The Twilight Zone, S1E01, "Where Is Everybody?"

Welcome to season one of The Twilight Zone! The format for this coverage will look a little different from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents reviews: I’m no longer separating out any twists, so the whole episode will be discussed in one piece, complete with spoilers. I’m including the intro and outro texts (as well as the occasional mid-episode narration) for flavoring.

I originally posted these write-ups on a personal blog, and it’s been nice to go back to them and make occasional tweaks as I revisit the episodes in question.

Opening: The place is here. The time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we are about to watch, could be our journey.

It’s worth noting that while the theme for this season isn’t the iconic Twilight Zone theme, it’s masterfully unsettling all the same and a terrific way to establish atmosphere. This more understated theme is by the great Bernard Herrmann, who would go on to score several early episodes; he was also the composer for such little-known films as Psycho, Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Cape Fear, and Taxi Driver. The intro visuals have the same restraint, something we won’t always see—compare the M.R. Jamesian cave mouth here with the later ludicrous floating e = mc^2.

Rod Serling won’t have an on-screen presence until the first season finale, “A World of His Own,” but we have him doing the narration in voiceover form right from the start. Or almost from the start: the original airing of “Where Is Everybody?” featured Westbrook Van Voorhis instead, but Serling was substituted in later. Orson Welles was floated as a candidate, as well, and while I love Welles, in this case I’m glad he would have busted the show’s budget. It’s such a pleasure to hear Serling week-to-week and eventually get him in front of the camera as well; the TV landscape was better for the series making him an iconic presence.

“Where Is Everybody?” is a strong start to the series, kicking off at least three of its long-running fascinations: astronauts, Americana-made-eerie, and creepy mannequins. It’s also a risky opener, since much of it is a one-man show for the great Earl Holliman, and there’s a limit to how naturalistic it can seem for someone to keep talking to themselves. Holliman pulls it off pretty well, I think, and he’s especially good at conveying a kind of whistling-in-the-dark attitude slowly cracking, after hours of unsettling isolation, into sweaty, adrenaline-fueled terror. He may not know who he is (his amnesia means he doesn’t even have himself for company), but we begin to: he’s bold, good-humored, desperate, and on edge. He’s considerate enough, and empathetic enough, to realize that a woman might be alarmed to be approached by a strange man.

He’s a likable person stuck in a quietly terrifying situation. This is a top-notch ghost town, from the diner with the pot of coffee left on and the jukebox left playing to a still-smoking cigarette in an ashtray to the taunt of mannequins and reflections that promise a companionship they can’t deliver. It’s worth noting, too, that his predicament would be all the more uncanny in 1959. We’re used to automated messages and the inability to get an actual human being on the phone; for Mike, dialing the operator and only getting a recording about it being an on-working number understandably produces a spike of panic. His world literally has more available, obvious human contact than ours. (In a nice touch, he even resorts to a phone book to prove that the town supposedly does have a population.) It’s a time when a film projector didn’t run without a projectionist, so when he’s in the theater and a movie begins to play, his frantic attempt to reach whoever’s in the booth—because there has to be someone–has a sharp pathos to it. He’s constantly running into the possibility that people are there but just out of reach.

As, indeed, they are. His paranoia—“I wish I could shake the crazy feeling of being watched. Listened to”—is less significant to him than his overwhelming solitude, but the two things turn out to be intertwined. We segue from him pushing a walk button over and over again, pleading for help and relief, to him in a small booth in the middle of a vast hangar, continuing to bash his hand into a broken clock. We’ve got a couple nice repeating details here—the broken clock also appeared in the ghost town, and the testing booth he’s trapped in is, of course, foreshadowed by the claustrophobia of him getting stuck in the phone booth.¹

I usually don’t like “it was all a dream”-style endings, but “Where Is Everybody?” makes it work for me because it gives us a strong reason why Mike—as he turns out to be—has entered into this hallucination in the first place and because his desperate search is, to him, exactly as real and desperate as it seems. It’s not like this was a literal dream he simply wakes up from, safe and sound in his own bed.

The twist also isn’t the end. It’s specific rather than generic, and it not only continues the story but positions Mike’s experience as part of an ongoing story.² The Air Force was testing his capacity to survive prolonged periods of cramped isolation, because he’s going to need it for an upcoming spaceflight. He lasted 484 hours and 36 minutes—“roughly equivalent to a trip to the moon, several orbits, and a return.” It would be easy to make this into a harsh look at people getting dehumanized for the sake of some possibly arbitrary achievement—to make Mike’s superiors dismissive of his trauma—but The Twilight Zone, again establishing a pattern here, isn’t really that show. Mike’s superiors note that he “cracked,” but they’re well-aware that this is simply what happens; it’s not weak, it’s just human.

You see, we can feed the stomach with concentrates. We can supply microfilm for reading, recreation – even movies of a sort. We can pump oxygen in and waste material out. But there’s one thing we can’t simulate that’s a very basic need. Man’s hunger for companionship. The barrier of loneliness – that’s one thing we haven’t licked yet.

“Yet.” Everyone here, including Mike, is committing to the task despite the difficulty of it—Mike, covered in a blanket and carried away on a stretcher, tells the moon not to go away, because they’ll be there in a little while. Isolation is the enemy, as the outro notes, but maybe it can be accommodated or outwitted, rather than simply to surrendered to.

Closing: The barrier of loneliness: The palpable, desperate need of the human animal to be with his fellow man. Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting… in The Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Rod Serling

Cinematography by: Joseph La Shelle

Up Next: One for the Angels

1. Mike getting trapped in the phonebooth because he’s pushing rather than pulling is, per Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion, drawn from Serling having the same thing happen to him in an airport. He got alarmed and started calling out for help: “Suddenly, some guy comes along and kicks it with his foot. I wanted to die.” Relatable. ↩︎
2. Twilight Zone episodes not infrequently continue past their iconic twists and into some understanding of how their characters live with the situations they’re in. The show’s not devoid of mean kicks in the teeth, but I think it’s often remembered as being crueler or more reliant on stingers than it really is: Serling’s warmth and curiosity often make themselves felt in the endings. ↩︎