Happy National Twilight Zone Day: "Come Wander with Me"

There are, perhaps, several episodes of Rod Serling's classic The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) more sharply-written, more morally-valuable, and more resonant in a simple, emotional sense than "Come Wander with Me." Many Twilight Zone segments also boast superior twist endings.

And yet, for my money, there are few segments more haunting or dream-like than this superb fifth season phantasm, penned by Anthony Wilson and directed by a young Richard Donner (The Omen [1976]; Superman: The Movie [1978], Ladyhawke [1985]).

Simply stated, "Come Wander With Me" casts a hypnotic spell.

"Come Wander With Me" was the final episode of The Twilight Zone filmed/produced for CBS, and the third-to-last episode to air on that network in prime time. It premiered on May 22, 1964 and dramatized the tale of Floyd Burney (Gary Crosby), the so-called "Rock-a-Billy Kid."

Burney is a cocky but insecure "celebrity," an up-and-coming music star without the slightest sense of originality, individuality or artistry. As the episode begins, Burney has arrived at the foothills of Appalachia in hopes of "stealing" a song from the naive locals there and "conjuring" another hit to augment his singing career. He justifies this act of creative theft by noting that all the folk-music stars of the day do it...

This narrative set-up mirrors a real-life context of the times. From the 1950s-to-early 1960s, there was a folk music revival movement in the U.S., one in which a wide variety of artists imported the fiddle and banjo-style of Appalachian folk songs (often ballads...) from remote, poverty-stricken Appalachia into the nation's musical mainstream.

This local music style proved increasingly popular -- especially as the Beatnik "coffeehouse" movement came to life -- but so did the notion of Appalachia as a backward, violent, isolated realm of cultural separation and inscrutable mystique.This geographical region in the South East U.S. became increasingly feared and derided because of popular stereotypes; for the sense of it as a setting of oppressive fundamental religion and...ghost stories.

In "Come Wander with Me," we see such a world-view fully articulated.This Appalachia is a dangerous, foreign place that doesn't conform to the "rules" of life as Burney understands them. In other words, cash isn't God; and actions (such as pre-marital sex...) have consequences. And far from being an authentic musician (or even boasting a particularly "Up with People" attitude...) Floyd Burney is but a slick, self-centered celebrity looking simply to steal a resource. Even his car is gaudily decorated with the titles of his insipid hit songs. We recognize immediately that he's out-of-his-element...and playing with fire.

There's a great visual touch that inaugurates "Come Wander with Me." As Burney stops his car at the foot of a rickety, damaged bridge, we can see that a floorboard is missing directly ahead. So Burney exits his car, and steps over that gulf himself, unawares.

That missing plank in the bridge, however, is the specific demarcation point between reality and the supernatural; between the American mainstream and isolated Appalachia. And, as Rod Serling would no doubt declare, it's our point-of-entrance into...The Twilight Zone.

Once in the woods, the hungry, exploitative Burney begins hunting for his "new" song. He tells a gargoyle-esque junk/music shop owner "Anything you got is PD - public domain! You've got no rights!" and then graciously (!) offers to buy the old man's songs for a meager handful of cash. The local declines to help, but Burney refuses to relent...until he hears a recurrent, eerie melody emanating from somewhere deep within the forest ahead.

Burney passes into a heavy mist as he treads deeper into the seemingly-endless woods, and is so consumed with his mission that he misses something important nearby: his own grave-stone, jutting roughly out of the Earth.

As Burney goes in search of the obsessive melody, he misses something else too. In at least two separate shots, we detect a mystery figure shrouded in black...reaching out for him in the distance. This apparition appears in the background of the frame (as Burney hunts in the foreground...), and the long-shot, deep-focus composition crafted by Donner is creepy as hell. Because the figure is at first stationary -- and almost camouflaged -- we don't see it right off the bat amid the ancient woods. When we do see it, we're startled. 

This Life and the After-Life have merged...

Burney soon discovers that the source of the song is an innocent young woman, Mary Rachel (Bonnie Beecher). This siren is beautiful, a bit sad, and all-together reluctant to sing Burney the entire song.

Ever the smooth operator, Burney romances Mary Rachel, even though she's already "be-spoke" to a local gent named Billy Rayford. Successfully taken-in by promises of a life with Burney, Mary Rachel finally reveals the melancholy song in its apparent entirety: a haunting, timeless composition by Jeff Alexander, called, appropriately, "Come Wander with Me." 

As the song is repeated -- and as Floyd and Mary Rachel consummate their relationship 'neath an old willow tree -- the episode cuts to another montage that seems to fracture time: a series of progressive zooms leading into crisp dissolves. The zooms always draw us nearer to the intermingled duo (sometimes from doom-laden high angles). It's as though Fate itself has locked them in its cross-hairs.

