AllMovie

In his first Twilight Zone appearance, Burgess Meredith stars as Henry Bemis, a miopic bank clerk who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone to read his precious books. He unexpectedly gets his wish when, while hiding in a bank vault with a book in his hands, a hydrogen bomb devastates the city around him. The sole survivor of this nuclear attack, Henry is at first stricken with panic, then becomes delighted at the prospect of reading to his heart's content, without being nagged by his wife (Jacqueline De Wit) or his boss (Vaughn Taylor). The episode's ironic payoff is so well known that it does not bear repeating here; suffice to say that the ending was invoked in the first few moments of 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie. First telecast November 20, 1959, "Time Enough at Last" was scripted by Rod Serling from a short story by Lynn Venable.