It's a chilling moment that is only made more so by Bemis's disregard for the loss of life that just occurred. Lucky for him, an H-Bomb eradicates the entire world population while he is locked away in a bank vault. He's bothered by his coworkers, his wife, and seemingly the entire universe.
The episode follows Henry Bemis ( Burgess Meredith), a bank teller who just wants to get away from everyone and find a quiet spot to read. The '60s were not plagued by nuclear paranoia to the same degree that folks were in the previous decade, but that's what makes one of the series' only '50s episodes, "Time Enough at Last," timed so perfectly. The Twilight Zone might have been ahead of its time, but that's all thanks to Rod Serling. Not only that, but he was also delivering genuinely nightmarish narratives to the homes of millions.
ATOMIC TIME KEEPING TV
He was ready to tackle hot-button topics within the parameters of genre storytelling well before it became popularized by filmmakers in the late '60s and early '70s, and at a time when TV was barely ever giving creators a chance to do so. Here, you had a writer who respected his audience enough to posit tough questions about the current societal landscape, but he never talked down to anyone. That's where Rod Serling comes into play, one of the most innovative writers in the history of television. Few shows challenged their audiences intellectually, let alone made them want to leave a night light on. This was a medium that, at the time, was ripe for purely giving its audience a good time. The Twilight Zone first premiered in October 1959, a time when TV was predominately overrun by dramas and Westerns.
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