Anthologized
A solid punchline (but not enough punch).
Opening: Her name is the Arrow 1. She represents four and a half years of planning, preparation, and training, and a thousand years of science, mathematics, and the projected dreams and hopes of not only a nation, but a world. She is the first manned aircraft into space and this is the countdown. The last five seconds before man shot an arrow into the air.
“I Shot an Arrow into the Air”1 invokes the ghosts of “The Lonely” and “And When the Sky Was Opened,” reusing a location and character name from the first and the music from the second. Both homages make sense—like “And When the Sky Was Opened,” this is another “the spaceship dropped out of contact” story, and we, like Corey and his unfortunate compatriots, are primed to read the bleak, scruffy Death Valley landscape as a nearly uninhabitable asteroid.
At the same time, though, “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” suffers from these comparisons. It’s a solid episode, but it doesn’t have the character work, surprises, or genuine uncanniness of the stories it’s alluding to. This one is all pointed at the darkly funny ending.
That’s probably why it made a compelling pitch. Madelon Champion has a story credit here, and she got it in an unusual way: buttonholing Serling at a party and telling him her idea.2 Apparently Serling handed her $500 then and there, making this the only time he ever bought a TZ story someone pitched him in an ordinary conversation. I can see how the idea felt irresistible at the time, but it’s strangely hard to reverse engineer a plot from a punchline.
If you go in looking for the twist, you’ll probably guess it fairly early on, and that makes the tension go a little too slack for my taste: I think the story and its survival vs. humanity dilemma is stronger if you’re not constantly waiting for the characters to realize they’re on Earth. It also tips its hand about Corey’s state of mind almost immediately—there’s no build-up to making him capable of killing in a kind of preemptive self-preservation; Corey comes across as someone who, the second the ship crashes, starts mulling over cannibalistic recipes.
Still, while this episode may not hit any series highs, and it’s arguably a little too slight for its length, it’s entertaining. I can see its flaws, but I like it. The plot is kind of absurd—in The Twilight Zone Companion, Marc Scott Zicree rightly points that the astronauts not realizing their predicament immediately is farfetched even by the wobbly scientific standards of a TZ science fiction episode—but it’s entertaining. I wind up less concerned with the astronauts’ scientific training and more with whoever approved them for this mission. If it took you four years to build that ship, you could have taken more than four minutes to do some psychological screening.
The contrast between Donlin (Edward Binns)3 and Pierson (Ted Otis)—calm and honorable—and Corey (Dewey Martin)4—selfish and panicking—is obvious but well-handled. I like Donlin’s insistence on giving the injured man water—“If he dies, he dies, but nobody gets behind him to push”—and his stance that they should care for each other and bury each other when the care ceases to be enough. (It’s a nice counterpoint to Corey eventually leaving the bodies where they’ve fallen.) Interestingly, the core conflict of this episode isn’t just decency vs. selfishness, it’s also about how differently they treat the future and the issue of control.
Corey sees the future entirely in terms of competition for a scarce resource. His speculative vision is completely narrowed down not only to whether or not he can get his but to only one factor of that, and he’s unwilling to accept any element of risk. Any attempt to point him towards the larger questions of survival—investigating their terrain, planning ahead—gets irritably brushed off as insignificant, foolish, and outside of his control. He’s unwilling to explore the area before he gives up, because that would acknowledge he’s at the mercy of a broader universe. He can’t manifest a stream or edible plants. He can guarantee that he maximizes his available water supply. It’s limited imagination and negligible curiosity, on top of everything else. He treats theft and conquest as the only sure way to get resources, because it’s the most obvious possibility: see, take, have.
Seriously, who approved this man for a chancy journey into outer space? This is all happening on day two.
Pierson and Donlin aren’t just the better men but the better scientists5, the ones who take the time to consider their relative position to the sun and note the lack of radiation. When Corey explodes in a rant about how little he found on his exploratory mission, Pierson calmly talks to Donlin about what they should do next.
On top of all that, for all Corey’s “cold equations” about survival, Donlin is the one with the numbers that matter. Corey reasons that he can live longer off their whole water supply than a third of it, but he doesn’t even acknowledge that he would still be measuring his life in days—and Donlin already acknowledged that since there’s no back-up spacecraft, it will be years before there’s any chance of rescue. If they were on an asteroid, Corey wouldn’t be saving his life. He’d barely even prolong it. All his strategy really ensures is that he will die alone.
