Richard Matheson in The Twilight Zone
Just two weeks after his friend Charles Beaumont made his debut in The Twilight Zone, another future mainstay of the series was announced.
A couple of months shy of his thirty-fourth birthday, Richard Matheson published his first short story, “Born of Man and Woman,” in the quarterly The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in summer 1950. Since that time, he had confirmed himself as perhaps the premier fantasy writer in America, a published novelist since 1953 who delivered Someone Is Bleeding and Fury on Sunday; and, since 1957 brought the world its first glimpse of The Incredible Shrinking Man, an acclaimed screenwriter.
Yet still The Twilight Zone was to become his major break as a television writer, following on only from single episodes of the westerns Buckskin (life in a fictitious Montana town—think Deadwood with dialogue instead of loosely linked profanity) and WanteDead or Alive, with Steve McQueen as a Confederate veteran bounty hunter.
Like Beaumont, Matheson was to become one of Serling’s most reliable regulars, contributing no less than sixteen stories to The Twilight Zone, including many that, unlike Beaumont’s efforts, are routinely regarded as the show’s crowning glories: “Third from the Sun”; “The Last Flight”; “A World of Difference”; “A World of His Own”; “Nick of Time”; “The Invaders”; “Once Upon a Time”; “Little Girl Lost”; “Young Man’s Fancy”; “Mute”; “Death Ship”; “Steel”; “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; “Night Call” and “Spur of the Moment.”
But it all began with “And When the Sky Was Opened,” a Serling teleplay that was based on “Disappearing Act,” a Matheson short story first published in the March 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and for which TV Guide reserved only the highest reverence. “As pure horror, the episode can stand right up there with the best of Poe, Bierce and Sheridan Le Fanu.”
“And When the Sky Was Opened” (First broadcast: December 11, 1959)
It is difficult to shake the feeling that we have seen this tale before. At least, we have if, prior to The Twilight Zone even being born, we watched the first BBC television adaptation of British author Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass. And then, in our memories, conflated it with David Niven’s 1946 masterpiece Stairway to Heaven (UK title A Matter of Life and Death).
In one, an experimental spacecraft returns to Earth with two of its three-man crew having mysteriously vanished, and the third in a state of such peculiar withdrawal that it is almost a relief when we realize that he is no longer human; that his body is now a hollow husk, incubating an alien of the most horrendous dimensions.
In the other, a British airman during World War II returns home to discover that he should have been killed on his last raid over Germany; that a clerical error (even the afterlife has pen-pushers) allowed him to live, and now Heaven intends righting its wrongs.
Matheson’s original story eschewed much of this. His tale was that of an everyman who fears that he’s losing his mind, as everyone he knows and loves suddenly starts vanishing into thin air—not only as people, but as memories too. He still recalls them, but he’s the only person who does. There is positively no indication that they had ever existed, and when the story blinks out in the middle of a sentence, we know the narrator, too, has ceased to be.
It was not, initially, one of Matheson’s most successful tales—in fact, he later revealed, the first agent that he sent it to, returned it to him, ripped into pieces. It was some time before it finally found a happy home, at The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and from there to the author’s first book-length anthology Third from the Sun. It was in that latter publication that Serling first read it, and where he discovered the title piece too, which became Matheson’s second Twilight Zone episode.
Serling, in adapting the story for The Twilight Zone, adapted it too for a science fiction–loving audience, and one that remained on the edge of its collective seat as the space race continued to rage. The Russians had landed a craft on the moon just weeks before The Twilight Zone debuted. Now Luna 3 had photographed much of the satellite’s surface, while both of the competitors, the United States and the Soviets, were predicting that they’d have a human in space sometime within the next six months, the Russian Yuri Gagarin, the American Alan B. Shepard.
What The Twilight Zone was now asking was, what would happen if either didn’t come back? Not all the way back, anyway.
Equally relevant, and just as exciting, was a project that the air force was running, a now two-year-old series of tests for a revolutionary new type of aircraft . . . one that could enter space to—for instance—attack enemy satellites. That could take off in the manner of a conventional aircraft and land in the same manner too, in the style that the later Space Shuttle would perfect.
