Or, Twilight in the Black of Space
The Twilight Zone debuted on television with what remains one of its best-remembered stories, “Where Is Everybody.” It also set out one of its most successful premises—man’s all-consuming urge to touch the stars.
Unquestionably, events in the real world conspired to give the launch of The Twilight Zone a serious case of topicality. The Soviet Sputnik, the first craft ever to enter outer space, had taken flight as recently as fall 1957—that is, just two years before The Twilight Zone made its debut; the United States’ equally pioneering Explorer I lifted off on New Year’s Day 1958. Even NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was just a year old when “Where Is Everybody?” was screened; and it was still in the formative stages when Rod Serling read the article that inspired the script in the first place.
In its issue of May 12, 1958, Time magazine ran a feature on the experiments being undertaken as the slow process of selecting the United States’ first astronauts got under way. In a story titled “How Far the Moon,” readers learned, “Voyages to distant planets seemed blissfully easy a few years ago, because they were theoretical. Now that satellites, the first crude spaceships, are actually on orbit, spacemen are being asked to deliver real transportation, and a voyage even to the nearby moon looks disturbingly hard.”
Indeed it did. But a year later, on April 2, 1959, NASA announced the names of the so-called Mercury Seven, the first men destined to go into space. John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton, Alan Shepard, Scott Carpenter, and Gordon Cooper were selected from over five hundred applications, and each one of them had undergone much the same treatment as Mike Ferris (Earl Holliman), hero of “Where Is Everybody?”
On September 13, 1959, just weeks before The Twilight Zone launched, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 became the first man-made object ever to touch (or, more accurately, collide with) the surface of the moon. Less than a month later, even as the first episode of the show was broadcast, mankind was impatiently awaiting Luna 3 to commence transmitting back to Earth the first-ever photographs of the so-called dark side of the moon.
“Where Is Everybody?” (First broadcast: October 2, 1959)
The Twilight Zone’s much-anticipated pilot episode was the tale of a man who found himself alone on a road, walking into a strange town, and discovering that he was the only person there. Every place he visited, from a diner on the outskirts, to the police station, a movie theater and a drugstore, was deserted, and while he continually saw signs of recent activity . . . a boiling coffeepot, a still-lit cigar, a ringing telephone and so on . . . life itself was altogether absent. His sole companions, it appeared, were a dressmaker’s mannequin seated in a car and his own reflection in a mirror.
It is a fascinating study of isolation and loneliness, edging into paranoia and terror. Throughout what quickly turns from a perplexing mystery to a screaming terror, the man cannot help but feel he is under constant observation, and when he finally cracks, that was the horror that he verbalizes. Stop watching me!
Only in the last minutes of the story do we understand who the man is and why he is in this predicament—an astronaut undergoing isolation training, in the days when the space race was still in its infancy and science had barely succeeded even in launching satellites into space, let alone a manned craft.
Some liberties were taken, of course. The dimensions of the Mercury spacecraft, after all, were tiny—so much so that no candidate over five-foot-eleven and 180 pounds could even be considered.
Ferris appears much larger than this (although it is difficult to judge, with all but a few moments of his entire time on-screen being spent alone). But nobody watching the episode would doubt that he readily filled another of the requirements—he was a “superb physical specimen . . . [a] mature, middle-class American, average in . . . and visage, [a] family man.”
But he is also a family man who is left shattered by the sheer desperate loneliness of the mission he is about to undertake. For, staring up at the sky, to the stars and moon, even the most hardened viewer cannot but suppress a shiver as Serling reveals what awaited Ferris, and all who would follow in his footsteps.
“Up there . . . up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky . . . up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting . . . waiting with the patience of eons . . . forever waiting . . . in the Twilight Zone.”
“Where Is Everybody?” was filmed on the same Universal-International lot that had hitherto featured in such movies as It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Tarantula (1955); and, later, would be seen in Gremlins (1984) and Back to the Future (1985).
The decision to allow Serling himself to handle the narration was very much a last-minute thing—other names were suggested, including Westbrook Van Voorhis, of the March of Time series of radio broadcasts and newsreels, but fears that such already-familiar voices were too readily associated with other shows eventually saw the field whittled down to the show’s creator alone. Just as he had always intended.
