Brief Passages - Twilight Zone (The Lonely)

Please see the uncut version because SYFY cuts out an entire scene where Corry and Alicia are away from his shack home, looking into space at constellations, seeing Allenby’s rocket on its way to the asteroid. It is very romantic and gives us a rationale as to why Corry loves her. She’s developing, learning, and evolving. When Allenby shoots her in the face, and the wires, gyros, nuts, and bolts are exposed, he shows Corry that she isn’t human. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t left to contemplate her being left behind, a companion that was abandoned because to Allenby she served no other purpose, while Corry is left to consider whether or not she outlived her usefulness. I think that is what haunts me…did she deserve to be left behind with that put-together car? Wasn’t she more than just a machine?

There is a cult following for the episode, “The Lonely”. It moves many who (and, I’m sure, eventually will) watch it. I think it is the ending, ultimately—as I’m sure I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion—that haunts viewers. A “ro-bit” that gave a prisoner on an asteroid comfort, provided by a sympathetic astronaut, accompanied by two officers under him that didn’t share his heart of kindness for a derelict, lonely man left to deteriorate under a hot sun (the Death Valley location, used more than once by those who produced TZ, never fails to really make you sweat and thirst) by a cruel law system of the future. Warden’s James Corry claims he killed in self defense but a young Ted Knight (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) as a grinning, mocking fellow astronaut doesn’t relent in reminding him of his forty years of confinement on the asteroid while Dehner’s Captain Allenby brings the prisoner books, items to help with the boredom, and eventually a female android (Dehner calls her a “ro-bit”, TZ fans never fail to find amusement his pronouncement of robot), in the “design” of a lovely Jean Marsh. Marsh, named Alicia, informs Corry she can feel and be a companion to love. Allenby never considered her anything but a cure for loneliness while Corry, at first resentful at Alicia’s very feminine and beautiful design (a reminder of woman) before falling for her, considered her much more than a ro-bit. Eventually pardoned, Allenby comes calling for Corry, but there is no room on the rocket ship for Alicia.

--Brian

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So just for 2020, along with my other ongoing projects for the horror genre, I thought it would be fun to build towards my [now annual] self-created 4^th of July Twilight Zone Marathon with a “brief passages” series for the first season. I thought it would be a neat sort of 2020 episodic footprint and the point of the “brief passages” part is to try and limit myself to just a “mini-review” five-to-six line paragraph for each episode of the Twilight Zone (and some Universal Monster films as well) in the first season. My marathon for Independence Day will not be as extensive as it was in 2019…ten episodes, five from the third season and five from the fifth. Because I have written big reviews for many of the first season episodes in the past, this “brief passages” format won’t be as difficult while those certain few that might not have gotten a more elaborate, detailed treatment, it should be quite a challenge to limit myself.