The Twilight Zone - King Nine Will Not Return

*** / ****

I hadn’t watched King Nine Will Not Return in quite a while. Perhaps I haven’t watched it since the 90s when Syfy was still The Sci-Fi Channel, complete with the Saturn logo. I do recall Cummings was alone and dealing with “ghosts from the past” while seemingly searching for his lost Air Force officers in the African desert of 1943. The twist wasn’t as significant as it might have been when I was a teenager, but I still rather liked it just the same. Cummings’ Captain James Embry is slowly going mad as he experiences illusions of his officers, approaching them exhilaratingly only for them to disappear before his eyes. This is definitely an acting showcase piece for Cummings, who endures the desert heat, loneliness, the loss of his men, and reminded of his situation through the crashed remains of a B-25 bomber (WWII). He finds the grave of one of his men, seeing a fellow officer in the cockpit and his crew later with smiles, all vanishing when calling out to them. Later waking up in a hospital, Embry questions whether or not he was actually there on the desert because of his recollection of jets flying overhead (the B-25 bomber had been found 17 years later; this front page news story sends Embry into a shock, resulting in an unconscious hospital stay), when a doctor (Paul Lambert) and psychiatrist (Gene Lyons) are talking about his condition (and his ties to the King Nine bomber). The question of if Embry was there or not is left up to us to decide. It is offered as a possibility. Cummings and the B-25 are great characters stuck on this sun-baked landscape, with the additional ghosts included adding some eerie to the hot, dehydrating environs. If I personally had any real problem with this episode is that it doesn’t necessarily hang on the mind for any length of time. It is more or less a nicely acted episode featuring a tormented soul, rattled from the reminders of the past where he felt he had failed his fellow officers (he didn’t go on the mission because he “fell ill”). He spends some time where they came to rest and died, getting a glimpse of the conditions and understanding briefly what they must have experienced. Cummings sells that “visit” and the futile search for the men long gone. He must carry an entire episode on his own, and I admire his ability to do so. The use of "thoughts of the mind" narration is a device also available in the episode to describe Cummings gradually descending condition before maniacal laughing and admittance of ensuing madness further elaborate Embry's deterioration.