It was a move that would find immediate support from the critics. Deep into the first season, TV Guide was still moved to report, “a highly competent group of actors has been employed on The Twilight Zone—Burgess Meredith, Everett Sloane, Dan Duryea, Ed Wynn, fellows like that. But the real star of the series is its creator, chief writer, executive producer and narrator, Serling himself. It is the Serling touch that brings The Twilight Zone out of the everyday—and into the beyond”; establishing it, in fact, as “the most refreshing new anthology series in some time, [with] imagination, highly competent production and excellent acting. There isn’t much meat in it, but, for a mulligan stew, it is a tasty dish indeed.”
The New York Daily News agreed. “The premiere episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone . . . was a suspenseful, tautly-written story of an Air Force officer who finds himself in a completely deserted town. This is still an interesting theme, even though it has been used in other works, including the current [science fiction/end of the world] movie, The World, the Flesh and the Devil.” An interesting comparison, albeit one that must take into consideration the very different payoffs that the two productions deliver.
Other reviews of the episode were likewise enthusiastic.
“This debut scored with dramatic impact infrequently found when the TV camera attempts to focus on the fringes of fantasy, and while short on insight, it was strong on style and solidly suspenseful,” declared the Hollywood Reporter, while Time magazine called the show “a fresh idea presented by people with a decent respect for the medium and the audience . . . proof that a little talent and imagination can atone for a lot of television.”
In the Chicago Sun-Times, Earl Holliman was singled out as “painfully convincing as the last man on earth in an episode that brilliantly exploited those story line details the eye and ear remember long after the fadeout.” Across the board, reviews and reviewers were spellbound, although there was some dissent. The revelation that the events of the show took place only in the mind of a NASA test subject was not to everybody’s taste—more than one viewer, at the time and subsequently, would describe the tale’s solution as simply a variation on the most grisly storytelling cliché of them all, the breathless cliff-hanger that is resolved because “then the little boy woke up.”
Where is everybody? They’re watching from the other room. Earl Holliman in the Twilight Zone pilot.
CBS/Photofest
Or, as Variety put it, “since the zinger lies in the denouement, it is here where Serling lets down his audience by providing a completely plausible and logical explanation. Somehow the viewer can’t help but feel cheated, even though Serling gives it a topicality attuned to the current human experimentations in preparation for space travel. A science fiction ending would be more in the realm of the imagination.”
But the strength of the story, the beauty of the photography and the power of the more-or-less monologuing Earl Holliman were such that any and all disappointments were overridden. Such values were, of course, common to many pilot episodes, as all concerned threw their very best efforts into displaying the project in the best possible light. But Serling was already committed to retaining those values throughout the entire series, a point that Variety predicted in its review of the opening story. “Everything about [The] Twilight Zone suggests solid production values, with director Robert Stevens extracting maximum performance in this one-man (almost right up to the end) journey into shadow.”
Yet ratings were low. Lower than low. Then sponsors were edgy, the network aghast. Serling might have consoled himself with the knowledge that the fifteen million people who tuned in for the first few episodes was many more than witnessed Oklahoma! throughout its entire Broadway run, but he was comparing chalk and cheese.
With less than one-half of the season either filmed or in production, the possibility that The Twilight Zone might be canceled before its first season was even complete was never far away. Serling himself joked that there were three principal occupational hazards facing the average television producer—hair loss, hypertension and ulcers. He only hoped he could keep all three at bay until the full season was in the can, but a growing tide of industry opinion seemed to be that the show’s life span was already nearing its end.
No matter that ratings offered only a very subjective snapshot of a show’s overall viewing public . . . in that strange way the human race has of playing “follow the leader” at every available opportunity, the news that a show was struggling in the ratings was itself often enough to turn hitherto faithful viewers away from it—out of fear, perhaps, that their neighbors might discover they watched a loser show, and ostracize them accordingly.
Serling himself believed a mail bag that hit twenty-five hundred letters across the first three weeks of the show spoke louder than the ratings, and maybe he was correct. But networks are in the business of pleasing their sponsors, and sponsors are in the business of making money. A couple of thousand people had bought a couple of thousand stamps, and used them to mail a couple of thousand letters, that is true. But how many General Foods products did they also buy? How many Kimberly-Clark?
