The Twilight Zone: The Last Flight
Nov. 25th, 2025 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRod Serling holding a model biplane and talking about a World War I pilot in his next-episode preview got my attention. Recollections of having seen “The Last Flight” brought up before just might have come back to me. As I waited to reach the episode proper, I suppose I did get to thinking a bit about how “the flying aces” have been picked out from the grimmer image of the First World War as a whole, but a thought or two about the World War I Flying Ace in Peanuts reminded me that the episode was older than Snoopy’s first appearance in a flying helmet and scarf. That ever-popular comparison “we’re now further in time from this thing than it was from that thing...” came to mind. When the episode premiered sixty-five years ago, the beginning of the First World War had preceded it by less than fifty years.
The episode’s World War I pilot landing at an end-of-the-fifties American airbase that just happened to be in France is easy enough to suppose a way to not actually have to go overseas. Maybe I wondered more about what sort of “future shock” might have resulted from that than found it in the episode myself, but a thought or two of this preceding “everyone” in stories, too, becoming “genre-savvy” enough to start identifying time travel to themselves and the audience did come to mind. I did take some note of how the story at one point became a matter of two men in a sparely furnished room, but at that point it started dealing with something more universal and, from at least some perspectives, more interesting than “mere time travel,” before time travel proved the key to a resolution and the comparative closer spacing in time I’d thought about before was put to use as well. I also wondered again about The Twilight Zone working in a presentation of a military man as something in between “a hero” and “a villain,” but I suppose unfortunate thoughts of “wider experience in the culture not that long after the Second World War” mixed with “counter-portrayals” and “counter-counter-portrayals.”
The episode’s World War I pilot landing at an end-of-the-fifties American airbase that just happened to be in France is easy enough to suppose a way to not actually have to go overseas. Maybe I wondered more about what sort of “future shock” might have resulted from that than found it in the episode myself, but a thought or two of this preceding “everyone” in stories, too, becoming “genre-savvy” enough to start identifying time travel to themselves and the audience did come to mind. I did take some note of how the story at one point became a matter of two men in a sparely furnished room, but at that point it started dealing with something more universal and, from at least some perspectives, more interesting than “mere time travel,” before time travel proved the key to a resolution and the comparative closer spacing in time I’d thought about before was put to use as well. I also wondered again about The Twilight Zone working in a presentation of a military man as something in between “a hero” and “a villain,” but I suppose unfortunate thoughts of “wider experience in the culture not that long after the Second World War” mixed with “counter-portrayals” and “counter-counter-portrayals.”