While The Twilight Zone's specialty was telling stories based in strange and inexplicable situations, the series also hosted quite a few episodes that took a more realistic approach to things. Jeopardy Room is one of my favorite episodes of the entire show because (unlike most episodes) it has no supernatural or fictional elements to it at all. The events shown can actually happen, and in some parts of the world, maybe they did. The plot is about a high ranking military officer serving some unknown country in the Eastern Bloc, controlled by the Soviet Union. Major Kuchenko (Martin Landau) is the man in question, and he stands completely alone in a hotel room, waiting for his chance to flee the country. Another officer who outranks him, Commissar Vassiloff, is instructed to kill the defecting communist. He watches him from a dark room in the building next to his. However, he refrains from shooting him right then and there because that would be too easy. He plans to make Kuchenko suffer and kill him very artistically. After going to see him face to face in his room, Vassiloff drugs him with a bottle of wine, and upon waking up, Kuchenko finds a tape recording saying how Vassiloff has put a bomb somewhere in the room. If Kuchenko finds and defuses it within 180 minutes, he's allowed to leave. If he tries to run out of the room, Vassiloff's right hand man Boris will snipe Kuchenko from across the alleyway. With time running out very quickly, Kuchenko looks for the bomb, but has no luck. Eventually, he realizes it's in the telephone, and it will explode if he picks it up. Vassiloff exploits this on purpose and tells the hotel manager to ring Kuchenko's phone, but he's too smart to fall for it. He manages to bolt out of the room, dodging a lethal hail of bullets. Later, Vassiloff and Boris are in Kuchenko's former room, trying to find how in the world he discovered the bomb's location. All of a sudden, the phone rings. Without thinking, Boris goes to answer it, and the whole room is wiped from existence. The caller turns out to be Kuchenko, and even though he can't hear anyone talking to him, he knows what has just happened. While I like this episode a lot because of its lack of supernatural elements, it does have a kind of glaring plot hole that sticks out like a sore thumb. Surely, no military officer (at least a high ranking one like Vassiloff) would be stupid enough to walk into a room that he himself planted an explosive device in. The only reason why they ended it this way is so the episode could have a happy ending and have Landau escape. Despite this pretty big flaw, Jeopardy Room is one interesting Twilight Zone episode that has no fantasy aspects to it, and just consists of 3 men, 2 rooms, and 1 battle to find who has the higher intellect.
Review of The Jeopardy Room
