Faith and the Fifth Dimension: "One for the Angels" (October 9, 1959)

As Marc Scott Zicree notes in The Twilight Zone Companion, Ed Wynn was “an odd choice for the role of a fast-talking pitchman.” The sidewalk sales spiel he delivers to keep Mr. Death (Murray Hamilton) from keeping a midnight appointment to collect the soul of young Maggie (Dana Dillaway) is “thoroughly unconvincing.” 

Hamilton, however, does the heavy lifting to sell the scenario. Proving the venerable adage that acting is reacting, Hamilton does a more than credible job of looking spellbound as Wynn does his best. And as Bookman’s pitch wears on—effectively intercut with shots of the alarm clock on Maggie’s bedside table ticking ever closer to twelve o’ clock—Hamilton looks increasingly worn down, sweating and nodding weakly as he holds a handful of cheap silk neckties and simulated Kashmir socks from Bookman’s display case.

Although Bookman does give up a few more years of earthly existence by offering himself in Maggie’s stead, “One for the Angels” is a less a story of self-sacrifice and more a story of cheating Death, whom the apostle Paul named as “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Corinthians 15.26). 

Bookman doesn’t destroy Death, but he does manage to bamboozle him to salvific effect—a sort of distant echo of the atonement theory in which Christ defeats the powers of Death and the grave by tricking them into thinking they could hold him. In a way, Bookman’s pitch “so big that the sky would open up” is a riff on the words from Hosea that Paul quotes to rejoice in Christ’s last laugh on mortality: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (15.55).