Mute

I think this story is about the essential need for love and the moral need to act for the good of the child. Little Ilse (Ann Jillian) is born to parents belonging to a weird society that wants to further telepathy, partly by keeping children mute. Her parents die in a house fire and the couple who look after her become very emotionally involved.

Cora (Barbara Baxter) is a bit psychologically fragile and very clingy to Ilse, probably because she had a daughter who died. Baxter plays the part well, never trying to make Cora saintly or plain selfish. All the adults seem to have their own agenda, so its hard most of the time to know what to wish for Ilse.

I think its about love-either that or Richard Matheson wrote it to drive us all bloody mad. Decent, watchable TV drama but not what I really feel TZ should be.

One of the reviewers is so bent on pushing his/her political agenda that s/he seems to have missed the point altogether. A liberal philosophy of education bent on results rather than the marvelous conservative one of opportunity???? This episode is NOT about approaches to schooling. And my goodness, the parents who denied their child the ability to speak have NOT given her opportunity to succeed in a world where speech is essential.

Mr. Serling is criticizing the arrogance of parents who think they know what's best for their child but are actually cruel and damage them. He criticizes parents who treat their children as objects to be molded but who don't see them as people with needs and rights of their own. As the sheriff's wife states, the welfare of a child is everyone's concern. But Serling also recognizes the inadequacy of "love only" in repairing the damage done.

And by the way, it was "liberals" who came up with the idea of "equal opportunity." The traditional way actually afforded less opportunity for those of limited means or without family connections. But again, that isn't even the point of this episode.

Of the approximately 100 "Twilight Zone" episodes I've seen thus far, this was only the first where I genuinely had the impression the script was too ambitious and too intelligent for its own good. Richard Matheson's ideas are intriguing but very convoluted, and there isn't enough time to let everything unfold like it should. This would have made a great novel, probably.

As said, the basic premise is beyond fascinating, or at least that's how it felt to me. A group of telepathically gifted parents make a pact and decide they'll raise their children exclusively via telepathic communication. But what then happens if the parents die in a horrible accident, like a house fire, and their timid and mute child is taken in by strangers? This overcomes 12-year-old Ilse Nielsen in a little Pennsylvanian town. The "strangers" are people with the best intentions, and also still struggle with the loss of their own daughter, but they are unable to communicate with the girl, and quickly suspect that Ilse got emotionally and mentally abused by her parents.

Despite the complete lack of any action or supernaturally uncanniness, "Mute" is absorbing from start to finish, and thrives on the immensely powerful performance of Barbara Baxley as the tormented mother/housewife Cora Wheeler. My main (and only) complaint is that I wanted to know more... How exactly do you raise a child telepathically? What happened to the other parents in the initial Düsseldorf group? How exactly did telepathy rescue Ilse from the fire? How did the teacher figure it out so quickly? Matheson really should have made a novel out of it.

While watching this episode about how a young girl's remarkable gift is overlooked, misinterpreted and ultimately psychologically bullied out of her, if you'd asked me what the moral was supposed to be, I would have guessed that it had to do with how society tends to destroy anything it doesn't understand. I suppose the actual message is meant to be "love is better than psychic powers." That's as may be, but this episode failed to set the right tone to deliver such a message. Everyone might have had Ilse's best interests at heart, but I was far from convinced that their idea of what was was best for Ilse was correct, or that their actions were appropriate.

Another reviewer excuses the teacher's behavior as simply being a product of that era. I don't know how you could see this woman's actions and attitudes as anything less than sinister, particularly her line about making Ilse just like everyone else. As for Cora Wheeler, I have my doubts that she truly loved Ilse and find it plausible she saw her more as a substitute for her dead daughter. The underhanded way in which she sabotaged Ilse's chances at being reunited with people like herself did little to endear me to her, nor did the hysterical way she clung to the confused Ilse in the end, screaming about how Ilse needed her, when the case seemed to be more the other way around.

All this is not to necessarily say that I wholeheartedly approve of child rearing techniques of Ilse's biological parents, but frankly, if a line hadn't been shoehorned in at the end that explains that the Nielsens viewed Ilse as a science experiment more than a daughter, it would be harder to condemn them as parents simply because they were a tad unorthodox. When Ilse begins speaking her name out loud for the first time, it didn't register as an uplifting moment for me, like Helen Keller saying "water" in "The Miracle Worker," but rather it had the extremely uncomfortable feel of watching someone break under the strain of mental torture. What was intended as a hopeful ending instead left me feeling saddened that something special had been lost in order to force Ilse to conform to the rest of "normal" society.

This is about a young girl who becomes the victim of a sad experiment. A group in Germany decide to promote telepathy as the sole means of communication in their children. The little girl is sequestered by her parents in a small town. The worst happens. Her parents/scientists are burned in a fire which she manages to escape. She is taken in by the sheriff and his wife. She cannot speak and this leads to great complications. She doesn't seem able to read or write and can't be coerced to speak. She also comes under the tutelage of an evil teacher, Miss Frank, who bullies her and demeans her. School is a nightmare. Meanwhile, the sheriff's wife, who lost a child to drowning, begins to bond with the little girl. She intercepts the mail her husband tries to send to Europe as he searches for relatives. This is a story about how we can't accept differences. We beat up those who aren't like us. The teacher even says of Ilse, the little girl, we are going to make her "Just like everyone else." The problem with the plot is the telepathy never plays a part, other than as a deafening cacophony, driving the little girl to despair. The wife is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and it would have been so much more interesting if she had connected in some way with the girls gifts. The story slogs along and is ultimately kind of empty.