The Twilight Zone, S1E20, "Elegy"

Opening: The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They’re looking for home. And in a moment, they’ll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt.

“Elegy” makes me long for human drama of “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air.” The astronauts in this episode may not be quite as slow on the uptake, but they lack survival instincts, purpose, and any sense of individual characterization. There are two blond astronauts (Kevin Hagen¹ and Don Dubbins²) and one dark-haired astronaut (Jeff Morrow³), and I have to cling to hair color because it doesn’t feel like there’s any other way to distinguish between them. Kevin Hagen’s character is technically the captain, but he doesn’t radiate any sense of command, authority, or concern for his men, and he’s not tasked with making any important decisions, so his rank is meaningless to both his character and the plot.

The plot, such as it is, involves our three astronauts running out of fuel and landing—seemingly via autopilot?—on an asteroid with identical conditions to Earth. Before we can even start speculating that they’ll once again be right outside Reno, they discover an old-fashioned—to them—barn and tractor outside, complete with a frozen-in-place farmer and barking dog. Have they somehow traveled into Earth’s past? No, because—as one of them says solemnly—Earth never had two suns, and look, this place does. The fact that two of them completely failed to notice that an extra sun in the sky makes me despair of the whole profession.

The astronauts wander all over town, discovering other set-pieces like a mayor’s inauguration party, a man raking it in at a poker game, a couple dancing to the music of their own private string quartet, and a fairly plain woman winning a beauty pageant. On the way, with some of the most stilted line deliveries imaginable, they theorize about all these statue-like people they’re encountering.

Is someone deliberately creating illusions for them? If so, why would they be drawing off Earth history two hundred years before the astronauts’ own time? My separate but related question: if this is two hundred years in the future and, as we eventually learn, after a nuclear war, isn’t it a little much for the opening to call it “the day after tomorrow”?

The best wrong solution they bring up—one that would have made for a better episode and did in fact make for a pretty good Star Trek episode—is the possibility that they’re somehow out-of-sync with everyone around them, and that all these still people are moving, just too slowly for them to perceive. Unfortunately, this interesting theory is capped by the comparison to the slowly moving hands of a clock, and one of the astronauts looks at a nearby grandfather clock and exclaims in horror, “This clock has no hands!” Gasp!

(The problem with this episode that honestly wouldn’t matter if it were a better episode overall is that all the posed bodies are real actors standing as still as they possibly can, and let’s just say that some of them are better at it than others.⁴ This is distracting to an extent, but I would completely breeze over it if there were more effective storytelling involved. It does entertain me that it’s like the fake freeze-frame endings at the end of Police Squad!, though.)

Eventually, the astronauts encounter Jeremy Wickwire (Cecil Kellaway⁵), an affable old man who introduces himself as the caretaker. Wickwire makes the episode vastly more bearable. He has twinkling eyes, a sense of humor, and a sense of gravity, and his priorities are both very clear—eventually—and satisfyingly alien.

Wickwire explains that this is Happy Glades, a cemetery for the ultra-rich that lets their preserved bodies live out their happiest fantasies for all eternity. The fantasies are more diverse than what we’ve seen so far—one man explicitly changed his mind about the elaborate Victorian mansion he originally requested and opted to be “buried” in the medieval section, where he can wear a suit of armor and fight a dragon—but Wickwire says that this 1950s-era Earth was very popular with the people who originally built this asteroid cemetery in 1973. It’s a little odd that the astronauts are so wildly unfamiliar with preservation and AI technologies that were apparently mastered two hundred years ago, but they do have the excuse of a devastating nuclear war in the meantime, so I’ll try to cut the episode some slack on that point and assume that a lot of their progress got lost and had to be reconstructed.

… Actually, no, I won’t cut it that much slack. This is an obvious and very dumb plot hole. I’m still irritated by it.

There’s an important survival lesson in all this, however, which is to never drink anything handed to you by someone who proposes a toast “to everlasting, eternal peace.” The “twist” ending of Wickwire killing them—“Because you’re here, and you’re men, and while there are men, there can be no peace”—is easy to predict once we get to the cemetery revelation. Then there’s the toast, the not-so-casual question about what their dearest wishes would be, Wickwire’s stated purpose to make sure the “guests” aren’t disturbed … it’s not hard to figure out what direction this is going in, but Kellaway gives this last encounter a pleasant but subtly unsettling vibe that works almost despite the best efforts of the rest of the cast. There’s no impact to it all, but the occasional fillips of horror and unease make this parlor scene by far the best in the episode.

But despite a good scene, a good performance⁶, and a relatively Twilight Zone-ish feel, there’s just way too much about this episode that flops for me. The mediocre line deliveries, the flat characterization, the bad pacing, etc. I’m also troubled by the questionable business model. I can’t buy that this is financially viable! Sure, we tend to care what happens to our bodies and even want to retain certain possessions or qualities in death—bury me in this outfit, don’t buy me that tombstone, etc.—but I have trouble believing in the popularity of this particular extreme. Even Pharaohs wanting their servants to be killed and buried with them make more emotional sense to me than this, but maybe I’m the odd one here. Please comment if this actually sounds appealing to you, because I’m really curious if this actually is a more universal fantasy than I realize.

Closing: Kirby, Webber, and Meyers, three men lost. They shared a common wish—a simple one, really. They wanted to be aboard their ship headed for home. And fate—a laughing fate—a practical jokester with a smile stretched across the stars, saw to it that they got their wish with just one reservation: the wish came true, but only in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Douglas Heyes

Written by: Charles Beaumont

Up Next: “Mirror Image”

1. A TV staple best known for Little House on the Prairie. ↩︎
2. Another frequent TV guest star of the period, with some earlier movie work. ↩︎
3. More of a stage and radio presence for a long time, but he had a busy (if mostly B-level) career on screen later on. ↩︎
4. And there’s a bizarre reverse gaffe, too. When one astronaut accidentally knocks over the posed fisherman, we briefly cut to a still photograph of the other two astronauts on the bridge. Why someone decided that their reaction shot was so necessary that it needed to be included despite having not even been filmed is beyond me. I assume this happened in post, because Heyes feels like too good a technical director for that: The Twilight Zone Companion goes into some detail about the smart choices he made here and the mistakes he learned from, and he directed great episodes like “And When the Sky Was Opened,” “The After Hours,” “The Howling Man,” “Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Invaders.” Clearly this one doesn’t work for me, but all those others really, really do. ↩︎
5. The true acting highlight of the episode: Kellaway snagged two Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations in his long career, and he went from being a stage-and-screen star in Australia to being a reliably grand supporting presence in American studio pictures, including such films as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Wuthering Heights, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (for one of his nominated performances). ↩︎
6. Truly, Kellaway gives Wickwire so much lively charm that produce Buck Hougton, per The Twilight Zone Companion, shrugged off the technically bleak ending: “You couldn’t really feel too depressed about these fellows in the care of such a fine old fellow, I think.” ↩︎