In any event, the program was canceled before a complete craft had even been built, in 1963. In 1959, on the other hand, the project was in the rudest health. And this miraculous new aircraft’s name? The Dyna-Soar. The X-20 Dyna-Soar.
Serling’s X-20 moves faster than the air force’s. Not only is it built, it is tested, perfected, and then launched into space. Now it has crash-landed back to earth, but all three of its crew survived intact, a little knocked about but otherwise in perfect states of health. Or so it seems when two of them, Colonel Forbes and Colonel Harrington, are discharged from hospital one morning, with the newspaper headlines still celebrating the fact that three astronauts survived.
So how is it, when Forbes returns to the hospital later to visit Major Gart, he . . . Forbes . . . is the only person on earth who remembers that Harrington even existed. Not their former commander, not Forbes’s wife, not even the newspapers, whose headlines now celebrate the fact that both of the astronauts, Forbes and Gart, lived.
Forbes alone remembers the man who’d been his friend for twenty years, but everybody else—and that includes both Gart and the viewers themselves—is convinced that the colonel was more injured than anyone realized. That he must have had a bump on the head.
Nobody listens, nobody understands. Screaming, Forbes races out of the room, with the perplexed Gart following just a few paces behind. But when he looks out of the door and down the long corridor, Forbes has disappeared. There is only a nurse, who sends him back to bed, and a newspaper lying with its headline screaming loud. The spacecraft may have crashed, but its sole occupant, Major Gart, had survived.
Something had gone wrong in space, very wrong indeed. Four hours after takeoff, the astronauts blacked out. Twenty-four hours later, they found they had crash-landed back on Earth, with no memory of the intervening day and no explanation for how they had disappeared from the radar throughout that span top.
What if, Major Harrington had speculated before he vanished, they had not been supposed to return at all? And if the error was now being corrected, by lifting them one by one out of existence? When he said that to Forbes, his friend thought he’d gone crazy. When Forbes repeated it to Gart . . . well, maybe he’d gone the same way.
When Gart vanishes at the end of the tale, there was nobody left to make that assumption, and no reason why they should. For X-20 had never existed, either.
“Third from the Sun” (First broadcast: January 8, 1960)
Richard Matheson’s second story in the twilight zone is, like its predecessor, rightly regarded among the series’s finest. Originally published in the October 1950 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, it was a fondly remembered episode even before rock star Jimi Hendrix adapted its title (to “Third Stone from the Sun”) for a track on his landmark debut album Are You Experienced in 1967.
It is another end-of-the-world story, with the planet just forty-eight hours away from nuclear extinction. Scientist William Sturka and his friend Jerry intend escaping with their families from the imminent holocaust by stealing an experimental aircraft (shades of X-20) that they have been working on and becoming interplanetary tourists. They even make contact with one of the alien races they intend visiting, and are assured they will be given a warm and friendly welcome.
And so they will be . . . on the brightest star in their nighttime sky, a planet whose inhabitants call it “Earth.”
Wryly, one recalls the plethora of other sci-fi stories of the fifties where visiting aliens were greeted with anything but respect, and of course we never see the little spaceship arrive.
Anything could have been awaiting them, from indeed a brass band and some fine speeches by the town mayor, to the full weight of the military, just itching to blow these Martians (“or whatever they are”—you can already hear the square-jawed, gum-chomping general crushing pedantic comment like a wasp) back to the stars.
But this story ends with just a hint of hope, a taste of common decency. It’s how we hope the aliens will behave toward us, after all.
“The Last Flight” (First broadcast: February 5, 1960)
A Richard Matheson original, “The Last Flight” is another of those tales whose absence from any poll of the greatest-ever episodes of The Twilight Zone can only be put down to collective amnesia . . . or to the (admittedly controversial) belief that a vaguely similar tale of time travel was told equally effectively in the 1986 movie Biggles . . . Adventures in Time, the first and thus far only attempt to bring cinematic superstardom to English author Captain W. E. Johns’s legendary pilot hero.
And again in an episode of the BBC’s Torchwood, in which an aircraft from a distant era suddenly impinges on the modern world. As David Bowie once said, sometimes it doesn’t matter who does something first. “It’s who does it second that’s important.”
