The Ray Bradbury Theater (TV Series) The Lake (1989) User Reviews

Completing the Sand Castle

[Hitchcoc · 7/10 · 25 March 2015]

Once again, using the name Douglas for the main character, Bradbury introduces us to a love story. A thirty-something man and his new bride are to move into his childhood home on the shores of a beautiful lake. He has a sadness in him that goes back to when he was ten and met a pretty blonde girl with whom he fell in love. She loved to swim and he was petrified of the water. She wanted to teach him, but his fears overwhelmed his feelings for her. As the family was about to leave at summer's end, she decides to take one more swim. She disappears in the water and is never seen again. Now the man sees a an castle on the beach. This has the classic ghost story ending.

A lake made out of my tears because this episode makes me cry so many tears

[samgslp · 6/10 · 8 January 2013]

Watching "The Lake," I was forced to remind myself every few minutes that this was Ray Bradbury theater, because it felt so much like an episode of the 80s reboot of the Twilight Zone. It's one of those dreamy, nostalgic coming of age stories that uses the present as a point of reference. In order to form a cohesive narrative, Bradbury Theater destroys the meaning of Bradbury's original story, "The Lake," on which this episode was based.

Destroying the story is not as offensive as it sounds, because a Bradbury story will never look as good on a television as it looks in your head. It's just confusing trying to follow what you're watching and what you know - but what you know isn't what's happening. Yes, it's a cohesive, dreamy story recalling the end of a summer and the beginning of adulthood - which, as Bradbury explains, is a coincidence as (he claims) this story was the one that "turned (him) into a writer." It's a nice story, you will probably remember it, but it's sappy and the meaning of the original is lost. And it's really sappy.

"I'll be here every summer, every single summer."

[classicsoncall · 7/10 · 11 January 2022]

Ray Bradbury's introduction to this story is exceedingly nostalgic and sentimental. When he wrote it, he claims, it made him cry and at that point, he knew he was a writer. Watching it, one will experience sadness, as it moves it's principal character from present to past and back again, with memories tinged by guilt and recrimination. Douglas (Gordon Thomson) and his new wife Margaret (Tina Retgien) visit his boyhood home and the beach where he so often played and built sand castles as a ten year old. It's also where he first fell in love with a young girl named Tally (Jessica Billingsley). While he enjoyed building his sand formations, he kindly refused every invitation from Tally to join her swimming in the lake. His fear of water even went so far as to believe that 'water hates people'. With summer over and their last day at the beach together, Tally takes one final swim, and never returns from the lake. Rescue divers fail to find her, and in his quiet rage, Doug destroys his sand castle. Doug's return to the beach with Margaret brings him to the exact spot where he experienced tragedy twenty five years earlier. A man rowing in to shore expresses his surprise over a drowned swimmer he has just brought in from the lake. Ray wistfully strokes the dead woman's hair, and regretfully recalls his past once again. His bittersweet memories of long ago affect him in a profound way, perhaps even regretting that he brought his wife along. At least this one time for a Bradbury story, one could almost call it depressing, as it leaves the viewer with no sense of wonder or surprise.