The Twilight Zone, S1E18, "The Last Flight"

Opening: Witness Flight Lieutenant¹ William Terrance Decker, Royal Flying Corps, returning from a patrol somewhere over France. The year is 1917. The problem is that the lieutenant is hopelessly lost. Lieutenant Decker will soon discover that a man can be lost not only in terms of maps and miles, but also in time – and time in this case can be measured in eternities.

We welcome Richard Matheson to the show in his first scripted episode! The Twilight Zone previously adapted two of his short stories for “And When the Sky Was Opened” and “Third from the Sun,” but this is the first time he’s written the script, not just inspired it. He’ll become a series stalwart, and he makes a strong, moving debut here.

I always like redemptive, second-chance Twilight Zone episodes, and this is one of my favorite examples of the form: poignant, tender, hopeful, and with real stakes.

In a lot of ways, it’s a simple episode. Lt. Decker (Kenneth Haigh²), a WWI pilot, lands at an American airbase in 1959 (the juxtaposition of his small plane next to the massive contemporary one is a great visual touch), and once we find out how he got there—fleeing near-certain death in combat and abandoning his friend in the process—and he finds out that he may actually still have the chance to choose honor and courage over fear, saving his friend and (by proxy) many other lives as well, he knows he has to risk everything to return to his own time. And he does.

If the episode doesn’t click for someone, I imagine it’s partly because Decker overthrowing a lifetime of combat jitters seems too abrupt, but I actually love the suddenness with which he makes his decision, and I think Haigh sells it as a natural move for his character. He’s afraid, and his fear has made him act badly, but despite having left Mackaye to die, he sincerely loves him, and it shows in how soft and fond his voice when he gets when he talks about him. He says he knows Mack in a way that suggests “know” is too small a word, and it’s a beautiful grace note that while he first relays his nickname for Mack—Old Leadbottom, thanks to the time Mack got shot in the ass—almost unconsciously, when he has a little more presence of mind, he adds that it’s a private nickname, just for the two of them and no one else: “Mack’s a private fellow, you know. He wouldn’t like it if I bruited it about.”

He’s grieving and reminiscing at the same time, because no matter how many times the no-nonsense General Harper (Alexander Scourby³) and the more open-minded Major Wilson (Simon Scott⁴) say otherwise, he knows Mackaye is dead. He last saw him surrounded by seven German planes! Wilson says he must have gotten away somehow, because he would go on to save hundreds and maybe even thousands of lives in the ’40s: “He was one of Britain’s great heroes during the Blitz! That was the second war we told you about.”

(That last line is such a by-the-way kind of gut punch, and almost a bleakly funny one. Imagine coming from the Great War, the grimmest imaginable kind of atrocity at the time, and landing in a future where all that horror is now just installment I of II.)

When Decker finds out that Alexander Mackaye is on his way to inspect the base, his confusion turns to panic and reveals everything: He can’t see Mack. Why? “Because he’ll know me for what I am.”

Kenneth Haigh is good throughout the whole episode, but this may be his best scene, the one where his calm, stiff-upper-lip attitude from the earlier scenes not only cracks but is revealed to have been a conscious pose all along. He’s spent his life trying to avoid combat, and he knows Mack is dead because he left him for dead. He told Wilson that he couldn’t go to Mack’s aid because he was dealing with three German planes of his own, but that was a lie. He just fled into the clouds to save his life.

I love how Decker says that he always got by because his “kind of strained idiocy is exactly the brand [all the Royal Flying Corps officers] put on,” acting like daffy boys on the ground—only the others turn into “ice-cold” killers in the sky, and he never could. (Honestly, knowing how long WWI pilots usually lived, I can fully see his side of this.) There’s a real power—and a real hint of what’s to come—in him saying that he even used to fantasize about landing behind enemy lines and getting taken prisoner, since pilots were guaranteed relatively good treatment … but he couldn’t bear to be “discovered and discredited.” He always wanted to look like the man he pretended to be: “You know, I’ve actually fired bullets through the cockpit walls so the chaps will see them and be impressed. God help me.”

