Mute

This is an amazing performance by both Baxley and Dailey. It's also one of Serling's better teleplays. Yes, there's an underlying social message. Yes, it's about parenting and personal agency. The most profound message for me was never trust a teacher who makes statements like "It's the only way" or "We are going to work with her until she's exactly like everybody else." That's the truly horrifying part of this story. One should see it before reading some of the reviews here. This episode has depth.

I'm surprised at how good The Twilight Zone is. The 60's were an awful time for American television. This was the era of sitcoms based on the most ludicrious situations. Like being married to a Genie/Witch or having a family made up of monsters or being lost on an island with all your Earthly belongings.

But The Twilight Zone is incredibly good.

This episode deals with a lot of subjects and doesn't spoon feed the audience an easy answer.

It touches on child abuse, what makes a parent a parent, conformity, trauma, children being used as pawns, Germans as the symbolic stand in for extremism, and difference as both strength and weakness. All wrapped up in a story about telepathy. A story of voicelessness. A truly underrated episode.

I found this episode an incredibly well composed and emotionally intense one.

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.

Ace performance from little Ann Jillian that almost puts this 60-minutes over. The entry's concept of substituting telepathy for speaking is an interesting one. Unfortunately, the dynamics are muddied in development. It seems the telepathy taught to little Ilse must proceed in a language, English or German, yet she seems flummoxed by spoken words of any kind. Maybe I missed something, but the details of her acquired incapacity appear unclear in important respects. Adapting a concept of this type to an hour's dramatic format without lengthy exposition may be the underlying problem, even for such a skilled writer as Matheson.

Nonetheless, the acting's first-rate, especially from Jillian whose suffering can register only through facial expressions, which she does in controlled, non-sticky fashion. Ironically, it's hard to know just what therapeutic direction would help. It's certainly not that of the lock- step demanding teacher (Dailey). As a result, I ached along with her. Still, that Hollywood ending may have relieved audiences, but it's spread on pretty thickly, and amounts to a divergence from the TZ norm.

All in all, it's an interesting, if uneven, entry, salvaged in no small part by an excellent cast. (In passing—good to see the familiar face of the gnomish little Percy Helton picking up a payday.)