Her Pilgrim Soul
| "Her Pilgrim Soul" | |
|---|---|
| The Twilight Zone episode | |
| File:Her Pilgrim Soul.jpg Scene from Her Pilgrim Soul | |
| Episode no. | Season 1 Episode 12a |
| Directed by | Wes Craven |
| Written by | Alan Brennert |
| Original air date | December 13, 1985 |
| Guest appearances | |
| Kristoffer Tabori: Kevin Drayton Anne Twomey: Nola Granville Gary Cole: Daniel Wendy Girard: Carol Katherine Wallach: Susan Richard McGonagle: Lester Betsy Licon: Nola (age 5) Danica McKellar: Nola (age 10) | |
"Her Pilgrim Soul" is the first segment of the twelfth episode from the first season (1985–86) of the television series The Twilight Zone.
Plot
Dan and Kevin are two scientists who create a holographic projector. One day, the device starts generating images of a human fetus. The two watch as the fetus matures into a baby, a young girl, then a full grown woman, growing at a rate of ten years each day. They find out that Nola, as she calls herself, was once a young woman who lived in Westchester County, New York (near Hastings-On-Hudson) during the early twentieth century. They debate over whether or not Nola is a human soul somehow integrated into their hologram generator.
Kevin begins to fall in love with this creation. He spends more time at the lab than at home and his home life deteriorates over a few days. Nola talks with Kevin about her father and how he tried to keep her burgeoning intellectual desires from blossoming. They discuss the poetry of Yeats. During the fifth day of studying Nola, she describes her pregnancy and relives a miscarriage. Dan later discovers the miscarriage was the cause of Nola's death. In real life Robert never forgave himself for her death and died of a broken heart soon after.
As the holographic Nola ages and nears death she uses a voice modifier machine to call Kevin's wife Carol. Posing as Kevin, Nola tells her to come pick him up from the laboratory. In the final conversation between Kevin and Nola it is revealed that Kevin is Robert reincarnated. He carried his grief "for the rest of [his] life and into the next." Nola has finally been able to give him closure by living the life he wanted to have with her. He brings out the Yeats book and reads their favorite passage. As they tearfully acknowledge the passage, Nola fades away as Kevin's wife enters the lab and they have an emotional reunion. Carol is then quite surprised as a child's toy ball bounces out of the holographic chamber and into her hands.
Closing narration
And bending down beside the glowing bars, murmur, a little sadly, how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid her face amid a crowd of stars. A variation on William Butler Yeats to all those who have loved and lost, and loved again, on Earth or...in the Twilight Zone.
Notes
The title is a literary allusion to "When You Are Old", a poem by William Butler Yeats.[citation needed]
This story was made into a one-act stage musical by Alan Menken and paired with James Tiptree, Jr's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" as a stage production titled Weird Romance: Two One Act Musicals of Speculative Fiction. The James Tiptree Jr. story "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" was made into an episode of the short-lived SCI FI Channel anthology series Welcome to Paradox.