"The Twilight Zone (2002)" Retro Recap: "One Night at Mercy"

​Written by Scotty

​Do you want to live forever? That is a question that everyone should have an answer to after they hit their mid-twenties and if you have not even thought about it at that point yet, well you should.  I can give you my answer and it is no. I have been around to witness plenty of changes in the world and although I would have liked to see some things that happened in the past, I do not want to be around to see the world end. Being around after everyone you cared about has passed on would also be terrifying and you would have to build new relationships every generation just to have someone to talk to. It sounds awful to me, but that is just my opinion and everyone is entitled to their own.

Doctor Jay Ferguson has joined the medical ranks for one reason, to save lives.  Knowing the pain that is caused from losing a loved one, Jay has made it his primary objective to fend off death with all of his knowledge and knowhow. But he is also fully aware of the fact that not everyone can be saved, when it is your time to go, the is no pushing back the clock any further.  But anything he is able to do to make someone as comfortable as possible so they no longer have to suffer and can outlive the maker's plan for another day, he is in and will not give up his fight.
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After saving his first patient at the hospital, his next one is being wheeled into the ER.  After being found hanging in a tree for over twenty hours, Dr. Ferguson believes that the homeless man that found this poor soul was pulling the chain of the EMTs.  When the mysterious man starts to come to, he says that his name is Death, but the doctor is not willing to take that as an answer.  Putting him down as a John Doe, Jay starts talking to the man and when the answers turn out to be something a crazy person would say, he is ready to turn his patient over to the mental ward.

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But Death does not want to give up on his doctor and urges him to stick with him.  Being able to name the first patient who died in the hospital in 1968, Death is willing to let Jay take his time to research the facts about his story.  When Jay finds out the name of the first person that died in the hospital from the head nurse, he is ready to listen to Death’s story, but the strange man has vanished from his restrained bed.  Finding Death down in the morgue, apologizing to his recent kills, Jay wants to find any reason he can to not believe him, but when the two are walking back to his room, Death picks up a newspaper to make his point.  Opening it up to the obituaries and seeing that no one has died in the last twenty four hours, Jay has no other reason but to trust that his patient had a hand in it.

Death has been working on the planet since the beginning of time and is tired of taking lives away from the beauty the life has to offer.  Knowing that he cannot stay on the sidelines for long, since the others in the heavens get upset and can put the squeeze on him to get back to work, he is enjoying the time to stop and smell the roses.  Jay has a flashback to watching his mother die, the main reason he became a doctor and now he has a plan of his own to keep Death from working again, but has not thought out all of the consequences that could follow if no one would die from this day forward.  As a handful of patients get rolled into the ER burned to a crisp with no pulse and reeling in pain, Jay sees that his plan cannot work.  When someone’s number is up, it is time for them to be released, but when asking Death to resume his post, Jay is hit with a life changing event of his own.

I like this episode since Death is very straight forward throughout and makes it fun to listen to his stories.  Wanting to see what life has to offer, Death has never taken the time for himself and give the world a break, even the young Doctor.  But when he is urged to stop his former ways, Death fears that something bad could happen instead, but he is taken back by the young Doctor and understands where his feelings are coming from.  Poor Doctor Jay does not know what to expect when death is taken out of the equation, but quickly understands when he sees what can happen first hand.  Starring Tyler Christopher as Dr. Jay Ferguson, Jason Alexander as Death and Lynda Boyd as the Head Nurse, this is a fantastic telling of good and evil, or maybe just life and death since everyone has their path, you just need to keep your name out of Death’s notebook. 

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