Time Enough at Last story
A bank teller yearning for more time to read gets his wish when he becomes the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Directed by: John Brahm. Story by: Lynn Venable, Rod Serling.
16 total · 1 choice · 6 major · 9 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| what if I were all alone in the world | choice | Henry found that he was the only survivor after a nuclear war, and was at first delighted as there was nobody around to prevent him from pursuing his favorite pastime: reading. |
| escape from reality | major | Henry was so absorbed with reading books that he was constantly distracted both at work and at home. |
| human addiction | major | Henry was as addicted to reading as some are to alcohol and his social life suffered correspondingly. |
| ironic twist of fate | major | Henry at long last found himself with time for his passion, reading, alas was deprived of the ability when his glasses broke. |
| loneliness | major | Harry initially lamented his loneliness and searched desperately for others. |
| nuclear holocaust | major | While not explicitly spelled out, it seems obvious that the catastrophe that wiped out humanity had to do with explosions of a magnitude only the hydrogen bomb can explain, since Henry read a headline int he newspaper about the H-bomb shortly before the catastrophe occurred. |
| reading as a hobby | major | Harry was a bibliophile to the point of parody. |
| best laid plans often go awry | minor | The narrator used this phrase in the end to sum up how Henry's meticulously laid out plan to read virtually all the books in the library went up in smoke when he broke his reading glasses. |
| blindness | minor | Henry was myopic as a mole and quite helpless when he lost his glasses. |
| boredom | minor | Henry put a gun to his head as he lamented that he had nothing to do. |