"That song was meant for me." Floyd declares, more accurate than he realizes.

"It can't be bought," Mary Rachel counters, but Burney doesn't understand what she means.

Then a jealous Billy Rayford shows up -- a man with the odd, shambling gait and blind, lifeless stare of the living dead. There's a scuffle, and Burney (too easily, perhaps...) kills him. 

Suddenly, Mary's song changes. It is no longer soft and melancholy. Now it is loud, strident, and fearful. A new verse emanates from the tape recorder and states "You Killed Billy Rayford...bespoke unto me..."

In fact, as Billy's brothers relentlessly hunt down Floyd Burney to avenge the death of their kin, Mary Rachel's song continues to morph and grow, adding new, more disturbing verses all the time.

Mary Rachel begs Floyd not to run "this time," but he does it anyway. As he flees, he sees Mary Rachel once more, now garbed in black...a mourner at his grave. 

And when the Rayfords finally come for Floyd, we never actually see them as human beings. Rather, they are suggested as inhuman Furies. They are depicted as long black shadows which stretch malevolently across the ground, and then, finally, eclipse the light over Floyd Burney's terrified face...

What "Come Wander with Me" circumscribes, however, is truly a vicious circle. A cycle without end and without beginning, very much like a song being composed before our eyes and ears. If we could ever truly feel what it likes to be trapped inside a song -- inside a personal melody -- I have the feeling it would seem just like "Come Wander with Me" because the story is graced with a sense of the inevitable, the inescapable. 

And the main character, Floyd Burney, has already been "conceived" or "imagined" by the composer as the subject of this tune, and therefore cannot change his path, his destiny, his crescendo. He will always be the Rock-A-Billy Kid...the one who trespassed (by stealing a song and a woman...), and who paid with his life. The song tells us who he is; and he can never change because those verses are already written and sung. The song which can't be bought...defines him. He already "owns" it. 

Or it owns him.

The less-important supporting characters, like the doomed Billy Rayford, are barely "human" at all. They are merely ciphers -- musical notes, perhaps -- who help bring the song round to its final stanza. As Mary Rachel explains, they do only what is expected of them. "He always comes here," she says, in regards to Billy. He has no choice in the matter, because this isn't his song...it's Floyd's.

If you remember the story of Sisyphus, you might recognize "Come Wander with Me" as something more than a never-ending song. 

It's also a personal Hell for Floyd Burney (meaning, perhaps, that it occurs after his mortality ends, in Hell itself). 

Just as Sisyphus's punishment was to always push a rock up a hill, only to see it roll back down, and have to start over, our Floyd Burney must likewise re-live -- again and again -- the avaricious song hunt (and personal manipulation of Mary Rachel) that led him to his trespass and demise. 

In each refrain of the song (and of his personal Hell...) Mary Rachel begs Floyd to change his course (to hide, rather than run...) but Floyd is stuck in a rut -- like a record repeating on the same groove again and again. Even Fate (or is the Devil?) is seemingly against Floyd: when he returns to the junk music store to hide, all the musical instruments come miraculously to life to reveal his position to the Rayfords.

And, finally, when Burney states that he has "come too far, too fast to be buried in Sticksville," I wondered if he meant, perchance Styx-ville.

There's a majestic sweep, and subtle, cerebral horror underlining "Come Wander with Me." The song was deployed to similar haunting effect in Vincent Gallo's 2003 film, Brown Bunny. Several contemporary bands have covered the tune too, and it even appeared in a Dutch insurance commercial in 2006.

But for me, it's virtually impossible to separate "Come Wander with Me" from Bonnie Beecher, Floyd Burney's personal hell, Applachia, or this unique, brilliantly-crafted episode of The Twilight Zone. 

This is a song (and an episode) you just can't get out of your head.

Happy National Twilight Zone Day: "One for the Angels"

"One for the Angels" opens with Rod Serling's staccato narration about "summer in the present." His words introduce us to Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn), a "pitch man whose life is a tread-mill," a character aged about 60. Today, Lou lives alone on a bustling city block, and is well-loved by the local children, who take an interest in the toys he sells on his stoop.

Then, one day, Mr. Death (Murray Hamilton) shows up in Lou's one-room apartment, and tells Mr. Bookman that the old man's departure from this mortal coil has been scheduled for midnight. The "pre-ordination is death in your sleep."

Lou tries to escape his death, and learns that there are only three valid reasons for appealing a death verdict: family hardship, priority for important individuals (a scientist working on a cure for a disease, for example) or unfinished business of a major nature. 

