Plot
Penny is a very harried housewife with a dim-witted husband, Russell, and four children, Janet, Susan, Gertie, and Russell Jr., who simply do not get along with each other. A typical morning consists of Penny being awakened by her excessively loud clock radio, cooking breakfast while the children fight and interrupt her, Russell complaining about something, the phone ringing, the dog barking, and the washing machine acting up.
One day, Penny works in her garden while her neighbor loudly removes tree limbs with a chainsaw. As she digs, she discovers a wooden box containing a beautiful gold pendant in the shape of a sundial, which she takes inside and puts on.
At the grocery store, Penny is harassed by her whining children and by annoying customers. While driving home as her children loudly fight, Penny seems to be on the verge of a total nervous breakdown. While she tries to cook dinner, her children begin to pester her again and her husband comes downstairs complaining about a rip in his shirt. As the noise level becomes too much, she yells at them to shut up and they freeze in time. She is confused at first, but soon realizes that the pendant is an amulet that can stop time. She tells her family to start talking and time restarts. She is happy as she realizes that she will finally have a little peace and quiet. "Shut up" is the word to stop time and "start talking" restarts time. However, the power will only work if Penny is wearing the amulet.
Later that night, Penny watches a news program about the recent peace talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. She becomes annoyed and briefly freezes time, then expresses her happiness and goes to sleep.
The next day, Penny uses her time-stopping power to enjoy a peaceful breakfast with her family, to shop at the grocery store without incident, and to avoid being pestered by two anti-nuclear weapons activists; she drags their frozen bodies into the yard, lays them down, then restarts time, and the shocked activists decide to skip her house.
Later that evening, Penny enjoys a relaxing bath when air raid sirens go off and she hears her husband calling loudly from the bedroom. When she goes into the bedroom, the radio announcer reveals that nuclear missiles are heading for the United States. When the radio reveals that ICBMs have entered U.S. airspace, her husband and son begin to weep and an explosion is heard in the distance, Penny quickly freezes time, leaves her house and walks through a frozen town. She looks up to see what the frozen people are looking at...and is horrified to see a Soviet nuclear missile frozen over the city, nose down and seemingly a second or two from detonating.
The episode ends with Penny facing an impossible dilemma: Will she live eternally alone in a silent but safe world...or unfreeze time but die instantly?
Read more about this topic: A Little Peace And Quiet
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)