User Reviews

(Some Major Spoilers) Having accepted her fate to live a life of loneliness homely 35 year old waitress Margaret, Shelley Duvell, doesn't realize that her loneliness has attracted someone like herself from the outer reaches of the universe.

Taking a walk down the beach Margaret is suddenly, and in broad daylight, approached by this illuminated yellow and orange flying saucer that signals her out of the hundreds of startled persons there. The flying saucer telepathically tells Margaret a massage that will change her life but at the same time make life, in everyone wanting to know what the flying saucer told her, a living hell from that moment on! For the first time in her life people from all walks of life, not just those she comes in contact with on her job, are interested in Margaret! Not really her but what was the massage that the strange glowing UFO delivered to her. Whch was something that was only meant for Margaret and no one else!

As it turned out the one thing that Margaret could call her very own her loneliness became open season for every news reporter shyster religious nut and even physician, who's by oath sworn to keep a client patient relationship private, who came in contact with her. Even her own mother, Nan Martin, threw Margaret out of the house accusing her of being a commie spy in not releasing the information, that she thinks will help the US military, that she got from the UFO or flying saucer!

***SPOILERS*** Deeply depressed and hounded like a wanted serial murderer Margaret decides to finally end it all an take a walk into the Pacific Ocean and drown herself. It's then that someone who shares Margaret's loneliness, Richard Libertini, comes out of nowhere and saves her from drowning. Margaret at first thinks that the man who saved her life is just like everyone else who's trying to get her to tell them the massage that the flying saucer gave her. To her shock and pleasant surprise Margaret finds out that he already knew it! And he got that massage from non other then Margaret herself!

P.S What this "New Twilight Zone" episode tells us is that loneliness is in fact not alone. It affects all of us, no matter how popular we think we are, many times in our lives. It was Margaret's loneliness that attracted someone just as lonely as she was from beyond the vastness of space to tell her that she's not alone in her loneliness. And with that, by putting that massage in a bottle, Margaret attracted someone here on earth who ended up filling the void that her, as well as his, loneliness infected Margaret's lonely heart with.

Lonelyheart Shelley Duvall just wants a man of her own. Working as a diner waitress, she unfortunately lives with a nagging, noisy mother (Nan Martin, quite a loud hag) and feels destined to always be *single woman seeking*. While walking the beach sidewalk, Duvall encounters an alien saucer that catches the attention of all in attendance. The saucer "communicates" a message to her which everyone wants to know about. Even a handsome customer in her diner who asks her out to dinner under false pretense of being interested in her, when in fact he wants to know the message. When she's kicked out of her mom's house (a blessing in disguise, really, considering the mother did nothing but insult and verbally assault her), having to take an apartment in a less than flattering complex, Duvall sees nothing much of a future. So she decides to walk into the ocean…until Richard Libertini (Fletch's boss at the LA paper) stops her, appealing to her to not waste life but embrace romance. Messages in bottles are thrown into the ocean with Duvall developing her own means of spreading what the saucer told her…with her own words adding poetry to them. Libertini found those messages and took them to heart. This kind of story isn't really my personal cup of tea, but Duvall does pitiable and desperate well. Her life is just turned upside down…even a woman believing "Jesus came to her" wants her to help a crippled boy!

***SPOILERS*** It's when Elvis Presley impersonator Gary Pitkin, Jeff Yagher, survived a near fatal traffic accident one evening driving home to his hotel room that he unknowingly entered the dark recesses in both time and space of the "Twilight Zone"! It's there that he met his idol Elvis Presley, also played by Jeff Yagher, in the flesh himself back in the summer of 1954 in Memphis Tennessee when he was 19 and on the brink immortality! That was during the July 4th weekend just before Elvis made Rock & Roll history by cutting his record "Thats all Right Mama" for the obscure Sun Record Lable.

