![]() ![]() Er, that’s confusing: the point is, this part was intended for Rooney and Rooney alone, and he makes the most of it. In this case, the face and sweat belong to Mickey Rooney, a man so perfectly cast to the episode’s leading (and only) role that Rod Serling actually wrote the script for him. ![]() You just keep coming back as someone slightly sweatier. ![]() Maybe that’s the ultimate Twilight Zone twist: no one escapes, not even in death. Every new iteration just seems like the same soul with a slightly different face. It’s a meaty part for an actor, and Serling just seems to understand this kind of man (and I think it’s always a man, at least on this show) intuitively. The self-loathing bastard, the guy willing to sell his soul for a taste of the big-time, is a Rod Serling staple, and even when the episode around them isn’t all that great, the character itself always shines through. In fact, we’ve already had at least one episode of the show that featured a roughly similar set-up: “Nervous Man In A Four-Dollar Room” had another weaselly, crummy guy in a crappy room arguing with himself in the mirror (and losing). The details keep changing, but The Twilight Zone has seen this face before: twisted into a snarl, screaming at shadows, and rushing headlong in a comeuppance you can see from Cleveland. If this all sounds a little familiar, that’s no surprise. But if he does realize it, it just makes him angrier. That genetics may have made him a short, but he’s the one who keeps holding himself down. He blames everyone else, but deep down, on a level so small it’s practically sub-atomic, he realizes, he has to realize, that this is all in the end his fault. Mostly, he’s angry with himself, if he just had the wit to realize it. He’s miserable because he’s angry: angry about the way the world’s treated him, angry at how he never gets a fair shake, angry at this cheap, ugly little room with the dirty walls and the newspapers scattered on the carpet, reminding him of his sins. And this particular man (Grady, a jockey recently suspended on horse-doping charges after a long and storied career of cheating and lying and doing whatever it takes to win) isn’t miserable because of bad weather or the blues. Well, would you look at this: a miserable man in a miserable room. (Available on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon.) “The Last Night Of A Jockey” (season 5, episode 5 originally aired ) ![]()
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