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Friday night is The Twilight Zone night. It's true that the second season has not been as consistent in terms of quality as the show's first season, but it has had enough good episodes to remain regular watching.

Normally, I wait until I have a month's worth of episodes before I summarize, but this week's episode, The Odyssey of Flight 33 impacted me such that I wanted to talk about it with my readers.



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What goes down sometimes comes up! The sensational new sci-fi/surreal anthology, The Twilight Zone, started its sophomore season with a sharp decline in quality from its debut run of episodes. I'm happy to say that the quality of last month's batch was pretty good.



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When does the New Year start?

Your first instinct might be to say "January 1, of course!" But that's simply the beginning of the calendar year. Think of all the other days that kick off the next 365-year cycle. For Jews, New Year is in September. If you run a company, your fiscal year has a good chance of not matching the calendar.

And if you're a student, a football fan...or a television viewer, you know viscerally that the New Year starts right after Labor Day.



Last TV year, writer/producer Rod Serling stunned his audiences with the exciting new anthology show The Twilight Zone. Featuring half-hour episodes with science fiction/fantasy/horror themes, it was some of the best material the small screen had to offer.

It's no surprise that Twilight Zone was renewed for 1960-61, but can the new season match the expectations set by the first?

(find out at Galactic Journey)!

Summer is here, and that means the television season is wrapping up, freeing time for a slew of blockbusters. But the small screen hasn't quite finished with all it has to show us--between Maverick, Bonanza, and The Twilight Zone, there's still plenty to enjoy. I must confess a guilty affection for What's My Line, too. I like to close my eyes when they display the guests' professions so I can play along with the contestants in guessing.

Twilight Zone, in particular, continues to impress. The latest three episodes (there was another gap in the schedule for some reason) are all interesting, and they break from the early season mold of featuring a fellow descending into madness and screaming through the second act.

In fact, it's rather hard to pick a favorite from this bunch. Perhaps you can help:

(see the rest at Galactic Journey!)

Some shows start with a bang and quickly lose their spark; some are a slow burn, taking a while to find their stride; The Twilight Zone has remained a class act from the beginning.

As of Friday, April 8, 1960, there have been 27 episodes. They have ranged in quality from fair to outstanding, and the current crop of four (I like to review them in monthly batches) comprises superior installments.

I think the success of the show can be attributed in large part to the high bar that creator and writer, Rod Serling, has set for its production. This is a person who clearly knows his craft and seeks out like talents (Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, etc.) to draft screenplays. Much of the credit must be doled out to the directors, cinematographers, and composer Jerry Goldsmith, to say nothing of the frequently excellent acting talent that CBS has managed to contract.

So much for the general praise. On to the reviews!



Long Live Walter Jameson sets the standard for this batch. The eponymous Professor Jameson is a brilliant history teacher with a knack for vivid anecdotes. It's almost as if Jameson has lived through each of the periods and settings he describes, which is, of course, the case.

This is a thoughtful, fascinating piece that describes the blessing and curse that is immortality. It's hardly the first, of course. The one I remember most vividly is The Gnarly Man, by L. Sprague de Camp, but it is always a worthy topic. In a piece I wrote many years ago, I once put these words into the mouth of a 5000 year old man:

"Imagine being in library with every book you ever want to read, and all the time in the world in which to do so. And you read them... and you still have all the time in the world."



The following week, People Are Alike All Over. Two astronauts, a rock-chinned type and a frightened intellectual, go to Mars where they find a remarkably human populace. But why does the fine house crafted for the scientist (the hero-type having died soon after landing) have no windows or doors?

I'll spoil it for you. Roddy McDowell (the panicky scientist's actor) has been turned into a zoo specimen, relegated to live out the rest of his life as an exhibit in his "native habitat." I get the message, but I still think it was a weak story idea.



Execution is another time travel fish-out-of-water story, but unlike The Last Flight, the voyager is a thoroughly unlikable chap. Snatched from the hangman's noose in 1880, the murderous viewpoint character finds himself in 1960, the guest of a dapper chronologist (is that what you call a time travel expert?) The criminal remains true to type, killing and looting, being driven close to madness by the ever-present 20th century cacophony. The ending comes as a surprise, for the most part.

An interesting point—time travelers often are inordinately worried about changing the past, but no one gives a thought to changing the future. After all, the present is really just someone else's past, and any gross modification of the present (say, sending one of its inhabitants permanently into the past) must to a resident of the future, make a severe alteration to the timeline. Food for thought.



Finally, we have The Big Tall Wish, the first episode to date that features a black protagonist (and several black supporting actors). An over-the-hill boxer tries to win a come-back fight with the help of the wishes of a little boy.

The episode doesn't feature the madness or the weirdness of its predecessors. Rather, it is a slow, wordy piece. My daughter particularly enjoyed the heart-warming relationship between the boxer and his child friend. That said, the twist (there's always a twist on this show) is very effective, and we are left with this conundrum: is a fight won with magic preferable to one honestly lost?

That's the wrap-up for this month. I'll be back in two days with this month's F&SF!

