On the one hand, I have read too much science fiction to be the ideal audience for "Man on a Mountaintop" (1961). Even before I get around to picking at the entanglement of gifted children and anti-intellectualism and human loneliness and abusive parenting that comprises this ambitious, unwieldy teleplay written by Robert Alan Aurthur and directed by Tom Donovan for The United States Steel Hour (1953–63), I want to fight it on its own ground of the literature that supplies the allusion of its title. Once a nationally famous child prodigy tenure-tracked before he could buy his own drinks, Horace Mann Borden (Cliff Robertson) at the age of thirty-one busses tables at an all-night cafeteria in Greenwich Village and doesn't crack a wince when baited to perform his savant's calculations for a fifty-cent contemptuous tip; he gets away as often as he can to the movies, returning to sleep in his rented room furnished with secondhand stills of old movie stars and the three books of his total library. He is obsessed with Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930), seeing in the tragically misfit end of its artificially created superman his own doom since childhood. He meets no one who can challenge him to see himself instead in the super-intelligent community of Wilmar Shiras' Children of the Atom (1953). He calls himself a freak and a monster for graduating summa cum laude at twelve with an honor thesis in theoretical physics which he defended before the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT and despite reading voraciously enough to imprint on Wylie, never seems to have run across A. E. van Vogt's Slan (1946). Of course no one within the walls of the script will have handed him a stack of Zenna Henderson because the entire premise rests on how nihilistically isolated Borden has become from himself in the course of fleeing other people, but how could he not have known a single person in his formerly high-flying intellectual life who could have accurately informed him that he may be damaged, but he's not—for God's sake, especially in his field—that weird? His flat affect and avoidance of eye contact and jerkily uninflected voice may conventionally indicate the alienation of his intelligence or realistically reflect a childhood spent as a prop for his father's theories of pedagogy, an adulthood salt-smarting conscious of every discomfort his differences provoke. As much for his own reinforcement as to warn off the sympathy he can feel coming from his newest neighbor, he repeats, "A freak and a monster cannot live in this world of normal people." Corn-fresh from Iowa by way of an aborted summer in Europe, Gerta Blake (Salome Jens) is not equipped to argue with Borden's self-presentation of irredeemable strangeness; her ability to make her way into a friendship with him is founded on the determination of naïveté, her unconditionally offered support which she eventually names as love. She is a normal person, she wasn't reading by the age of four; her solution to the bitterness with which he describes himself as a machine because he understands the formula for mass–energy equivalence but not the meaning of the words I love you is to let him, like a fairy tale, kiss her. It is so far from a solution for a man directed by nature and nurture to look for the one correct answer to a problem that it winds him right up into a meltdown. It couldn't have to hurt to try him on Theodore Sturgeon first.

On the other, out of eviscerating nowhere at the midpoint of the episode comes the monologue in which Borden reveals the reason that six years ago he quit academia to haunt the local movie houses and duck his neighbors in the hall and make no use of the formidable intelligence for which he was so strictly valued:

"Yes, I was a teacher. At nineteen, I was an associate professor. And all that time, I had the feeling that everybody was looking and waiting, waiting, waiting. All right, prodigy, produce. All right, genius, produce. Produce the evidence that will prove Einstein is wrong. Produce the theory that will change the world. They were like children at my feet, waiting for me to hand them down the ABCs that would rock their very existence, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I could never do it, because I don't know enough and I'll never know enough. There's so much, so very much to know and I could never know enough . . . I used to walk the halls of that university, afraid to face people to whom I was becoming a failure. I hid behind the door in my office, hating the thought of seeing my students and the other members of the faculty to whom each day was another day of disappointment, another day in which I did not produce. And one day, I said, enough! I will live where are no mirrors, where I—where I won't even have to face myself. I will live alone, where I will disappoint no one. It's simple, satisfying, and I'm happy this way."

Oh, Borden. Wittgenstein at that age ran as far as the Russian front trying to drop out of his own head. It didn't work for him, either.