In fact, “The Last Flight” had an even earlier antecedent, in the form of “One for the Book,” an episode in the late 1940s anthology series Quiet, Please, scripted by Wyllis Cooper. It was the tale of an air force pilot aboard an experimental rocket plane in the then unfeasibly distant year of 1957, hitting the hitherto untapped speed of Mach 12 and being catapulted back in time to 1937. Indeed, Rod Serling was so concerned over the apparent similarities between that tale and Matheson’s offering that he made a serious attempt to contact Cooper himself. His search came up empty-handed, however, and “The Last Flight” took flight.
It is March 1959, and the ground crew at a U.S. Air Force base in Reims, France, is both astonished and alarmed when a World War One vintage Nieuport biplane comes coughing in to land, piloted by an equally veteran pilot, Second Lieutenant William Decker. He had, it transpires, lost courage as he headed out on his very first mission and instead “deserted”—by flying into a cloud.
Now, however, he is having second thoughts. For the air marshall who is now on his way to interview Decker is the very same commanding officer, Mackaye, he abandoned in 1917. He leaps back aboard his aircraft, flies back into the clouds . . .
. . . and the official record of the conflict tells the rest of the story. Decker was killed on this day in 1917, saving Mackaye’s life. Swooping down out of the cloud where he was hidden, to blast lead into the German plane that had Mackaye’s aircraft dead in its sights.
Matheson did not actually have a story written when he first proposed the idea, but once he had received approval, it came quickly.
The episode also involved one of the show’s most spectacular props, a precise replica of the aircraft in which World War One fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker shot down his first enemy aircraft. It was a familiar sight to moviegoers, with appearances in The Lost Squadron (1932), The Dawn Patrol (1938) and, most recently, Lafayette Escadrille (1958). The craft was owned by collector Frank Gifford Tallman, himself a former air force pilot and, more recently, a stunt flyer who would, within the year, be launching Tallmantz Aviation, specializing in furnishing veteran aircraft to the entertainment industry. It was his partner in that company, Paul Mantz, who actually flew the aircraft in the episode.
“A World of Difference” (First broadcast: March 11, 1960)
A successful businessman living a lovely life in luxurious Woodland Hills, Arthur Curtis suddenly discovers that none of it is real. Worse than that, it’s an outright fiction, a television show called The Private World of Arthur Curtis. His entire existence is filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, with a real-life actor playing the role of Curtis, and everything he had taken for granted—his wife, his daughter, even his job—nothing more than the invention of some mysterious scriptwriter. And now, the movie lot is scheduled for demolition. What will happen to him now?
Remade today (as it almost was, via The Truman Show), “A World of Difference” would be little more than one more sobering parody of the rise of reality television, in which great swathes of the viewing public are seemingly convinced that the creatures cavorting across our screens, and revealing their vilest fantasies for the camera, really do live their lives like this.
It has already proven ripe for parody, as in the episode of Saturday Night Live, with the crew of the original Star Trek depicted (John Belushi as Captain Kirk . . . sheer genius), attempting to comprehend the reality of the show’s cancellation.
At the time, however, the story not only enthralled, it also perplexed. Apparently, both CBS and Serling received a number of letters demanding a proper explanation for the story’s end and the conclusions viewers were intended to draw from it; letters that Serling forwarded on to Matheson with a note reading, “these are a couple of many who want egg in their beer. Not satisfied with being entertained, they insist on understanding. . . . If you can drop these people a note, it would be appreciated.”
“A World of His Own” (First broadcast: July 1, 1960)
Richard Matheson was responsible for the season finale to the first run of The Twilight Zone—in an age, of course, before season finales became the hysterically shrieking game-changers that we have come to know and love today.
Which is not to say that the drama was not palpable. Just that it was as beautifully self-contained as every other visit to the twilight zone.
Virginia West has a problem. The realization that her husband, the renowned playwright Gregory West, is seeing another woman. More than that, he is seeing her in their own home, in the office where he locks himself away every day to work on his next masterpiece.
But this is no simple case of marital infidelity. “Mary,” and a host of other visitors too, are fictions, men and women who come to life when Gregory describes them into his Dictaphone, and who vanish when he throws the tape into the fire. So, when Virginia, despite the evidence of her own eyes, declares that he must be insane and moves to have him committed, he opens the safe and takes out a strip of tape. Then he throws it on the fire and Virginia disappears—to be replaced, a few quickly spoken words later, by Mary.
