Leave it to the Twilight Zone to take something as innocuous and innocent as a toy doll and turn it into a genuinely intimidating and chilling presence. When cold hearted stepfather Eric Streator scorns his stepdaughter's new doll, to his amusement and then increasing confusion and aggravation, "Talky Tina" talks back and engages the disgruntled parent in increasingly hostile verbal exchanges until she decides that Streator needs to be put in his place for good. The writing is fantastic, and it only gets stranger as the story goes along and Eric slowly begins to grow more afraid and lose his grip as he faces something beyond his understanding. Is Tina really doing all this? Or is someone playing an elaborate trick on him? Or is it all happening only in his demented mind? Whatever the case, I find it hard not to get the creeps every time Tina opens her freaky eyes... This episode always stuck with me after I first saw it, it was my big favourite of the series, I was always looking out for it when the show would be on. By golly is it still good, the story at face-value is a simple and straightforward one but it's very engaging, and the mood is so tense and spooky. Telly Savalas was terrific in his role. Even though he's obviously a creep from he start, he isn't just a one-note mean stepfather and nothing else. He's an angry man who tries for his wife's sake to have a relationship with his stepdaughter, but possibly because he can't have kids of his own he isn't really capable of showing her love, and so he turns all his frustrations against an innocent toy that he is clearly jealous of every time it says to the child "I love you." And he's not completely hopeless, he does at least try to make things right by returning the doll to little Christina but it's too little too late as far as Tina is concerned, to her he doesn't deserve forgiveness or to have such a sweet girl in his life. And Tina herself is a wonderfully quaint object of fear, what a great voice, her famous inflections sound both innocent and ominous at once. You don't need to see her walk for her to be eerie. As intriguing as the metaphorical aspects are, it certainly throws a wrench in that angle when Tina reveals to the mother that her husband had not been so crazy after all... It's a very enduring episode indeed, besides being one of the best ever examples put on film, the idea of the living doll was realised and executed tremendously well and was undoubtedly a big influence on puppet, doll and dummy nightmares in movies for years to come. Metaphors are fine, but I prefer to take it as a good old-fashioned honest tale of some manner of supernatural justice against a cruel man. Such a gem, it's one of the true legends of the series.
Review of Living Doll
