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krpalmerPaying attention to Rod Serling’s next-episode preview had me supposing The Twilight Zone would stick with science fiction as it got to “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.” As I finished the second disc of my Blu-Ray set (and faced swapping four discs around a stacked and overlapped arrangement to get ready to move on), I was a bit conscious of being reminded of the previous science fiction episodes of the series.
Beginning with stock footage of an Atlas missile launch got my attention as distinct from the space travel implied in “Third from the Sun” and had me wondering to what extent the particulars of Project Mercury had been established in the news when the episode was made in 1959. I did also notice whatever the stock footage was intended to indicate being launching called an “aircraft,” though. When that vehicle vanished off the charts I thought a bit of “And When the Sky Was Opened” and the “vanished in space” stories it had brought to mind, then wondered if this was going to be a story set in “mission control.” Then, however, the actual opening commercial break showed up, and the story shifted focus.
The survivors of the crash (from a craft vanished off screen but rather larger in crew size than a “capsule”) being out in the open on what they called an “asteroid” had me thinking of “The Lonely,” even if I got to remembering a science fiction juvenile from the 1950s I’ve seen that involved a more realistic airless asteroid and wondering if the episode would already be annoying serious fans of written science fiction. A comment about the apparent size of the sun in the sky had me anticipating the twist ending. There was enough drama built around competing strategies for survival before that moment, though, that I didn’t quite wind up with the sort of dismissive half-grin that writes off a story along with its twist. I wondered a bit about two episodes of The Twilight Zone now involving unsuccessful first steps into space; maybe I’m stuck with incomplete assumptions of “the 1950s” this actual evidence bumps against even as I can also suppose it takes work to build drama around “careful success.”
Beginning with stock footage of an Atlas missile launch got my attention as distinct from the space travel implied in “Third from the Sun” and had me wondering to what extent the particulars of Project Mercury had been established in the news when the episode was made in 1959. I did also notice whatever the stock footage was intended to indicate being launching called an “aircraft,” though. When that vehicle vanished off the charts I thought a bit of “And When the Sky Was Opened” and the “vanished in space” stories it had brought to mind, then wondered if this was going to be a story set in “mission control.” Then, however, the actual opening commercial break showed up, and the story shifted focus.
The survivors of the crash (from a craft vanished off screen but rather larger in crew size than a “capsule”) being out in the open on what they called an “asteroid” had me thinking of “The Lonely,” even if I got to remembering a science fiction juvenile from the 1950s I’ve seen that involved a more realistic airless asteroid and wondering if the episode would already be annoying serious fans of written science fiction. A comment about the apparent size of the sun in the sky had me anticipating the twist ending. There was enough drama built around competing strategies for survival before that moment, though, that I didn’t quite wind up with the sort of dismissive half-grin that writes off a story along with its twist. I wondered a bit about two episodes of The Twilight Zone now involving unsuccessful first steps into space; maybe I’m stuck with incomplete assumptions of “the 1950s” this actual evidence bumps against even as I can also suppose it takes work to build drama around “careful success.”