Room for One More, Honey: The 7 Cult-TV Flights You Don't Want to Board

I must confess that I have never been very comfortable with flying. 

The last time I flew, in fact, was in the year 2005, I believe. So I’m (happily…) going on over ten years since I boarded a commercial air-liner.  I'd be happy to make it twenty.

Anyway, I don’t want to blame my aviatophobia on my mis-spent youth TV-watching, but there’s little doubt that cult-television, has, for decades, featured terrifying stories of flights imperiled, flights lost, and commercial air-liners crashed. 

With that frightening thought in mind, here is a list of the seven cult-television commercial flights you hope you never end up queuing to board…

And yes, The Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964) features heavily on this list, since it re-visited the premise of doomed air-line flights fairly regularly.

7. Spartan Air Flight 602 (“Souls on Board,” The Others, 2000).

The short-lived The Others was a great horror series that should have gone on for many seasons, but one of its finest efforts was “Souls on Board.”  In this macabre tale, the protagonists -- a diverse team of psychics -- board a plane reputed to be haunted.  The team-members soon learned that the plane has been retrofitted with parts from Flight 390 which crashed…killing all hands aboard.  Now, the ghostly crew of lost Flight 390 haunts the new plane…

So imagine boarding a plane on a routine flight only to discover that: a.) the plane is built from crash scraps.  And b.) the salvaged parts are haunted.  How's that for flying the friendly skies?

6. Sub-orbital flight in 1983, aboard the Spindrift (“Crash,” Land of the Giants, 1968).

A sub-orbital ship, The Spindrift, encounters "solar turbulence" upon final sub-orbital approach to London. Before long, the small commercial vessel crashes on a strange world, and the crew and passengers encounter the peculiar dangers of this planet, namely giant spiders, cats, lizards...and (apparently) giant, hostile humans.

This is the premise of Irwin Allen’s final science fiction series Land of the Giants.  Again, a routine commercial flight leads to an unexpected danger, in this case permanent exile on a planet where you are, essentially, an ant, compared to the indigenous population.

5. Bound for Bomano, South Pacific (The New People, 1969).

In the 1969 generation-gap series The New People (from Rod Serling and Aaron Spelling) a group of thirty or forty college students in the South Pacific on a "good will" trip are recalled to America because of international tensions.  Their plane goes off course in a pounding storm, however, and crashes on remote Bomano, where the U.S. has abandoned its Atomic Energy Testing Site.  The site is now a ghost town populated only by creepy human dummies.  “The New People “-- with no chance of getting home -- must start a new life with no adults, no government, and limited provisions…

So what starts out as a routine flight ends, essentially, in Lord of the Flies.  The only adult trapped in this nightmare, played by Richard Kiley, wisely dies before the end of the first hour...

4. Flight 22 (“Twenty-Two,” The Twilight Zone, 1962)

In this classic The Twilight Zone tale, Liz Powell, a dancer, has experienced for weeks a strange and terrifying nightmare about a morgue, a pleasant though sinister-looking nurse, and the number 22.  

“Room for one more, honey…” the nurse repeatedly intones, offering a slot in the morgue.  

After exorcising the fear of this baffling nightmare, Liz leaves the hospital, travels to the airport and prepares to board a plane.

But when she is about to board, Liz learns that this is Flight 22, and the pleasant stewardess intones -- wait for it -- “room for one more honey…”  

Appropriately, Liz freaks out and leaves the tarmac.  Moments later, the plane explodes on take-off, killing all aboard.

Although shot on video-tape (as a cost-saving measure) this is one of the all-time classic Twilight Zone episodes, and one that many viewers still remember from the original airing.  Although my mother often explicitly recalls the terror of "The After Hours" and "Eye of the Beholder," it is "Twenty-Two" that terrified by Dad as a young man..

3. Global Airlines Flight 33 (“The Odyssey of Flight 33, The Twilight Zone, 1961).

This is another remarkable Twilight Zone story about unlucky plane passengers.  

