinnati, and several sources list “Over the Rhine” among titles of Serling’s scripts produced by The Storm. Given that this title does not appear in any contemporaneous TV listings, evidence suggests that “Over the Rhine” was an alternate title for “The Night Cry.”
“Train West”
Cast: George Palmer, Jay Overholts, Maryanne Hackett The Cincinnati Post described this as the “story of a man desperately trying to flee from behind the Iron Curtain.”5 From this description, “Train West” may have been an early draft of Hallmark Hall of Fame’s “I Lift My Lamp.”
“A Machine to Answer the Question”
Synopsis: A detective and a coroner have arrived at the laboratory of Dr. Joseph Bukoff, now the scene of an apparent murder-suicide. Bukoff lies on the floor with his skull bashed in, and his assistant, Dr. Robert Chesney, lies nearby, dead of what seems to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The incident is being investigated with a high level of secrecy as a consequence of Bukoff’s work. For decades, he has been developing a machine capable of answering any question put to it. In the same room as the body of its dead creator, the machine’s robotic voice repeats the answer to the last question posed to it: “The answer to the question is—tonight.” The detective quiets the machine, wondering what kind of questions could have led to two men’s deaths.
Flashback to earlier in the evening: Although Bukoff has been working on his machine for thirty years, he still treats it like a newborn baby. He asks the machine to solve basic mathematical equations, and it does so correctly and quickly. But he refuses to challenge it with complicated questions for fear that it will break down. One day, Bukoff claims, his machine will be able to answer any question put to it, including questions about the most profound mysteries of the universe. But not yet. It is still not ready.
Chesney disagrees. He thinks that Bukoff is crippled by fear—not merely fear of damaging his machine but also fear of what the machine might answer if they were to ask it any truly important question. He slams a newspaper onto the desk and points to the front page as an example of a mystery that the machine could help them solve: Why have unidentified flying objects begun appearing in the sky all around the world? Where are they from? What do they want?
Bukoff argues that there are too many variables, too many unknowns, for his machine to answer such questions. Again, Chesney disagrees. He says that he has written the precise equation that the machine would need to answer these questions. Bukoff looks over the equation and agrees to ask the question, but first they’d better inform the military so that they can be prepared for the answers.
With a high-ranking general on hand, Chesney feeds his equation into the machine. It takes longer to provide an answer, and Bukoff fears that they have overtaxed it. But finally, it responds: “The answer to the question is—from Mars.”
Over Bukoff’s objections, Chesney feeds it his next question: Why are they here? This time, the machine takes even longer to answer, and it in fact appears to have stopped functioning altogether. Bukoff compares its state to a human coma. Tired of waiting, the general leaves, telling the scientists to contact him if the machine reawakens. Finally, the machine responds, “The answer to the question is—to destroy the Earth.”
At first stunned, Bukoff and Chesney then begin to argue about whether to ask one more question: When? Because the ships still appear only as vague, occasional streaks of light high in the sky, Earth might have been under surveillance for centuries, and another hundred years might pass before the aliens attack. Bukoff argues that it is better not to know precisely when the end will come. Chesney again accuses him of being afraid. The argument turns violent, with Chesney bashing Bukoff’s head against the side of a desk, killing him. Chesney then feeds his next question into the machine.
A few hours later, the detective turns the machine back on and it immediately returns to its refrain: “The answer to the question is—tonight.” How could these words have driven a man to suicide? But the time has grown late, and outside the night is beautiful. Any further questions, the detective decides, can wait until the morning.
Notes: “A Machine to Answer the Question” was later produced on the radio series It Happens to You. This synopsis is based on the radio script, which was published in Twilight Zone Magazine in September 1982.
1. The sources did not provide a title for the episode that aired on this date; however, various clues have enabled the author to determine that this is the episode that appeared.
2. It is likely but not certain that this episode aired on this date.
3. No copy of this script has been found among Serling’s papers