And When the Sky Was Opened,
Season 1, Episode 11, 1959
SPOILERS, DARLING MANATEES
Colonel Forbes (Rod Taylor) goes to visit his crew mate William Gart (Jim Hutton), the two of them having survived a very strange trip into space on an experimental aircraft. During the flight, the men blacked out and awoke hours later crashed in the desert. Gart is happy to see his friend, but there's just one problem: Forbes insists that there were
three of them on the flight, something that no one else seems to remember . . .
I was heavy into the
Twilight Zone in the very early 2000s, so there are many episodes I watched then that I haven't seen in about 20 years or so. This episode was familiar to me, and yet there were still plenty of surprises to be found.
I really enjoyed this episode, and for a whole mix of reasons.
First of all, I really enjoyed the in media res beginning of it all. The minute Forbes walks into the hospital room to talk to Gart, he is already agitated. As he tries in vain to get Gart to remember Ed Harrington (Charles Aidman), their third crew member, Forbes is clearly already going through it. The episode then uses a flashback to show how Forbes arrived at that point, and the structure of the episode is very satisfying.
I also thought that the episode was just incredibly good at taking a character's emotional arc (something seems wrong---> everyone else thinks I'm crazy-->Oh god am I next?!) and giving us all three characters cascading over each other at different stages of it. The three men are never on the same page exactly, and that means that they aren't able to support each other in this horrible thing that they are going through.
Lastly, the episode walks just the right line of ambiguity when it comes to what is happening. Harrington ominously speculates that "someone or something" let them come back to Earth, but that it was a mistake. Who or what that someone or something is never gets totally defined. With it being a space mission (and, let's be real, with it being a
Twilight Zone episode), your thoughts go immediately to aliens. But what is actually happening to these men---the alteration of reality--feels more like the actions of an angry god.
The broader plot dynamics---that of a person knowing that there is something wrong with their reality--are very familiar for this show. Having just watched
Walking Distance, this is yet another episode where someone's parents don't know them. But the acting is so solid and the ambiguity generates so much tension that it works very well. The extra layer of the men experiencing it at different moments, creating further isolation is a new wrinkle that adds a lot of emotional heft to the story. Aidman in his role as Harrington really captures that feeling of sensing that something is wrong, but not knowing what.
A very intense and involving episode.