episode #44 - The Lateness of the Hour

Air Date: 12/02/60  Writer: Rod Serling    Director: Jack Smight


This one predates such famous sf as Blade Runner and A.I., suggesting the subversive possibility that being a robot and being a human being is not very different. I just gave away the twist surprise but the ending is not the big plus with this one. This was one of the half-dozen episodes which was videotaped, not filmed, and it takes away much of the eeriness. Buzzfeed liked it even more than I did, rating it #23 out of 156 episodes:

Finding out you’re a robot might be scarier than finding out you’re a mannequin, but this episode is an understated kind of terrifying, and colored by an ever-familiar technophobia. There’s a disturbing idealization of living like “normal people” — i.e., living without robot maids, like good salt-of-the-earth folks — and, as always, a healthy obsession with the idea of what makes a human human. (Hint: Implanted memories are probably not enough.)

Trivia From the Zone: there's an additional undertone of sadness to this one because actress Inger Stevens committed suicide about a decade later; she was in another episode, The Hitch-Hiker;
Star Trek TOS actor alert: John Hoyt plays the scientist father here; he was the doctor in the 1st pilot episode The Cage.