| “ | You have sentiment, Murlowe, but no brains. | „ |
| ~ Carl Lanser mocks his officer for being reluctant to murder civilians |
Carl Lanser is the villainous protagonist of The Twilight Zone episode "Judgement Night". He is a sadistic Nazi general who, after being killed in a bombing raid, is damned to experience his worst crime in life from his victims' perspective over and over.
He was portrayed by the late Nehemiah Persoff, who also portrayed David Steinmetz in Law & Order, Little Bonaparte in Some like It Hot, Iben Kostas in the 1966 Mission: Impossible series, Graile in The Comancheros and Jesse Jerome in Columbo.
History[]
Carl Lanser was apparently born in Frankfurt, Germany, and at some point chose to join the Third Reich, becoming a Kapitan in the Kriegsmarine, and the commander of a German U-Boat.
In 1942, his German U-Boat came upon a defenseless ship called the S.S. Queen of Glasgow, and though it was carrying civilians (including women and children), Lanser decided to open fire on it without warning, slaughtering the entire ship's crew and passengers.
Afterwards, Lanser expressed smug satisfaction with what he considered a job well done, but his second, Murlowe, was not enthused; he recognized the evil that had been done and could not reconcile the act with his conscience. He expressed these feelings to Carl Lanser, who dismissed them with contempt and disdain, deriding Murlowe as weak for having such sentiments.
However, Murlowe's fears proved well-founded; in death, Carl Lanser became an amnesiac, cursed to again and again experience being on the ship and meeting and knowing the lives he callously and thoughtlessly snuffed out, before dying along with them when his Nazi self showed up to shell the ship. And then, no sooner was Lanser "dead" and everyone else on the ship killed and the ship sunk, did the nightmare begin all over again...
Trivia[]
- The twist in the episode, that of a seemingly innocent and sympathetic protagonist turning out to be a violent and/or criminal individual being punished for their actions, is similar to the twist ending in two different episodes of the sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror (which in fact drew much inspiration from The Twilight Zone).
- In Hell, the amnesiac Lanser does express remorse and sadness for the deaths of the innocent people on the S.S. Queen of Glasgow, but as a damned soul it is now too late to redeem himself.
