Twilight Zone episode review — 3.5 — A Game of Pool
Episode 3.5 “A Game of Pool”
Original air date: October 13, 1961
Writer: George Clayton Johnson
Director: Buzz Kulik
Rating: 10/10
Leave it to The Twilight Zone to take a story of two people playing a game of billiards, and turn it into a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of life. That’s the power of this episode, one of the best in the series. It’s some of the most compelling television I’ve ever seen.
We meet Jesse Cardiff (Jack Klugman), a man that believes he’s the best pool player on earth. He has a very theatrical monologue about how no matter how good he is, people will always tell him that Fats Brown was better. Fats Brown, of course, is dead.
In heaven, Fats Brown (Jonathan Winters) gets a call to go down to Chicago. He proposes a game with Jesse to see who is the best. He insists on stakes, however: life and death.
Jesse is hesitant, and Fats taunts him by saying the greatest race car drivers and bullfighters face death everyday. Jesse agrees, and they decide to have a game — the first to 300 points.
Jesse takes a commanding lead early, but once he boasts about it, Fats comes back. Eventually the score is 299–296 in favor of Jesse, and it’s his turn. Jesse screws up when Fats distracts him by dropping his cue, and he gets very upset, but Fats shrugs it off as a bit of fun. He then makes three shots, tying the game, until he misses his last one, leaving Jesse a very easy shot in the corner pocket.
Fats then talks to him for some time, telling him that the reason they’re playing for life or death is because for Jesse, pool is his life. Fats talks about how he had to practice to get good, of course, but he also experienced life in full, traveling the world and enjoying every moment of it. Jesse had given that all up just to be the best.
Fats then tells him that if he wins, he may win more than he bargained for, then apologizing, saying he was required to say that. That doesn’t mean anything to Jesse, though, who sinks the shot and celebrates, only to see that Fats has disappeared.
In the final scene, it is Jesse in heaven that gets called to meet a challenger.
It’s a really great episode with some fantastic dialogue. It ends up being about so much more than its premise, becoming a powerful and compelling drama. It’s definitely one of my favorite episodes of the series, and is right up there with the best of the non-Serling penned scripts.
