Veteran character actor Theodore Bikel gives a strong performance as an obsessed and despicable man who finds it is his duty to report people for things for which he really has no proof, accusing one through an anonymous phone call to their employer of being a communist, a teacher of being immoral and a doctor whose practice he questions. "That man has a leak in his attic a mile wide!" landlady Moyra McGill tells visiting doctor's wife Phyllis Love who goes to see Bikel to confront him about what right he has to judge her husband who remains unseen.
Serling intelligently bashes the Gladys Kravitz's of our world, the "Permit Patty's", the "BBQ Betty's", those who stick their nose into the private lives of people just living their lives, based upon prejudice and assumption of supposed wrong doing. It is very apparent that Bikel is as mad as a hatter, laughing maniacally like Herbert Lom in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again", threatening to turn all of his victims into two feet tall little people. His confession to Linden Chiles of what he is planning reveals another "Twilight Zone" megalomaniac whom the audience wants to see taken down from his very first telephone call. For every finger he points, four point back at him, and the moral lessons of this episode are very strongly dramatized.
Serling intelligently bashes the Gladys Kravitz's of our world, the "Permit Patty's", the "BBQ Betty's", those who stick their nose into the private lives of people just living their lives, based upon prejudice and assumption of supposed wrong doing. It is very apparent that Bikel is as mad as a hatter, laughing maniacally like Herbert Lom in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again", threatening to turn all of his victims into two feet tall little people. His confession to Linden Chiles of what he is planning reveals another "Twilight Zone" megalomaniac whom the audience wants to see taken down from his very first telephone call. For every finger he points, four point back at him, and the moral lessons of this episode are very strongly dramatized.