Twelve Hours to Live (1959)

Episode 5 of One Step Beyond · One Step Beyond: The Dark Room · One Step Beyond: Epilogue

John Newland, Merwin Gerard, Jean Allison · 1959 · 26 min

A husband drives off into a storm after an argument and crashes; his wife feels it happen. Merwin Gerard's telepathy premise, played almost entirely as a rescue procedural, which is a stranger choice than it sounds.

Chosen print: Archive.org item one-step-beyond — One Step Beyond TWELVE HOURS TO LIVE S1E5.mp4, 100 MB · 26 min.

One torrent per episode, with the Archive.org item as a BEP 19 webseed alongside our seedbox and tracker. Not yet fetched, hashed or watched: the print report is completed when the file is downloaded and verified against Archive.org's published size and checksum.

Public domain: registered as published, never renewed. World Television Programming, Inc. registered this episode with the Copyright Office as a published motion picture, which is the fact that matters most — a series that was only broadcast and syndicated was never published, never needed renewing, and would still be protected today. The registration line reads: Twelve hours to live. © 17Feb59; LP13663.

No renewal was filed in the 28th year. The check is not a search for this episode's title, which can be spelled differently on the record than on air; it is a sweep of the Copyright Office's post-1978 records for the claimant's own filings, which returns exactly twelve renewals across the whole series and does not include this one. Underneath, the teleplay is original — no renewal surfaced under any credited writer — and Harry Lubin's theme returned no renewal under composer or title, so unlike most vintage television nothing survives in the music.