paulbehrer22173 Review of Room with a View/The Little Black Bag/The Nature of the Enemy

Night Gallery: Room with a View/The Little Black Bag/The Nature of the Enemy (1970) Season 1, Episode 2

The Little Black Bag

[9 March 2009]

In this segment, adapted by Serling from the Cyril M. Kornbluth short story, Gillings (George Furth), a low-level employee at a time-travel laboratory in September 2098, reports that a high-tech medical bag was mistakenly given a tube number and routed into a time-travel circuit set for the year 1971, and that no one in the facility is able to retrieve the bag. Shortly thereafter, William Fall (Burgess Meredith), a Skid Row wino who once was a practicing doctor before he was brought before a medical review board and stripped of his license to practice medicine because of fee splitting and attempting to perform an appendectomy while intoxicated, all of 20 years ago, and fellow derelict Hepplewhite (Chill Wills, best known for providing the voice of Francis the Talking Mule in the 1950s and appearing in several John Wayne films in the 1960s), discover the medical bag in a back alley trash can. Initially, Fall and Hepplewhite take the bag to a pawn shop, intending to sell it for eight dollars, but while inside the building are met by a mother desperate for someone to save the life of her daughter. Fall and Hepplewhite arrive at the apartment, and Fall checks the diagnostic card describing the girl's condition, which is, of course, a rather nasty lymphatic infection. Fall uses a hypodermic syringe containing a medicinal compound tuned to cure the infection, and the girl recovers almost immediately. Fall and Hepplewhite have a look at the bag's patent date: July 2098, which amazes them both. Fall checks the diagnostic computer's data concerning a specific scalpel, and it says that the scalpel can cure cancer by bypassing major and minor blood vessels and muscles in order to remove the cancerous tissue. Fall then goes to the room of his friend Charlie Peterson, who has a malignant tumor on the left side of his neck, uses the scalpel to remove the tumor, and Charlie descends the stairs with Fall and Hepplewhite, completely restored to good health by his friend's efforts. Another of the residents of the flophouse in which Fall and Hepplewhite stay approaches Fall to ask for treatment of his arthritis, Fall checks the computer screen, and the data presented directs Fall to use a compound tuned specifically to cure rheumatoid arthritis. After that, Fall and Hepplewhite discuss how the bag should be put to use in the future. Fall wants to use the bag in a demonstration before an assembly of the top figures from the medical and scientific fields to exhibit the healing potential of the bag's contents, thus bypassing a century of medical and scientific trial and error, and in the process save countless lives. Hepplewhite wants to use the bag's healing properties for profit, with the proceeds divided between Fall and himself. When Fall refuses to do what Hepplewhite wants, Hepplewhite extracts a scalpel from the bag and, with a wide-mouthed facial expression of greed, advances on Fall with murderous intent. Roughly a month after the incident, Hepplewhite, having cleaned himself up and assumed the identity of his late acquaintance William Fall, holds center stage at a packed hospital lecture hall, asking the doctors and scientists in the audience what their appraisal of his odds for surviving a 3 centimeter deep incision in his neck by a scalpel would be. When one of them responds that Hepplewhite would die almost immediately from loss of blood as a result, Hepplewhite responds, "Then, gentlemen, watch this!" Back in September 2098, Gillings reports that an alert tone given by one of the bag's scalpels indicates that the scalpel was used to commit murder, and deactivates the bag at about the same instant that Hepplewhite makes the 3 centimeter incision in his neck, said deactivation reducing the scalpel being used in the demonstration to an ordinary scalpel incapable of doing any medical benefit whatsoever, resulting in Hepplewhite's fatal undoing by his own greed. As the doctors file out of the hospital lecture hall, one of them asks a colleague why Hepplewhite didn't have the decency of committing suicide at home instead of in public, and his colleague responds that he isn't so sure that what happened before them was suicide, adding that he'd never seen anyone look so surprised at what happened as Hepplewhite looked. The bag and its contents, now reduced to decayed uselessness, is immediately dispatched to the medical waste incinerator, and the markings describing what the incinerator was for provides a telling commentary of how greed can waste a gift. Spoiler alert: George Furth, who played Gillings in this segment, was responsible for scripting the Broadway play Company, which was a huge hit in 1970.