Rod Serling: What you're witnessing is the curtain-raiser to a most extraordinary play; to wit, the signing of a pact, the commencement of a project. The play itself will be performed almost entirely offstage. The final scenes are to be enacted a decade hence and with a different cast. The main character of these final scenes is Ilse, the daughter of Professor and Mrs. Nielsen, age two. At the moment, she lies sleeping in her crib, unaware of the singular drama in which she is to be involved. Ten years from this moment, Ilse Nielsen is to know the desolating terror of living simultaneously in the world and in the Twilight Zone.
Air date: January 31, 1963
Ilse Nielsen (Ann Jillian) is a bright young girl who can't verbally communicate, apparently thanks to severe neglect from her shut-in parents. In actuality, Ilse's parents are members of a secret society of scientists who have believed that humankind naturally used Telepathy before the invention of written and spoken language. To this end, Ilse's parents treated her as a guinea pig, dedicating themselves to bringing back humanity's latent telepathic talent by never verbally speaking to her. A fire soon breaks out in her home and her parents perish, after which Ilse is adopted by Sherriff Harry Wheeler (Frank Overton) and his wife Cora (Barbara Baxley). Having been only exposed to mental communication, Ilse needs to enter a world that communicates in the spoken word... and, because of her upbringing, vocalization itself is a cacophonous and confusing thing which gives her great pain.
Mute Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Ilse's birth parents only viewed her as a lab rat in their attempts to revive humankind's natural telepathic ability. The other members of their society were the same, but they change their minds by the end of the episode.
- Adaptation Deviation: In the short story by Richard Matheson, Proessor Werner tells the Wheelers about the telepathy experiment which Paal Nielsen and other children were subjected to by their parents. In the television adaptation, he keeps it a secret.
- As the Good Book Says...: Rod Serling's closing narration includes a quotation from 1 John 4:18 (KJV): "perfect love casteth out fear".
- Bittersweet Ending: Ilse loses her telepathy, a potential boon to mankind, but as her parents' associates put it, she's better off without it, having the chance to live a normal childhood. Given that her biological parents only viewed her as a lab rat, she's found a real family in Harry and Cora, who will love unconditionally whether she can read minds or not.
- Dutch Angle: Several are used when Ms. Frank tries to force Ilse into saying her name in front of the class for her first day of school.
- First Day of School Episode: The Wheelers enroll Ilse in an American school, but a lot of factors in her telepathic upbringing make the experience very unpleasant for her.
- Gender Flip: In the short story, the telepathic child is a boy named Paal Nielsen, and the Wheelers lost their son David. In the episode, the child is a girl named Ilse while the Wheelers lost their daughter Sally.
- Guinea Pig Family: Ilse's birth parents, Holger and Fanny, ultimately made her the subject of an experiment to induce telepathy from the moment she was born, which they did by never speaking to her. Three other couples, the Werners, the Elkenbergs, and the Kalders, did the same thing with their own children. In spite of the treatment the kids likely endured, all of their attempts were successful, with Ilse being the most powerful telepath.
- No Antagonist: Although the Wheelers and Ilse start out against each other, they both have noble goals and biases of their past. Cora helps out Ilse, the orphan of a tragedy, but sees too much of her own daughter in her. Ilse wants to unite with a would-be family, but thanks to her sheltered upbringing, she literally and figuratively can't recognize Cora's words of love. One could argue that Ms. Frank is the true antagonist of the piece, but even she is depicted as being a Well-Intentioned Extremist as far as Ilse is concerned.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Before Ilse came to live with them, the Wheelers' daughter Sally drowned while she was learning to swim.
- Replacement Goldfish: Through Ilse's mind-reading, we learn that Cora's beloved daughter Sally died in an accident while swimming. All of Cora's attempts to help Ilse are filtered through the loss, but it's only brought up once or twice in the actual episode.
- Time Skip: The prologue takes place in 1953, and the remainder takes place ten years later.
- Telepathy: The main concept of the story. The secret scientist society Ilse's parents were part of believed that humanity communicated this way before language came about, rather than miscellaneous sounds and gestures. Speech largely overwrites it, but with sufficient enough training, telepathy can be re-learned like any other language. Interestingly, the talent also provides the ability to see things remotely, as seen when Ilse remotely scans the wreckage of her home.
- Translation Convention: As Ilse reacts to spoken language like it's nails on a chalkboard, it's assumed that her thoughts as we hear them are full sentences and/or images for our convenience. Anything Ilse doesn't understand, when her point of view is shown, is layered multiple times and played slightly out of sync, to help the audience understand the sheer dissonance she feels.
Rod Serling: It has been noted in a book of proven wisdom that perfect love casteth out fear. While it's unlikely that this observation was meant to include that specific fear which follows the loss of extrasensory perception, the principle remains, as always, beautifully intact. Case in point, that of Ilse Nielsen, former resident of the Twilight Zone.