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Unless you're watching the rather dull Men Into Space, the putatively "realistic" tales of astronaut Colonel MacCauley and his lunar mission crew, there isn't a lot of science fiction or fantasy on television. Thank goodness we have Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone to tune into every Friday night. This is a mature show for adults, and while the scripts have not been as cutting edge conceptually as the stories you can read in the digests, they evince a sophistication you won't find much of...well, anywhere, on television.

It has been a month since the last Twilight Zone round-up, so here's a summary of the last four episodes so you're ready come rerun time:

I'd had high hopes for The Hitch-Hiker after seeing its star, Inger Stevens in The World, The Flesh, and the Devil. Ms. Stevens drives cross-country with a spectral hitcher constantly on her tail. The story is let down by a couple of points. The story is largely told in narration—Ms. Stevens mostly tells rather than shows her plight. This strikes me as lazy storytelling. I also find the section where she picks up a sailor to keep her company (and maintain her sanity) particulary off-putting; the fellow who accompanies her is far creepier than any shabby hitching bum. I can't figure out if this was intentional or not. I suspect not.



The Fever is more of a public service warning against the dangers of gambling in which a normally sober husband is seduced by a demonic slot machine who calls the man's name with an eerie tinkling, silver dollar-laden voice. It is highly overwrought, and the ending is ridiculous. Moreover, one can't help feeling glad that the domineering wretch gets his comeuppance; he really is inexcusably rude to his wife, and his initial sanctimony, rather than pointing up the tragedy, is just annoying.



That puts us at two for two episodes involving someone going raving mad by the second act!

But then you get The Last Flight, which makes up for a lot of prior sins. Yet another Richard Matheson teleplay (and far better than Third from the Sun), it's the story of a Royal Air Corps aviator who takes off from a French airfield in 1917 and lands at a French airfield in 1959. There is some delightful paradox looping and a very pretty Nieuport plane, and it's all a lot of fun. My daughter, who is just old enough to appreciate such things, noted that the pilot's British accent was "so cute!"



Finally, we have The Purple Testament, another war-themed episode, involving a young Lieutenant in the Pacific Theater who can see death in his soldiers' faces several hours before their last breaths. Unremarkable, unambitious, at every turn predictable.



The show started so promisingly that it's frustrating when one gets several mediocre turns in a batch. Still, even the worst episodes generally have something to recommend them, there's no slighting the production values, and the stand-outs keep my daughter and I watching every Friday night.

As you all know, my editor loves to publish reader commentary in this column, so please feel free to tell me your thoughts on this show. Do you agree with my rather curmudgeonly appraisals? Do you wish to set me straight? Sharpen those quills!

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Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns. While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!







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This Friday night was a bit of a repeat performance of last week's: another trip to the German delicatessen in Escondido, another beer, another coffee and dessert. This time, I was in the most enjoyable company of my wife, and we had an avid discussion of what it is to be a "fan."

A mutual friend of ours once observed that fandom has three things in common—the following utterances:

"Where did you get that?"

"How can we get more people into it?"

"It's not as good as it used to be..."

It's true that fandoms come and go. The "Golden Age" of science fiction, when Astounding ruled the roost with its Campbellian stories, is departed. The boom of science fiction magazines came to an end a couple of years ago. The cozy British country-house mystery is becoming a thing of the past.

Things change. It's an inevitable part of life. But it's a mistake to get so stuck in nostalgia that one cannot see the old fandoms that continue to thrive (Conan Doyle, for instance) or the new evolutions in current fandoms (the small but rising tide of female authors, the general increase in quality of science fiction and fantasy even as the number of digests diminishes).

There are also brand new fandoms. I am very excited to have gotten in on the ground floor of one on which the paint is still wet: Rod Serling's anthology science fiction show, The Twilight Zone.

Three months ago, the program was an exciting idea. Now, eleven episodes in, it is a bonafide phenomenon with staying power. Though the quality of each episode varies, of course, Twilight Zone is still head and shoulders above what came before on television. I've high hopes it will only rise in excellence.

Here's what my daughter and I have enjoyed for the last four Fridays:



Time Enough at Last came out on November 20. The buzz I hear is that it went over well, and there's no question that Burgess Meredith turned in a fine performance as a frustrated bibliophile bank teller, who finds himself alone after surviving a nuclear holocaust. But the ending, where he finds a lifetime of books to read and then immediately breaks his glasses, is not clever. It's just cruel, and it soured me on the whole piece.



Charles Beaumont is the first writer whose name isn't Rod Serling to pen an episode, and his outing, Perchance to Dream was interesting. A fellow with a heart condition is afraid to sleep for he knows that a temptress in his dream will lead him into a carnival of horrors, which will aggravate him into cardiac arrest. The afflicted man tells his story to a sympathetic doctor, and we get to see the narrative progress in flashback. It's creepy and fascinating. I guessed the ending early on, but the tale was so compelling, I forgot all about my premonition until it actually happened.



