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Carol Shelton is a professional photographer who has just been offered a promotion
to a world-wide beat, which means a lot of traveling. She tells her fiance about her offer. He’s okay with her news until she tells him she doesn’t want to start
a family right away, since she doesn’t want to have her kids grow up while
she’s on the road; she’d miss everything. He gets angry, and stalks off.
The
next day, she’s at the zoo waiting for a child model who will pose with
the animals, her current assignment. A boy shows up, and when she asks him what
his name is, he asks her to guess. She
guesses Kenny, and the boy says that’s it. He seems very familiar to her, but she can’t place him. They have a wonderful day at the zoo, and she
asks a passerby to take a picture of her and the boy. When Carol asks Kenny a personal question,
he runs off and she doesn’t see him again that day. When she gets home, the message on her phone says that the model
for the photos couldn’t show up that day. Now she’s really puzzled, wondering where the boy came from.
The next day, she has a fight with her fiance,
and tells him she just doesn’t want to start a family right now, and he
calls off their engagement. When
she returns home, Kenny is waiting there, asking her why she is turning
her back on her fiance. Carol asks
him about his parents, and the boy runs down the apartment corridor. She runs after him, but when she turns a corner,
there is no sign of the boy in the dead-end corridor. Several days later, she has completely broken
off contact with her fiance, and we are to assume the relationship is dead. She sees Kenny in the park across from her apartment, and runs to
catch him. He asks her why she couldn’t
choose him, and she realizes that he is the child she would have had if she’d
turned down this job and gotten married. Kenny slowly fades away. At the end of the episode, Carol is off to
the travel the world for her dream job, presumably less a woman for not
having had children.
The song unsung, the wish unfulfiulled..Even with the dream in hand, there is the chill of an eternal loss, fading, fading. For every choice made, wrong or right, a thousand alternatives denied, when tomorrow calls sometimes the heart must be denied. For Carol Shelton, there will be other tomorrows, other joys, and yet, fading, fading, for one trembling instant she was given the opportunity to take snapshots of an alternate future. Snapshots forever undeveloped, in the darkness of the Twilight Zone. |
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