In this case, a commercial air liner en route from London to New York somehow jumps a time track. Instead of arriving at Idlewild Airport in the present, the plane flies over New York to find it inhabited by dinosaurs.  The plane retraces its steps, makes a second approach, and the passengers see the 1939 World’s Fair this time  Finally, the plane makes one final attempt and…

…well, let’s just say that if you ever hear something in the sky above -- the strain of over-taxed engines, for instance -- it may very well be the sound of lost Flight 33, still trying to reach home…the Flying Dutchman of cult-television history.

2. Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 (Lost; 2004)

The year 2004 brought scripted dramatic television back to the forefront with a bang (in the era of reality TV) with Lost (2004 – 2011).  This science-fiction drama from J.J. Abrams concerned the passengers of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, which crashed on a mysterious island and was soon confronted with a “smoke monster,” hostile “Others” and even a strange, subterranean hatch.  

The crash itself was depicted in harrowing and vivid terms in Lost's extraordinary pilot, and the plane was seen to split into sections.  In the second year of the series, some survivors met up with the “tailies,” passengers who survived impact in another part of the plane.

Before Lost was through, the passengers of Flight 815 were subjected to flash-backs, flash-forwards, and even flash-sideways...

1. Flight of the Gremlin (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," The Twilight Zone, 1963).

This is surely the acknowledged classic of the terror-on-an-air-liner sub-genre.  A passenger named Robert Wilson (played with twitchy authenticity by a young William Shatner) becomes convinced that a monstrous, mischievous gremlin is on the wing of the his plane, imperiling the flight.  A taut and tense half-hour from director Richard Donner finds Shatner -- believed to be insane by his wife and fellow passengers -- battling the Gremlin, and attempting to prevent a crash.  Although the monster isn't very convincing, this episode remains incredibly suspenseful, and oddly touching.  At some point, Shatner's Wilson realizes that he is totally and completely alone, patronized and written off, and takes matters into his hands.

God knows just how many people this single half-hour of a fifty-something year old series scared permanently away from commercial air travel.

And if you're traveling that route today...have a nice flight, and watch out for detours into...the Twilight Zone.

CULT TV FLASHBACK #143: Lost: "Pilot" (2004)

From a certain perspective, it's fair to state that Lost (2004 - 2010), created by J.J. Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber and Damon Lindelof, helped to rescue dramatic, scripted television for the next generation. 

If you remember the context of early last decade, the big four TV networks weren't doing very well as the 20th century became the twenty-first.  Cable television was siphoning off viewership by the droves, and networks were seeking to cut costs.  Reality programs such as Survivor, Big Brother, Boot Camp and Temptation Island were thus taking over the airwaves like a virus, as were gimmicky game shows such as ABC's four night-a-week broadcast lobotomy, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?. 

But in 2004, Lost -- to a very large extent -- re-ignited interest in the prime time drama with the high concept tale of diverse plane crash survivors contending with life on mysterious Pacific island, one where magic and science seemed to intersect.  At first, the series was sexy, provocative, and unpredictable.  It was an immediate critical and popular hit.

By the 2005-2006 season -- just a year later -- all the big networks were seeking to imitate and emulate Lost with other high concept series, ones that blended sci-fi, seralized storytelling, flashbacks, and large ensemble casts. 

These programs boasted titles such as Prison Break, Reunion, Surface, Invasion and Threshold.    More recent programs such as The Nine, FlashForward and The Event appear to operate from the same outline.

Yet from another perspective entirely, Lost may also be a textbook example of the egregious and perhaps unavoidable pitfall of serialized storytelling on television.  As it wore on across the long years, this Emmy-nominated series kept slathering on new mysteries (what's below the hatch? Who are the Others? What does a repeated sequence of numbers really mean?) and kept promising answers, but never really delivered in a substantive or coherent way. 

Then, the series culminated with a whimper rather than a bang after featuring flashes-forwards and, weirdly, flashes "sideways."  By the end of its network run, Lost had became a veritable cluster fuck of narrative cheating and revisionist series history.  The final episode cracked open a pretty big schism in Lost fandom (as the final episode of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica also did, likewise, in that particular franchise). 

