Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

Woo-hoo! Mystery solved.

Let me back up a bit. Yesterday, while getting off the subway in Berkeley, I had this really eerie feeling. I guess classes aren't in session anymore because the streets are empty now, and, unusually for summer, it was cold and misty. Instead of throngs of students everywhere, the only people I saw were people sweeping the sidewalks with dustmasks over their faces.

The feeling brought back a faint memory of a tv show I saw as a kid where a guy somehow ends up out of sync with reality and sees what's really going on behind the scenes. Instead of seeing his normal house, he sees the physical world getting built just-in-time as people traverse throught it. Very odd and for some reason it stuck with me on the fringes of my memory.

This is the sort of question that would be perfect for Ask FlickChick, which is a great column where people as things like "I caught the last scene of something on tv where there was a guy and car near a bridge. What tv show or movie was it? I think the guy was balding." And then they come up with all kinds of possible answers. Great stuff.

But I've been meaning to track down this snippet of memory for a while and spent some time yesterday on this. I had the feeling it was an Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episode because it had the kind of self-contained, anthology feel to it.

[Funny side note: A few years ago I watched all the original Twilight Zones which brought back all kinds of memories from my childhood. All the paranoia, allegory, and sappy sentimentality came back to me like an old friend, and I saw the source of many of these strange images and stories that lurk in my distant memories]

But this new memory was definitely not part of the old series, it was in color (modern color, not the weird color of the final TZ episodes from the 60s). For some reason I had thought it was the Outer Limits because I had written off the 80s Twilight Zones as crap. It turns out that this show was, in fact, part of the 80s Twilight Zone series and was an episode called "A Matter of Minutes", written by Theodore Sturgeon (based on the short story "Yesterday was Monday"). link

I must have watched quite a few episodes of that incarnation of the Twilight Zone because I stumbled upon another one that I vaguely remembered. Something about a bunch of spirits turning themselves into raindrops to restore an environmentally destroyed planet. The episode was "Voices in the Earth", story by Alan Brennert. It must have made an impact on someone else, because someone has put the entire episode available for download here.

Now I just need to see if they have the 80s TZ series available on DVD. Hmm, I've still got to track down the Return of Starbuck, and I could put together a killer Movie Night.