Lou feels his appeal falls under the third category because he's never made a truly big pitch, "for the angels." Mr. Death reluctantly agrees to give him more time to achieve that dream, but quickly learns that Lou has exploited the loophole. Now Bookman plans never to do another pitch again...so he will never die.

Unwilling to be outmaneuvered by a mortal, Mr. Death selects an alternative soul to take with him that night. He decides to take a little girl from the street, a friend of Lou's. When Lou realizes she is to be taken at midnight, he tries to delay Mr. Death by launching into a pitch for the ages, and the angels...

As the above-synopsis makes plain, this early Twilight Zone concerns both mortality and morality. In our effort to avoid one (mortality), we can, somehow, manage to ignore or circumvent the other (morality).  

Lou Bookman is 69 years old, and yet he very much wants to continue to live. He believes that he can trick death, and manages to do just that.  But Death chooses to kill a little girl, and that is an immoral thing, a that, for Lou, he cannot abide. So Lou steps in and makes his pitch for the angels, knowing full well that it is he, not the girl, who will travel with Death that night. Bookman's understanding of right and wrong ultimately wins out over his desire to keep on living.

"One for the Angels" is both sweet and sad for its depiction of Lou, a kindly, unmarried senior citizen, scraping by, barely making a living, and having lived in a one-room apartment for 21 years. And yet Rod Serling sees a kind of dignity in this man, and his life. Lou leaves the mortal coil having saved a child's life, having made room for another soul. Lou's life is not one we might choose for ourselves, but it matters, both to him, the children whom he has befriended, and, in fact, the cosmos itself. 

"One for the Angels" also remains memorable for its depiction of Mr. Death as a kind of mid-level bureaucrat. He is smartly-dressed, attractive (but not too attractive), and he uses the jargon of his job ("pre-ordination," etc.) He seems to rather dislike having to prove his identity, and he is obsessively concerned with administrative details. "When might we expect it?" He asks of Bookman's pitch "for the angels."  Like many bureaucrats, Mr. Death also seems to possess a limited imagination.  

Or, that's one reading of his character, anyway.  

Perhaps, Mr. Death knew all along that Bookman was going to try to outsmart him, and his ploy with the little girl was all pre-meditated, part of the overall plan to make Bookman feel his death was more meaningful, more palatable. Again, this goes back to Serling's view of humanity, and the notion that all people are valuable, that all people matter. 

The episode's only let-down, perhaps, is the underwhelming presentation of Bookman's big pitch. The episode cuts to shots of Mr. Death sweating, forking over cash, etc., but the audiences doesn't get to hear all of the sales pitch "for the angels." This is a bit disappointing since Lou's gift of gab is the thing, in a way, that saves a child's life. It feels like a failure of writing and presentation for the pitch not to come across with more stellar specificity than it ultimately does.

"One for the Angels" is sweet and humanistic. In this outing, Mr. Death is not someone to be feared or loathed, but  just a regular guy doing his job. In the end, this Not-So-Grim Reaper and Mr. Bookman walk off together, under the moonlight, and it's not hard to imagine that both men feel they have done a good night's work.

Happy National Twilight Zone Day: "To Serve Man"

“To Serve Man” remains one of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes ever broadcast.  And since today is National Twilight Zone Day, it seemed appropriate for a revisit!

Everyone remembers the tale’s unforgettable punch-line: “it’s a cook book!!!”  But by the same token, it’s easy to forget what a sturdy, brilliantly-constructed episode it is. 

Based on a 1950 short-story by Damon Knight (1922 – 2002), “To Serve Man” features a flashback structure.  

From his room (or cell…) on a spaceship in flight, an American man named Chambers (Lloyd Bochner) recounts how alien Kanamits (Richard Kiel) came to Earth promising friendship and peace, but actually executed an insidious and secret agenda.

Chambers explains how the alien spaceships were first seen over many cities across the globe, and how the U.N. Secretary General welcomed the aliens, with some reservations. 

But the 9-foot tall Kanamits promised peace and honorable intentions. They planned to transform Earth into a veritable paradise by offering economical new power sources, and radically improving means of agriculture.  And if humans didn’t want their help, the aliens promised that “nothing would be forced” upon them.

All the while, Chambers worked on translating an alien book that one Kanamit representative left behind at the U.N.  

The deciphered title?

To Serve Man.

Over the months, Chambers toiled further on the extra-terrestrial book even as excited humans boarded Kanamit spaceships and headed to the distant home-world for vacations, shopping excursions, and guided tours.

Chambers then decided to go on one such visit for himself.  

But before he left -- right as he was boarding a saucer in fact – Chambers’ assistant discovered a terrible secret.