Serling returns to the screen to remind viewers that the story was “purely fictional. In real life,” he says, “such ridiculous nonsense could never. . . .” He is still speaking as actor Keenan Wynn produces a strip of tape, looks pointedly at Serling and then throws it into the fireplace.
“Well, that’s the way it goes,” shrugs the host, and he vanishes.
But of course, he was not gone for good. Summer reruns would keep the show in the viewer’s mind through until the end of September. And then season two would dawn.
William Shatner and Patricia Breslin ponder their next move in Richard Matheson’s season 2 episode “Nick of Time.”
CBS/Photofest
“Nick of Time” (First broadcast: November 18, 1960)
Rod Serling’s trailer at the close of the previous episode informs us that the next “intriguing tale” was the work of Richard Matheson, and he was correct. It is indeed intriguing . . . one of the writer’s finest.
You really don’t see them around any longer, except as untouchable museum pieces, but there once was an entire generation of penny-powered arcade games that professed to predict the future. Of course, they didn’t—well, not unless you were the kind of person who can read any number of coincidences into the spin of a dial, or the dictates of a fortune cookie. But they were entertaining enough if you had nothing else to do, and when honeymooners Don and Pat Carter find themselves marooned in the small town of Ridgeview, Ohio, after their car developed a problem, Don turns his attention to one such device.
Which, to his astonishment, has an infallible knack of getting things right.
In fairness, his questions are rather dull. Anybody else, finding such a device, would doubtless have thrown the most incredible problems at it—“will I become the captain of a starship?,” for instance. Or, “will I ever have a career in advertising?” But Don, superbly played by William Shatner, does no such thing. He plays it straight and the machine plays straight in return.
Pat is unconvinced. She sees the machine’s predictions and answers as little more than a cipher that Don’s own imagination has translated into reality; and ultimately, her impeccable logic wins the day.
But, as they leave the cafe, another couple enters, and we quickly realize that they were not so easily dissuaded about the penny machine’s mystic powers.
You’d hopefully think twice about asking this chap to tell your fortune for you. But the Mystic Seer will do it regardless.
Robert Jimenez ©zerostreetcom tikitowercom
“The Invaders” (First broadcast: January 27, 1961)
Another Richard Matheson classic, “The Invaders” deposits us within sight of a ramshackle farmhouse, barely touched by the hands of progress since it was built a century or more before. There is no gas or electricity, no running water; just an old woman who lives there alone, “whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat.” But, continues Serling’s opening monologue, she is “about to face terror which is even now coming at her from . . . the Twilight Zone.”
One of the most acclaimed, and lionized, episodes in The Twilight Zone’s entire run, “The Invaders” takes us into the heart of suspense—an alien spacecraft landing on the rooftop of a run-down, desolate farmhouse, miles from the nearest town and seemingly eons from any manner of modern convenience.
Within, Agnes Moorehead—Endora from TV’s Bewitched—prepares for the battle of her life as two miniature humanoid aliens disembark from the craft, seemingly set upon her destruction.
No matter that, compared to them, she is a giant. They are tiny but tenacious. Blasting with weapons that humankind cannot conceive, they have already blown a hole through one of the walls when the woman, many times their size, finally manages to batter one of the creatures to death, and then destroy the spacecraft with an axe, before the other can get away.
Her attack is frenzied, uncontrolled, and so effective that just one piece of the craft remains. A tiny piece of hull, on which some words can just be discerne“U.S. Air Force, Space Probe.”
Intriguingly, Matheson did not originally visualize “The Invaders” as a sci-fi story. Rather, it was titled “Devil Doll”—with all the connotations that title embodies—and submitted that to the show . . . and later still, it became “Prey,” an April 1969 highlight of his contributions to Playboy, as he explained when the latter reappeared in his Collected Stories anthology.
“I . . . originally submitted the story—or at least a similar premise—to The Twilight Zone. And they rejected it because they thought it was too grim. So I turned it around into a science fiction story—and it became ‘The Invaders,’ the episode that Agnes Moorehead was in. Because it’s the same damn story—except here there’s only one doll. Later on, I wrote the premise as the short story called ‘Prey’ and Playboy bought it.”