The overwhelming feeling was: it was all leading to this?  Are you serious?

In fairness, so much anticipation was built up for the final episode of Lost that there was very little way, realistically, that the writers could successfully meet it.  But the problem was largely exacerbated because the writers also mostly seemed to be making things up as they went along, and constantly changing conceits, or discarding established mysteries that didn't fit into the new overall arc.

In 2011, the widespread, mainstream response to Lost may best be expressed by my wife, a good, patient soul who watches every science fiction series in existence with me, and yet is not a "sci-fi" fan herself.  When she heard I was planning to re-screen Lost's pilot for a cult-TV flashback on the blog this week, she actually turned visibly grumpy, and opted to go read something on her Kindle instead.  I asked her what the problem was, and she said that just the thought of watching Lost again -- even a single episode -- reminds her that the series constantly "jerked her around."  The mere mention of Lost made her mad.

And it takes a lot to get my wife mad.  Seriously. 

So was Lost the messiah for network television during the last decade, or just a long, meandering road to viewer frustration?   Was it a science fiction masterpiece, or a half-baked mess? 

I'd like to see the whole series again (and that isn't likely, considering my wife's viewpoint on the series...) to make an intelligent determination on that point.  But nonetheless, I still admire the promise and potential of the series pilot, which I yet rank as one of the finest made in the history of the TV form (eclipsed, possibly, only by the sterling pilot of Chris Carter's Millennium, which could play theatrically, even today).

As you may well remember, the first episode of Lost commences with utter and total chaos.  After a close-up shot of a distressed-looking eyeball, we pull-up-and-back at extreme velocity to find a man laying prone in the jungle, surrounded by tall reeds and plants. 

After checking to make certain he is actually alive, this visibly-shaken man runs onto a nearby beach and finds utter, complete pandemonium.  A jet turbine grinds away, undeterred, as huge sections of the downed plane are seen on the shore line.  Survivors of the crash move about, dazed and confused, bloodied and bruised.

And before you know it, our hero -- Matthew Fox's Jack -- goes into full doctor mode, tending to the catastrophically injured.  For ten minutes or so, during one crisis after another, this pilot episode maintains a breathless, urgent quality that absolutely rivets the attention.  In one famous, surprising and harrowing moment, a plane survivor is sucked into the whirring turbine...and it explodes into flame.  This moment actually best characterizes the pilot episode's dazzling nature: All bets are off.   Buckle yourself in for chaos and anarchy because it's going to be a damned bumpy ride.

By the pilot's twenty minute point, the survivors of the plane crash, including Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), Locke (Terry O'Quinn), Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and Hugo (Jorge Garcia) are facing a new challenge: some kind of roaring monster, obscured in the distance, shaking the tops of high trees in the nearby jungle. 

Out of the frying pan and into the fire...

When Jack, Kate and Charlie bravely explore the jungle in hopes of locating the downed plane's shattered cockpit, they meet their wounded pilot (Greg Grunberg). 

He promptly informs them that authorities are looking in "the wrong place," and that the plane was "a thousand miles off course."  In other words, the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 are really on their own, and can't count on a rescue.

Before Jack and the others have time to really let these facts sink in, the unseen creature returns and yanks the pilot from his seat  in a terrifying instant. Kate, Jack and Charlie run for their lives through the pouring rain, fearing that the "monster" is hot on their trail...

And that's the first hour of Lost.  Survivors of one horrible disaster find themselves facing another terror, almost immediately.  Set amidst beautiful natural settings, the pilot generates an aura of spine-tingling uncertainty and fear.

And the potential here for good science fiction storytelling was nothing short of amazing.  What was the monster?  Who was on the island along with the survivors?  Would the survivors ever be rescued?  Or were the survivors actually already dead...dwelling in some kind of strange, paradisaical Purgatory?

This first episode of Lost makes limited use of the flashback, which is a blessing given its overuse in the following series, and these character-building moments ground the proceedings in matters of real human import.

