The Twilight Zone: The Lonely
Aug. 28th, 2025 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerHearing “asteroid” in a next-episode preview had me thinking The Twilight Zone would be getting back to something I could point at and say “science fiction” for the first time since its first episode. I also have to admit I thought again of certain comments returned to not that long ago where faint praise for Rod Serling seemed directed more at his non-science fiction scripts, and of different comments over the years that Star Trek establishing the fixed setting of a roving spaceship was a way to avoid just how cheap everything would look should you have to create a strange new world from scratch week after week on a television budget...
As it turned out, “The Lonely” used location shooting in Death Valley to make an asteroid you could go outside on, and the effects and costumes used to indicate space travel to it did have me thinking of certain movies included in Mystery Science Theater 3000, but with that said the episode had something to say beyond just “this is taking place in ‘outer space.’” What it said had a first similarity to the previous science fiction episode, but “loneliness” is a big topic to explore. I suppose it’s something that these old stories can be compared to modern worries about loneliness, even as I contemplate my own way of life and how I suppose I use solitude to recharge from crowds and not the other way around.
So far as other resonances between past and present went, I had wondered from the preview about some element of loneliness-caused hallucination showing up again only for “a robot that looks human” to show up instead. I hadn’t quite expected “imprisonment in space” either, but I can both imagine this being supposed more relatable than my own previous thoughts of some sort of “lone researcher” and also being different from what happened in the first episode. A few thoughts about “what couldn’t be shown, perhaps couldn’t even be implied, on television” did flit through my mind. That “playing chess” was shown did have me wondering about how much had been said about computer chess by that point, anyway. I suppose I also thought a lot was going into this episode for a half-hour time slot, but wondered if that was just some variant on how suspicious “online commentary” in general sometimes feels about romance. It was at least tempting to imagine greater familiarity with some of the ideas in science fiction producing a different solution of sorts to the final dilemma in the episode, but this amusement didn’t distract from the episode itself for me.
As it turned out, “The Lonely” used location shooting in Death Valley to make an asteroid you could go outside on, and the effects and costumes used to indicate space travel to it did have me thinking of certain movies included in Mystery Science Theater 3000, but with that said the episode had something to say beyond just “this is taking place in ‘outer space.’” What it said had a first similarity to the previous science fiction episode, but “loneliness” is a big topic to explore. I suppose it’s something that these old stories can be compared to modern worries about loneliness, even as I contemplate my own way of life and how I suppose I use solitude to recharge from crowds and not the other way around.
So far as other resonances between past and present went, I had wondered from the preview about some element of loneliness-caused hallucination showing up again only for “a robot that looks human” to show up instead. I hadn’t quite expected “imprisonment in space” either, but I can both imagine this being supposed more relatable than my own previous thoughts of some sort of “lone researcher” and also being different from what happened in the first episode. A few thoughts about “what couldn’t be shown, perhaps couldn’t even be implied, on television” did flit through my mind. That “playing chess” was shown did have me wondering about how much had been said about computer chess by that point, anyway. I suppose I also thought a lot was going into this episode for a half-hour time slot, but wondered if that was just some variant on how suspicious “online commentary” in general sometimes feels about romance. It was at least tempting to imagine greater familiarity with some of the ideas in science fiction producing a different solution of sorts to the final dilemma in the episode, but this amusement didn’t distract from the episode itself for me.