The noticeably shy and somewhat introverted Elvis, a lifetime believer in the supernatural, at first thought that Gary, whom he gave a lift on his pick-up truck, was actually his long dead twin brother Jesse-who died at childbirth-coming back from the dead! That's how much Gary looked like Elvis that Elvis himself believed his cock & Bull story about being him from another time in the not so distant future. It's when Garry in trying to give his idol a few lessons on the coming new wave of music-Rock & Roll-started to impersonate the wild style of music that made Elvis, by wigging and shaking his vital body parts, made famous that the momma's boy and God fearing Elvis, who was raised on Gospel music, just lost his cool! Outraged by Gary who just couldn't get Elvis to get the hang of this new musical phenomenon,that in fact he was to invent, and calling him a son of a bitch thus insulting his mom had Elvis attack a shocked Gary who had nothing but love and admiration for the guy in accusing him of being the devil incarnate; Who came from the very depths of hell to corrupt him and his music!

During the wild and crazy fight with Gary Elvis in trying to drive a stake or broken guitar handle through his heart, like you would do to kill a vampire, ends up impaling himself on it! With Elvis no longer around to make Rock & Roll history a distraught Gary takes on Elvis' identity and over the years turns into the legend that he, the real Elvis, was to later become! As the years go by Gary has second thoughts about his masquerading around as Elvis Presley in that he knows that he's a total fraud and in fact was responsible in causing his mom's Gladys premature death, before her 47th birthday, in her finding out that her beloved and only son, the real Elvis, was no longer with her. It's later in the mid 1970's when he invites one of his legions of women, young & old, admirers into his Las Vages hotel suite that "Elvis' spills his heart out on what a real fraud he is and ends up giving her the silk scarf he's to wear in his next on stage performance.

***SPOILERS*** As luck or fate would have it the young woman turned out to be Sandra, Lisa Jane Persky, the future agent of Elvis impersonator Gary Pitkin! And it was Gary's break up with Sandra, over doing a gig in Vages, that started him out on his backward in time journey into the Twilight Zone! Where he was to take on the identity and became the once and future, as well as dead, King of Rock & Roll Elvis Aaron Presley!

So apparently the estate of Elvis Presley decided that this episode was OK. Poor Elvis himself never got to have a say. In this episode an Elvis impersonator is in a rollover, finds himself back in 1954, and catches a ride with the big guy. While trying to help him become a star he accidentally kills him. His approach to Elvis lacks a bit of tact. It doesn't get much more stupid than this. If I was able to rate these individually, I would give this a two. The second, more touching one, involves Shelley Duvall's waitress character having a close encounter and then being the object of every nut case in existence. It is a touching story of a lonely young woman who has little love in her life. If you want to see awful-- check out her mother.

Surely Gary would have known Elvis' future and avoided his mistakes.Like not signing up with Colonel Parker or making such lousy movies or becoming a fat paranoid wreck!

How to explain Elvis Presley's inimitable star power? Teleportation of savvy stage tips from the future!

Such is the premise of this entertaining "Twilight Zone" episode.

No sooner has Elvis-impersonating lounge lizard Gary Pitkin (Jeff Yagher) bonked his head in an auto accident, than he's hitchhiking through Memphis, where his idol picks him up. Only, Elvis in 1954 isn't yet the guy with a bedroom baritone and swivel hips.

The lookalikes grapple with the notion that the newcomer is really Elvis's twin, Jesse -- all grown up, and not stillborn as history tells us. Country-boy Elvis doesn't take well to the doppleganger's outré stage coaching, attacks him, and dies in the tussle, clearing the way for Gary/Jesse to make audition history at Sun Studio.

The episode ends on a most wistful note, allowing us time with the heavy, big-hair, Vegas Elvis of his later career.

The teleportation angle here recalls "Somewhere in Time" of 1980. I'd never have found it, if not for a "Biography" profile of Johnny Cash, who'd performed with Elvis. That show mentions the Sun Studio session with Sam Phillips, whose Wikipedia entry mentions the TZ episode.

In all, an intriguing experience!

Nan Martin guest stars in this episode, and in fact she also starred in an episode of the original series. Shelley Duvall is quite moving in this episode about UFOs and private messages. Her loneliness resonates on some levels, and you wonder how many people crave company.

I especially liked the night lights along the beach in the final scene.

I like the 80s reboot of The Twilight Zone. Not perfect, but still worth watching.