The Twilight Zone S01E01, Where is Everybody?

Summary:

For my TV commentaries, I figured there was nowhere better to start than the first episode of The Twilight Zone. (Side note: I love how Netflix lists the cast of the show as solely Rod Serling. I get that he is the only constant on the show, but it still made me smile, because Rod Serling is awesome and deserves solo listing.) In this episode, a man wonders upon a town. Music is playing in the jukebox; coffee is brewing. But there are no people. The man doesn’t know who he is or where he is. He wanders from building to building. He briefly thinks he’s found someone, but she turns out to only be a mannequin. Why are mannequins ALWAYS creepy in TV or movies? In the drugstore, he fixes himself a sundae. He sees dozens of copies of the same book: The Last Man on Earth. Evening comes, and all the lights come on. He goes to the theater, which is advertising Battle Hymn. That reminds him that he’s in the Air Force. So he knows he’s American and in the Air Force, but still doesn’t know who he is.

He’s running around the theater and smashes into a mirror. It reminds me of the scene in Contact where the girl is running down the hall to get the medicine. It’s shot where you think you’re watching the real person and only when that person reaches the mirror do you realize you’ve been watching the reflection. Everything is backward; everything is a little off. It’s a trick which could be easily overused, but in these two contexts make a good impact.

The man runs out into the street and sees a large eye (in the optometrist’s window), adding to the fear that he is being watched. He begins panicking, pressing the “walk” button at a cross-stop and crying, “Help me, please! Help me! Somebody’s looking at me!” etc. Cut to a room of military men listening to his pleas. It turns out the man is in an isolation booth, part of an Air Force experiment. The “walk” button is a panic button in the booth. He is pulled from the booth in which he had been confined without any contact for 484 hours, or as an officer put it, “That’s roughly equivalent to a trip to the moon, several orbits, and return.” As they carry him out of the hanger, the man looks up to the full moon and says, “Don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.”

Lesson:

The moral of the story is that man is not meant to be alone. We’re communal creatures. We need to be heard and understood by other humans. Alone, we go mad.

I often forget that the heyday of Space Age popularity took place before we reached the moon. This episode is from 1959, a full decade before Apollo 11, and even a few years before Yuri Gagarin’s orbit. But the seed is already there; we’re going to the moon. Even if it’s uncomfortable. We test the limits of the human body and mind just to see how far we can go.

Isolation experiments haven’t stopped. As recently as 2011, there have been isolation experiments on small crews to see how they would fare on a trip to Mars. For 520 days, a crew of six (3 Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian/Columbian, and a Chinese citizen) simulated a full mission to Mars including simulated Mars-walks and a realistic 25-minute time delay to headquarters. The conclusion of the experiment was that all participants completed the experiment in good physical and psychological health. But maybe that’s because they had five other people to bond with. Real solitude flips reality, where only the concoctions of the mind seem real.

I think this was a good episode to serve as the pilot. It latches on to the popularity of space travel, but shows the darker, more technical side of it –the planning, the experiments, the moral questions that came with the Space Race. It has a good twist ending; you’re lead to believe that something is wrong with the town, but it turns out that something is wrong with the man. The town is a delusion. It is a good introduction to the Twilight Zone.

Quotes:

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone.”

“I don’t remember who I am. It’s a real oddball thing, but when I woke up this morning…well, I didn’t exactly wake up. I just found myself out on that road, walking.”

“I wish I could shake that crazy feeling of being watched.”

“What happened to him is that he cracked. Delusions of some kind, we assume.”

“Where did you think you were?” 

“A place I don’t want to go again, sir.”

“We can feed the stomach…we can pump oxygen in and waste material out, but there’s one thing we can’t simulate. That’s a very basic need—man’s hunger for companionship.”

“Next time it won’t be in a hanger.” 

“No, next time you’ll really be alone.”

Trivia:

The opening to the show was originally written, “There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to man…” but when no one could name a fifth dimension, the opening was reworded.

Serling’s original pilot was titled “The Happy Place” and was about a society where citizens were killed when they reached age 60. The network thought the subject matter too dark. The theme was explored again in season two with “The Obsolete Man.”