Enough, it seemed. By the end of the year, Serling was claiming that at least one of the show’s sponsors had informed him that there was a 90 percent chance of the company renewing its sponsorship on the strength of the show’s mailbag . . . or, rather, on the strength of its contents, which was almost unilaterally in favor of the show. Other observers, too, were impressed. Bill Baur of TV Guide even claimed that Serling was in receipt of more fan mail than anybody else on television . . . even if “a great deal of [it] is from neighboring planets.”
In fact, Serling placed very little faith in the content of his mailbag, positive or negative, recalling instead how a favorite episode of the Lassie show, in which the titular collie gives birth to a litter of puppies, was lambasted by viewers—many from the Deep South; many written in the same hand and posted from the same mailbox, that apparently compared the birth of Lassie’s pups to some kind of bump-and-grind burlesque show. To which the network responded by banning any further scenes in which puppies might be born.
Besides, the highest accolades were still to come. In January 1960, at its annual Milestone Award dinner, the Screen Producers Guild declared The Twilight Zone as the best-produced television film series of 1959—a considerable feat for a show that had only debuted in October! Producer Buck Houghton received his award from actress Jane Wyman, and, a month later, the New York Times was repeating that both of the show’s sponsors, General Foods and Kimberly-Clark, had renewed their sponsorship deals for the remaining ten episodes of the season. A further ten, opening a second season, were confirmed by CBS on May 11, 1960. (Kimberly-Clark would drop their sponsorship of the show following the last of the summer reruns. They were replaced for season two by Colgate-Palmolive.)
Later in the year, The Twilight Zone won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Work of 1959 in the science fiction field—the first of three consecutive such victories; quickly followed by the first of two successive Emmys. Nor was the show only winning the respect of the industry. Science fiction fandom, too, was thrilling to its audacity and imagination.
“The Lonely” (First broadcast: November 13, 1959)
The Twilight Zone’s next venture into space took it farther than man had even dreamed of traveling, to an asteroid nine million miles from the Earth, on which a single man served out the most ruthless form of solitary confinement that humanity had ever envisioned.
“Witness if you will,” Serling invites viewers, “a dungeon, made out of mountains, salt flats and sand that stretch to infinity. The dungeon has an inmate: James A. Corry. And this is his residence: a metal shack. An old touring car that squats in the sun and goes nowhere, for there is nowhere to go.”
The first overtly science fiction–based story in The Twilight Zone’s run was, in some ways, a restatement of the premise of the pilot episode, only now the protagonist’s isolation and desperation are not the mental product of an endurance test, but a brutal reality.
Death, it seems, is no longer regarded as a suitable punishment for the most heinous criminals. Exile to the farthest reaches of the universe, to live in solitary confinement on a desolate asteroid, is seen as far more fitting, and far more punishing too. Just four years into a fifty-year sentence, James Corry is convinced that he will have gone insane long before he reaches the end of his term. His only hope is that, back on Earth, a general public unease about the nature of the punishment might cause it to be abandoned.
Only one man is permitted to break Corry’s isolation—Captain Allenby, who makes regular visits to the asteroid, every three months, to drop off sundry proscribed, and minimal, supplies. Taking pity on the convict, however, he also delivers a pile of paperback books and a large wooden crate containing a robot. A female robot, named Alicia, whose personality, behavior and (daringly for the time) physiognomy have been painstakingly crafted to disguise the fact that she is a robot. And, after a brief period of resentment and distrust, Corry finds himself falling in love with her.
Life, for a time, becomes happy again. Only to be shattered, with vicious irony, when Corry learns that he has been granted a full pardon . . . but that there is no room on the cargo ship dispatched to bring him home for anyone other than himself. Alicia will have to remain behind, and to ensure Corry does not argue any further, Allenby shoots the robot in the face, destroying it. Corry returns to Earth alone, and the lessons that one can draw from that are among the most sobering that ever stalked the twilight zone.
“The Lonely” was shot in Death Valley, as close in atmosphere and appearance to any benighted asteroid that one could imagine, particularly when the mercury tipped 116 degrees Fahrenheit (with a ground temperature of 139) and crew members started dropping like flies. No less than seven people, including the cameraman, the sound man and the script girl, were floored by the heat during the first day on location.
“The Lonely” is also one of those episodes that could be said to have introduced America to what would become one of the most familiar faces of twentieth-century television—in this case, British actress Jean Marsh, destined in years to come for roles as Sara Kingdom in Doctor Who and, even more lastingly, Rose in the long-running period drama Upstairs Downstairs.
