A Kind Of Stopwatch

Starring Lou Diamond Phillips

Adapted for radio by Dennis Etchison

Orignally written by Rod Serling

It’s important for me to describe the headspace I was in when I first listened to A Kind Of Stopwatch. I haven’t talked about it much because it didn’t effect me as much as other people I knew both in my college town and throughout the Appalachian mountains, but I was stuck in my apartment during hurricane Helene at the end of September 2023. It hit on a Friday, I think. It rained all day, but because my apartment was up on a hill the worst that happened to us was that some of our shingles came off the roof. For my friends in the valley, their houses and apartments were trashed. Uninhabitable in some cases. In Asheville, things were even worse. Late that night me and my roommate went down to town to see the damage and try and find some food with no luck. We drove back up the steep hill to the apartment to eat cold spaghettio’s in the dark. The next day, the 321 was clear enough to make the trip from Boone to Lenoir, by way of Blowing Rock. There we got hot food and my roommates family supplied us with flashlights, batteries, canned food, and anything else we may need to survive the end of the world. It really felt like the end of the world, it took multiple weeks for water and power to return to our apartment. That saturday night, I had nothing to do but listen to some of the Twilight Zone radio dramas I had saved on my iPod, which I had ripped from CD’s I found at my college campuses library. It was only the first ten episodes, and I couldn’t have picked a worse one to start on then A Kind Of Stopwatch.

The story of the episode follows one mister McNulty, who nobody really likes. Not at work, not at home, not even at the bar where he whiles away his free time. A strange bum gives him a stopwatch that when engaged seems to freeze time altogether, with only McNulty able to move. Being self absorbed, he tries to use this power for his own personal gain, trying to get a raise at work before being fired. He then uses the watch to rob a bank, and in the process drops the watch.

It breaks, with time still frozen.

He desperately shakes the statues around him, begging and pleading for them to come back to life, to talk to him, to give any sign that he wasn’t really alone in the world. The ending narration for the radio drama adaptation of this story went something like ‘Mister McNulty will never want for money or food again, only for company.’ Then the episode went to a jarring ad for cassettes and CDs of additional show episodes and ended. The world around me was quiet, and dark, and dead.

I grabbed my flashlight and left the house, out into the cold fall breeze. None of the lights from the town below were on, and the usual barrage of noise from the sorority houses around me was vacant. It was dead quiet, and dark, and so dead. I had been camping before, but those were purposeful exits from civilization. This was the world I knew in a way I never knew I’d see it before. I ran back into the house and begged for mercy, begged over the phone between ragged breaths to let me leave this place. I’d dare dangerous roads before I spent another night in this hell on earth. I couldn’t bear it a minute longer. The next morning, I left the mountain on freshly cleared roads, with military trucks driving up the other way.

You listen to these radio dramas and find them intriguing looks into the human psyche, then you live one and realize you are no better than one mister McNulty. When dropped into total isolation, you too will panic, scream for help to an empty world. That’s why I need to do this series of blog posts about the Twilight Zone, because it’s touched me in such a personal way that I feel I would be doing an injustice not talking about it, analyzing it, over-analyzing, ripping away at it until meaning becomes clear to me. What can I learn from these stories. And will another one hit me as directly as A Kind Of Stopwatch? I have to find out.