This is one of my favorite episodes, partly because I can identify with Martin Sloan. I had once worked in one of the world's largest ad agencies on Madison Ave. in NYC, and was working in a large management consulting company when I decided to quit working for someone else at age 36 (Sloan's age in this episode) for many of the same reasons he was getting tired. I started my own business and never looked back.

I loved the visual metaphor near the beginning, at the gas station, when Sloan decides to walk to his nearby hometown while his car is being serviced. We see him walking away, not directly, but in a vending machine mirror, symbolizing his transition from reality to the Twilight Zone.

This episode also features one of the most hauntingly beautiful closing narrations by Rod Serling:

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.