Martin Landau is faced with his own Mission Impossible as an Eastern bloc defector forced into a cat and mouse game with the KGB boss that put him away some twelve years earlier. Commissar Vassiloff's (John Van Dreelen) specialty is doing away with defectors, describing himself as the 'last of the imaginative executioners'. He treats his victims with subtlety and finesse, teasing Kuchenko (Landau) with a death that will be like a finely crafted ballet.
Rod Serling leaves matters of the supernatural aside for this take on a Cold War theme, resulting in a fairly original story this late in the game for the series. It takes a while for the set up to occur, and when Kuchenko finally makes a break for it, I wondered why he didn't do it sooner since the door to his room remained unlocked the whole time. I also had to wonder too if the triggering mechanism device would have worked with the technology available in the Sixties, although I'm sure something like that could be rigged up today.
The ending is a typical one in The Twilight Zone sense, and astute viewers and fans will see it coming. The message that Serling cleverly inserts into this, another of his statements on the evils of statism, is that leaders of the elite class are not only necessary to tell their followers what to do, but are also necessary to tell them what NOT to do.
Rod Serling leaves matters of the supernatural aside for this take on a Cold War theme, resulting in a fairly original story this late in the game for the series. It takes a while for the set up to occur, and when Kuchenko finally makes a break for it, I wondered why he didn't do it sooner since the door to his room remained unlocked the whole time. I also had to wonder too if the triggering mechanism device would have worked with the technology available in the Sixties, although I'm sure something like that could be rigged up today.
The ending is a typical one in The Twilight Zone sense, and astute viewers and fans will see it coming. The message that Serling cleverly inserts into this, another of his statements on the evils of statism, is that leaders of the elite class are not only necessary to tell their followers what to do, but are also necessary to tell them what NOT to do.