Moorehead’s performance is magnificent, a silent tour de force that called on all the resources she developed as a student of mime artist Marcel Marceau years before. However, director Douglas Heyes also admitted that there was an element of mischief embodied in her casting. At the time, Moorehead’s best-known role had been a virtually unstoppable monologue in writer Lucille Fletcher’s “Sorry Wrong Number,” a radio play broadcast in the series Suspense in 1945. Now she was being offered its utter opposite, a role that demanded no speaking whatsoever.
Agnes Moorehead cowers from the might of “The Invaders.”
CBS/Photofest
“Once Upon a Time” (First broadcast: December 15, 1961)
Richard Matheson returned to The Twilight Zone with an intriguing story that, Serling’s opening monologue assured us, will lead “a rather dour critic” named Woodrow Mulligan “to discover the import of that old phrase, ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’ . . . said fire burning brightly at all times . . . in the Twilight Zone.”
It is, unusually for The Twilight Zone, an out-and-out comedy tale, written specifically by Matheson for one of his own heroes, the silent movie star Buster Keaton. Now in his late sixties, the veteran comic was still active, on stage as well as television—a guest spot on the Donna Reed Show, a Broadway run in Once Upon a Mattress (whose title clearly inspired Matheson’s!) and a small part in the 1960 cinema adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ranked among his most recent projects. And he was brilliantly cast in The Twilight Zone.
With the story atmospherically set in the New York City of 1890, and portrayed on-screen exactly as though it were an old silent movie, we swiftly identify Keaton’s characteristically stony-countenanced Mulligan as one of those Twilight Zone regulars who is brutally opposed to the march of time.
Every day, it seems, there is a new “innovation” designed, he believes, specifically to make life a little more unpleasant. The soaring price of everyday goods. The ceaseless hubbub of people on the streets, and businesses on the sidewalk. The ever more precipitous speed of passing traffic—truly, if the Lord had intended man to move at eight miles per hour, he would have given us wheels of our own.
But, as with so many other of the characters in such stories, Mulligan swiftly learns to appreciate the times in which he lives—in this instance courtesy of a time-traveling helmet that his employer, the scientist Professor Gilbert, has recently developed.
It is capable of transporting a man through time for thirty minutes at a time, and when Mulligan curiously dons the helmet, he is sent rocketing forward a full hundred years—to 1962, which is even louder and more chaotic than 1890 could ever be. And the fellow scientist who makes the return journey with him, from 1962 to 1890, is equally appalled at just how primitive the world was back then. He returns home (taking the helmet with him), proud to be an inhabitant of the late-mid twentieth century; and Mulligan settles back to enjoy a life that feels luxurious by comparison.
“‘To each his own,’” as Serling’s closing homily declares.
“To excellent effect,” raved Variety’s review, “the 1890 sequences were done in the silent vogue with perfect piano accompaniment by some unsung ’88er. Most striking was the contrast between the silence and sound as Keaton projected himself ahead eighty years. A much older clown attacked the sight gags and pratfalls with real courage, allowing for some fine nostalgia.”
Truly, one of the most successful and, despite the absence of thrills and chills, most enjoyable episodes of the third season.
“Little Girl Lost” (First broadcast: March 16, 1962)
Richard Matheson’s teleplay was based on the short story of the same name originally published in the November 1953 issue of Amazing Stories—a magazine, of course, whose contents could probably have sustained an entire season of The Twilight Zone on its own.
It is the story of a missing child, but one that arrives with a truly scintillating twist. Six-year-old Bettina Miller is missing, for sure, and her description, as narrated by Rod Serling, reminds us of just how ordinary, and how beloved, she is. “One frightened, little girl . . . average height and build; light brown hair, quite pretty. Last seen: being tucked in bed by her mother a few hours ago.”
But when was she last heard? Well, as Serling says, quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Aye, ‘there’s the rub.’” For, although she cannot be seen, she can be heard clearly, crying for help in the emptiness of her bedroom. So where is she? Obviously, says Serling . . . “Let’s say for the moment . . . in the Twilight Zone.”