As much as he dreads danger and the prospect of death, the prospect of shame is even worse, and now—due to his impulsive flight—he’s mired in it. His journey to 1959 doesn’t just serve as time travel, it serves as a kind of necessary pause, giving him the chance to make the choice to be courageous even though his instincts are towards self-preservation.

“Maybe it was me that helped him!” he says to Wilson, and you can see how he lights up with hope.

I don’t even think it’s the lives Mackaye saves during the Blitz that tip the scales for him, even though he does feel the weight of those sheer numbers. I think he mostly snaps into gear because he realizes that he’s been given an extraordinary kind of grace here, the chance to lift the crushing shame and sorrow he’s feeling. His time travel is purposeful—guided by either providence or some kind of divine intervention—rather than random, and he responds to that possibility, to the suddenly open door letting light and air into an inner world that’s been dark and suffocating since he left Mack before.

I also like that while it’s an easy decision for Decker in that moment, a choice that he makes swiftly and without ambivalence, it is a choice. Nothing here is written in stone. Decker could stay in 1959, and Mack could die in 1917, and all those people could die during the Blitz, because nothing forces Decker’s hand. He not only has to choose to go back of his own free will and in cold blood, he has to fight to go back, throwing punches and facing down Wilson holding a gun to his head. That last part is an especially beautiful moment: telling Wilson to go ahead and fire, because he’d rather die than get out of the plane. It’s a wonderful last line for him.

The denouement with the newly arrived Mackaye (Robert Warwick⁵) is the necessary coda, and it works nicely. (I’ll also throw in some appreciation for General Harper’s incredulous, irritated reaction to Wilson having let Decker go after all: “You know, your thought processes elude me! They positively elude me!” This seems like a useful thing to yell at someone.)

I really appreciate that Mack does know that Terry flew away from him at first—he knows (or has at least considered the possibility) that Terry was leaving him—and he simply chooses not to care about it given that Terry came back. It’s a moment of forgiveness and knowledge, not just the time-travel fantasy of “I fix the mistake completely and everyone thinks I’m awesome”; here Mack’s perception of it all is more or less accurate, just not on the time-frame he thinks.

Warwick also sells Mackaye’s reaction to seeing the personal belongings that Harper and Wilson took from Decker’s plane. Mackaye’s face just sort of crumbles as he looks at these mementoes of his decades-dead and still-mourned friend, and Warwick really sells it. It’s all beautifully done, and the pathos is handled with a deft and delicate touch.⁶

This may not be one of the show’s best-known classics, but it’s close to my heart.

Closing: Dialogue from a play, Hamlet to Horatio: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Dialog from a play written long before men took to the sky: There are more things in heaven and earth and in the sky than perhaps can be dreamt of. And somewhere in between heaven, the sky, and the earth, lies the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: William F. Claxton

Written by: Richard Matheson

Up Next: “The Purple Testament”

1. I enjoy that Rod Serling gives this the British pronunciation. ↩︎
2. A theatrical icon for originating the role of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, an excellent play I’ve never liked. He’s also in Cleopatra, but now I mostly want to try to spot him in an uncredited role in A Hard Day’s Night. ↩︎
3. I know him best from The Big Heat. ↩︎
4. Scott worked steadily but never quite hit it big, which is why a screencap from this episode is on his Wikipedia page. But as a certified MASH fan, I should mention that he was on Trapper John, MD. ↩︎
5. A major screen player, which is exactly what you need from someone turning up this late in such a major supporting role: if we don’t feel Mackaye’s emotional significance, we don’t feel the weight and heroism of Decker’s sacrifice. Warwick could pull that off, and looking at some of the greatest hits of his filmography, that’s no surprise: Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, I Married a Witch, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Sea Hawk, etc., making him both a Preston Sturgess guy and an Errol Flynn guy. ↩︎
6. I’m not saying I wouldn’t watch Biggles Travels in Time, because as far as I can tell, that’s what literally happens in the Biggles movie I probably will watch at some point, but this is a more moving take. ↩︎