June 19, 2023- numbers 66, 67

Spoilers

“Two”

Season three started off with two well known faces as the only two actors on the show: Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery.

“This is a jungle, a monument built by nature honoring disuse, commemorating a few years of nature being left to its own devices. But it’s another kind of jungle, the kind that comes in the aftermath of man’s battles against himself. Hardly an important battle, not a Gettysburg, or a Marne, or an Iwo Jima; more like one insignificant corner patch in the crazy quilt of combat. But it was enough to end the existence of this little city. It’s been five years since a human being walked these streets. This is the first day of the sixth year, as man used to measure time. The time: perhaps a hundred years from now, or sooner. Or perhaps it’s already happened two million years ago. The place: the signposts are in English so that we may read them more easily, but the place is the Twilight Zone.”

One of the issues of this show is that there is no real explanation for what was going on here and who these two people were. They had been on different sides as we see when they first interact (a great little fight scene between them) and the fact that they are wearing different uniforms.

I will say that this idea was interesting and I was curious about what was going on. However, as with many Twilight Zone episodes, it felt like the episode wrapped up too quickly and the ending felt forced. This would have been a story that required another twenty minutes or so to make things make more sense.

The final narration from Rod Serling indicated that this had been a love story, but none of that had come through even remotely and that is a major drawback to the episode. It was clearly a comment on the idea of the Cold War and the dangers of nuclear war.

“The Arrival”

The second episode of the season takes some big swings, but does not quite land the plane, if you forgive the horrible pun.

A mystery is set up in the episode.

“This object, should any of you have lived underground for the better parts of your lives and never had occasion to look toward the sky, is an airplane, its official designation a DC-3. We offer this rather obvious comment because this particular airplane, the one you’re looking at, is a freak. Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled. On rare occasions they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other. Now, yesterday morning this particular airplane ceased to be just a commercial carrier. As of its arrival it became an enigma, a seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing. In just a moment, we’re going to show you the tail end of its history. We’re going to give you ninety percent of the jigsaw pieces and you and Mr. Sheckly here of the Federal Aviation Agency will assume the problem of putting them together along with finding the missing pieces. This we offer as an evening’s hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime in the Twilight Zone.”

An airplane lands at the end of its voyage but nobody is on the flight. No passengers. No pilots. No stewardesses. No one.

What a cool idea for a story. I was fully into the mystery that the show was setting up for me. Speculating about what could possibly have happened was a lot of fun. The show dropped a few hints along the way that the viewers should be thinking about- such as why was there no relatives of the missing flight passengers calling looking for updates?

The resolution of the mystery was also intriguing as it turned out the plane was just an imagined thing. It kind of reminded me of the comic book Department of Truth by James Tynion IV, with how group delusions can become real.

However, this was not a group delusion as everyone else disappeared when Mr. Sheckly proved his idea. Turned out that this was all an illusion from his own mind because of guilt from his failure to solve this plane’s disappearance from 17 year prior.

While I like the overall concept of the episode, I do think the actual execution of the idea was lacking. Was there a triggering event that caused Sheckly to imagine this into existence? The beginning when Sheckly wasn’t yet here and the other employees (who were shown to be in Sheckly’s imagination too later) felt odd in retrospect.

I was in this episode from the beginning. I just feel as if the conclusion did not live up to the prologue.