What right has this speech to ring true as pain when so much of the rest of the episode is full of stock sentiments about smart people in a stupid world? None of them are straw men, but most of its characters are fleshed out only as far as their arguments, their hostile or possessive or amiable misconstructions of Borden who holds the gravity of the play like a dark star in his separateness from them which may not be anything as mythical as he's built it up to be. His estranged father (Paul McGrath) is a sort of snake-oil cartoon of B. F. Skinner, an obscure psychologist who made his name exploiting his brilliant child as if its achievements were his own invention and still maintains with proprietary frustration that his new Einstein owes the world his gifts no matter the cost to himself. Bohemian Charlie Blake (Chris Wiggins) inclines toward a protective animosity when his little sister starts bringing their "real flip" of a reclusive neighbor home like a stray cat and only an insightful, unexpected comment on his avant-garde paintings checks him into a second look at this blunt dark-haired man in busboy's shirtsleeves, for once feeling safe enough to venture an opinion that might make him visible. Gerta is steadfast throughout, but the most telling show of support may actually come from Willie Bliss (Gene Saks), the brash off-Broadway actor who surprises everyone within earshot by apologizing to Borden for bullying him like the class clown with the bookworm, even if he has to broach the subject with typical theatricality: "Why, do I have to say why? Isn't it enough I want to apologize? I'm stupid . . . Sometimes when you're stupid, you're afraid of people who aren't." It does not please Gerta that they team up to entertain her party with a quiz kid act: she runs from the room in tears, leaving Borden mystified. The speech rings true because he does, even in ways I can't tell if his author intended. Even granting his definition of happiness as the avoidance of pain, the most encouraging thing that can be said for Borden when we meet him is that he has a stable routine. His reputation in the building is half creep, half punch line; the combination should make him disappointment-proof, but he shies off at the first threat of contact as if a civil word might unacceptably raise hopes. It isn't funny that he drops his newest armful of old Hollywood in his haste to get out of sight. His social overloads are brief and distressing, glitchier than his usual conversations with his throat working against the lockjaw of listener's expectations, the staccato key-clack of his sentences so invariable that hearing it lighten with uncertain pleasure at the end of a quiet evening strikes like a revelation. He can hold down a job on the night shift and lose himself in the silver screen. His diffident offer to Gerta of some pictures from his collection of William Holden is the bravest move he's made in years. It's a crystalline performance by Robertson, coming so soon after his first run at flowers and Algernon in The United States Steel Hour's "The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon" (1961) that it is impossible for me not to wonder if he was typed slightly as an exponent of neuroatypicality, but Borden himself doesn't feel like a type. Genius is a tough act to put over and he does it without fanfare or equations, the seal on his intelligence not that it comes bundled with weirdness and trauma, but that devastating articulation of the flipside of Dunning–Kruger: the knowledge of how much he doesn't know. "Somewhere the cogs didn't mesh." It should not be lost on viewers sensitive to depictions of giftedness that the play, like Borden, ultimately blows off the big question of whether he will accept or decline the new offer of a teaching position at Columbia; it's irrelevant. It's not his route back to himself, or on to the self he was never allowed to be. "I'm a machine built without love," he tries to make real to the parent still bent on seeing him in terms of his potential, unwilling or unable to acknowledge that for all his eidetic memory and precocious mathematics the prodigy was a person instead of a paradigm shift in waiting. "Didn't you know that, Father? Didn't you know if you failed that I would be a freak? Didn't you know that? When you build a machine and it fails, you throw it away. What do you do with a man? What do you do with a man?"

I have less in common with Borden than makes a neat sign-off. I was reading by the age of four and designed my own octal system after reading about Maya numerals around the age of nine and was regularly challenged to recite verbatim passages from books that classmates refused to believe I was reading at my usual speed and would jerk out of my hands just to make sure, but I also had a talking doctor and the luck of a pair of parents who cared more about my resilience than my potential, which doesn't mean I can't understand a character who finds it easier to imagine their own death by lightning than a life that isn't seen as a disappointment. It gets me over the jostling rather than melding of themes in "Man on a Mountaintop" and helps a little with the construction of its female lead as a normalizing force of love. Borden is drawn with sufficient reality that even a healthier version of him would be hard to picture as particularly normal, except in the ways that it is completely normal to make only so much eye contact and watch a heck of a lot of movies and look in science fiction for ways to understand your life. When it gets into print, I'd give him Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1968): Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger. However familiar some of the strangeness may be. Enjoy the preview of the Space Needle during the commercial breaks. This flip brought to you by my real backers at Patreon.