One of Serling's message movies but a pretty spooky one at that. Like so many other characters in this series, Nehemiah Persoff finds himself in a strange situation -- he's aboard a small freighter with a couple of other passengers in the middle of the Atlantic in 1942 -- but he can't remember anything much about himself. He knows his name, he knows it's on the passenger manifest, but he doesn't know how he got aboard or why he's there.
The others find Persoff's tentative stumbling around, his eyeballs bulging, his stuttering premonitions of impending doom, a little exotic. Then, too, every once in a while when someone makes a remark about the threat of U-boats, Persoff seems to switch to personality B and make some curt correction regarding submarine doctrine.
He has a right to be worried. A blinding searchlight engulfs the ship. It's a U-boat. The last thing Persoff sees as he rushes frantically to the rail is the captain of the submarine giving the order to fire on the ship. And the Ka El of course is Persoff himself.
When the ship is blasted to bits and everyone -- man, woman, and child -- are dead, the scene switches to the wardroom of the U-boat where a troubled young man confesses to Persoff, now the captain, that he feels guilty about killing these people without warning. He wonders if there is a special place in hell for people like the U-boat's crew, where they may be doomed forever to make the same voyage aboard the doomed ship for all eternity. Persoff scoffs.
Considering that it's a half-hour television show and everything must be hurriedly sketched in -- the characters and settings -- without becoming to expensive, it's rather gripping. As the anxious passenger, Persoff gives off a convincing odor of sour fear. (When he snaps into his Kapitan Leutenant role, he overplays it and barks out his lines.) The English woman aboard is Dierdre Owens and she's unusually sympatico. Patrick Macnee is the Executive Officer whose career as Mr. Steed, one of "The Avengers", was just about to be launched.
It's a thought-provoking story, as well as a spooky one. Yes, the submariners may be doomed to go through the agony of their victims for all eternity. Fortunately, our bomber crews who blitzed places like Hamburg and Nagasaki will not go to the same place, will they?
The others find Persoff's tentative stumbling around, his eyeballs bulging, his stuttering premonitions of impending doom, a little exotic. Then, too, every once in a while when someone makes a remark about the threat of U-boats, Persoff seems to switch to personality B and make some curt correction regarding submarine doctrine.
He has a right to be worried. A blinding searchlight engulfs the ship. It's a U-boat. The last thing Persoff sees as he rushes frantically to the rail is the captain of the submarine giving the order to fire on the ship. And the Ka El of course is Persoff himself.
When the ship is blasted to bits and everyone -- man, woman, and child -- are dead, the scene switches to the wardroom of the U-boat where a troubled young man confesses to Persoff, now the captain, that he feels guilty about killing these people without warning. He wonders if there is a special place in hell for people like the U-boat's crew, where they may be doomed forever to make the same voyage aboard the doomed ship for all eternity. Persoff scoffs.
Considering that it's a half-hour television show and everything must be hurriedly sketched in -- the characters and settings -- without becoming to expensive, it's rather gripping. As the anxious passenger, Persoff gives off a convincing odor of sour fear. (When he snaps into his Kapitan Leutenant role, he overplays it and barks out his lines.) The English woman aboard is Dierdre Owens and she's unusually sympatico. Patrick Macnee is the Executive Officer whose career as Mr. Steed, one of "The Avengers", was just about to be launched.
It's a thought-provoking story, as well as a spooky one. Yes, the submariners may be doomed to go through the agony of their victims for all eternity. Fortunately, our bomber crews who blitzed places like Hamburg and Nagasaki will not go to the same place, will they?