The Twilight Zone, S1E11, "And When the Sky Was Opened"

Opening: Her name: X-20. Her type: an experimental interceptor. Recent history: a crash landing in the Mojave Desert after a thirty-one hour flight nine hundred miles into space. Incidental data: the ship, with the men who flew her, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four hours. … But the shrouds that cover mysteries are not always made out of a tarpaulin, as this man will soon find out on the other side of a hospital door.

Technically, Richard Matheson won’t make his Twilight Zone debut until the excellent “The Last Flight,” but his work first appears here. This is far from a faithful adaptation of his short story “Disappearing Act,” but it still captures the lucid strangeness and muscular storytelling Matheson did so well.

This is one of my favorite of the purely uncanny TZ episodes. Usually stories that offer the protagonists no chance or ability to change their circumstances are inert and even depressing, but this is where the half-hour format shines. The characters in “And When the Sky Was Opened” are at the mercy of forces they don’t—and probably can’t—understand, reason with, or appeal to, but the story moves swiftly enough and ends soon enough that the sense of fear and awe never really becomes a sense of futility.

Three men go up into space, and three men come back down. One by one, they disappear from both the present and the past, vanishing from reality and the memories of those who knew them. Harrington goes first, then Forbes (who remembers him), and finally Gart (who remembers Forbes). Even the ship itself vanishes, leaving behind only a slightly rumpled tarpaulin in an otherwise empty hangar.

Despite—or maybe because of—the story’s simplicity, it has an unusual structure. We start with Gart (Jim Hutton¹), itching to get out of the hospital but otherwise normal; he’s then visited by an obviously ill-at-ease Forbes (Rod Taylor²). It’s a nice touch to have Forbes in uniform, because he’s nervy and unraveling, his messy emotions at odds with the neatness of his dress. He looks official, but he’s lost any semblance of a professional demeanor. Forbes insists that there were three of them in the spaceship—him, Gart, and Harrington (Charles Aidman³)—but Gart doesn’t remember Harrington at all.

Forbes them reminisces, and we get a lengthy flashback to when he and Harrington left the hospital yesterday. Harrington’s a lively, enthusiastic, affectionately joking guy, and the three of them have an endearing dynamic with a lot of teasing and mutual fondness. Forbes is so different in the flashback that it’s almost jarring; it’s like a brighter version of the difference between the dead Lanser and the living one back in “Judgment Day.” Now that we see him whole, we can really grasp how diminished he was in his first scene.

Forbes and Harrington go to a bar, where they’re minor celebrities—the bartender, endearingly, is delighted to pour them a drink: “I don’t even care that you cracked up the ship! And I’m a taxpayer!”—and a woman shows some interest.

Things go sideways almost immediately, however. Harrington begins to feel himself edging out of the world. In a particularly nice touch, he freezes and drops his glass of beer after glancing at the back-bar mirror—we don’t see it, but he undoubtedly notices what Forbes himself notices later: he’s missing his reflection. He calls his parents to ground himself, but it doesn’t do any good. His father just tells him to get off the phone: “He didn’t want any practical jokester bothering his wife. He said he didn’t have any son at all.” It’s through Harrington, the first to go, that we get the most idea of what’s happening:

“It’s like I didn’t belong here. Like if I was to let myself go, I’d … like I’d disappear,” he says at one point. He feels like they shouldn’t have come back from that flight, that someone or something “made a mistake” and let them slip through when they shouldn’t have.

Even that, of course, doesn’t give us much of an answer—it only evokes an unsettling sense of cosmic horror, of a vast strangeness overcorrecting its mistake. Whatever happened to doom them, we instinctively feel that it must have happened during the twenty-four hours they dropped off the radar, which means space travel itself isn’t the problem. Did they see something? Did they travel too far? At what point does exploration become trespass? Did they die? Were they supposed to have died? This has always felt like the workings of a vast and indifferent cosmos, but in writing all this up, I notice that the men disappear in order of rank: Colonel Harrington, Lieutenant Colonel Forbes, and finally Major Gart. That suggests an odd level of intent behind it all, as if they’re being removed from the world in order of responsibility. If it were just in order of age, you would think, if anything, that it would go the other way around—but it almost feels like Gart was shielded somewhat by his injury and his lower status, as if he was beneath the notice of whatever was cleaning up after itself … until that second sweep. There’s no answer, nor should there be, but I love how many possibilities it evokes.

It’s also just a terrific tale of the uncanny. The newspaper with its constantly changing headline and front page photo is a predictable-but-nice prop, and the dogged research Forbes does to try to prove Harrington’s existence has a great rhythm of hope followed by bleak downfall.

The only fault in all this is, potentially, Taylor’s performance. He’s not bad, but he plays Forbes’s mental breakdown with such wild-eyed, ragged-edged commitment that he veers into being a little too much; there’s a certain point where it’s hard to distinguish intensity from overacting, and the tipping point often involves screaming. Taylor screams. However, he does an excellent job finding different registers of panic in all the many, many times he says “Ed Harrington,” too, insisting on the reality of the person behind the name everyone else only clocks as empty syllables.

It’s intriguing to me that this riff on The Lady Vanishes and “Into Thin Air” is not only more cosmic but also more masculine—we have a trio of male protagonists, and while a somewhat significant character is introduced in Forbes’s girlfriend, Maxine Cooper’s Amy, even Forbes essentially forgets about her⁴—but that does not make it more stoic. There’s a lot of emotional openness to the terror and desperation on display here. That comes with a built-in excuse—it’s almost immediately obvious that this could not be faked, so these men know they’re experiencing a collapse of either reality or sanity—but it’s still unusual to have the “male” version of the story be the more “hysterical” one.

Forbes’s exit is well-handled. We were in Gart’s shoes at the beginning of the episode, and now we’re thrown back into them as he pursues Forbes out into the hall, calling for someone to help him—only to find that no one knows who he’s talking to. The second bed in the room is now gone, and Gart’s trip into space is memorialized as a solo voyage. When he lies back in bed, falling out of frame and out of the world all at once, it’s a superb shot that emphasizes how well the show could use its visuals. He’s gone.

Wherever Harrington, Forbes, and Gart went, wherever their ship went, we’re now the only ones who remember them; we’re the only ones who can react to their disappearance. They’ve been “yanked out,” as Forbes puts it, so thoroughly that there’s no longer even anyone to miss them. Their absence is a neutral fact. This was always an empty room.

Closing: Once upon a time, there was a man named Harrington, a man named Forbes, a man named Gart. They used to exist, but don’t any longer. Someone – or something – took them somewhere. At least they are no longer a part of the memory of man. And as to the X-20 supposed to be housed here in this hangar, this, too, does not exist. And if any of you have any questions concerning an aircraft and three men who flew her, speak softly of them – and only in – The Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Douglas Heyes

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: What You Need

1. Timothy Hutton’s father, and eventually TV’s Ellery Queen! He and Serling both called Binghamton, New York home. ↩︎
2. One of the lesser Hitchcock leading men to me, since I’m not wild about him in The Birds, but he had an incredible career, and anyone who can voice a dog in 101 Dalmatians and end his filmography with a cameo in Inglorious Basterds obviously has a lot to be proud of. ↩︎
3. A Hoosier and IU alum, just like me. Also for a time the host of the ’80s Twilight Zone, regrettably unlike me. We’ll see him again in “Little Girl Lost.” ↩︎
4. For shame, sir. She was in Kiss Me Deadly! ↩︎