Her father, Chris, calls a physicist friend, Bill, by which time a second disappearance is baffling the family—their pet dog, Max, ran under Bettina’s empty bed and never reemerged. Bill, however, needs just a few minutes to examine the room before he discovers a crack in the wall behind the bed, within which there exists another, alternate dimension—a plot device that was a lot more original, and therefore less expected, in 1962 than it might be today (Doctor Who based an entire thirteen-episode series on a similar device; Poltergeist a full-length movie).
But how to retrieve the missing girl? Only when Chris himself falls through the mysterious crack does he see his chance, calling for Max, who had already located Bettina, while Bill hauls all three of them back to reality—and only just in time, as the portal begins to close around Chris, almost trapping him between dimensions.
One question is left unanswered. Where, or more explosively, what was that other dimension? “The fourth?” asks Serling. “The fifth? Perhaps. They never found the answer.” Apparently scientists later swarmed the house, armed with every machine they could find. But no conclusions were ever arrived at. “Except perhaps a little more respect for and uncertainty about the mechanisms . . . of the Twilight Zone.”
Matheson later explained that the story was based on a real-life incident, when his own daughter Tina fell out of the bed and rolled to the far wall, out of reach of his initial grasping. And then his own imagination started running.
Tracy Stratford (with friend) is a “Little Girl Lost” in season 3.
CBS/Photofest
“Young Man’s Fancy” (First broadcast: May 11, 1962)
Another Richard Matheson marvel, “Young Man’s Fancy” encouraged Serling to deliver one of his longest-ever opening monologues, setting up a scenario in which a young man, Alex Walker, grieving for his deceased mother, Henrietta Walker, returns to the house with his new bride, Virginia, to regretfully pack everything up before the place can be sold.
The story that follows is, perhaps, familiar to every young wife who has found her work cut out for her, trying to sever her mother-in-law’s apron strings; and the fact that her mother-in-law is dead turns out to be all but immaterial.
Moving into the dead woman’s house, the young marrieds discover the appearance, and the contents, of the house returning to how they were during the dead woman’s own past. The arrival in the midst of this of her ghost should come as no surprise to anyone. But the ghost’s revelations, perhaps, are.
The late Mrs. Walker has nothing to do with the house’s regression. It is Alex’s doing. He’s the one who wants to go back, and we leave a decidedly unhappy home with Alex regaining his own youth and ordering Virginia to leave.
“Mute” (First broadcast: January 31, 1963)
Richard Matheson based “Mute” on his short story of the same name, first published the previous year in the Ballantine Books anthology The Fiend in You—edited by fellow Twilight Zone alumnus Charles Beaumont.
The suspicion that this story became, among other things, an inspiration behind Stephen King’s Firestarter is seldom distant, although the payoff, of course, is very different. And, if the truth be told, somewhat disappointing, particularly bearing in mind the tale’s parentage.
Ilse Nielsen is the twelve-year-old daughter of Professor and Mrs. Nielsen, and the sole survivor of a devastating fire that destroyed the family home in a small Pennsylvania town.
Seemingly very backward in her education, with difficulty even in speaking, she is taken in by Sheriff Harry Wheeler and his wife Cora, who are unaware (for how could they be otherwise) that, a decade before, when she was just two, Ilse was part of an experiment in which certain leading scientists trained their children to communicate telepathically.
Yet she does learn to speak, and she does so just as the Wheelers have resigned themselves to allowing the girl to go live with a family in Germany—apparently proving that love is stronger than telepathy.
Or something like that. Either way, it’s a stunningly weak story, and we probably won’t mention it again.
“Death Ship” (First broadcast: February 7, 1963)
Matheson based “Death Ship” on the short story of the same name, published in Fantastic Story magazine in March 1953.
Set among the stars, in the skies above the thirteenth planet of star system fifty-one, in the far-off year of 1997, the spaceship E-89 is preparing to land on a fact-finding mission, gathering samples of the local flora and fauna to take back to Earth for analysis.
A hideously overcrowded home planet is scouring the stars desperately for new worlds to colonize, and Serling’s opening words introduce us to the cre“Captain Ross, Lieutenant Mason, Lieutenant Carter. Three men who have just reached a place which is as far from home as they will ever be. Three men who in a matter of minutes will be plunged into the darkest nightmare reaches . . . of the Twilight Zone.”