I enjoyed the subject and setting of Judgment Night, in which a German man finds himself aboard a British liner cruising the Atlantic during World War II. He is deathly afraid of U-Boats and seems to be certain that an attack from under the sea is impending. It's a suitably atmospheric piece though somehow a bit plodding. It was during this episode that my daughter noted that virtually none of the protagonists on the show are female. I can only recall one, from The 16 millimeter Shrine.



This week's episode was a winner. Written by the master of science-fiction horror teleplays and fiction, Richard Matheson, it stars the excellent Rod Taylor as one of three survivors of a spaceplane crash. It seems each of the astronauts is disappearing one-by-one, not just from the Earth, but from history and memories. Creepy creepy stuff, though my daughter complained that she was getting tired of episodes featuring "people acting crazy." (A neat tidbit: the spaceplane featured is the X-20, a real-life Air Force project that has either just gotten or is in the process of getting the green light for construction. This vehicle will be the next step beyond the X-15, actually capable of orbital flight!)

As much as I enjoyed the episode, it shared the same overwrought middle that I've seen consistently in the last eleven episodes. This, I think, is the main weakness of this young show. While the writing is often brilliant, the acting usually excellent, and the cinematography remarkable, the middle third of each episode tends to take a bit too long padding out the set-up before the payoff.

Perhaps I'm just a little too clever, guessing the ends before well before they happen. It may well be that Twilight Zone is starting easy to draw in the uninitiated, those who haven't read a thousand science fiction stories already. With all the talent going into this program, I have faith that the show will continue to mature and, as with science fiction, move beyond "gotcha" storytelling.

What say you?

Note: If you like this column, consider sharing it by whatever media you frequent most. I love the company, and I imagine your friends share your excellent taste!

P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns. While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!







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It never ceases to amaze me how far technology can progress in such a short time.

Think about it: a thousand years ago, the pace of history was pretty placid. Sure, there was plenty of turbulence in the span of a life, from war to plague to famine, but the background of civilization (or lack thereof) was fairly constant.

Over the last few hundred years, the pace of change has accelerated exponentially. There are people alive today who clearly remember a time before automobiles, before air travel, before the telephone, before electricity, before atomic energy, before computers. So much of our values and coping mechanisms are rooted in our childhood and upbringing; how do people adjust to living in a world so wildly different from that of their youth?

It seems inevitable that change is going to become so rapid that we just won't be able to deal with it. Perhaps science fiction is the lubricant that keeps it all from being too overwhelming. After all, if we've already gotten a sneak preview of the future, it can't surprise us as much.



What brought this all home to me was the debut of a new science fiction/fantasy anthology on television called The Twilight Zone, hosted by screenwriter and producer, Rod Serling. It debuted yesterday, October 2, 1959. And here's why it is so significant, to me.

Twenty years ago, "hard science fiction" was just beginning, led by Astounding and Campbell's brood. Ten years ago, print science fiction exploded and produced a profusion of genre magazines. Many have died, but I think the science fiction novel may fill that gap. And, in the last decade, the science fiction movie (and it's bastard step-child, the science fiction B-movie) has come into its own.

Now we're getting science fiction delivered to every home in the country courtesy of the little glass-screened box in the living room. We truly are living in the future.

If this first episode of The Twilight Zone, entitled "Where is Everybody?" is any indication, the future is bright, indeed. For the show is produced with movie-level sophistication, including technically innovative cinematography and excellent musical scoring. Production values would be meaningless without a good story, however. So how did TZ do on its first outing?

The episode opens up with a jumpsuited youngish man walking down an empty road. He arrives at a cafe where music is blaring from a jukebox, steam is rising from a coffee pot, pies are in the oven... but there's no one in sight. Moreover, the man doesn't remember who he is or where he came from.



Walking into town, he hears the reassuring bells from a church marking the passage of time, and there are hints that life is going on: a lit cigar, a phone ringing in a booth, but still no people at all. Our protagonist stumbles upon a movie theater, which springs to life as the sun sets, and he realizes he is a member of the Air Force (which explains the jumpsuit).







At this point, my daughter cleverly guessed that the man had flown an experimental plane so fast that he'd broken some kind of time barrier. This was after I had guessed that the man was somehow in the same time as everyone else but out of phase.

It turns out that both of us were wrong. The man is actually an Air Force sergeant enduring three weeks in an isolation chamber so as to get used to one aspect of a solo lunar trip: enforced solitude. The sergeant has cracked up by the end of it, though he recovers after being let out.





For me, the ending was a bit of a let down. I thought our explanation was more interesting. Moreover, I just don't believe all this hype about the dangers of space travel. I don't think weightlessness will be a problem, or loneliness, or radiation, or meteors. Lack of air, pressure, the cost of rockets, the ability to lift off and land safely, those are real issues. These other factors are melodramatic boogeymen.

That said, I think the show has a lot of potential. It's smartly done and very atmospheric. My daughter loved it and can't wait to watch next week's episode, apparently involving an aged salesman and a Mr. Death. We'll tune in, for certain.

We should all rejoice. Science fiction has entered yet another medium. Truly, the Golden Age endures.

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P.S. Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns. While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



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