This might be a strange thing to write an essay about. It might also be strange that I wrote an essay for fun, but it's not an essay so much as an homage, I guess. I also find it vaguely distressing that I now watch enough television to write an essay about it, but I guess my priorities have shifted since I have become a college graduate. I saw an episode of The Twilight Zone tonight that I'd never seen before, and I felt compelled to share it with anyone willing to read the following.
“The year is 1997,” Mr. Rod Serling informs us. Three men (yes, men) are aboard a spacecraft that looks like our traditional notion of a flying saucer, on a mission to explore and take samples of a newly discovered planet in order to determine its inhabitability for colonization. Upon reaching the planet, a crewmember sees something strange on the surface. The captain doesn’t see it, but grudgingly agrees to check it out. Once landed, they discover a spaceship. Inside the spaceship they discover their doppelgangers[1]—exact replicas of themselves—only dead. The Captain believes they may have circumnavigated time[2], and that this is a sign that if they leave the planet their ship will crash and they will die, ending just as their counterparts did. Meanwhile, two of the men (the Captain is the exception) experience visions or hallucinations of their loved ones from home. The first man gets to his home to find that his wife has received a telegram notifying her of her husband’s death. The second man meets his daughter and wife near a lake, and when roused from his reverie the viewer finds out that his family has, in fact, been dead since before our travelers left Earth.
The Captain supposes, and convinces his colleagues, that they are being tricked by whomever lives on the planet. He is convinced there are unseen aliens on the planet that use mind control to show them whatever will scare them as a defense against their planet being colonized[3]. The only way to test their new theory is to take off and attempt a return to Earth. They successfully get into the air, and decide that the Captain was right. Now, the Captain says he is going to prepare again for a landing, because they know what was happening, and there is no longer any reason for them to fear the planet; they will collect their samples. They nearly crash, but descend back to the alien planet, believing that if their theory was correct, the crashed spaceship containing their doubles will be gone. They land uneventfully, but the spaceship is still there.
One of the crewmembers insists that the visions they saw were real, and that they are in fact already dead, and their bodies were those in the other spaceship. Unwilling to believe this, the Captain takes off again, and the spaceship flies off into space. Mr. Serling’s voice tells us that the Captain is a man of will so strong that he is blind to what he does not wish to see. He compares the spaceship to the Flying Dutchman, wandering forever through the Twilight Zone.
I love the Twilight Zone. It ran for five years, between 1959 and 1964, before we’d even landed on the moon. The very essence of the show was the exploration of possibilities that exist only in our imaginations. In this particular episode, we envisioned a future (as soon as 1997!) when men are zipping around the universe colonizing planets, and what they find, literally, is their own demise. I think one of my favorite things about the show is the ambivalence of the possibilities imagined therein. It is at once optimistic and foreboding. It shows us that we cannot fathom in our wildest dreams what we might one day be capable of, while simultaneously warning that we may go too far, that we may be forced to face that which is most terrifying (usually in ourselves). The plot and tone of the stories have influenced countless other shows (“Simpsons did it!”), and I submit that it’s one of the best television shows we’ve ever produced, but feel free, as always, to disagree.
[1] Seeing one’s own doppelganger is sometimes thought to be a harbinger of bad luck or death (Wikipedia: Doppelganger).
[2] This is an event that has happened before on the Twilight Zone; once an airplane crew got disoriented and lost communication with everyone, only to find when they looked out the windows that they were flying over a prehistoric Earth complete with dinosaurs.
[3] This is very similar to what happens in the movie Contact when Jodie Foster gets to the alien planet and is deluded into thinking she sees her dead father, until she realizes she is speaking to a figment created by an alien being on the planet to make her more comfortable.
2 comments:
All i know about the twilight zone is the parodies on futurama called the SCARY DOOR! basically the most famous plots in 10 seconds or less
I will never watch the Twilight Zone with the same mindset after reading your fabulous essay with footnotes! It was very thought provoking and enjoyable. :)
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