episode #15, segment 3: A Matter of Minutes

#15c: A MATTER OF MINUTES written by Harlan Ellison, Rockne S. O'Bannon

A fanciful episode which revolves around a wild concept, making this one of the more re-watchable episodes; I like to revisit this one often, just to hear some of the explanations for how real reality works (oh, so that's how the universe works). Maybe everything doesn't really work that way, but it would be cool if it did. The episode begins with a couple (Adam Arkin & Karen Austin) waking up in their home to the sounds of clatter and banging. They find that their home has been seemingly invaded by an army of 'blue men' (for lack of a better name); these quasi-men are wrecking everything in sight, but also constructing things. It's a very surreal scene. And, it's not confined to just their house; these blue men are everywhere!
Pretty soon, the couple are noticed by the supervisor (Adolph Caesar) of these blue men. He explains what has happened: the couple have slipped through the fabric of time, a couple of hours into the future - yes, it's another cosmic imbalance; these happen once in a while. This future has not been fully built yet. According to the supervisor, each minute of reality needs to be rebuilt by these blue men. So when the couple run into, for example, a white space, where there is nothing, that area has not been built yet; some areas never are rebuilt, because no persons are scheduled to be in those areas during that minute.  I get a headache thinking about all the work involved in building the same world over & over; I know there are lot of these blue men, but c'mon! It's too much. Maybe this is one of those concepts difficult to grasp by humans.

The whole hook of this story is based on that old familiar situation: a person is looking for a personal object, such as a key chain. The person looks everywhere and cannot find it. A minute later, they look again and find the key chain where they could have sworn they'd looked only a minute before. This is an example of the blue workers slipping up a bit, but it's usually these very small details that get overlooked. I dunno - makes sense to me; and that's disturbing. This episode had a whimsical tone and was fairly amusing. But, it's also one those that make you think about reality, if only for a minute. The couple are also in a dilemma of how to get back to their own proper time. BoG's Score: 8 out of 10
Stephen King applied a similar concept to his story, then TV movie, The Langoliers (1990).