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The Twilight Zone: Joy Ride/Shelter Skelter/Private Channel (1987)
wife commits manslaughter, portrayed as an angel. WTF?
SPOILERS and outrage follow. You know, I really enjoyed the first three quarters of the Shelter Skelter episode, that is, right up until it starts diverging from all reasoned and moral norms.
First things first. It seems quite far fetched that we don't see the character of Harry emerging from the dome. Yes, even if Harry was inside an enormous concrete dome* Harry appears to have enough military ordnance in his refuge to likely make a conspicuously loud dent, if not blow right threw the wall of that thing. Harry seems like the kind of person who would pack a few breaching charges in his refuge for a rainy day, if not be able to fashion an expedient demolition charge from his vast stores of smokeless powder and blasting caps. So I had to suspend my disbelief that you don't see Harry emerging from the dome at the last minute in this episode. There are also a few other physically suspect elements in this show that I could rattle on about in detail, like how according to this show, you can do nothing about radioactive contamination like that which befell the character of "Nick Gatlin", when in reality you can, it's called "Gross-whole body decontamination".
Secondly, and more importantly from the point of view of what this show's message to viewers really is; the very fact that Harry's wife and children don't tell anyone about their fathers extensive preparations for nuclear war, like "if anyone could still be alive after such a nuclear explosion, it would be my dad/husband Harry"; is so morally repugnant I had to kick myself for letting my kids watch this episode. As it took me ages to explain how it was the seemingly innocently smiling mother that was really the bad guy of this story.
Harry's children can be slightly excused due to their age, but Harry's wife is literally shown to be gleefully happy that her husband is buried alive, and when you think about it, you realize she obviously didn't even bother to tell any of the dome's construction crew to go to her house, as there is a chance that there may be living human beings down in the basement refuge.
Now I do understand that Harry is displayed to be an uncaring and overbearing survivalist of a husband, but what level of evil do you have to be to knowingly allow someone to be buried alive?
In sum, I think this episode has the potential to really split a room, and it would be quite illuminating to gauge a groups reactions to it from a psychology stand point. As there are other reviews here that are diametrically opposed to my own, it certainly appears there are some folks who feel that depicting the burying alive of innocent, albeit grumpy people, is something to smile about and as one reviewer puts it, they regard it as a form of "ironic" "poetic justice".
*In case anyone's interested, the production crew likely got the inspiration for the dome in this episode from seeing the very real concrete dome built on Enewetak Atoll to decontaminate that island chain, it is called the "cactus dome".