The three are just preparing to land when Lieutenant Mason picks up an unexplained blip on the radar screen. Investigating, they discover to their amazement an exact replica of their own craft and the bodies of three dead crew members—themselves.
With increasing fear, and unable to make contact with Earth Station 1217, the three men throw out their own solutions to the riddle.
According to Captain Ross, they are viewing a possible future, as seen through the distorting prism of a time warp.
Lieutenant Carter believes that they are indeed dead and hallucinates his wife reading a telegram announcing his demise.
And Lieutenant Mason becomes convinced that they are victims of an alien attempt to frighten them away, so they return to Earth empty-handed, and the planet will be left in peace.
Fear alone is their enemy, he insists, and so it initially appears. Returning to their own craft and blasting off, their terrors all subside. So they return to the planet, return to their mission—and they return to the wreckage too, to realize that Carter was right all along. They crashed on their first attempt at landing. Now they are merely ghosts.
“Steel” (First broadcast: October 4, 1963)
Richard Matheson’s “Steel” was originally published in the May 1956 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and its appeal to Serling, and his long-held love of boxing, is obvious.
Set in 1974, it imagines an age in which prizefighting has been illegal since 1968 and replaced on the schedules by battles between automatons. Another example, in other words, of The Twilight Zone’s uncanny knack for predicting at least fragments of the future, and the modern popularity of robot wars.
True to Serling’s fascination with fallen stars, however, Battling Maxo, B2, might once have been a heavyweight champion, but now he is verging on obsolete, his abilities long since surpassed by a new generation of robot. Still, his managers and owners, Steel Kelly and Pole, are going ahead with the fight, knowing that their appearance fee alone will provide them with the money necessary to thoroughly update their fallen idol.
But they have waited too long to make the repairs. Battling Maxo breaks down on the eve of the fight, and there is just one solution. The human Kelly will take its place, disguising himself as the automaton—and getting thoroughly battered for his pains. He is down before the end of the first of the scheduled six rounds, and the audience howls abuse at his battered frame, convinced that they have simply seen one robot crush another. Nobody suspects that the man inside the machine showed more courage and pluck than any one of them could ever have imagined.
“Portrait of a losing side,” Serling explained. “Proof positive that you can’t out-punch machinery. Proof, also, of something else. That no matter what the future brings, man’s capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered; his potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to out-fight, out-point and out-live any and all changes made by his society. For which three cheers and a unanimous decision—rendered from the Twilight Zone.”
Lee Marvin played the beaten Kelly, trained for the role by Johnny Indrisano, a professional welterweight whose career since retiring from the ring had been spent coaching actors for exactly these kinds of roles.
It was not, however, a well-received episode; the fight scenes were condemned as substandard, and there was a growing feeling (possibly exacerbated by the previous week’s “In Praise of Pip”) that The Twilight Zone was focusing less on mystery and fantasy and more on sentimental homily.
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (First broadcast: October 11, 1963)
This is it. The biggie. The one for which everybody remembers The Twilight Zone and for which, if Star Trek had never happened, they would remember William Shatner too.
Richard Matheson took the tale from the short story of the same name, published the previous year in the Ballantine Books collection Alone at Night, and the plot—an airline passengers suffering a nervous breakdown that convinces him there’s a gremlin on the wing—has been so oft discussed, admired and even parodied that there can be few people who do not know the story, whether or not they’ve seen the episode in question. However, that was not his original idea; when first he stared out of an aircaft window and imagined seeing life out there, it was in the form of someone skiing over the fluffy white clouds. Which wasn’t the scariest idea he had ever had, so he altered it somewhat.
In season 5’s classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” William Shatner expected to see only his reflection in the glass. He neither expected nor recognized Nick Cravat to be scowling back at him.
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Shatner himself has his own reasons to dislike air travel, although perhaps nothing could compare with seeing a monster cavorting on the wing. In 2015, he told the Associated Press of one occasion passing through Los Angeles International Airport; “I got patted down one time, wearing loose-fitting clothing, and my pants fell down. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.”
