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Night Gallery: "Brenda"

You never forget your first love, do you? Especially if it's a summer love like Brenda Alden's. And especially if it's not human. But wait. I'm guessing that last part never happened to you.

The funny thing is that Brenda started out this episode seeming just like a normal girl. She chased a butterfly but did not catch it. She knocked down a sandcastle but rather than taking the blame like a normal kid -- Who am I kidding? The way Brenda Alden justified the wrecked sandcastle as an apt response for its builder's failure to talk to her on a previous day was totally the response one could expect from all too many "normal" kids (at least the ones I know). So was her attempt to patch things over and make friends with Frances Anne Emsden, the builder of said sandcastle. She had no real reason to expect Frances Anne to have warmed up to her since the last time they met; if anything, she had just assured that Frances Anne would hate her twice as much in the future. Still Brenda had the chutzpah to at least try to make friends with Frances Anne and as you might guess, she got turned down. Indeed, it was quickly pointed out by Frances Ann that none of the kids on the island were interested in being Brenda's friend. And given Brenda's odd idea of fun, who could blame them?

Then she met a creepy monster that seemed to be passing by from a nearby Theodore Sturgeon story. Brenda Alden tricked the monster into falling into a nearby pit but then she stuck around and talked to the thing. Eventually the thing got out of the pit and started wreaking havoc on Brenda's neighbors. So Brenda naturally decided to respond by leaving the front door of her parents' vacation home open one night. And then, of course, the monster came...

Unlike most conventional monster stories, Brenda Alden never got a comeuppance for any of her more dubious actions in this episode. But I was left with the impression that she was terribly lonely. True, it might be argued that Brenda's loneliness was really Brenda's own fault but Brenda obviously did not see it that way.

And in the end, Brenda had this very creepy monologue where she professed love for the monster even though it had been covered with rocks and placed in a pit by her father and her neighbors, even going so far as to declare the monster to be the only thing that she ever truly loved. (Interesting to know that she did not bother to mention her parents in that speech.) Brenda's monologue was made even creepier by the fact that it took place one year after Brenda and her family left the island where she first found the monster.

We viewers were never told exactly how the monster got there and what it would have done had it not run across Brenda. It was noted, however, that Brenda was twelve when she first found the monster and one year later when she said she loved it, she was thirteen. Coincidence?

Should we consider Brenda's situation to be a metaphor for puberty? Unwed motherhood? Or something else?

Anyway, narrator Rod Serling told us viewers at the beginning of the episode that he hoped that we would never end up being as lonely as Brenda. He had a point. It was hard for me to watch that last monologue and not think, "God, I hope I never get that lonely." And this despite the fact that -- as I've noted above -- Brenda Alden was not a very likable person.