Revisiting The Twilight Zone’s “Nick of Time” with William Shatner

The Twilight Zone‘s “Nick of Time” episode features no aliens, gremlins, deals with the Devil, godlike children, alternate realities, or overt genre elements of any kind.

In fact, the only monster to be found in this classic Twilight Zone episode from the show’s sophomore season (the entire series can be found airing regularly on SYFY) is nothing more than the horrors that can be dreamt up by a feverish human imagination grappling with the unknown. After all, is there anything scarier than what the mind can cook up when left to its own devices, particularly once superstitious tendencies enter the conversation?

Remembering the monstrous anxiety of The Twilight Zone‘s “Nick of Time” episode starring William Shatner

Written by Richard Matheson, “Nick of Time” centers around Don S. Carter (William Shatner in the first of his two Twilight Zone appearances), a man who becomes ensnared by a diner fortune-telling machine that spits out little paper responses to “yes or no?” queries for a penny a pop.

The now-iconic dispenser is rather ordinary, save for the bobble-headed caricature of Satan sitting atop it that lends an aura of cheeky malevolence to the proceedings. “My wife and I were in San Fernando, going to a movie, and there was a little fortune-telling machine like that in the booth in the café,” Matheson recalls of the script’s origin in Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion.

Don, who carries around a rabbit’s foot and four-leaf clover for good luck, begins to take the machine’s highly ambiguous answers (the kind you’d get after shaking a Magic 8 Ball, for instance) at face value, which begins to worry his new wife, Pat (Patricia Breslin), who doesn’t share her husband’s almost childish views on predestined paths and the bad juju one incurs by deviating from fate’s grand blueprint. When concrete threats and obstacles are in short supply, that mushy lump of firing neurons encased within our skulls begins to make up its own and becomes stuck in a bubbling quagmire of what-if-based indecision. It’s a pretty genius depiction of how anxiety can very quickly become a snarling beast blocking the only exit.

In the end, however, Pat’s rationality wins out and the two are able to break the neurotic spell, successfully escaping the small town of Ridgeview, Ohio and continuing their leisurely honeymoon road trip to New York. “They’re rescued in the nick of time and there’s also time — the nick — how it cuts into your life,” Matheson explains.

But as the cheerful newlyweds leave their nebulous worries behind, a second, harried-looking couple enters the diner and begins to implore the machine about when they might be able to escape. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction… even in The Twilight Zone.

Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!