Most of the hour-long TZ episodes from season four were unnecessarily long and loaded with padding to fill them out, with few exceptions ("Death Ship," for one), but "Thursday" is unquestionably the finest of the fourth season, and in my opinion right there in the top ten of all TZ episodes, a very high bar to clear, given the unusually high quality of the series. This is a story about a man, who calls himself Captain Benteen (James Whitmore) who has used his sheer force of will to hold together a small colony trapped on a desolate planet overheated by a binary star, one that they mistakenly thought would be a kind of utopia, an escape from an Earth that had become to dangerous, too warlike. Benteen came to this bleak place when he was only fifteen, so you know that his title is one he gave himself, which nicely explains his behavior later on, when a chance for salvation for the colony becomes possible. Benteen is intelligent, strong, benevolent, kind, and dictatorial, all at the same time, a very complex man. You can see this so well when he swiftly punishes a sleeping watch stander one minute, then the next minute treats broken bones with a tender touch, then (best of all) soothes a young boy and the rest of his people by so touchingly telling them about what Earth had been like, since few of them had been born there. He is neither villain nor hero, only all too human. Even the soundtrack is top shelf, especially the beautiful strings used during Benteen's speech he used to comfort his people after the meteor shower. Serling liked to make his characters multi-faceted, and Benteen's fate is all the more powerful for that complicated nature. If you haven't seen this one, you definitely owe it to yourself to watch it. btw...Frank Darabont chose Whitmore to play the role of Brooks Hatlen in "The Shawshank Redemption" specifically because of his magnificent performance in this TZ episode, and I wholeheartedly agree with his choice for that reason.