In general, the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic and the writing is sharp and lean too.  The dynamic visual presentation, of course, is the thing that matters most, and Abrams directs the episode well.  The pace never flags and we feel, by and large, that we've been dropped into a blender; only half-understanding what has happened, and to whom it has happened.

From this stirring opening episodes, there were a million possibilities and stories to explore on that remote, isolated island. In fact, this may have simply been too big, too ambitious a canvas to paint upon successfully. 

By the second year, stories such as "Adrift" featured characters stuck on a raft at sea, literally treading water for forty-five minutes instead of countenancing the island's many enigmas.   At this point, the show became about purposefully denying the viewer answers rather than explaining what the hell was going on.   And in this fashion, Lost pretty much tread water for its first few seasons itself, the producers and writers apparently never certain if they were making a science fiction epic, or a drama that happened to be set on a weird island.

So...if you haven't sampled Lost....should you find it? 

 

I wish I had a better and more decisive answer for you.  The storytelling is pretty variable overall, and the final destination may not be worth the six year journey.  And yet Lost is historically important in terms of the sci-fi genre and television.   The pilot episode suggests a level of promise never quite delivered upon.

 

In other words, if Lost were a novel, I'd recommend you read the fantastic first chapter, and then put it down.  That way, you can imagine what a terrific story might follow, and -- in all likelihood -- come up with something more consistently intriguing.

 

Later today, I'll be posting  a "from the archive" post about another sci-fi series that commenced with a plane crash on a mysterious island: The New People. 

CULT TV FLASHBACK # 58: The New People (1969)

In the autumn of 1969, the ABC Network premiered a unique youth-centric prime time TV program called The New People. Developed for television by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling and producers Aaron Spelling and Larry Gordon, this singular genre series -- aimed straight at the under-thirty demographic - was a direct response to the dramatic social turbulence and strife of 1968.

Consider for example, a few events from that watershed year. In early 1968, the tide turned in Vietnam, and America seemed to be losing the war. Specifically, the Tet Offensive, the attack on the U.S. Embassy, and the Battle of Saigon all occurred in '68.

In the same year, a new generation of peace and equality seeking leaders - Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy - were assassinated, essentially killing hope for reform. Civil Rights issues were also boiling over, and there were protests held in South Carolina (over a whites-only bowling alley...), and all across the country. College students demonstrated for peace at Columbia University, and at the Democratic National Convention that summer.

1968 was also the year France test detonated its first H-Bomb, and the year of the My Lai Massacre.

As tumult swirled across the globe, a disenchanted, young generation was finding its voice over many of these hot-button issues (racial equality, an unjust war, etc.). Yet the radicalism of that "flower power" generation also frightened Nixon's so-called "silent majority" (meaning the older folks...) It was undeniably a season of change, and the Generation Gap grew wider and wider.

Capitalizing on this gulf was Serling and Spelling's The New People, which concerned several dozen young adults who, after a harrowing plane crash in the Pacific, were stranded on a tropical island one thousand miles from the nearest airline or steam ship route.

With no hope of rescue -- "we just got dropped out of the world," acknowledges one character -- it was up to these forty American youngsters to build an entirely new civilization on that mysterious island. For the marooned, it was now essentially "Year One," and thus an opportunity to make a clean break with the failed policies, bigotries and inequalities of the past and previous generations of mankind.

As one young woman (Susan) stated, "In fifty years, they couldn't do it, but we could have instant peace...." At least that was the hope...

But it wasn't that simple, as the idealistic youngsters soon learned. And one of the great facets of The New People was that the series didn't take the easy way out. It did not just mindlessly advocate for the youth position (or any position, for that matter). Rather, The New People forced these youngsters to reckon with many, many difficult questions, including ones of law and order; crime and punishment.

How they solved these problems was always "true" to who they were as a group, but it wasn't exactly a love-in either. Primary among the barriers to peace was the socially encoded heritage of "the old world" that these youngsters carried with them to the island; their preconceived notions, biases and hurts.

