Faith and the Fifth Dimension: "Escape Clause" (November 6, 1959)
“Escape Clause” isn’t one of The Twilight Zone’s stronger episodes. It’s a particular let-down immediately after the beauty of “Walking Distance.” Where viewers can feel abundant empathy for Martin Sloan, it’s hard to feel any for Walter Bedeker (David Wayne).
I don’t say this because Bedeker is a hypochondriac. True, he is an extreme hypochondriac, but I can empathize with excessive worries about one’s health. Illness anxiety is a disorder and, like other disorders, deserves compassion.
No, what bothers me about Bedeker is his severely limited view of life.
In this episode’s closing narration, Serling tells us Bedeker was “a little man with such a yen to live.” But “Escape Clause” gives us a man who has a yen, not to live, but simply to stay alive. He had a yen to go on existing.
As he belligerently asks his long-suffering wife Ethel (Virginia Christine)—who must, for whatever reason, love him, else she surely wouldn’t have put up with him for as long as she did—“Why does a man have to die? The world goes on for millions of years, and how long is a man's life? . . . A drop. A microscopic fragment.”
Scripturally speaking, Bedeker has a point. Our lives are brief, especially when set measured against God’s eternal being. The psalm-singer praises God as “our dwelling place in all generations,” and divine “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90.1, 2). Human beings, in contrast, “are soon gone, and we fly away” (verse 10).
The psalmist might be surprised to learn that human beings now regularly live to be a century; he can imagine a span of eighty years at the most. But whether 80 years or 100 or more, when compared to God, in whose sight a millennium is “like a watch in the night” (verse 4), he would still judge the human lifespan as transient as grass that flourishes in the morning and fades in the evening (verse 6).
Walter Bedeker signs the devilish contract Mr. Cadwallader (Thomas Gomez) offers because Bedeker thinks the solution to the problem of mortality is to become immortal. He realizes in his jail cell, serving a sentence of life without parole, that simply living, simply existing, is no life at all.
Contrast Bedeker with Bookman, from “One for the Angels.” When Mr. Death shows up for Bookman, he, too, wants to stay alive—because he knows he hasn’t done all with his life that he could have. At first, he grasps at such “unfinished business” as never having flown in a helicopter and never having witnessed a Zulu war dance. But eventually Bookman’s truth comes out: He hasn’t made his one, great pitch.
Bookman, unlike Bedeker but very like the psalm-singer, realizes mortality isn’t a problem to be solved but a summons to spend our mortal time wisely. “Teach us to count our days,” the psalmist sings to God, “that we may gain a wise heart” (verse 12). The “solution” to mortality is to choose “work of our hands” (verse 17) that gives our days meaning—not only for ourselves but also, and especially, for others.