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McNulty isn’t having a good day. Despite submitting suggestions nearly non-stop since he’s joined his new firm, his boss has decided to fire him. So he goes to the bar, and now nearly everyone he talks to doesn’t want to talk to him. Except this oddball stranger, who has decided to leave his stopwatch. Only, if you press the stopwatch, everything else stops too. So McNulty decides to try and sell his ex-boss just one more time, only his boss doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.

So McNulty decides to do what he probably should have done in the first place – head down to the bank and clean out the vault. But in the process of doing so, he drops the watch, only to crack the watch as it drops out of his pocket, and he can’t seem to get it going again. So now he has all this money, and everyone else is stuck in time.

Reminds me of the classic Time Enough at Last, from Season 1. Seems as if the best stories are being recycled, seeming somehow stale and reused by this point. They’re still good, but not as good as they were.

Some twenty years before The Twilight Zone Movie was released with a skeletal maniac on the wing of a plane, methodically ripping it to shreds, William Shatner (Nick of Time, Season 2) witnessed what can only be described as a giant ewok wandering aimlessly about the wing of his flight, peering somewhat aimlessly into one of the engines, and generally causing no small amount of distress.

When they land, however, just as in the movie version of the segment, the strange creature has left his mark – with the cowling of the engine pulled back oddly, in a way the should not have happened just by being buffeted by the wind. Perhaps the nervous passenger did see something on the wing before he popped open the emergency exit window! All-in-all a very satisfying episode.

In 1974, humans are no longer allowed to box, as it’s been deemed barbaric. So now androids do the fighting for us, and one trainer (Lee Marvin), who used to box, but can no longer do so because of the law, totes his B2 from town to town trying to find a fight, but because the model is so outdated he has problems finding fights. He also has problems finding parts for it, and his mechanic has no problem telling him so.

So when the pull into Kansas to fight a B7, and the left arm spring goes awry, Steel Kelly figures he’s going to have to get into the ring and fight so they can collect their money, since the B2 won’t be able to do so, and without the money, they won’t be able to fix it and collect anything else. Since no one knows his face, he’s got a chance, right? Wrong. He takes it on the chin and on the head and everywhere else, barely getting out alive. His mechanic can only collect half the take since he didn’t even last one round. But at least it’s something.

Jack Klugman plays another loser here (after Joey Crown in A Passage for Trumpet, in Season 1 and Jesse Cardiff in A Game of Pool in Season 3), a bookie who can’t take the money off of a kid who bets it all on a horse that loses, then gets the comeuppance himself when his boss finds out about it.

When he’s called to the mat he gets a telegram that his son, fighting in Vietnam, is wounded, he loses it, and he sees a vision of him as a younger boy (played by Bill Mumy, It’s a Good Life, Season 3), where they make amends for everything they wanted to say to one another, and then he makes a deal with God to take him instead of his boy.

The next thing we see is the boy, grown again, shooting at the gallery where he and his dad met that fateful night, reciting lines that they would tell one another, so it looks like the bargain worked and the youngster’s life was spared.