To Serve Man was a cook-book…

Much of “To Serve Man” appears to concern humanity’s short-sightedness.

Chambers regrets that the human race should have been focusing on the “calendar” and not the “clock” while contending with the Kanamits. 

He states that humans should more often be worried about “tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow.”

This is a universal real-life refrain, certainly, in regards to man’s stewardship of the environment, and even his foreign policy principles. 

Too often, it seems, we are focused on crisis-management and dealing with what is right in front of our face, rather than planning for the looming disaster just around the next curve.

Here, humanity is taken in by the Kanamit promises of a brave new world, and immediate gratification too. 

“It was the age of Santa Claus,” Chambers notes with cynicism.

In other words, because things seem to be good at present, humans don’t look beyond that “shiny” surface to the future. In “To Serve Man,” no one really examines the alien race’s long-term motivations for fundamentally transforming the Earth. 

In this case, the Kanamits end war (with the creation of national force-fields…), hunger, and poverty…but for the express purpose of growing and fattening the herd.

Clearly, given the episode’s prominence in the pop-culture, “To Serve Man’s” most memorable moment arises when the other shoe drops. 

Chambers assistant tells him that “To Serve Man” is a cook-book. And then he is forced on the ship anyway…by a hulking Kanamit.

In that moment, Chambers learns that mankind has gone from “being ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone’s soup.” 

“Sooner or later,” notes Chambers caustically “we’re all of us on the menu.”

…”

“To Serve Man” doesn’t really reveal much detail or background information about the Kanamits. We don’t know if there is famine on their world…only that we are their latest smorgasbord, and that they have been to other worlds…and done the same thing before.

And, I suppose, we know that their name -- Kanamit -- isn’t far from our word “cannibal.”

That's enough.  This episode is one of the most chilling of all the Twilight Zone canon.

60 Years Ago: The Twilight Zone: "Where is Everybody?"

Sixty years ago, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) premiered on network TV (CBS) with this story: "Where is Everybody?"

Written by Serling and directed by Robert Stevens, "Where is Everybody?" follows the lonely trek of a wandering amnesiac, played by Earl Holliman. This adult man, dressed in military overalls, comes upon a lonely town called Oakwood. 

Although there are signs in the diner and at other locales of recent habitation, the man cannot find any other human...anywhere. He seems entirely alone, not just in Oakwood, but in the world itself.

Increasingly, the lonely man, fears he is going mad. 

Finally, he can't take it anymore, and the truth is revealed. He is actually Mike Ferris, an American astronaut-in-training who has just hit the panic button in an isolation tank on a military base.

For his long trip to the stars, Mike has been learning how to contend with being alone...for 484 hours and 36 minutes, precisely.  

But now, finally, he has cracked. The town and all its locations were delusions.

The next time there is a man alone like this, Mike's superior tells another officer, there will be no escape, no panic button as man faces "an enemy known as isolation."  

That enemy is a force waiting..."in the Twilight Zone."

The pop culture journey of The Twilight Zone begins with "Where is Everybody?" and with an opening narration from Serling which orients audiences to the fact that "The place is here. The time is now." He also alerts viewers to the fact that "this could be our journey."

Today, few critics or viewers would place this particular story -- basically a one-man show -- in the upper tier of series episodes, and yet "Where is Everybody?" still casts an incredibly creepy spell.  What the episode lacks in supporting cast members and pacing, it makes up for in symbol-laden imagery.  

Throughout the episode, for example, Ferris keeps encountering *almost* companionship.  He sees himself in a mirror at one point. So there is a "second" person to talk to, but it is merely a reflection. At another point, Mike encounters a woman, but again, not the companion he would seek. Instead, she is a mannequin.  He is like the mythic Tantalus, always near companionship but forever without real companionship.

The modern technology that should connect Ferris to other individuals also fails him throughout the episode. He attempts to use a telephone, but again, doesn't find the human connection he seeks. An operator's voice tells him that the number he has dialed is not working.  Failure, once more!

And in the diner, another bit of technology, a jukebox, is playing, but there is no sign of any other person for Mike to interact with.  The world seems to be spinning on, with all its devices, only devoid of human life.  One wonders if this could be Purgatory, Hell, or even a weird alien experiment.

Other symbols suggest Ferris's isolation throughout "Where is Everybody?". The audience sees the lonely town through his eyes, and through a barrier (a chain link fence) in one shot, suggesting his constant separation from home, safety, and the rest of the human race.

Intriguingly, it is via the mass media that Mike begins to put together the pieces of his mysterious past and his frightening present.  

For example, the only paperback on a kiosk is one titled "The Last Man on Earth," which seems to indicate (and be aware of...) his plight. And at the local movie theater, a film called "Battle Hymn" is showing. An image on the poster reminds Mike that he is in the air force officer.

