The Trade-Ins

The poker scene in this episode alone, is worth the price of admission.

Terence de Marney's performance as the shrewd professional card shark is masterful. It's a great example of how great TV writers were back then, and how actors rose to the challenge. Expressing the subtleties of human interaction.

He gets the new body, works for a year or two, saves up the 5k and then she gets her new body. She's not the one in pain, she can easily wait.

The wish to be young again was something Rod Serling said he was obsessed about. John Holt (Joseph Schildkraut) and his wife Marie (Alma Platt) are an old couple who go to a company called New Life that deals in selling new bodies that would give them a hundred years more of life together.

Best not to apply logic to this one as it's raison d'etre is to tell a simple story about love. At least you feel very much in 'The Twilight Zone' with this one as the couple look over potential new bodies and the music adds a mysterious quality. The poker game in the middle just feels like padding, and for me, the ending was predictable.

You can usually find good old fashioned, noble values in the Zone. Here is no exception.

Slender, sentimental tale courtesy TZ. A devoted elderly couple learn of a youth restoration clinic, and since their 50-year marriage has been so happy, at the same time he is in some pain, they consult. Trouble is the clinic charges $10,000 each for a new youthful body, but the couple has only enough for one replacement. So what will they do since separation from one another seems unthinkable.

The episode resembles John Frankenheimer's movie Seconds (1966) that came out about the same time. Here, it's hard to know where the plot is going—will they get the extra money, is the clinic on the level, will something unexpected happen. We're really rooting for them since the oldsters seem genuinely devoted. Apparently (IMDB), Schildkraut's real life wife died during production, which no doubt deepened an already moving performance. And, oh yes, baldy Theo Marcuse had a different look at a time when only he and Yul Brynner sported slickened pates. Here he turns in an unusually nuanced card dealer in a brief supporting role.

All in all, it's a different type entry that may not appeal much to the younger crowd, but is not without its subtle virtues.

For a brief moment, I hoped this would to be a dystopian Sci-Fi tale about rich elderly folks paying huge sums of money to transfer their selfish personalities into the bodies of young people, and then these young people turn out to be captured slaves from poor ghettos, or something. Alas, the tone of the episode turned towards the other direction, more specifically a sentimental direction with a dull "accept your fate" message. The sentimental "Twilight Zone" episodes are my least favorite ones; I prefer the grim and disturbing stories, but "The Trade-Ins" still deserves credit for the distant-future rejuvenation theme and the strong performances by Schildkraut, Platt and Marcuse (as the gentlest illegal gambler in history). The rudimentary premise by Rod Serling is similar to a brilliant novel by David Ely, and also got turned into one of the most dazzling but underrated Sci-Fi movies of all times; namely "Seconds" (1966)