He doesn’t think about that. He doesn’t think about Pierson’s drawing in the sand and what it might mean. (Donlin, on the other hand, briefly forgets his enmity with Corey in his eagerness to discuss it.) He just kills … and once he has, as Serling notes, it would be fatal for him to stop and reflect on it.
Unnecessary Mid-Episode Narration: Now you make tracks, Mr. Corey. You move out and up like some kind of ghostly billyclub was tapping at your ankles and telling you that it was later than you’d think. You scrabble up rock hills and feel hot sand underneath your feet and every now and then, take a look over your shoulder at a giant sun suspended in a dead and motionless sky…like an unblinking eye that probes at the back of your head in a prolonged accusation.
Mr. Corey, last remaining member of a doomed crew, keep moving. Make tracks, Mr. Corey. Push up and push out because if you stop…if you stop, maybe sanity will get you by the throat. Maybe realization will pry open your mind and the horror you left down in the sand will seep in. Yeah, Mr. Corey, yeah, you better keep moving. That’s the order of the moment: keep moving.
That “yeah, Mr. Corey, yeah” part is one of the rare cases of the narration not working for me. Serling’s speech is emphasizing the weight and tragedy of all this, and that line—delivered with a slight sneer—undoes the effect somewhat. This does, however, mark the transition into Corey becoming a raw, ravaged character who is more sympathetic than before. He has his prize, and he’s on the brink of realizing how little that means and how much he lost to get it. His loneliness and stunned guilt have more of an impact than his earlier fear.
Then, of course, we get the inevitable bleak reveal: all this time, they’ve been just outside Reno, within walking distance of a dusty little gas station-diner-motel that would surely have a phone and all the water they could drink. (This is nicely shot, with the camera holding on Corey’s reaction before it shows us what he’s reacting to.) The crushing revelation brings Corey back to himself, and he falls to his knees, crying and laughing at the same time, weeping and begging for forgiveness. It’s worth wondering what happens when he picks himself up and goes down to meet the world again. A number of Twilight Zone episodes continue to follow the characters after the final twist, and while doing that would have cost “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” its clean, economical structure, it might have added to the human messiness of it all and become a story rather than a dark joke.
Closing: Practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature and a combination of improbable events. Practical joke wearing the trappings of nightmare, of terror, of desperation. Small, human drama played out in a desert 97 miles from Reno, Nevada, U.S.A., continent of North America, the Earth and, of course, the Twilight Zone.
Directed by: Stuart Rosenberg
Written by: Rod Serling
Up Next: “The Hitch-Hiker”
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Things one is likely to see eventually in the Nevada desert: birds, airplanes.
This is entertaining enough if you don’t stop and think about any of it for long. A story that was just about survival might have been more interesting, though also a bit trite.
Serling liked the idea of “my god I was wrong, it was Earth all along!” so much that he came back to it in his script adapting Planet of the Apes (which was in fact not about Earth in the novel).
Stuart Rosenberg would go on to win an Emmy for The Defenders (the legal drama, not the Marvel show) and had a notable career directing features, including Cool Hand Luke and two other movies with Paul Newman and The Pope of Greenwich Village.
I remember Edward Binns best from Patton, where he played Gen. Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith.
“Birds, airplanes” made me laugh.
I think the twist works much better in Planet of the Apes, where there’s much more foundation for assuming it’s a different world: at the very least, as far as Charlton Heston knows, there’s no part of his present-day Earth where he could find ape civilizations. These guys should have heard of the desert, though!
I’ve mostly been singling out the directors when an episode especially impresses me with its visual flair, but that’s quite a CV for Rosenberg, so I’m glad you noted it when I didn’t.
I think I’d have enjoyed this one a little more if they hadn’t just done a better “turns out it was(n’t) Earth” story literally one week ago. It’s still pretty decent though, even if Cory’s descent into madness is indeed a little too steep to make much sense.
I enjoyed all the talk of it being excessively hot, since I watched it on the afternoon of the hottest day of the current heatwave. I was already pleased to see they’ve solved the loneliness problem from the very first episode by, as I suggested at the time, bunging a few more guys in there. Although clearly they still need to work on the vetting process.