A label on the movie poster reads "Now Playing," which is a remarkable self-referential touch. The TV audience watches the story of a U.S. military officer, while the movie theater shows a movie starring a military officer at the same time. Both stories are "now playing."  The poster and the label, "Now Playing" also function as a suggestion that Mike's plight, like a movie now unfolding, is not quite real.

These visuals very much carry the story, as do the sounds of life everywhere, which constantly haunt Mike.  It all feels very much like the dream that Mike fears he cannot awake from.

The episode's final reveal is not one of the more stunning ones in the Twilight Zone canon. The surprise ending (that the town is a delusion of a cracked mind) doesn't feel particularly special or shocking, even if it does foster empathy for the lone, wanderer. The audience learns that Mike has been wandering in his mind, not a real town, and that another astronaut will be doing the same thing soon, only for real...in space.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the early Twilight Zone's focus on the advent of the space program, and that new and unknown age of space travel seems to be the basis for this story. Can man survive in space alone? For long spells?  Without the sights and smells and companionship of home? This episode is very concerned with that idea, noting that man possesses a hunger for companionship, and that such companionship is the "one thing we can't simulate" on a space journey.

It's a good, solid point, and one buttressed by the overall eeriness of the episode's central scenario, an abandoned town, and a man without memory, or company.  Yet with sixty years of hindsight it is also easy to see how this episode doesn't necessarily play to Serling's writing strengths.  This is a series that consists often of great dialogue and stunning narrative u-turns.  

"Where is Everybody" depends on visuals, not Serling's brilliant use of language, and the final u-turn is a little ho-hum in the context of the series, overall.

Again, there's cleverness in abundance here, especially in visual execution: the idea of the cracked mirror as a reflection of Ferris's cracked mind, for example. 

But if anything, "Where is Everybody?" is a potent reminder of the fact that at the beginning, The Twilight Zone still had some growing to do before becoming the classic it is recognized as today.

The Twilight Zone: "One for the Angels" (October 9, 1959)

The second episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) is a marked improvement over the first installment, "Where is Everybody?" and, more than that, a remarkably affecting and sweet tale. It's amazing to consider that this fledgling series manages to hit its stride just two weeks into its run, but that's pretty much exactly what happens with this tale by Rod Serling, the first to introduce the series' recurring character: Mr. Death.

"One for the Angels" opens with Rod Serling's staccato narration about "summer in the present." His words introduce us to Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn), a "pitch man whose life is a tread-mill," a character aged about 60. Today, Lou lives alone on a bustling city block, and is well-loved by the local children, who take an interest in the toys he sells on his stoop.

Then, one day, Mr. Death (Murray Hamilton) shows up in Lou's one-room apartment, and tells Mr. Bookman that the old man's departure from this mortal coil has been scheduled for midnight. The "pre-ordination is death in your sleep."

Lou tries to escape his death, and learns that there are only three valid reasons for appealing a death verdict: family hardship, priority for important individuals (a scientist working on a cure for a disease, for example) or unfinished business of a major nature. 

Lou feels his appeal falls under the third category because he's never made a truly big pitch, "for the angels." Mr. Death reluctantly agrees to give him more time to achieve that dream, but quickly learns that Lou has exploited the loophole. Now Bookman plans never to do another pitch again...so he will never die.

Unwilling to be outmaneuvered by a mortal, Mr. Death selects an alternative soul to take with him that night. He decides to take a little girl from the street, a friend of Lou's. When Lou realizes she is to be taken at midnight, he tries to delay Mr. Death by launching into a pitch for the ages, and the angels...

As the above-synopsis makes plain, this early Twilight Zone concerns both mortality and morality. In our effort to avoid one (mortality), we can, somehow, manage to ignore or circumvent the other (morality).  

Lou Bookman is 69 years old, and yet he very much wants to continue to live. He believes that he can trick death, and manages to do just that.  But Death chooses to kill a little girl, and that is an immoral thing, a that, for Lou, he cannot abide. So Lou steps in and makes his pitch for the angels, knowing full well that it is he, not the girl, who will travel with Death that night. Bookman's understanding of right and wrong ultimately wins out over his desire to keep on living.

"One for the Angels" is both sweet and sad for its depiction of Lou, a kindly, unmarried senior citizen, scraping by, barely making a living, and having lived in a one-room apartment for 21 years. And yet Rod Serling sees a kind of dignity in this man, and his life. Lou leaves the mortal coil having saved a child's life, having made room for another soul. Lou's life is not one we might choose for ourselves, but it matters, both to him, the children whom he has befriended, and, in fact, the cosmos itself. 

