I came across this vignette from the first season of the 1980’s Twilight Zone reprise. If you don’t want to watch the video (it’s just over ten minutes), be forewarned of spoilers ahead.

(Spoilers beyond this point.)

“Examination Day” is based on a short story by Henry Seslar first published in the 1950’s. I like this summary of the setup from All Things Dark and Magical:

The premise of Examination Day is that Dickie, an only child to two loving parents in a somewhat sterile-looking futureworld, has just turned twelve, which means he has to undergo a government IQ examination. A perpetual optimist, Dickie feels confident in his abilities, and he is eager to pass the test and please his parents. They assure him that he already makes them very proud, regardless of how the test goes. They do, however, avoid his questions about the test itself, appearing more distraught about it than Dickie himself is, because “He’s not like other boys.“

(Irrelevant aside: The kid who played Dickie also played Sylvester Stallone’s son in 1987’s Over the Top.)

The story serves as an excellent example of two things: (1) misdirection in storytelling, i.e. the “twist ending”; and (2) what the future looked like from the 1980’s.

Now, in fairness, the story depicts some sort of dystopian/totalitarian society where technology is restricted by age. With such a level of control, it might not be surprising for officially-sanctioned technology to be far below state-of-the-art (i.e. to look like something we thought would be “futuristic” in the ’80s).

It’s also possible that the oppressive regime came about due to some apocalyptic event, and what we are seeing is a reconstruction of past technology, with architecture going in a different direction than in our time. I like to imagine that this society has an underground of hackers who make illegal upgrades to whatever technology they are allowed. Long story short, the atmosphere of this episode probably owes a great deal to the cyberpunk genre.

As for misdirection (that’s just my term for it), I remember watching this when it first aired in 1985, and asking my parents why everyone seemed so nervous. (Of course they had no more idea than I did, but I was 11 years old at the time and didn’t know that.) This was a pretty standard tactic for The Twilight Zone—allow the audience to develop a particular perception of the story, and then hit them with a twist. If you think too much during the episode, you might figure out the twist, but you’ll miss out on the storytelling experience. (I call the process of scrutinizing a movie or show for hints about upcoming twists during the initial viewing “Shyamalaning.”) The short story on which the episode is based is barely 2,000 words long, but it packs a great deal of both world-building and character development into a small number of words.

There is certainly allegory to the story, especially considering that the short story was first published in 1958 (in Playboy, as it happens), not too long after the McCarthy era and at a time that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were having a technological race that required a lot of smart people. The TV episode aired in November 1985, when the Cold War was still on and everyone worried about whether we even had a future.

So how could the story relate to the Cold War America of the 1950’s or ’80s? I think it’s about the dangers of enforcing conformity, but I could be wrong. I’m honestly more interested in the details of the world the story depicts.

Knowing that this society callously eliminates anyone who scores too high on an intelligence test makes my scenario of an underground hacker society a bit less likely. Rebellion is a much more difficult concept in a population where the highly intelligent are weeded out. The way the parents are utterly resigned to the process is chilling, but even more disturbing is the blandly bureaucratic manner of the process—especially the woman who calls to inform them of their son’s test results, and then switches gears immediately to burial arrangements. The manner of Dickie’s death is left unstated, leaving the viewer’s imagination to run wild to places it probably should not go.

The story also plays into notions of “idiocracy,” as satirically depicted in the (not very good, IMHO) 2006 movie of the same name, except that intelligence is suppressed from on high, not thrown away. It’s also reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which the government forces people with any sort of exceptional ability to handicap themselves in one way or another, thus making everyone nominally “equal.” It’s far more likely that the government’s goal in both “Examination Day” and “Harrison Bergeron” is control, not equality. Vonnegut’s point was most likely to satirize the idea of equal outcomes being a desirable goal. I have no idea what Mike Judge was trying to say with Idiocracy. Regardless, we should promote education and discourage efforts to denigrate intelligence—without being know-it-all douches, of course.