Her career had brought her to the United States two years earlier, just twenty-one years old and already beaten down, she later admitted, by the impossibility of finding suitable roles in British broadcasting. Although she did still find occasional parts in her homeland (she appeared, for example, in an episode of the crime drama The Third Man, the show that made a household name of the character Harry Lime), it was her appearance in the 1959 NBC TV movie The Moon and Sixpence, alongside Laurence Olivier, that truly marked her arrival, and her American television debut.
The Twilight Zone followed soon after, and she certainly seems to have made an impression. In California, one fan even wrote to his local newspaper demanding to know where he could get an identical robot, only for the TV critic to regretfully disappoint him. “Probably this will come as a terrible shock, what with half the men around saving their money to buy one, but the robot wasn’t really a robot. It was Jean Marsh, a real, live human girl.”
But so convincing was her performance, and so excellent was Serling’s script, that it was hard to believe we’d witnessed anything less than a scientific marvel, and a tragedy on a par with any of humankind’s greatest doomed love stories. And, of course, Serling himself wrote Alicia’s epitaph. “On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man’s life. All of Mr. Corry’s machines . . . including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now . . . obsolete . . . in the Twilight Zone.”
“I Shot an Arrow into the Air” (First broadcast: January 15, 1960)
Madelon Champion, a family friend who mentioned an idea she’d had, while she and her husband John dined with the Serlings one evening, provided the original nugget from which Serling would tell this tale.
Borrowing his title from the Longfellow poem, “I shot an arrow into the air. It fell to Earth I know not where,” Serling later revealed that Ms. Champion accepted payment in the form of a new refrigerator!
Again, the fervent topicality of man’s first steps into space lay behind the story line. In Russia and the U.S.A., Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard’s first steps for mankind were growing ever closer, the fruition of so many years of research and study. And it was no different on The Twilight Zone.
The craft the camera first glimpses is the Arrow One, the culmination of five years of planning “and a thousand years of science and mathematics and the projected dreams and hopes of not only a nation but a world. She is the first manned aircraft into space. And this is the countdown, the last five seconds before man shot an arrow into the air.” And before it crashes back down, out of control and, seemingly, now out of commission.
A return trip of Death Valley provided the barren, desolate landscape on which Arrow One finds itself, as the three survivors of an eight-man crew prepare to scout the immediate locale in the hope of finding something, anything, that will help them. But what could they find on this blasted, rocky asteroid, beneath the baking sun, with supplies running low?
None, or so Flight Officer Corey believes. Determined that what remains of the water should be his alone, he cold-bloodedly murders his companions, even as the mission commander, Colonel Donlin, attempts to alert him to something on the horizon. He ignores the man, cuts him down, and then he sets out alone, desperate, barely alive. Only to run straight into a signpost pointing the way to Reno, Nevada, a mere ninety-seven miles distant. The craft had crashed without even entering space.
“People Are Alike All Over” (First broadcast: March 25, 1960)
Rod Serling’s teleplay this week was based on author Paul W. Fairman’s short story “Brothers Beyond the Void,” as published in the March 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures. A regular contributor to such magazines as Mammoth Detective, Mammoth Mystery and Mammoth Western throughout the late 1940s, Fairman was then founding editor of If magazine (albeit for just the initial four issues); and, later still, Amazing Stories, a magazine he first wrote for in 1950.
Prolific throughout the years that followed, Fairman’s greatest stories were those, like many of Serling’s, that began from an improbable premise and then spiraled back to reality from there. “Brothers Beyond the Void,” however, was one more in The Twilight Zone’s (and television’s in general) still flaring fascination with the space race. In particular, the covetous eyes that mankind had foxed on Mars.
More so even than the moon, Mars has fascinated science for as long as science has been fascinated by anything. Even reaching the moon, mankind’s first target, was often regarded as little more than a trial run, a jumping-off point for expeditions deeper into the solar system, and though the distances involved were sobering to say the least, Mars was always the next on the agenda.
With good reason, too. Of all the planets that can be seen from the Earth, Mars has always been the one considered most likely to harbor other life. Any number of studies has posited any number of signs that the Martian landscape was shaped by intelligent beings, relics that range from what was once believed to be a network of canals crisscrossing the surface, to the notorious Face on Mars, first sighted by the Viking I probe in 1976.