"One for the Angels" also remains memorable for its depiction of Mr. Death as a kind of mid-level bureaucrat. He is smartly-dressed, attractive (but not too attractive), and he uses the jargon of his job ("pre-ordination," etc.) He seems to rather dislike having to prove his identity, and he is obsessively concerned with administrative details. "When might we expect it?" He asks of Bookman's pitch "for the angels."  Like many bureaucrats, Mr. Death also seems to possess a limited imagination.  

Or, that's one reading of his character, anyway.  

Perhaps, Mr. Death knew all along that Bookman was going to try to outsmart him, and his ploy with the little girl was all pre-meditated, part of the overall plan to make Bookman feel his death was more meaningful, more palatable. Again, this goes back to Serling's view of humanity, and the notion that all people are valuable, that all people matter. 

The episode's only let-down, perhaps, is the underwhelming presentation of Bookman's big pitch. The episode cuts to shots of Mr. Death sweating, forking over cash, etc., but the audiences doesn't get to hear all of the sales pitch "for the angels." This is a bit disappointing since Lou's gift of gab is the thing, in a way, that saves a child's life. It feels like a failure of writing and presentation for the pitch not to come across with more stellar specificity than it ultimately does.

"One for the Angels" is sweet and humanistic. In this outing, Mr. Death is not someone to be feared or loathed, but  just a regular guy doing his job. In the end, this Not-So-Grim Reaper and Mr. Bookman walk off together, under the moonlight, and it's not hard to imagine that both men feel they have done a good night's work.

Next up: "Mr. Denton on Doomsday."

The Twilight Zone: "Where is Everybody" (October 2, 1959)

Nearly sixty years ago, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) premiered on network TV (CBS) with this story: "Where is Everybody?"

Written by Serling and directed by Robert Stevens, "Where is Everybody?" follows the lonely trek of a wandering amnesiac, played by Earl Holliman. This adult man, dressed in military overalls, comes upon a lonely town called Oakwood. 

Although there are signs in the diner and at other locales of recent habitation, the man cannot find any other human...anywhere. He seems entirely alone, not just in Oakwood, but in the world itself.

Increasingly, the lonely man, fears he is going mad. 

Finally, he can't take it anymore, and the truth is revealed. He is actually Mike Ferris, an American astronaut-in-training who has just hit the panic button in an isolation tank on a military base.

For his long trip to the stars, Mike has been learning how to contend with being alone...for 484 hours and 36 minutes, precisely.  

But now, finally, he has cracked. The town and all its locations were delusions.

The next time there is a man alone like this, Mike's superior tells another officer, there will be no escape, no panic button as man faces "an enemy known as isolation."  

That enemy is a force waiting..."in the Twilight Zone."

The pop culture journey of The Twilight Zone begins with "Where is Everybody?" and with an opening narration from Serling which orients audiences to the fact that "The place is here. The time is now." He also alerts viewers to the fact that "this could be our journey."

Today, few critics or viewers would place this particular story -- basically a one-man show -- in the upper tier of series episodes, and yet "Where is Everybody?" still casts an incredibly creepy spell.  What the episode lacks in supporting cast members and pacing, it makes up for in symbol-laden imagery.  

Throughout the episode, for example, Ferris keeps encountering *almost* companionship.  He sees himself in a mirror at one point. So there is a "second" person to talk to, but it is merely a reflection. At another point, Mike encounters a woman, but again, not the companion he would seek. Instead, she is a mannequin.  He is like the mythic Tantalus, always near companionship but forever without real companionship.

The modern technology that should connect Ferris to other individuals also fails him throughout the episode. He attempts to use a telephone, but again, doesn't find the human connection he seeks. An operator's voice tells him that the number he has dialed is not working.  Failure, once more!

And in the diner, another bit of technology, a jukebox, is playing, but there is no sign of any other person for Mike to interact with.  The world seems to be spinning on, with all its devices, only devoid of human life.  One wonders if this could be Purgatory, Hell, or even a weird alien experiment.

Other symbols suggest Ferris's isolation throughout "Where is Everybody?". The audience sees the lonely town through his eyes, and through a barrier (a chain link fence) in one shot, suggesting his constant separation from home, safety, and the rest of the human race.

Intriguingly, it is via the mass media that Mike begins to put together the pieces of his mysterious past and his frightening present.  

For example, the only paperback on a kiosk is one titled "The Last Man on Earth," which seems to indicate (and be aware of...) his plight. And at the local movie theater, a film called "Battle Hymn" is showing. An image on the poster reminds Mike that he is in the air force officer.

