A Little Peace and Quiet

A Little Peace and Quiet
Season 2 (Second series) Episode 1 Segment a (1x01xb)
Episode information
Series:	The Twilight Zone (Second Series)
Director:	Wes Craven
Guest Stars:	Melinda Dillon (Penny)
Lead Character:	Penny
Episode guide
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Next	Wordplay

A Little Peace and Quiet is the second segment of the first season (1985-86) of the second series of The Twilight Zone. 

It was directed by Wes Craven.

Opening Narration

"Wouldn't it be nice if, once in a while, everyone would just shut up and stop pestering you? Wouldn't it be great to have the time to finish a thought or spin a daydream? To think out loud without being required to explain exactly what you meant? If you had the power, would you dare to use it, even knowing that silence may have voices of its own... to the Twilight Zone?"

Plot

Penny is a very harried housewife with a dim-witted and hapless husband, Russell, and four children: Janet and Susan, who are always fighting; Gertie, who is very clumsy; and Russell Jr., who is always playing pranks. A typical morning consists of Penny being awakened by her excessively loud clock radio, cooking breakfast while Janet and Susan fight and interrupt her, Russell Jr. playing a prank, Gertie spilling something, Russell complaining about something, the phone ringing, the dog barking, and the washing machine acting up.

One day, Penny works in her garden while her neighbor loudly removes tree limbs with a chainsaw. As she digs, she discovers a wooden box containing a beautiful gold pendant in the shape of a sundial. Not thinking anything of it, she takes it inside and puts on.

At the grocery store, Penny is harassed by the whining Gertie and Russell Jr. plus annoying customers. While driving home as Janet and Susan loudly fight, she seems to be on the verge of a total nervous breakdown. While she tries to cook dinner, her children begin to pester her again and her husband comes downstairs complaining about a rip in his shirt. As the noise level becomes too much, she yells at them to shut up - and they freeze in time. She is confused at first, but soon realizes that the pendant is an amulet that can stop time. She tells her family to start talking and time restarts. She is happy as she realizes that she will finally have a little peace and quiet. "Shut up" is the phrase to stop time and "start talking" restarts time. However, the power will only work if Penny is wearing the amulet.

Later that night, Penny watches a news program about the recent peace talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. She becomes annoyed and briefly freezes time, then expresses her happiness and goes to sleep. The next day, Penny uses her time-stopping power to enjoy a peaceful breakfast with her family, to shop at the grocery store without incident, and to avoid being pestered by two anti-nuclear weapons activists; she drags their frozen bodies into the yard, lays them down, then restarts time, and the shocked activists decide to skip her house. Later that evening, Penny enjoys a relaxing bath when air raid sirens go off and she hears her husband calling loudly from the bedroom. When she goes into the bedroom, the radio announcer reveals that nuclear missiles are heading for the United States. When the radio reveals that ICBMs have entered U.S. airspace and Russell and Russell Jr. begin to weep, Penny quickly freezes time just as an explosion is heard in the distance. She then leaves her house and walks through the frozen town. She looks up to see what the frozen, terrified people are looking at... and is horrified to see a Soviet nuclear missile frozen over the city, nose down and seemingly a second or two from detonating.

The episode ends with Penny facing an impossible NO WIN NO WIN dilemma: Will she live eternally alone in a silent, but safe, world... or unfreeze time but have herself and the world be destroyed by nuclear war?

Themes and Homages

This episode is similar in theme to two episodes of the original series; "Time Enough at Last" which involves a man who seeks a refuge from life while reading when the world ends through a nuclear war, and "A Kind of a Stopwatch" which involves a man who gains the power to stop time using a stopwatch. Also the episode “Elegy” specifically noted about nuclear war occurring in the year 1985 which destroyed much of Earth.

The ending is also similar to a short story by Arthur C. Clarke entitled "All The Time in the World", which concludes with the lead character in possession of a time-stopping device moments before a nuclear super bomb test ends the world. That story was adapted for television by Tales of Tomorrow, a forerunner to the original Twilight Zone series.

Cast

• Melinda Dillon: Penny
• Greg Mullavey: Russell
• Clare Torao (as Clare Nono): Newscaster
• Joshua Harris: Russell Jr.
• Judith Barsi: Bertie

Trivia

• On the complete series DVD set, there is an audio commentary for this episode that revealed various details.
• All the actors and extras stood in place for the frozen time scenes and even the dog was trained to sit very still. They can be seen swaying a bit back and forth however.
  • For those seen off balance like running, there were hidden armatures so they didn’t fall down.
  • For props the mid-poured orange juice and mid-spilled milk were made of plastic.
• Judith Barsi was tragically murdered alongside her mother three years later by her own father who then killed himself.
• The movie theater that Penny runs by before seeing the bomb frozen in the sky has nuclear themed films Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove both from 1964 listed on the marquee.
  • The frozen Soviet warhead is partly inaccurate as it shown as being completely intact in the air while in reality it would have broken up before impact that close to ground.
• When the emergency bulletin comes in, the clock radio reads 9:51 pm. When Penny and Ross wake up at the beginning of the episode, it reads 6:31 am. When time is frozen at the grocery, the circle clock there reads about 10:27 am.
• During the outbreak of war, the television simply flashes “Emergency Alert Broadcast” which suggests the system was caught off guard and unable to send a message. A similar thing occurs in the nuclear attack aftermath film Testament released two years earlier in 1983.
• Choco Poppers is a fictional cereal with the box art displaying a smiling train similar to characters such as Thomas the Tank Engine and The Little Engine That Could.
  • Various real varieties can spotted on the shelves including Froot Loops and Captain Crunch plus one of particular interest which is the short-lived 3CPO cereal that was a tie-in to Star Wars made between 1984-1986.
  • Penny puts $51 in the frozen manager’s mouth to pay for her groceries. This was rather illegal as items are supposed to be scanned at checkout for purpose of inventory.
• The scene of Penny yelling shut up three times as war broke out was partly improvised since the script intended for Melinda to yell it once.
• This episode has no closing narration.