Subsequent research has decided that the face is simply a fluke of shadow and light, just as it has discarded any notion that the canals were the product of intelligent design. No humanoid visage stares down from the barren planes of Cydonia, and we have to ask ourselves, why would it, when almost all of man’s attempts to visualize our Martian neighbors (the good ones, anyway, where the cinematic budget permitted more than a slightly space-age costume) have painted creatures with no humanoid resemblance whatsoever?
From the squelching, tentacular fiends that lay behind H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, to the invisible telepaths of Captain Scarlet’s Mysterons; from the six-limbed, green-skinned Tharks of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Thuvia, to the fiendish Marvin the Martian who so bedeviled the life of Bugs Bunny; Martians are monsters, and in a way they have to be. What would be the point of them, otherwise?
For astronauts Marcusson and Conrad, simply getting to Mars was strenuous enough, with their craft’s final descent wrapped up in near disaster, crashing to the surface and leaving Marcusson (the best trained of the two men) seriously injured. Conrad, a biologist who more or less came along for the ride, is left to panic—all the more so once the ship starts echoing to the sound of someone rapping on the hull.
Marcusson begs for him to open the door, convinced that Martians will rescue them. But he dies before he meets their putative saviors—a race of human beings, likened to us in every way, bar their phenomenally advanced intellect. And, it seems, their belief that the human they have discovered is no different from any other animal that they might cage inside an alien zoo.
That is what they do, then, carting Conrad off to be locked away with a sign that reads “Earth Creature in its Native Habitat.” And there, as Serling elaborates, he will remain, “with the running water and the electricity and the central heat [for] as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad . . . has found the Twilight Zone.”
Actress Susan Oliver recalled the production for Starlog magazine. “That was lots of fun. Rod Serling was very special. He was a nice, gentle man, very modest and self-effacing. Mitchell Leisen had been a costumer as well as a film director. He picked my costume, a Greek gown, for me to wear as a Martian. He said, ‘You can only be so futuristic, and then it comes back to what the classic is.’”
“The Little People” (First broadcast: March 30, 1962)
Another Rod Serling space opera, “The Little People” is set, he explains, on “a barren landscape of a rock-walled canyon that lies millions of miles from the planet Earth.”
Commander William Fletcher and copilot Peter Craig have landed on the surface of the asteroid in order to make repairs to their damaged spacecraft. The two astronauts are scarcely friends, however; indeed, their relationship is pure antagonism—Fletcher constantly ordering his subordinate around, Craig sick of his commander’s constant carping.
Instead of working together, they separate; the commander to work on the ship, Craig to explore the landscape and, on discovering a miniature civilization, peopled by tiny beings, he amuses himself by demanding that the aliens respect him as a God.
Horrified by Craig’s callousness, Fletcher catches and disables him before he can take his mania too far—but it is too late. Soon, the tiny race had erected a life-sized statue to their supposed God, and when Craig discovers this, he has no interest whatsoever in continuing his mission with Fletcher.
At gunpoint, he orders his former colleague to depart, and, for a time, he is content exerting his divine power, and bestowing his divine blessings, on his tiny people. In fact, everything is going swimmingly until the day another spacecraft lands on the asteroid, and from it step two creatures who tower high, high above Craig. So high that when one stoops to pick him up . . . it crushes him to death.
At which point, the giants leave and the little people demolish their statue.
“The Parallel” (First broadcast: March 14, 1963)
A year later, Rod Serling’s latest space drama was inspired not by future possibilities but by recent history. On February 22, 1962, John Glenn, aboard the Mercury 7 spaceship, became the first American to orbit the Earth, three times in a flight that lasted a little under five hours.
Now Serling’s astronaut Major Robert Gaines is preparing to follow him there, and beyond . . . traveling “farther and longer than any man ahead of him. Call this one, one of the first faltering steps of man to sever the umbilical cord of gravity and stretch out a fingertip toward an unknown.”
One week later, he returns, his mission flawless bar one anomaly. Somehow, the spacecraft lost all communication with mission control for six hours, while Gaines himself claims to have lost consciousness following his fifteenth orbit of the planet.
It is only after he is debriefed and returns to his home that he begins to notice things are not as he expected them to be . . . as he remembers them. He is no longer a major, but a colonel. His home looks different . . . he is somehow different. His wife notices it, his colleagues suspect it.
