It would have been too easy to use the 'I'm going to kill you' line to summarize this story. Coming out of the fifth and final season of The Twilight Zone, this entry offers up a classic exercise in psychological terror, where the horror is implied and you're challenged to guess the punch line. It has some of the qualities of the third season TZ episode 'The Dummy', and it's twist ending is just as satisfying. That has a lot to do with the character of pre-Kojak Telly Savalas, definitely not the lovable lollipop sucking TV police detective of a decade later. Here he's a mean spirited husband and father who takes his frustrations out on the woman he married (Mary LaRoche) and her daughter Christie (Tracy Stratford). They can't win with Eric Streator, and Talking Tina's intrusion into the family as a surrogate baby sister to Christie is the set up to the nightmare that follows.
I didn't notice while watching this episode as a kid back in the day, but you had here a rare look at a woman with a child who remarried, a rarity for TV of the Sixties. In this and many other respects, Rod Serling was a pioneer, exploring ideas and themes that tended to cross the line of acceptable behavior for the era. Notice that Eric and Annabelle slept in separate beds, a full decade already since 'I Love Lucy' first aired, and back then you never even made it into the Ricardo bedroom. One doesn't generally think about it, but you can trace the pattern of societal norms while watching the shows of successive eras. It wouldn't be long before dysfunctional families would take over the sit-com landscape altogether, but gradually. By the time 'Married With Children' came around in 1987, TV families were a veritable free-for-all.
But back to Talking Tina. A single viewing of this one and you're not likely to forget it. And that's coming from someone who saw it back when it originally aired. The Twilight Zone seemed to have that kind of way of leaving it's imprint. Maybe not all the episodes, but certainly enough of them to invite lengthy conversation among one's close circle of friends whenever the subject came up. This one had the classic ingredients, a malevolent talking doll and a future celebrity who managed to leave his indelible mark in The Twilight Zone.
I didn't notice while watching this episode as a kid back in the day, but you had here a rare look at a woman with a child who remarried, a rarity for TV of the Sixties. In this and many other respects, Rod Serling was a pioneer, exploring ideas and themes that tended to cross the line of acceptable behavior for the era. Notice that Eric and Annabelle slept in separate beds, a full decade already since 'I Love Lucy' first aired, and back then you never even made it into the Ricardo bedroom. One doesn't generally think about it, but you can trace the pattern of societal norms while watching the shows of successive eras. It wouldn't be long before dysfunctional families would take over the sit-com landscape altogether, but gradually. By the time 'Married With Children' came around in 1987, TV families were a veritable free-for-all.
But back to Talking Tina. A single viewing of this one and you're not likely to forget it. And that's coming from someone who saw it back when it originally aired. The Twilight Zone seemed to have that kind of way of leaving it's imprint. Maybe not all the episodes, but certainly enough of them to invite lengthy conversation among one's close circle of friends whenever the subject came up. This one had the classic ingredients, a malevolent talking doll and a future celebrity who managed to leave his indelible mark in The Twilight Zone.