The Twilight Zone, S1E14, "Third from the Sun"

Opening: Quitting time at the plant. Time for supper now. Time for families. Time for a cool drink on a porch. Time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the Moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before storm. This is the eve of the end.

When “Third from the Sun” comes up in conversation, people most commonly cite the twist, which is one of the show’s most famous. It’s a good one, albeit one the title plainly hints at, but—thankfully—the episode doesn’t hinge on whether or not it surprises you. While the messages here have lasted, so has the tension. At heart, this is a taut, suspenseful story about whether or not this attempt to escape the imminent nuclear armageddon.

We are, as it turns out, not on Earth, but while the episode hints at that—especially via the prop design of the phone, which has a rotary dial on the underside of its base, looks vaguely like something out of Star Trek, and “rings” via high-pitched beeps—it also keeps everything as ordinary and suburban as possible. Even that phone could plausibly, and probably was, a self-consciously futuristic bit of mod home equipment. This is a world—our world, we’re encouraged to think—where an America stand-in has morphed into a police state without ever losing its pleasant, earnest 1950s trappings. Sprightly, ponytailed Jody (Denise Alexander of General Hospital) just wants to go on a (probably chaste) date. Eve Sturka (Lori March, another notable soap star) serves homemade cake and lemonade at their card party. This is a recognizable white, middle-class, suburban American life, it’s just being lived on a precipice, hemmed all around by informers, secrecy, and suspicion.

The degree to which the characters recognize or acknowledge the constant danger and totalitarian state varies. For the kids, it’s a nebulous unease, a sense that the situation is worse than the adults around them are (officially) letting on. The Sturkas and the Ridens know what’s happening, and they’re afraid of it, but they’re cautious in different ways. Sturka (Fritz Weaver¹) is wary of being bugged—a possibility that doesn’t seem to occur to Jerry Riden (frequent TV presence Joe Maross, also in upcoming episode “The Little People”)—but he has the vulnerability of a reasonable man in a situation that has lost all reason. When pushed into conversation with Carling (Edward Andrews²), a cheerfully fanatical adherent to his patriotic death cult, he almost can’t help trying to appeal to some sense of logic. His life is on the line—his family’s escape is on the line—but some part of him still hopes that he can unlock some latent empathy and reason in Carling. (I’m guessing this is a feeling a lot of us are exquisitely familiar with by now.)

Carling is complacent. If they strike first, which they will, the enemy “can’t do much.” Sturka throws his own words for nuclear attack back at him: “They can go whoosh, up, over, and whammo.” Carling dismisses this counter-attack and the millions of deaths that would come with it—the point is, they would win. Deaths on his side don’t really count as losses; the important thing is that deaths on the other side count as victories.

Carling makes for a fantastic antagonist, and Edward Andrews plays him with such sly menace. He’s well-directed, too, with Richard L. Bare twice capturing him entering the frame in an unconventional way—the first time, before we know him, there’s just a touch of unease, but the second time, with him rising up into view from where he’s been eavesdropping on Sturka and Riden, is as chilling as it is silly.

Still, the standout performance here comes from Fritz Weaver: my earlier notes on this episode described him as “likably cadaverous,” and I stand by that. He has a face with a history, and his choices in the role imbue Sturka with complex shades of fear, weariness, love, and loyalty; he’s recognizable as a man and moral actor, someone who has seen the choices he can safely make dwindle over the years. He doesn’t want the world to end, but he’s come to a place where he can no longer stop it. All he can do now is try to make sure his family doesn’t end with it.

The best scene of the episode is the card game, where the Sturkas and the Ridens keep up a surface-level normalcy while quietly planning to escape via a stolen spaceship—and then Carling intrudes and must be entertained under the breathless pretense that this is fine, this is all fine, and he’s not terrifying in the least.

Carling’s official purpose here is interestingly ambiguous, given that we already know he overheard a good chunk of the plan—he may be here to collect further intel, or he may be offering a pointed, condescending warning to go no further. Whichever it is, it’s secondary to his emotional rationale: he’s here because he’s enjoying himself. He’s toying with them, like a cat with a mouse. He takes pleasure in flaunting how much he knows: “I would’ve guessed that Sturka here is a good gambler. I would have guessed he’d gamble on just about anything.”

It’s an agonizingly suspenseful scene with a lot of beautiful grace notes, like Riden’s valiant attempt to establish that they plan to continue this card game next week and Eve’s realization that there’s no reason to clean up (their lives here, and possibly “here” in general, are over), but my absolute favorite moment is when Carling picks up the score sheet … and on the back of it is Riden’s star-map showing a crude approximation of their course. (Beforehand, Bare keeps the camera underneath the glass table, the better to remind us of what’s at stake. This may be the best-directed episode yet.) If Carling so much as flips the paper over, everything ends right then and there.

Since he doesn’t, Sturka urges them all to leave as soon as Carling is gone—no more waiting around for midnight. Their only chance now is speed (and the Forbidden Planet flying saucer, which we’ll be seeing again), violence, and a chance for the kindness of alien strangers—us.

Watching this now—and watching it in America, specifically—this ending isn’t just a twist, it’s the twist of a knife. I can’t help feeling that they may not get the kindest reception, although they have a few advantages on their side re: apparent race and culture, and what they speak is apparently close to English, even if the episode implies that it’s been “translated” for us somewhat. This episode has aged well as far as this (possibly unintentional) subtext goes, potentially encouraging privileged viewers to identify with refugees before revealing that’s what they’re doing. It’s a literal alien “invasion” made thoroughly human and desperate. (“The Invaders” is an excellent reverse of this.) As much as Serling wished he could have tackled the hot-button issues of the day more directly, this level of metaphor and abstraction—dealing with principles and ideas rather than specific manifestations—can create a more lasting applicability, even if it can also be easier to miss or deny.

Regardless of what reception the Sturkas and Ridens find on Earth, they’re bound to be disconcerted by how the shadow of potential nuclear war hangs over their new world as well. It’s an adjustment of an old escapist fantasy: if we mess up this planet, we can flee to another one. Here, we may find find the same problems are already waiting for us. Wherever you go, there you are. So while we still have hope, there’s a moral obligation to act on it. Maybe one day it’ll be harder to get these two worlds mixed up.

Closing: Behind a tiny ship heading into space is a doomed planet on the verge of suicide. Ahead lies a place called Earth, the third planet from the Sun. And for William Sturka and the men and women with him, it’s the eve of the beginning—in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Richard L. Bare

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: “I Shot an Arrow into the Air”

1. I believe I first saw him in Creepshow, and he’s since become one of my favorite people to spot, usually in a supporting role: Marathon Man, Demon Seed, Fail-Safe, The Thomas Crown Affair, and on and on—he had a gift for adding an eccentric gravity to numerous genre projects. We’ll see him again in “The Obsolete Man,” another classic episode. ↩︎
2. He’d see Joe Maross again in Elmer Gantry. Andrews had a long and impressive career as a character actor, appearing in everything from Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy to commercials to Gremlins, his final film role. ↩︎