Lights Out (TV Series) Perchance to Dream (1951) User Reviews

A doppleganger in more ways than one!

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 4 November 2012]

This is one of the more ironic episodes of "Lights Out"--that's for sure. That's because the main character talks about having a doppelganger (an exact double)--and the same could be said about this episode in many ways. You see, about a decade later, "The Twilight Zone" did another episode called "Perchance to Dream" and there are lots of similarities between the two shows. It's even more ironic because the leading character in the "Lights Out" episode is upset because he feels someone has stolen his story!! Weird--especially since no credit is given to the writer of this earlier show that seems to have strongly inspired the later one. See them both and you'll see what I mean. You can copy the "Lights Out" episode for free at archive.org--and it's worth doing anyways because it's one of the better episodes of this series.

By the way, sadly, the guy who starred in this one, William Eythe, only lived a few years after making this show--dying before his 40th birthday.

Quite poor

[lor_ · 3 November 2023]

This episode initially reminded me of my favorite Twilight Zone episode starring Richard Conte about recurring nightmares, which was infinitely better. But they aren't really comparable, because the "Lights Out" writing is just awful.

It's way too self-reflexive, opening with our antihero William Eythe reading a copy of Weird Tales magazine, and unfolding, perhaps unwittingly, as almost a satire of the pulp fiction in Weird Tales. I have an aversion to the glorification of Pulp Fiction (a la Tarantino of course) that has permeated modern or should I say post-post modern culture, and here we have such drivel creeping in as early as 1951!

He throws down the mag, goes to his desk drawer and whips out a four-year-old manuscript he wrote that was never published. Sure enough, it is identical to the new story he just read, and the "Lights Out" suspense begins.

What follows is filled with deja vu events, paranoia and surrealistic dreams (Oscar-winner Richard Sylbert was designer on the show, one of his first screen credits), leading to a very lousy ending. Perhaps it's a stylistic device that went out of fashion, but watching these vintage suspense series so many decades later I'm noticing how many simply end suddenly at the climax, with no coda or denouement following.