You could see all this trouble brewing in the primary characters who populated the island (and the series). There was idealistic and issue-oriented Susan (Tiffany Bolling), daughter of a U.S. Senator. There was Robert E. Lee (Zooey Hall), an angry Southerner. As the script described him: "Bobby -- he's from the South, he's got his own Civil War going on."

Another character was the dynamic Eugene "Bones" Washington (David Moses), "the house Afro-American" as he called himself with a sense of self-deprecation. Bones -- like Bobby Lee -- was angry too, "the end result of 5,000 lynchings" as the screenplay points out.

And then there was arrogant, entitled Bull (Lee J. Lambert) -- the George W. Bush of the island -- an "All-American" jock (in a letterman sweater no less...) who believed simply that "the enemy always wears different colored jerseys.")

Another resident on the island was more noble, more contemplative: taciturn George Potter (Peter Ratray), a Vietnam veteran and ex-marine; one who had spent the previous Christmas Eve in Vietnam and had been forced to deal (aggressively...) with a sixteen year old, female bomber.

These characters, according to the pilot episode "are a collection of everything you guys [meaning the Establishment] made us....Down the line, you find all the imperfect images of the Mamas and the Papas."

In other words, even the flower power generation -- so hopeful and "new" in so many ways - carried on the hates and hurts of the past. "It's a hell of a legacy," admitted the only adult trapped on the island, Mr. Hannachek (Richard Kiley).

The pilot episode of The New People commences in South East Asia, as Mr. Hannachek (Kiley), a low level bureaucrat for the American Consulate in Manila, is assigned to retrieve and take home the forty American youngsters. The kids have made something of a stir with their public displays. Yep, they were supposed to be good publicity for America (clean, healthy and happy youngsters!), but they went to foreign countries and instead decried American imperialism, and petitioned for international human rights.

Hannachek and the kids board a Manila Inter-Island Charter plane during a pounding rain storm and once in flight, the plane is promptly lost, remaining in the air an hour over the estimated time of arrival. Eventually, the violent storm forces the plane to lose altitude, and it crashes on a remote Pacific island.

In a scene that eerily forecasts J.J. Abrams' Lost, we see a high-angle shot of the plane wreckage on a desolate beach, as the survivors of the wreck mill around, shell-shocked and confused. Nine people died in the crash, and Hannachek himself is badly injured. He suggests that the youngsters should immediately set about the business of survival, exploring the island.

What the youngsters discover on the mysterious, isolated island is immensely creepy. On a nearby hillside, abandoned (but fully-clothed) mannequins stand watch like juggernauts; like warning sentries. We approach these unmoving statues with a shaky, hand-held camera, and the moment generates shivers and a feeling of "you are there" authenticity. Something...strange occurred here, and the mannequins (and an abandoned playground) are macabre, unsettling images.

Beyond the mannequins, in a valley, stands an abandoned, town; one overgrown with vegetation but replete with a saloon, shops, buildings and even supplies (including the apple in this garden of Eden: guns).

Hannachek suddenly realizes where they are: the remote island of Bonamo. It was here that the American A.E.C. (Atomic Energy Commission) planned to test detonate a new H-Bomb. Fortunately, the plan was dropped and the island was left abandoned permanently. The good news is that the town offers shelter and food. The bad news is that there is virtually no hope of rescue. Bonamo is far from the beaten path...

But then - a miracle! - a plane flies overhead, a rescue team, perhaps. At Hannachek and George Potter's urging, the youth have set up a signal bonfire on the beach. But before the rescue plane can spot the signal, racist jock "Bull" -- who has had a falling out with Bones over issues of race -- squelches it. The plane goes on, forever unaware of the marooned people. They will report back that the island is "clean."

Furious at Bull, the remaining youngsters take-up torches, and form a mob. We see this disturbing sight through a fish-eye lens, as though the world itself has become distorted. We see it also from Bull's perspective (P.O.V. subjective shot), so that we -- as viewers -- also "feel" surrounded, and can fully understand the horror of what is happening.

