Twilight Zone - An Aviation Theme

I started with some “aviation classics” with central characters haunted by the past. King Nine Will Not Return and The Arrival feature tormented souls unable to recover from phantoms…they happen to be planes. The crew Bob Cummings (Hitchcock’s 40s classic, Saboteur) tries to locate in 1943 Africa after a crash during WWII and Harold J Stone hoping to solve the case of a missing crew and passengers in a plane that took off from Buffalo and landed seemingly without a soul in a hanger. I love how Cummings moves through the wreckage of his downed plane, trying to keep his shit together, the voice in his head a narrative clinging to whatever sanity remains. The sand in his shoe at the end of the episode was a clever bit of a twist…what if you “go back” and the delusion is so real it does feel as if you were actually there? Cummings come-apart, the hot baking sun and desert environs make for quite an atmosphere. The idea that you create so much trauma through a guilty conscience (he didn’t go on a mission with his normal crew out of cowardice and when they don’t return, it truly leaves him grappling with that decision) that it manifests itself to the point that Cummings is “there”. I love that closing camera shot of the ship by itself, a skeletal, abandoned relic left to remain in its final resting place, in the desert where it actually came to rest. The Flight 107 (the nut Stone couldn’t crack) returning again to haunt Stone while the Vice President of the hanger (Noah Keen, also of the TZ episode, The Trade-Ins), along with the landing crew and public relations man (Wayne, also in the TZ episode, Twenty Two), appear as a delusion and later in the flesh (many scholars and critics point to this as a flaw in Serling’s script), with Stone knowing them inexplicably despite actually never meeting them until he rushed into their office in a panic. The inside of the plane empty despite landing without a hitch, as Kames and Russell remain perplexed by the idea of this, is just my jam. I LOVE when the Twilight Zone really wallops you with something so extraordinary. Maybe the payoff might not necessarily build off the opening and Stone’s pursuit of the truth, but Stone collapsing in a heap within the darkened hanger as Keen and Wayne are left to pity him is quite tragic. The Flying Dutchman of Stone’s psyche not allowing him the peace of solving every single mystery leaves behind a mess of a man. Good stuff.

King Nine Will Not Return : ****/*****

The Arrival : ****/*****

To continue with the aviation theme, I decided to conclude the first night with The Last Flight, one of my favorite episodes from the first season. Imagine landing your plane from 1917 on a French hanger in 1959! In the Twilight Zone, time can sort of throw you for a loop. Unlike the previous episodes, Kenneth Haigh’s Lt Decker gets a second chance to right a wrong regarding cowardice when facing certain death, returning to his time in order to alter a decision to avoid a certain destiny. Decker, British pilot of the biplane that lands, being navigated around the American base as all parties are confused at the situation is quite a nifty use of the time travel theme, an oft-used trope I personally never tired of as a fan. I didn’t even mind it when Serling (like the case in Back There) never explained how time travel happens. Like Decker perhaps just flew through some rift in time, returning to the same spot in order to cross the plane with his plane back to where he belonged. Haigh is just so good in the role of Decker…his reactions are so relatable. When told he was in 1959, that shock is quite understandable. When Cliff Robertson later carries that similar look in A Hundred Yards Over the Rim, I return to Haigh’s face when Scott and Scourby lay down the news…the shock and awe is always a constant and why wouldn’t it be?

“He belonged to the sky and the sky has taken him.”

One scene I always seem to forget is Decker describing a missing pilot from the Royal Flying Corps and how he might have passed through "the clouds" and vanished similarly. We often heard reports of UFO potential abductions. But the thought of time passage is quite a concept!

The Last Flight : ****/*****