The Twilight Zone, S1E25, "People Are Alike All Over"

Opening: You’re looking at a specie of flimsy little two-legged animal with extremely small heads, whose name is Man. Warren Marcusson, age thirty-five. Samuel A. Conrad, age thirty-one. They’re taking a highway into space, Man unshackling himself and sending his tiny, groping fingers up into the unknown. Their destination is Mars, and in just a moment we’ll land there with them.

This is one of those episodes defined by its twist—it has the structure of a bleak joke. Everything in it—the thematic concerns, the characterization, the opening voiceover, and even the SF elements—are all geared at getting us to the grim punchline of Roddy McDowall’s¹ Sam Conrad in his habitat, a gawked-at zoo exhibit who has come to understand a bitter truth far too late. To some extent, that ultra-tight focus weakens the episode … but the sting in this episode’s tail is so brutally apt that I tend to give the weaknesses in this one a pass.

Which isn’t to say that they’re not there. In particular, the story’s narrowness doesn’t do its central performers any favors. Roddy McDowall succeeds at making Sam Conrad convincingly high-strung, so tightly wound by anxiety that he even makes us nervous, but he could do a lot more than that if the episode would let him off the leash a little. Instead, he’s ushered from plot point to plot point without being allowed to dwell on any of the emotional beats. If he feels a stab of conscience at keeping Marcusson (Paul Comi²) from even glimpsing the world he died trying to reach, for example, we don’t see much of it. Even his most defining character trait—his alert, instinctive, and not irrational fear—takes a holiday when it’s convenient for the plot. Does he notice that the softhearted Teenya (Susan Oliver³) keeps hesitating and looking guilty? Does it occur to him that a species with advanced technology and effortless telepathy might, worryingly, find him a little underdeveloped?⁴ Clearly not. That’s partly because the episode has to be compressed and streamlined—if Sam’s fears aren’t assuaged, him being suddenly, horribly vindicated in them doesn’t have as much impact—but it still leaves him a choppily developed character.

Paul Comi’s Marcusson is more consistent, though he too is driven by plot constraints to the point where a practical and moral belief, beautifully expressed at the start, eventually becomes a hobbyhorse. But—both in terms of writing and in terms of fate—he gets off easy by dying halfway through.

In a way, I think Marcusson might have made the more interesting protagonist: his tragic flaw is that while he’s absolutely right, he underestimates what that means. His blinkered optimism—which to some extent has to come from his vantage point as a healthy, middle-class, white American male—gives him an all-too-limited understanding of what it means to be human. He assumes, in short, that a person will recognize another person and treat them well, that their common worth will be apparent. he doesn’t understand, at least not on a gut level, that it’s a longstanding habit of people to decide that other people don’t count.

“If they’ve got minds and hearts, then they’ve got souls,” he tells Sam—but having a soul, in whatever sense you want to define it, has never stopped anyone from doing evil. If anything, having a soul is kind of a prerequisite for committing truly evil acts. We don’t think of earthquakes as malicious, and we don’t—these days—arrest animals for murder. Humanity, on the other hand, has always had the capacity—often even the propensity—for unkindness, cruelty, and atrocity. It’s within the scope of what we do.

Usually, Rod Serling’s view of humanity, as expressed in his Twilight Zone episodes, emphasizes our better qualities: heart, warmth, and imagination. Serling recognized human kindness and believed that it sometimes got extended even in the darkest of places. He had a hope and a passion for people. But I think he had no patience with a certain kind of cheap, denialist optimism that refuses to admit people’s capacity for committing absolute horrors. He was, after all, a Jewish man who served in World War II; it would have been frankly bizarre if he’d had a sunny view of human nature.

So I think it’s unsurprising that he responded to the original story, with its bitter punchline that says more about us than about the Martians. People are alike everywhere … and think about how people really act. There are zoos on Earth, too. There have even been human zoos.

It’s an ending that, for me, has enough resonance that I really can get over how the whole rest of the story gets made into a greased chute leading up to that final moment. It’s not just a momentary jolt—it actually has made me think. I like that it’s not “the Martians were the Other all along” but rather “oh, right—I just remembered the full scope of human behavior. Fuck.”

A small detail I really like is the seeming adoration that Teenya beams at Sam in an early scene. Teenya develops enough of a soft spot for him to feel genuinely, tearfully guilty about luring him into captivity (although not, at least of the ending, guilty enough to do anything about it—she’s a sentimentalist, not an activist), but she hasn’t gotten there by their first scene. Initially, her reaction to him looks like a crush, like a slightly annoying lapse into the presumption that of course the alien woman will immediately fall for the Earth man. In retrospect, the look is much closer to the way you would coo over a particularly adorable dog, especially one doing something like standing on its hind legs: “Aww, how cute, he thinks he’s people!”

The horror of the ending is also well-handled. When Sam frantically pulls back the long drapes, looking for a way out, and discovers only blank walls behind the curtains, it’s chilling, even before the walls slide back to reveal the bars and the surrounding crowd. The falsely expansive habitat, with its doors that don’t open, is another good detail. Of course they would underestimate the amount of space he needs, just as they overestimate how content he’ll be to trade freedom for an environment they assure him will be “familiar” and “comfortable.” The silent crowd—telepathically communicating with each other, and no longer making any effort to reach out to him—is great, especially since the episode makes sure to include a fair number of a children. These are people on a pleasant family outing, getting a little nervous when the tiger lunges at the bars. Eventually, these kids will get an ice cream cone and write the whole thing up for a school paper, and life will go on.

Closing: Specie of animal brought back alive. Interesting similarity in physical characteristics to human beings in head, trunk, arms, legs, hands, feet. Very tiny undeveloped brain. Comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself Samuel Conrad. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found The Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Mitchell Leisen

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: “Execution”

1. He surely needs no introduction! My absolute favorite films of his are the Planet of the Apes movies and Evil Under the Sun, but was a delightful presence in any number of things, in and out of genre. ↩︎
2. Ripcord, Rawhide, and a nice body of films, but I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know him best from the excellent Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror.” ↩︎
3. Like Comi, I immediately think of Star Trek, since she played Vina in “The Cage.” But she had another long and varied career, especially on television, including stretches on Peyton Place and Days of Our Lives. She also stepped behind the camera occasionally and directed “Hey, Look Me Over,” the MASH episode focused on Kellye. ↩︎
4. It’s appropriate that we have two Star Trek actors here, because “advanced telepathic aliens who dress like Ancient Romans” is incredibly Trek. ↩︎