A Stop at Willoughby
October 24th, 2009
Gart Williams is a New York advertising executive who is burnt out. His boss, Oliver Misrell (All-Over Miserable?), is a tyrant whose motto is Push-Push-Push, and his wife Jane is a cold, selfish woman who doesn’t care if he’s happy as long as he keeps making money.
After a terrible day at the office, Gart gets on the commuter train home to Connecticut. It’s dark and snowy outside, and the weary Gart drifts off to sleep. When he wakes up, the conductor is calling out the stop for Willoughby. The train has been transformed into something from the nineteenth century, and when he looks out and sees a summer afternoon in a small town of 100 years ago, with a band playing, a couple of barefoot boys walking by with fishing poles, and a horse-drawn wagon waiting at the station. When he questions the conductor about the town, he’s told it’s a quiet place where a man can slow down and “live his life full measure.” When he goes to the steps to look out, the train jars back into motion, and Gart wakes up in his seat, back in the present.
Gart’s life at work and at home become more and more difficult, and he has two more dreams of Willoughby on the train. The third time, he gets off and walks through the town square, where people greet him by name and he feels a sense of calm and peace he hasn’t known in many years. Has he escaped to a new life or jumped to his death?
I watched this episode for the first time when I was ten years old, and I remember it well. I knew nothing about the world of advertising, of course, but I knew what it was like to have troubles and to long to escape to another place and time, where it’s always sunny and the band plays on.
The ending was shocking to me, unbearably sad but also sort of beautiful in a way. It was a vision of what Heaven might be like. My father had died a few months before, and I worried over the idea of an afterlife a lot. The image of Heaven I had from church and especially from the book The Littlest Angel by Charles Tazewell just didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t picture my father sitting on a cloud playing a harp and polishing his halo. But after seeing this episode, I thought that maybe when your body dies, the real you goes someplace nice like Willoughby. I found this thought very comforting.
I have been watching all the Twilight Zone episodes again, and realizing what an important influence they were on me when I was growing up. They made me think, much more so than anything we read or talked about at school.
A Stop at Willoughby — Watch the full episode free on CBS.com
