“The Commuter” is episode three of season one of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams and is based on the short story of the same name.
This episode opens at a train station in Woking. Ed Jacobson works at the station, and it looks like a less than wonderful job. Whilst he is working at the ticket counter, a woman asks for a ticket to Macon Heights. Ed has worked at the station for 20 years, and says that there isn’t a station by that name. When Ed asks the woman for the train time, he recognises the time and says that is for a different train. He hands her a timetable, which she takes, then looks down and she disappears. Ed does feel that he has heard the name before though. Ed is having problems at home with his son, who seems to be scaring people by accident when he loses control. He’s becoming violent and having psychotic episodes. Which sounds pretty bad.
At work, the mystery commuter reappears and Ed and his colleague Bob invite her into the office and ask her about Macon Heights, which is a pretty small town. A village essentially. Bob is showing the woman a map of the train network on the monitor, showing the woman that there is no stop called Macon Heights. Both Ed and Bob look away at the same time, and when they look back, she has disappeared. From inside the office. Which is odd.
Ed decides to start looking into matters himself, and gets on the train with the non-existent stop. The mystery woman had said how long her journey should take, so he times the trip to see where her stop would be. The train doesn’t stop and there is nothing there, but some other passengers jump out of train at that point. So Ed follows them. They walk across the fields to Macon Heights – a fairly normal looking place. For somewhere that doesn’t exist. People do seem pretty happy though, and Ed seems rather sad.
When Ed returns home that night after spending the day at Macon Heights, things have changed. His wife is different and his son, Sam, seems to have vanished. Ed doesn’t seem to really notice the differences. At work, some things seem to have changed as well, and Ed seems a little happier. Then he sees his son getting onto the train, and that triggers something in his mind.
Ed then starts looking more deeply into Macon Heights. Macon Heights seems to be a town on the edge of existence, a place that could have existed, and was planned to exist, but didn’t. Yet somehow it still seems to exist, on the edge of reality.
Things in Ed’s own world are changing, and he seems to be getting fascinated with Macon Heights. Addicted, perhaps. Macon Heights itself doesn’t seem to change much – to start with. Things start getting stranger and stranger, at Ed’s home and in Macon Heights, and not for the better it seems.
A rather surreal story.