May 28, 2023- number 1

“Where is Everybody?“

Spoilers

Welcome to the first post under the new initiative of EYG for the summer, The Daily Zone, which will take a deep dive into the episodes of the EYG Hall of Fame TV series, The Twilight Zone, from the creative mind of writer Rod Serling.

I will be talking about the episodes in detail, so expect that there will be spoilers involved in these posts. If you are mad about a spoiler from a 1959 TV series, then you have been warned.

I will be watching these daily episodes on Amazon Prime where all five seasons of the original series as well as the 2019-20 remake by Jordan Peele exist.

First episode up is episode 1 from 1959, entitled “Where is Everybody.”

The episode kicks off with Earl Holliman’s character walking into a town where there are no people anywhere to be found and the man has no idea who he is. Amnesia, he assumes as he tries actively to find someone who could help him with his plight. With each passing failure at the diner, the police station, movie theater and such, the man becomes increasingly frustrated and agitated.

Eventually the man realized that he had been a part of the Air Force and that lead to the audience having the curtain pulled aside and revealed the truth of what was happening to the man. He ended up desperately pressing a button which was revealed as a ‘panic button’ signaling to the Air Force that the man, who turned out to be Sgt. Mike Ferris, who had spent 484 hours in an isolation chamber in preparation for a trip to the moon.

Ferris’s mind had created the delusion of the empty town where he seemed to be the last man alive as a way to deal with the loneliness and the isolation he was experiencing. The hallucination was brought about by sensory deprivation.

To be honest, this episode did not include much science fiction. It was more of a psychological study, dealing with the effects of loneliness and isolation on the mind of human beings. The idea of space travel was the little bit of sci-fi in the episode and that came at the very end. The end was sudden and felt almost tacked on. Watching Earl Holliman decent into anxiety over the lack of human contact and his desperation to find anyone to interact with was interesting. Admittedly, the ending was not as interesting as what preceded it.