Tomato and Lettuce on Whole Wheat
S2 E7: Nick of Time
The Twilight Zone, 1959.
Picture it: Ridgeview, Ohio. A town with exactly one export: chicken-fried steak and existential dread.
Newlyweds Don and Pat Carter roll in when their car coughs itself into a coma and the local mechanic assures them he can fix it “in three to four hours” — a phrase that has never once meant three hours.
So, they head into the Busy Bee Café. Pat orders a lettuce and tomato sandwich on whole wheat with iced coffee. Don orders the exact same thing, because apparently their marriage vows included “and also I will never order anything different at a roadside diner, even if chicken-fried steak is actively begging to be noticed.”
Enter: The Mystic Seer. A penny-operated fortune-telling machine disguised as a napkin holder. Imagine a plastic devil bobblehead that offers life advice and napkins with equal authority. Don, already sweating about his job promotion back in St. Louis, asks the machine if he’s getting the big title. The Seer spits out a slip: “It has been decided in your favor.” Moments later, a long-distance call confirms it: Don is now the youngest office manager in history, a feat made possible by supernatural paper scraps and a phone bill of 76 cents, which in 1960s Ohio could buy you half the town.
This is the turning point. Don is hooked. Every vague answer the machine offers feels like divine intervention: “You may never know.” “If you move soon.” “Try again.” Each one is basically a passive-aggressive fortune cookie, yet Don treats them like gospel.
Pat, bless her lettuce-and-tomato heart, tries to talk sense: the machine is just a coin-operated horoscope for people too impatient to wait for their star chart in the Sunday paper. She points out that Don himself is connecting the dots, building the narrative, making the coincidences matter. Don, meanwhile, is out here treating a napkin dispenser like it’s the Oracle at Delphi.
The paranoia peaks when the machine suggests they shouldn’t leave until 3:00. They cave and stay, chewing stale whole wheat and staring at the clock like extras in a Beckett play. When they finally venture outside, they’re almost mowed down by a car, which Don takes as irrefutable proof that the Mystic Seer has his back. (Pat takes it as irrefutable proof that her husband should not be trusted around boardwalk amusements.)
Eventually, Pat lays it out: it doesn’t matter whether the Seer is real or not. What matters is that Don has turned into the kind of man who thinks his destiny is bound up with a napkin holder in Ridgeview, Ohio. And she didn’t marry that man, she married the guy who, until about an hour ago, thought lettuce and tomato on whole wheat was a sufficient honeymoon lunch.
They walk out together, deciding to make their own future. Cue swelling music, cue handholding, cue the Seer smirking in silence.
Final kicker: an older couple slumps down at the booth they left behind, immediately begging the Mystic Seer to tell them whether they’ll ever be free. Spoiler: no. They are emotionally handcuffed to that napkin holder in this small town, forever.