The Twilight Zone: Where Is Everybody?
Jul. 7th, 2025 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerEvery once in a while I drop into an independent movies-and-music store that’s stayed open in the area mall. Most of the time this amounts to looking and leaving, but a little while ago I noticed a complete Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set there. Having been aware of the show for a very long time without ever having managed to see any of it, I wound up succumbing and using cash I’d taken out of the bank just in case I wanted to buy things at the recent anime convention. I did wind up thinking, though, that I’d once bought a “first season” DVD set of the show from a yard sale of some sort and never got around to watching it...
Finding the time to begin watching what I was half-convinced would be “an hour-long drama” took a while. In the end, the other half of my impressions worked out, and the first episode was half an hour long. Part of what made me aware of The Twilight Zone was old books of episode adaptations having been in libraries when I was young, and “Where Is Everybody?” was something I was aware of through an adaptation. It was still interesting to watch; I did think back to when I’d seen the earliest episodes of Doctor Who (to trail off partway through its first season) and Star Trek (and then never got around to opening the third season set) and had the feeling those shows were honest efforts by those involved.
The twist ending to the episode also had me remembering reading a Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction collection of about the same age as it with a story involving a cosmonaut; just because I can suppose the first people launched by themselves into space in real life had full flight plans keeping them busy didn’t affect the portrayal of loneliness. I have to admit I was also thinking of a particular “host segment” in Mystery Science Theater 3000 built around Earl Holliman, even if the Holliman in mind there might have been some years older than he was in the episode. With one episode watched there are still a lot left in the collection, but I have started.
Finding the time to begin watching what I was half-convinced would be “an hour-long drama” took a while. In the end, the other half of my impressions worked out, and the first episode was half an hour long. Part of what made me aware of The Twilight Zone was old books of episode adaptations having been in libraries when I was young, and “Where Is Everybody?” was something I was aware of through an adaptation. It was still interesting to watch; I did think back to when I’d seen the earliest episodes of Doctor Who (to trail off partway through its first season) and Star Trek (and then never got around to opening the third season set) and had the feeling those shows were honest efforts by those involved.
The twist ending to the episode also had me remembering reading a Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction collection of about the same age as it with a story involving a cosmonaut; just because I can suppose the first people launched by themselves into space in real life had full flight plans keeping them busy didn’t affect the portrayal of loneliness. I have to admit I was also thinking of a particular “host segment” in Mystery Science Theater 3000 built around Earl Holliman, even if the Holliman in mind there might have been some years older than he was in the episode. With one episode watched there are still a lot left in the collection, but I have started.