The popularity of his appearance in this episode, however, apparently bemuses him. In 2012, he told Smithsonian.com, “For some reason, this show tapped into a universal unconscious that neither I nor anybody else—let alone Rod Serling—was aware of. They don’t know. . . . But certainly—in this case—they hit on something. ‘Is there a little guy on the wing?’ I mean, they’re all making jokes. What is that? So you have to surmise that, because it lasted longer than the half hour it was on the air, it’s tapping into something. . . . It taps into that fear [of flying]. How’s this thing getting up in the air?”
Interviewed in the July 1981 edition of The Twilight Zone Magazine, director Donner recalled of Shatner,
On [the] last night of shooting, he was visited on the set by Edd Byrnes . . . and when my back was turned, Shatner and Byrnes decided to stage a fight. . . .
I started running over, of course, and just when I got there I saw Byrnes hit Shatner, who went over the wing of the airplane, down forty feet to the [water] tank below! What I didn’t know was that they had dressed a dummy in Shatner’s clothes. All I could think at the time was, screw Shatner, now I have to re-shoot this whole thing! But Shatner is a wonderful guy. I enjoyed working with him tremendously.
Shatner’s sense of fun has even extended to parodying his role for other shows. When he guested on Muppets Tonight in 1996 and is confronted by a terrified Miss Piggy, who has herself seen a creature on the wing of a plane, he tells her to forget about it. He’s been trying to get people to believe him for years.
He also appeared in the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, arriving at an airport and remarking on having seen something on the wing of the plane—a double whammy in comic terms, as the show’s regular star, John Lithgow, appeared in the Shatner role in 1983’s Twilight Zone—the Movie.
“Night Call” (First broadcast: February 7, 1964)
The episode that was postponed on the evening of November 22, 1963, following the assassination of President Kennedy, “Night Call” was Richard Matheson’s adaptation of his own short story “Sorry, Right Number,” as originally published in the November 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction.
Set in a small rural community in Maine, London Flats, it is the story of the elderly, wheelchair-bound Elva Keene, living a quiet, solitary life that verges just on the precipice of boredom. She eats, she naps, she reads, she listens to the radio. She keeps herself busy. But, at the back of her mind, the yearning for something, anything, to happen, grows stronger every day.
In fact, that something has already begun, in the form of a string of mysterious late-night telephone calls, anonymous bar the sound of moaning and groaning. Convinced that some local prankster is playing a trick, she contacts the exchange and demands that a trace be put on the calls, but to no avail.
In fact, it turns out that her phone was not even connected—a repairman visits and informs her that her line came down during a recent thunderstorm, so there is no way the phone could have rung.
And where was this supposed line break? In the local cemetery. Right above the grave of her late fiancé.
This episode is remarkable in many ways, but not least of all for the directorial presence of Jacques Tourneur, creator of such cinematic jewels as Cat People and Comedy of Terrors. He was hired at writer Matheson’s suggestion and was responsible for the fastest turnaround of any show in Twilight Zone history—the full episode was wrapped, according to Matheson, in around twenty-eight hours.
Nora Marlowe (top) looks after Gladys Cooper in Richard Matheson’s “Night Call” from season 5.
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“Spur of the Moment” (First broadcast: February 21, 1964)
Richard Matheson’s final contribution to The Twilight Zone prior to the show’s cancellation was a remarkable study in creepiness, as eighteen-year-old Anne Marie Henderson, out riding one day, finds herself being furiously pursued by what she can only describe as a mad woman, dressed in black and screaming her name.
She flees, of course, and when a search of the grounds turns up nothing, she returns to the pursuits that habitually dominate her young life—among them, choosing between the two men who have asked for her hand in marriage; rich, dependable and ambitious Robert, or feckless, idle David.
There is no doubting which of the two her parents prefer, and maybe that is what pushes Anne to make her final decision. She weds David, and, as the years go by, she finds herself regretting her impetuous decision every day.
Finally, she can take it no more. Dressing in black, her face a mask of madness, she mounts her horse and goes out riding every day, crossing the route that she used to take, back in her carefree teenage days, hoping just one time to encounter her former self and deliver a warning from the future.
One day she even succeeds. But she reckons without one cruel factor. In youth, she was a very stubborn girl.