The Twilight Zone: “The Jeopardy Room”/“Stopover In A Quiet Room”

“The Jeopardy Room” (season 5, episode 29; originally aired 4/17/1964)
What is “A deadly trap that might be too easy to escape?”
If nothing else, “The Jeopardy Room” has a hell of a premise. A former political prisoner is tracked down by his captors, and forced to undergo a hellish “test:” the prisoner, Major Ivan Kuchenko (Martin Landau) is trapped in his hotel room, and informed that a single item in that room has been booby-trapped. If Kuchenko can find the trap and disarm it before morning, he gets to live. If he tries to leave the room with the trap still active, or fails to uncover the trap, he’ll be shot. And the trap itself is a deadly explosive, so if he trips over it while searching, or fails to disarm it properly—ka-boom.
There’s nothing supernatural about any of this, and while it’s not a kitchen-sink realism kind of scenario (depending on your brand of sink), it’s a plot that could’ve easily showed up on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or have served as a set-piece on any of a dozen action adventure shows. That’s not a criticism. There is an appealing clarity to the dilemma Kuchenko finds himself in, a crisis with clear rules and deadly stakes. It’s the sort of hook where you want to find out what happens next before you know anything about the actual details; the characters are important, but the plot itself is what grabs you. Puzzle premises, when done badly, can be reductive and airless, a series of mechanical events that exploit the audience’s curiosity without offering anything to justify it. But when done well, a good hook can serve as an entry point to a richer world. The main danger is that the puzzles tend to require simple, satisfying answers—but when you’re working in the anthology format, that’s less of an issue.
For most of its running time “The Jeopardy Room” does a very good job of pulling us in and keeping us watching. Landau is excellent in a comparatively thankless role; Rod Serling’s script splits the focus between Kuchenko, suffering in his hotel room, and his tormentors observing him from afar. Kuchenko is clearly the hero of the piece, and the suspense of the episode rests on first trying to figure out what the bad guys are going to do to him, and then hoping he escapes. And yet the character also remains somewhat opaque. His suffering is evident, as is his exhaustion and fear, but he’s not as talkative as Commissar Vassiloff (John van Dreelen). There are multiple scenes of us watching Kuchenko as Vassiloff watches him and comments on the action, and it creates a distance between us and the protagonist which, while not exactly Rear Window levels of meta, still adds a pleasing level of uncertainty to the scenario.
It doesn’t hurt that van Dreelen is a terrific villain, an urbane, eloquent monster whose infatuation with his own cleverness provides the episode with the fulcrum it needs to justify its plot. In lesser hands, the story would read like a subpar James Bond outing, with the sort of goofy deathtrap whose only real reason for existing is to keep us from realizing that a quick shot to the head would’ve ended the whole problem ages ago. And, to be fair, the “jeopardy room” is exactly that sort of death trap. It has several moving parts—first Vassiloff and his henchman, Boris (Robert Kelljan) have to track Kuchenko down; then Vassiloff calls him to say hello; then Vassiloff comes by to chat him up, and offer him a drink of wine that’s been drugged with a sedative (Vassiloff is immune to the sedative, having given himself moderate doses for years—shades of The Princess Bride); then Vassiloff has to plant the explosive device and get back to the apartment across the street he and Boris are sharing; then Vassiloff and Boris have to watch Kuchenko, make sure he doesn’t escape, and trust that the bomb goes off.
Even if one assumes that Vassiloff is planning to kill Kuchenko whether or not he figures out the game (and that’s far from certain; Vassiloff gives off the sort of evil smugness that Batman villains only dream of, and with guys like that, you never know how seriously they’re going to take their own rules), that’s a really inefficient way to go about being the agent of a totalitarian super-power. Yet it’s plausible enough, because van Dreelen does a great job of portraying the Commissar as a man so certain of his cleverness, and so sadistic in his appetites, that he can’t resist the chance to play games. It’s possible to see a personal angle to this as well. Serling’s script keeps the backstory to a minimum, but we do learn that Vassiloff was one of the men who tortured Kuchenko while he was in captivity. Kuchenko then escaped, so it’s possible that, for Vassiloff, this mission is a little more personal than he lets on. Maybe he doesn’t just want to beat his prey; maybe he also wants to destroy a man who dared to defy him.
But that’s subtext you can take or leave. For the most part “The Jeopardy Room” doesn’t require such close readings. Given the limited setting and cast (we only see three people, and there are only two sets), director Richard Donner does an impressive job telling the story in visually interesting ways. The shots of Kuchenko from Vassiloff and Boris’s perspective help keep things from being too static, and stress the concept of Kuchenko being trapped in a cage, observed and prodded by his tormentors. There’s also some nifty, subjective camera work later in the episode, as Kuchenko goes out of his mind trying to find the bomb. In terms of running time, we only spend a few minutes watching Kuchenko search his hotel room—most of the episode is taken up establishing the situation, so Landau’s performance and the direction need to convince us that Kuchenko is close to breaking very quickly. Which they do.
Frustratingly, “The Jeopardy Room” falls apart in its final moments, with a one-two punch that undermines the sense of hopelessness that had worked to make the rest of the half hour so effective. Vassiloff calls Kuchenko, and Kuchenko nearly picks up the phone before figuring out the secret: that the trap is in the phone, and it will explode when he answers it. While this requires an impressive intuitive leap on Kuchenko’s park, Landau’s dawning astonishment makes the moment work. The problem is that once he realizes the trick, he doesn’t try to defuse the bomb. He just dives for the door, and there’s no real justification as to why he’s suddenly able to escape now. Boris shoots at him, but he misses, and there’s no real reason why he misses; it implies that Kuchenko probably could’ve gotten out at any point, and that makes the trap Vassiloff set a lot less scary in retrospect. Worse, Vassiloff and Boris return to search the room after Kuchenko leaves, and Kuchenko is able to kill them with the bomb that was suppose to kill him. That’s just dumb. Boris knows the bomb is in the phone, and he knows how it works. And while it’s possible he could’ve forgotten, it makes Vassiloff look like an idiot for not simply taking apart the device as soon as he entered the room. (Why would they need to go into the room anyway? They had plenty of time to search it earlier while Kuchenko was unconscious.)