A label on the movie poster reads "Now Playing," which is a remarkable self-referential touch. The TV audience watches the story of a U.S. military officer, while the movie theater shows a movie starring a military officer at the same time. Both stories are "now playing."  The poster and the label, "Now Playing" also function as a suggestion that Mike's plight, like a movie now unfolding, is not quite real.

These visuals very much carry the story, as do the sounds of life everywhere, which constantly haunt Mike.  It all feels very much like the dream that Mike fears he cannot awake from.

The episode's final reveal is not one of the more stunning ones in the Twilight Zone canon. The surprise ending (that the town is a delusion of a cracked mind) doesn't feel particularly special or shocking, even if it does foster empathy for the lone, wanderer. The audience learns that Mike has been wandering in his mind, not a real town, and that another astronaut will be doing the same thing soon, only for real...in space.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the early Twilight Zone's focus on the advent of the space program, and that new and unknown age of space travel seems to be the basis for this story. Can man survive in space alone? For long spells?  Without the sights and smells and companionship of home? This episode is very concerned with that idea, noting that man possesses a hunger for companionship, and that such companionship is the "one thing we can't simulate" on a space journey.

It's a good, solid point, and one buttressed by the overall eeriness of the episode's central scenario, an abandoned town, and a man without memory, or company.  Yet with sixty years of hindsight it is also easy to see how this episode doesn't necessarily play to Serling's writing strengths.  This is a series that consists often of great dialogue and stunning narrative u-turns.  

"Where is Everybody" depends on visuals, not Serling's brilliant use of language, and the final u-turn is a little ho-hum in the context of the series, overall.

Again, there's cleverness in abundance here, especially in visual execution: the idea of the cracked mirror as a reflection of Ferris's cracked mind, for example. 

But if anything, "Where is Everybody?" is a potent reminder of the fact that at the beginning, The Twilight Zone still had some growing to do before becoming the classic it is recognized as today.

Next up: "One for the Angels."

The Twilight Zone (Season 1): "A Nursery Rhyme For the Age of Space"

The genre anthology Black Mirror (2011 - ) is beloved by today's audiences as a series obsessed with the nexus of human nature and technology. The titular black mirror is the reflective surface of a contemporary i-Phone, for example.

But going back nearly sixty years, it is possible to understand how Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) also stood on the vanguard of American's culture's imagination about technology. Where today, Black Mirror ponders social media, video games, the cloud, and other evolving 21st century technologies, The Twilight Zone stood on the cusp of a very different world.

Consider, on October 1st, 1958, just a year before The Twilight Zone debuted, NASA came into being. And in 1959, some six months after NASA's foundation, the seven astronauts of Project Mercury were named. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, did not take that famous journey until May 5, 1961, years into the Twilight Zone's run. 

So as The Twilight Zone bowed, America stood on the precipice of a journey mankind had never undertaken before. 

Man-made rockets were going to carry the human race further than it had ever traveled. But no outcomes, no details were yet known about what might be "out there." The Twilight Zone, in its original era, dealt in the realm of "anticipatory anxiety" about the next step in human development.

It is appropriate then, that no less than four episodes of The Twilight Zone's inaugural season obsess on the opening journeys of the space age, on man's first, tentative, frightening steps away from planet Earth.  

It is true that other episodes in the series' run -- and also others in its first season -- explore a later age of "established" space flight ("The Lonely," "Elegy," "The Long Morrow,") but it is fascinating today to remember the four episodes from the 1959 season that fretted and worried about what the first astronauts to leave the safety of Earth's atmosphere would discover upon their historic flight.  

These are the stories that The Twilight Zone imagined would be "Chapter One" in the annals of man's' space age.

The premiere episode of The Twilight Zone, "Where is Everybody," not only began the network run of the series, but also initiated this recurring theme about the beginnings of manned spaceflight.  "The place is here, the time is now," Serling's narration notes, as it introduces the audience to a man (Earl Holliman) who finds himself wandering in an isolated, lonely town. 

Throughout the episode, he keeps running into the inescapable conclusion that he is totally alone in this atypical town.  There is not a soul to be seen, or heard.

And at story's end, viewers learn that this "last man on Earth" is actually an astronaut in training, one sitting in a hanger, on an air force base, in an isolation chamber. After he goes crazy from the loneliness of the experience in town (really an hallucination), an Air Force officer observes that "next time, it won't be a box in a hanger."  

In other words, the next time it will be real. 

A real life human being will have to deal with being alone in space, far away from his home, family, and every other human being, for a long period. Will he face what Holliman did, the episode wonders, "an enemy known as isolation?"

A few episodes later, another first step to space generates terror in The Twilight Zone. In "And When the Sky Was Opened," the X-20 rocket is launched with much fanfare. It travels 900 miles into space from Earth's atmosphere, the first such voyage of this type. When it returns to Earth, however, something strange occurs.  

