Twilight Zone Labor Day Weekend Revists

Serling presents King Nine Will Not Return

 Just working in some episodes here and there this Labor Day weekend. Going backwards starting with just the absolute worst, The Bewitchin' Pool, I am just reminded of how atrocious the acting and direction is. Emblematic of the downward trajectory of the show, to this very day I wish there had been a better episode to close such an iconic classic. That horrendous dubbing of Sport, the insufferable parents, and the general creepiness of Aunt T in her backwoods Never Neverland putting kids to chores explaining how labor makes good kids better just leaves a bad taste I cannot wait to get rid of by watching a much more worthwhile episode of the show. And repeating the same divorce talk scene at the beginning and end is the icing on Aunt T's big ass cake. The theme does tap into an unfortunate situation that plagues children to this day, a wish to escape domestic strife and dysfunctional family challenges that leave them wanting to retreat a happier place...anywhere but with bickering parents whose hostility towards each other has reached a point of no return. Aunt T's fantasy land beats a fancy swimming pool and noise from arguing.

You know I do wonder if Mike would have been sent into space as an astronaut after "cracking", his manufactured mind producing a town without people, a loss of companionship where a simple voice would be badly desired. I wish I could tell you the sheer amount of times I have watched Where Is Everybody? but the blog knows in just the decade or so I have written about Twilight Zone here. Today, a generation or two might understand all too well why Mike "went off his rocker" and ran around a Universal Studios backlot looking for anybody to talk to. Isolation and loneliness can be a self-imposed exile few truly want to contend with and Mike, at the very least, was taken out of that experimental chamber in this episode to see others again.

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Sunday night late

Funny that the second season opener, King Nine Will Not Return, also dealt with a man alone and looking for people -- this time the crew he flew missions with called the King Nine -- with the result being he's a pilot awakening from a manufacture of a guilty conscience (not piloting the plane, his crew perishing in a crash while flying to Italy, landing at a still in Africa, 1943). The ghosts of his crew haunt him as does his reason for not actually going on the mission...he was not ill, just scared. I love that the story from Serling was taken from actual facts, a Lady Be Good B-25 found in Libya. The question was: at the King Nine in Africa, was James Embry actually there? Did the Twilight Zone spirit him there to feel the location, be touched by the heat and loss that exists in that particular spot of desert? How the did sand get in his shoe, dumping out as a nurse at the hospital in "present day" laid down Embry's clothes for the two doctors discussing his case?

Why not watch another creepy episode involving a plane? The Arrival was always, to me, a tale of two halves. The first just exceptionally eerie with one hell of a hook that  doesn't quite "stick the landing" (pudum ching) as the second half needs to explain why a plane can land in a hanger without any crew much less customers (or luggage), using the "illusion of a cracked mind" gimmick again. I think the music in this episode and the inside of the plane, how the opening of the episode sets this tone, with the employees trying to grapple with what has happened is why I love to return to The Arrival. Sheckley's arrival (yuk yuk) and how he works to find the answer as to where everyone is from the Flight 107 out of Buffalo begins to take the air out of the tires of the plot, with the FAA's "puzzle investigator" eventually hit with a rude awakening...everything we have seen until Sheckley challenges the illusion of the plane by approaching the propellor spinning was not real. And I think I felt deflated by that the very first time I watched it and continue to feel disappointed by that twist to this day. I just think they had the hook but how to really make that work all the way to its conclusion fell short.