Somehow, during that six-hour loss of contract, Major Gaines’s spacecraft slipped into a parallel universe—at the same time, perhaps, as another craft slipped from that universe into ours. Because, while the Major joins everybody else in wondering precisely what is going on, Mission Control is receiving a ninety-second communication from a craft orbiting the Earth. A craft piloted by Colonel Robert Gaines.
Space travel sounded so glamorous—until you saw the size of the vehicle in which you’d make the journey. A cutaway diagram of the Mercury space capsule in all its minute glory.
Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com
Not for the first time in the history of The Twilight Zone, copyright infringement issues dogged this episode, through the claims of one Steven Masino, in July 1963. He had submitted a story titled “The Carbon Copy” to Serling’s Cayuga Productions in 1961—a claim that was eventually settled out of court for $6,500.
No admission of guilt was affixed to the settlement. Rather, Cayuga’s insurance company believed that it was easier in the long run to settle claims for a relatively small amount than to fight them through the courts at a far greater cost in both dollars and time.
That this effectively amounted to a thieves’ charter did not seem to have concerned them. Litigation of this type was a common problem throughout both the television and movie industries, and just as many stores budget a certain amount of money to cover the cost of physical light-fingeredness, so here a similar amount was expected to be spent on what one might call intellectual shoplifting.
Such an arrangement freed all concerned from the fear that a less than sympathetic judge might side with the accuser, regardless of how much evidence the television people could bring to the courtroom; and allowed the network to continue rerunning the episode in question as often as it wanted to—as opposed to effectively placing it in deep freeze, as was the case with another episode, season four’s “Miniature.”
The story of the secret life of a department store’s dummies, “Miniature” was hit with an accusation of copyright infringement by one Clyde Ware, whose agent had submitted a script entitled “The Thirteenth Mannequin” to Cayuga Productions in spring 1961.
Ware’s story revolved around an aged department store caretaker whose closest friends are the display of twelve mannequins—whose numbers are swollen to thirteen immediately after the old man died.
The tale was rejected and forgotten about until the suit was announced, and with it a demand for compensation that far exceeded the insurance company’s threshold for simply paying such claimants off. In July 1963, the case was heard by the arbitrator, and in early August it went before Judge Carlos M. Teran of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. A little over a month later, the court found in Cayuga Productions’ favor, a judgment affirmed four years later when Ware requested an appeal.
Nevertheless, the dispute was sufficient to ensure that “Miniature” would remain unseen on the screens from the day of its original broadcast until it was finally repeated (partially colorized) in 1984.
“On Thursday We Leave for Home” (First broadcast: May 2, 1963)
Serling was back in the darkest bowels of the universe, and deep into the furthest reaches of time . . . August 1991 . . . gazing into what he calls “a disintegrating outpost in space.” The survivors of a colony ship, Pilgrim 1, which crash-landed on an inhospitable planet, were “a remnant society who left the Earth looking for . . . a place without war, without jeopardy, without fear. And what they found was a lonely, barren place whose only industry was survival. And this is what they have done for three decades—survive.”
Then dawns the momentous day when a signal from Earth is received, announcing that a ship is on its way to pick them up and take them home. It is now the year 2021—half a century away from Serling at the time the story was written; half a decade away from us now. And we might pause to wonder how it is that Serling, whose gift for predicting the future of mankind was spot on in so many other instances, was so far adrift when it came to man’s ability to conquer the stars?
Confidently, he predicted mankind to be scraping the very walls of the universe by the end of the twentieth century; instead, we have still to get any farther than the Moon, and we’ve not been there for forty years. All those dreams, all those hopes, all those glorious plans and visions, all as lost in desolate despair as the crew of the Pilgrim 1—the mere 187 who now survive.
There is dissent, however. For the past thirty years, Captain Benteen has been their leader, guiding them through the vicissitudes of their enforced lifestyle. It is only natural, now that they were returning home, that he should offer to retain that role, to lead them through what will certainly be the manifold mysteries of a much-changed world.
Of course, few among his one-time followers consider this a particularly good idea; they have relatives and friends who will serve that purpose, and the captain of the rescue ship agrees with them.
