Great Old TV Episodes...from The Twilight Zone

FOUR O'CLOCK  was a Season Three episode of one of my all-time favorite series, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone.  It first aired in April of 1962, but nearly sixty years later is more relevant than ever.  Starring Theodore Bikel as the hate-mongering, angry "man of justice" Oliver Crangle, the episode examines the mental makeup of people who make it their business to mind that of others while spinning a fantasy world of conspiracy everywhere around themselves.  Crangle, holed-up in his big city apartment with his obnoxious parrot Pete, has built up an extensive file system of papers and cards giving him detailed personal information on everyone he knows...and to Crangle, they are mostly evil.  On his self-imagined mission to do good, he calls different people's employers to expose their "evilness" and get them fired or otherwise punished...the seed of the cancel culture around us today, except that now the Internet replaces Crangle's filing system from which to draw accusatory information.  He finally comes up with a demented notion: at 4:00 pm he will have all the evil people in the world turn to two feet tall!  Calling an FBI agent to give him advance notice so that the agents can start their sweep of arrests, he is rebuffed as a mentally disturbed crank...but Oliver knows better: that agent has to be one of the evil conspirators!  The episode's ending is pure poetic justice, but I wonder whether even at this late juncture he ever was willing to come to terms with what he was all about.  Four O'Clock hit home to me in 2021, not only with its cancel culture ramifications but also with the demented, fantasy conspiratorialism prevalent in Crangle's mind and in that of millions of my fellow citizens today...the QAnon, Stop the Steal, "faked" mass shootings and pandemic denial movements stand out.  And what about the ghouls who seem bent on spending their hours going back through public figures' old social media posts and decades-old innuendoes in order to smear their reputations? So in a way this episode was a prophetic indictment against both politically left-wing excesses like cancel culture and predominantly right-wing crackpot notions.  Even before all this nonsense started to go down around us, I appreciated Bikel's great performance in this episode of a self-righteous meddler with no inner peace or ability to empathize...I think you will as well...