The youngsters -- now a murderous, unthinking pack -- chases Bull across the island...with the intent to kill. The wronged Bones leads the way, until finally stopped by Hannachek - the adult. "You're the ones who are going to inherit the Earth?," Hannachek asks at one point. Ultimately, Hannachek convinces Bones that killing Bull ("an All-American yo-yo") is morally wrong, the equivalent of a racial lynching. Understanding -- and sick to death of violence and anger -- Bones relents. Bull escapes punishment.

Hannachek soon dies from the injuries he sustained in the plane crash, but not before wondering, finally "what kind of world" these youngsters will make on the island. Our last memorable view of Hannachek finds the old Man seated next to two old, cob-webbed mannequins. Again, a telling, resonant image. Together, the mannequins and the Old Man represent relics of a distant, now-meaningless social order and civilization.

For these New People, "time has just begun," according to a narrator, and the pilot episode then culminates with sneak previews of upcoming episodes. Ultimately, the show aired from just September 22, 1969 to January 12, 1970. But the seventeen episodes of The New People examined many aspects of a new -- and young -- civilization.

The pilot episode, by Serling, Gordon and Spelling, is sharply written and certainly incendiary in theme, vocabulary and characterization. The pilot leaves no issue untouched. The diversity of the youngsters makes for plenty of fraternal disagreements, and the episode focuses not only on the Vietnam conflict (through the character of Potter), but especially matters of race. Race hatred was always a grave concern for Serling (see: The Twilight Zone), and Eugene "Bones" Washington is one of the most-developed characters in this pilot. He describes his journey as a "hell of a freedom march: from no place to no place." He also describes Bull as "the kind [of person] II had to stand up and give my seat to." Frankly, I can't imagine this kind of blunt talk about race on a major television network in 2008.

Still, I'd hate to give the impression that The New People is only some dry polemic. There's adventure and action here too, and even a bit of humor. One funny moment early on has Hannachek referring to Moses and a female singer as "Sonny and Cher over there." Kiley does well with that caustic moment, and is a standout amongst the cast.

So today, let's remember that while major TV networks were trying to gloss over the injustices and concerns of a turbulent time with empty-headed programming like Green Acres or I Dream of Jeannie, The New People -- in the noble tradition of Serling's Twilight Zone -- dedicated itself to facing these issues head on.

And, as I indicated above, it proved pretty even-handed in approach. For example, The New People's pilot characterizes the marooned youngsters as relatively callow and superficial. In the first episode, they party in a saloon (drinking booze and playing the blues...) rather than burying the dead. They also form a mob and nearly kill a man. Here, the Old Guard (represented by Hannachek) reminds the youngsters of what it means to be human; what it means to have civilization and be civilized. The episode ends with Hannachek's death (so that there is no one on the island over thirty...), but at the very least, he has been able to make the so-called "peace" generation feel shame for its mob-mentality.

Visually, The New People is quite dynamic and inventive. As the so-called "new people" build a new world, they are surrounded by the structures and empty symbols (the mannequins) of the world they have left behind. In other words, their efforts to craft a new culture are balanced constantly with visual reminders and objects of the world that failed.

In fact, their very "paradise," their would-be utopia, is built upon on the worst and most destructive impulses of the society they left (a bomb testing site). One can detect, watching this pilot episode, how Serling and his fellow writers had created an ideal set-up for a multi-layered adventure: one that could concern both survival and the social issues of the day. The island itself was a microcosm for 1969 America. The inhabitants were racially, politically and geographically diverse. Would the denizens of the island be united and succeed? Or fall, divided?

The New People theme song is written by Earle Hagen and sung by The First Edition, and it sounds just like a people-powered anthem of 1969 ought to. I wish you could all listen to that song, and watch this episode for yourselves -- it's an incredible time capsule, But as of yet, there is no official DVD release planned for The New People. The series is...for the moment...beyond obscure.

Yet to steal (and wildly paraphrase) a line from Star Trek's "Space Seed," it would indeed prove fascinating to return to that island of "the New People" in the year 2008...and see what kind of world our best and brightest and most optimistic and idealistic had created. For those New People, today would almost be Year 40.

Do you think they repeated the pitfalls of recent human history? Or overcame them?