Twilight Zone – One More Pallbearer

★★★★  January 12, 1962 Season 3 Episode 17

If you want to see where we are…HERE is a list of the episodes.

A school teacher, Reverend, and a Colonel get invited to a bomb shelter. No it’s not a joke…but it was an attempt at one by a man named Paul Radin played by Joseph Wiseman. Paul Radin was a very bitter narcissistic millionaire and he wanted to extract an apology for past deeds that he thought he was punished for unfairly by three different people.

Mr. Radin was not a good man and he was just as bad when he was young. He cheated on a test and then planted the crib notes on another student, he was court-martialed during World War II for failure to follow orders to attack the enemy, and because of his callous attitude he caused a young lady to commit suicide. Radin will stop at nothing  trying to extract that elusive apology from these people from his past…including ending the world.

I knew Joseph Wiseman was familiar…He played Dr. No in the first James Bond film.

This show was written by Rod Serling

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration: 

What you have just looked at takes place three hundred feet underground, beneath the basement of a New York City skyscraper. It’s owned and lived in by one Paul Radin. Mr. Radin is rich, eccentric and single-minded. How rich we can already perceive; how eccentric and single-minded we shall see in a moment, because all of you have just entered the Twilight Zone.

Summary

Successful businessman Paul Radin invites three people from his past to join him in the underground bunker he’s built under his commercial office building. All three have had major influence on him though not the kind that made him what he is today. His former military commander had him court-martialed; his former teacher ridiculed and humiliated him in class after she caught him cheating; and his church Minister who ruined his reputation after he drove a girl to suicide. All he wants from them is one thing: a brief apology. The impact of what they’ve done is far greater than it appears.

There were NO videos that didn’t give the end away to be found. 

Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:

Mr. Paul Radin, a dealer in fantasy, who sits in the rubble of his own making and imagines that he’s the last man on Earth, doomed to a perdition of unutterable loneliness because a practical joke has turned into a nightmare. Mr. Paul Radin, pallbearer at a funeral that he manufactured himself in the Twilight Zone.

CAST

Rod Serling… Narrator / Self – Host (uncredited)
Joseph Wiseman…Paul Radin
Katherine Squire…Mrs. Langsford
Trevor Bardette…Col. Hawthorne
Gage Clarke…Rev. Hughes