Benton will not buckle, however. Rather, he begins referring to the survivors as his children, and sees himself aglow with evangelical fury, acting as though he is not only their leader, but their savior too. But still they mock, and so furiously does Benteen rage against their laughter that he scarcely even notices the crowd of onlookers thinning, and the roar of engines close by. The ship has left without him, and he is alone, the master of his own world once again.
“Probe 7, Over and Out” (First broadcast: November 29, 1963)
On November 22, 1963, all scheduled programming was canceled following the assassination of President Kennedy. The following week, however, normal service was resumed with a Rod Serling script washing up on a distant planet, where Colonel Adam Cook finds himself marooned, following the crash landing of his spacecraft, Probe 7 (a craft first built for the episode “Specimen Unknown” in ABC’s The Outer Limits series).
Distant, but not barren. Plant life thrives in a strangely Earth-like atmosphere, and there is definitely something else moving around out there, something that keeps Cook constantly in sight but never permits itself to be seen.
Cook manages to communicate with his mission control, and his plight grows even worse. War is breaking out all across the planet Earth, a terrible war from which there is unlikely be any survivors. At which point, he finally encounters the being that has been stalking his camp, and learns that she, too, is the sole survivor of a world whose population perished when it spun out of its orbit. (Shades of the second season’s two-story “The Midnight Sun” here!)
Her name is Eve; and across the viewing spectrum, one could imagine a great groan going up, even before Serling’s closing narration asks “do you know these people?” Adam and Eve. “Names familiar, are they? They lived a long time ago. Perhaps they’re part fable. Perhaps they’re part fantasy. And perhaps the place they’re walking to now is not really called Eden. We offer it only as a presumption, This has been the Twilight Zone.”
Of incidental interest at the time, but interestingly coincidental today, in the same week The Twilight Zone was forced off the air by events in Dallas, Texas, across the Atlantic in London, the BBC was preparing to take its own first steps into what could be called a twilight zone of its own.
The adventures of Doctor Who took place in the same sighting universes of time and space that the twilight zone occupied, and several people connected with the now-fifty-year-old Doctor Who admitted that The Twilight Zone has its own special place in the iconography of their show, and has since been paraded as a major influence, too.
It might be (and it probably is) too much to reflect that the doctor’s chosen method of traveling through time and space, aboard an old British police telephone box, is at least a second cousin to the time-traveling plane in the “The Last Flight” episode. Likewise, it took over three decades before an author, Kim Newman, finally realized in print (the novel Time and Relative) that a pair of aliens wandering around London in 1963 as the doctor and his granddaughter were doing was something straight out of The Twilight Zone.
But, as Serling was still finding himself forced to argue when similarities were seized on between his stories and the work of others, the world is a very big place, and there’s a lot of people out there.
The chances of a few of them having roughly the same idea, at roughly the same time, are probably higher than anyone could calculate.
“The Long Morrow” (First broadcast: January 10, 1964)
Rod Serling (via a loose interpretation of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”) returned to deep space one final time, toward the end of season five, to deliver what might have been considered a salutary lesson in the dynamics of the ongoing space race.
With the moon firmly in NASA’s target, fanciful commentaries were already plotting man’s next objectives . . . Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus . . . and all without any notion whatsoever of the sheer length of time it would take any Earth-built craft to make that journey.
Serling shared that uncertainty. Traveling at the speed of light (which man is still a long, long way from managing), it would take one year to travel one light year. Commander Douglas Stansfield, on the other hand, is facing a round trip of 141 light years—two lifetimes even at that most impossible of speeds. But a newly developed interstellar drive can apparently accomplish that trip in just forty years.
It’s still a very long time for one man to be alone in space, especially after we witnessed what happened to Mike Ferris, hero of the very first episode of The Twilight Zone. Technology, however, has solved that riddle, and so Stansfield prepares for his mission—one in which he will be placed in hibernation for the duration of the journey, during which time he will age just a few weeks. (The same notion was applied by Serling to the episode “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” and would reappear in his script for The Planet of the Apes.)
What he does not realize is, back home, his girlfriend Sandra has made similar arrangements, so that when her lover returns, in forty years’ time, she and he will be more or less the same age as when he departed.
More or less. But six months into the flight, Stansfield awoke, determined to experience every moment that he could of his unique journey, irrespective of the toll it would take on his body, so that he might return home forty years after he left and find Sandra to have aged along with him.
Needless to say, the man who didn’t sleep has a very rude awakening awaiting him.