The episode follows Bemis through a post-apocalyptic world, touching on such social issues as anti-intellectualism, the dangers of reliance upon technology, and the distinction between solitude and loneliness.

A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock.

As a cruel joke, his wife asks him to read poetry to her from one of his books; he eagerly obliges, only to find that she has crossed out the text on every page.

Moments after he sees a newspaper headline, which reads "H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction", an enormous explosion outside shakes the vault, knocking Bemis unconscious.

Leaving the bank, he sees that the entire city has been destroyed, and realizes that, while a nuclear war has devastated Earth, his being in the vault has saved him.

Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone.Next week we enlist the considerable literary talents of Charles Beaumont, and invite you to join us in a strange and shocking dream.

He also narrated the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie, which made reference to "Time Enough at Last" during its opening sequence, with the characters discussing the episode in detail.

[8] The book that Bemis was reading in the vault and that flips open when the bomb explodes is A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving.

Additionally, the portrayal of societal attitudes toward books speaks to the contemporary decline of traditional literature and how, given enough time, reading may become a relic of the past.

Although "Time Enough at Last" implies that nuclear warfare has destroyed humanity, film critic Andrew Sarris notes that the episode's necessarily unrealistic format may have been what allowed its production to commence:[10] Much of the implacable seriousness of The Twilight Zone is seemingly keyed by the clipped, dour delivery of Serling himself and the interlocutor.

The point is that the bomb could never have gone off on network television were the plot couched in a more realistic format.In the era of the Internet and eBooks, the irony depicted in "Time Enough at Last" has an Information Age counterpart, according to Weston Ochse of Storytellers Unplugged.

As Ochse points out, when Bemis becomes the last person on Earth, he finally has time to read, with all his books at his fingertips and the only impediment is technology when his medium for accessing them—his glasses—breaks.

This notion, akin to Ray Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian" (1951), is also alluded to in the episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", in which a perfect and equal world considers works like those of Shakespeare "smut".

When a poll asked readers of Twilight Zone Magazine which episode of the series they remembered the most, "Time Enough at Last" was the most frequent response, with "To Serve Man" coming in a distant second.

[18] The PC game Fallout Tactics (2001) includes a librarian in a desolate world who wants the player to find his missing glasses so he can read his books.

[19] In a 2022 expansion for the game Fallout 76 entitled “the Pitt”, players may come across a small room featuring a pair of glasses, a gun, and a note called “Time Enough at Last”, containing lines of dialogue from the character of Bemis.