The three astronauts who made the journey to Earth orbit are erased from existence, one at a time. Finally, even the rocket, the X-20, disappears from the world. It is as if someone, or some thing has taken them somewhere; ripped them from consensus reality. As the episode observes, the astronauts and their vehicle are "no longer a part of the memory of man."  

Today, this episode plays on an understandable if irrational fear about progress and technology, framed in an almost religious way. Would God be angry, the episode asks, if man were to leave his home, forsaking the Earth? Would an angry deity punish the men who dared to make that journey? Not by killing them, but actually by wiping them from the face of reality?  

These heroic men face terror and oblivion as an unseen force wipes away their histories and lives, before their eyes.  

Then, they just fade away.  

Was their offense so great, hoping to get a "God's eye" view of the Earth?

"I Shot an Arrow into the Air," the third Twilight Zone episode featured in this survey, is oddly, a variation on the premise of "And When the Sky Was Opened." In this tale, the Arrow 1, "the first manned aircraft into space" (think, the X-20!) is launched, with a crew of eight men aboard. 

Something goes wrong during the flight, and that accident is called "a practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature." 

The rocket disappears from all tracking devices, radars, and watch posts on the Earth. A man in mission control discusses the lost rocket, and calls its story a "nursery rhyme for the age of space," an apt description of this Twilight Zone leitmotif.  The underlying fear is that something like this might happen, in real life, and quite soon. Astronauts sent to space could die in an accident, or even become marooned there. With six decades of hindsight, we know that space travel and accidents are not strangers, as Serling's series predicted.

The remainder of "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" follows the surviving astronauts, who believe they have landed on an arid asteroid, and go in search of water. One astronaut, however, is desperate to survive, and kills his ship-mates for their water canteens. 

After killing his captain, the last surviving astronaut crosses a mountaintop only to see, in the valley, below, a sign for Reno, Nevada. The Arrow 1 never left Earth at all, and now the astronaut is a murderer, and will pay for his crimes. He killed for a canteen of water on twentieth century Earth, only miles from civilization. 

This episode's stark photography and story are a clear influence on Serling's Planet of the Apes (1968) screenplay. In that story, astronauts also crash-land on Earth, mistaking it for another planet, and must traverse an arid wasteland in search of water and food. 

More to the point for this essay, however, "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" worries that mankind, when faced with life on an inhospitable world, will regress to his most barbaric, selfish nature. He will murder to stay alive. The underlying idea is that man may not be ready yet, to take to the stars. As "Chapter One" in the annals of manned space flight opens, there is the fear, displayed in this tale, that man is not the evolved creature of rockets, but still a cave man.

Finally, "People are Alike All Over," another first season episode, showcases yet another rocket "taking a highway into space," this time heading for Mars. Man is depicted "unshackling himself...and his tiny groping fingers into the unknown," Serling's narration tells us. 

The episode then showcases a fearful scientist and astronaut on the rocket, Conrad (Roddy McDowall). He is terrified of what might await mankind on the red planet.  He has good reason to be scared, as he soon finds out. After the rocket crashes on Mars, Conrad is captured by Martians and put on display in one of their zoos, where he spends the rest of his natural life, the man "from a primitive planet."

The photo above foreshadows Conrad's entrapment on Mars. In the shot above, he is trapped or caged by his fears of the space flight (which has not yet occurred, in the story). In the shot below, he is trapped or caged by what he discovers on his journey: man's inferiority in a cosmic sense.

Nearly sixty years later, it is easy to gaze at all these Twilight Zone tales and read them as simply "twist-ending stories" about failed space missions. Instead, one must remember the original context of the first season, and stories such as "Where is Everybody?", "And When the Sky Was Opened," "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" and "People Are Alike All Over."  

These tales were watched by a citizenry standing on the brink of a new frontier, not knowing what would await our brave astronauts out there. Would the first people to leave Earth find loneliness and nothingness, at a great distance from the rest of us ("Where is Everybody?") Would they face the wrath of an angry God by developing a technology that allowed them to leave this Eden-like home ("And When the Sky Was Opened?")  Would they face catastrophe, and revert to barbarism in a Darwinian battle for survival ("I Shot an Arrow into the Air?")  Or would they become the playthings of beings far more advanced than mankind ("People Are Alike All Over?")

Today, these science fiction stories remain ones that chill the blood. But imagine living in 1959, as NASA was founded, as the first astronauts were selected.  How must it have felt not to know what the opening chapter of space flight would look like? 

The Twilight Zone exploited these timely, and disconcerting fears brilliantly in its first season, and in these four tales, in particular.