This was the very first television show that I had ever seen where I understood the story that was being told.
I understood that Gary Merrill had a "brain machine", and that he kind of pulled a switch with Harry Guardino's character.
And that Merrill's character could not convince anybody of what had happened, until he asks his assistant (Sally Kellerman who would later be struck by a God lightning bolt in the second pilot of star trek) to "look in his eyes".
58 years ago, when I was five years old I understood exactly what this meant. and that was the part of the story which was important to me, and it stuck with me all of this time. From that moment on I was very interested in science. Not merely science-fiction, but I wanted to know how things worked, I wanted to know if things like what I had just seen in this episode where possible?
There is another aspect to this episode which deals with the madness of Harry Guardino's character. But since that connects almost directly to the main arc, it is not that important other than to say that men deal with their guilt in different ways.
I never understood why this series was cut short right in the middle of the second season, as it turns out the network deliberately put this show into a slot where it's previous fans could no longer watch it. So, the same thing that they did to Star Trek. In fact, a lot of these actors and some of the props would show up in Star Trek episodes.
And even though I like a lot of the episodes of the 1995 remake, I don't feel like they revisited enough of the original stories from this show. This show was so well-made that it was as if we were watching a theatrical production every week. The special effects, the props, the actors, the dialogue, it was modern and believable and contemporary. And I would hear people talking like that in real life which is what made me ask, "could such a thing where people switch bodies actually happen?"
And this was the question that we had to ask after every episode of the show, could this really happen, or was this actually happening right now? In fact, many of the things that they visit, have become reality. especially if you watch the episode "obit"