It seems to be about newly minted husband, William Shatner, and his dealings with a cheap fortune-telling machine at a booth in the local lunch counter. He and his wife, Pat Breslin, are waiting for their car to be fixed in this hick town in Ohio while on their honeymoon.
Shatner is a superstitious fellow. He carries a rabbit's foot AND a four-leaf clover on his key ring. Worse, as he feed this demonic little machine pennies, he begins to believe it can foretell the future. Actually, it's like one of those Magic Eight Balls put through a step-up transducer, or like the oracel at Delphi. Each time Shatner puts a penny in the slot, asks it a question, and pulls out the answer slip, it is uncannily appropriate. But in an ambiguous frame. Shatner is supposed to ask only "yes or no" questions, and the fiendish device comes up with answers like, "It has already been decided." Shatner is obsessed. His wife finally pulls him away and they resume their journey.
Shatner has a line of dialog that always cracks me up. His wife protests that the answers are vague and general, and he replies, "What am I supposed to do? Ask it how it is? And it's supposed to say, 'I'm fine, Don and Pat, so how's by you?'"
I said it "seems to be" about Shatner and the little machine, but actually it's rather more than that, whether the writers intended it or not. What it's really about is connecting the dots.
Shatner is all too willing to believe that the machine is divulging some fundamental truth and connects the dots to his own situation eagerly. (Who wouldn't want to know the future?) The problem that Shatner is dealing with is that you can find a pattern that suits your beliefs in any assembly of random events. That's one of the reasons we (and the Chinese) have zodiacs. Taken to its extremes, what you wind up with is a psychosis. Those lights in the next-door neighbors house? That's the IRS developing information with which to prosecute you. (That example is from Ernest Hemingway's later years.) Do you turn on your PC and find the desktop icons rearranged? They did it. Lose a lens from your eyeglasses? They've taken it deliberately. (That's another real example from a case of paranoid schizophrenia.)
There's more to this episode than meets the eye. I think Rod Serling and Richard Matheson were conspiring to tell us something. I think the machine was wired and the persons writing the answers to Shatner's questions were a bunch of secret government agents and Freemasons. They wanted him to stay in that one-horse town in Ohio because they plotted to put a communist mole in his place at the agency he worked for.
I'm just kidding. I think Matheson (whose title for the episode is a pun; "Nick" = "devil") just dreamed up the idea out of nowhere and thought it would make an interesting episode. At the same time, I sense a lot of us normal folks out here who are connecting dots that do not cry out for connection.
Shatner is a superstitious fellow. He carries a rabbit's foot AND a four-leaf clover on his key ring. Worse, as he feed this demonic little machine pennies, he begins to believe it can foretell the future. Actually, it's like one of those Magic Eight Balls put through a step-up transducer, or like the oracel at Delphi. Each time Shatner puts a penny in the slot, asks it a question, and pulls out the answer slip, it is uncannily appropriate. But in an ambiguous frame. Shatner is supposed to ask only "yes or no" questions, and the fiendish device comes up with answers like, "It has already been decided." Shatner is obsessed. His wife finally pulls him away and they resume their journey.
Shatner has a line of dialog that always cracks me up. His wife protests that the answers are vague and general, and he replies, "What am I supposed to do? Ask it how it is? And it's supposed to say, 'I'm fine, Don and Pat, so how's by you?'"
I said it "seems to be" about Shatner and the little machine, but actually it's rather more than that, whether the writers intended it or not. What it's really about is connecting the dots.
Shatner is all too willing to believe that the machine is divulging some fundamental truth and connects the dots to his own situation eagerly. (Who wouldn't want to know the future?) The problem that Shatner is dealing with is that you can find a pattern that suits your beliefs in any assembly of random events. That's one of the reasons we (and the Chinese) have zodiacs. Taken to its extremes, what you wind up with is a psychosis. Those lights in the next-door neighbors house? That's the IRS developing information with which to prosecute you. (That example is from Ernest Hemingway's later years.) Do you turn on your PC and find the desktop icons rearranged? They did it. Lose a lens from your eyeglasses? They've taken it deliberately. (That's another real example from a case of paranoid schizophrenia.)
There's more to this episode than meets the eye. I think Rod Serling and Richard Matheson were conspiring to tell us something. I think the machine was wired and the persons writing the answers to Shatner's questions were a bunch of secret government agents and Freemasons. They wanted him to stay in that one-horse town in Ohio because they plotted to put a communist mole in his place at the agency he worked for.
I'm just kidding. I think Matheson (whose title for the episode is a pun; "Nick" = "devil") just dreamed up the idea out of nowhere and thought it would make an interesting episode. At the same time, I sense a lot of us normal folks out here who are connecting dots that do not cry out for connection.