"A Thing About Machines" is the fourth episode of the second season of The Twilight Zone, and was first broadcast in October of 1960. It starred Richard Haydn as dandyish technophobe Bartlett Finchley .

Bartlett Finchley is a pampered journalist of cuisine who is elegant but sharp-tongued. He also is a technophobe, claiming that machines malfunction around him. Both his television repairman and his personal secretary don't believe his claims. But since this is a Twilight Zone episode, we can believe that his antipathy towards machines is something more than normal.

What is going to happen in this episode is clear almost from the title alone, and it was not too long into the opening that the course of the story was clear to me. At the time this story was broadcast, it might have depended on action and special effects to entertain. Twilight Zone episodes that depend on special effects rarely age well. What saves this episode is Haydn's scenery chewing performance as the snobbish Finchley.

There is some social interest in the story. The basic idea, of people clashing with modern technology, could have gone both ways. And indeed, other Twilight Zone episodes, such as Time Enough At Last and Mr. Bevis, have been more sympathetic to the eccentric that doesn't wish to conform to a modernizing society's expectations. But here, the old-fashioned Finchley is criticized by his working-class secretary and repairman for refusing to adjust to changing times. Here, instead of conformity to technology being seen as a bad thing, it is seen as something that connects people together. Once again, it is interesting how many layers of social criticism can be found in a seemingly silly Twilight Zone episode.

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