She looks in the mirror and sees herself quietly sitting on the bench. One of the most memorable scenes in the episode takes place while she is in the bathroom. In complete bewilderment she asks nearby passengers and quickly ducks into the bathroom. She also notices a checked bag that is identical to her own.
She asks the ticket agent about the schedule, but he curtly replies that she has already asked several times. Millicent Barnes (played by Vera Miles of Psycho fame) is seated at a bus station in Ithaca, NY waiting for the next late arrival to Cortland. Millicent Barnes, who, in one minute, will wonder if she’s going mad.”
Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes’ shoulders will be put to a test. Like most career women, she has a generic classification as a, quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes, not given to undue anxiety or fears, or, for that matter, even the most temporal flights of fancy. “Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. This notion of body doubles and evil twins can trace its roots to Germanic/Gothic literature, and perhaps the most famous occurrence is in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1839 tale “William Wilson.” Serling imagined the man with a face exactly like his own, as well. He saw a man who looked just like him wearing the same suit and carrying similar luggage. Rod Serling came up with the idea for the episode while at an airport in London. Who hasn’t ever wondered if they have an evil doppelgänger lurking somewhere out there? What person hasn’t experienced the strange sensation of deja vu? In “Mirror Image” a mischievous double plagues a young woman at a bus depot.
“Mirror Image” is a wonderfully unsettling episode of The Twilight Zone.
0 kommentar(er)
