The Twilight Zone, S1E7, "The Lonely"

Opening: Witness if you will, a dungeon, made out of mountains, salt flats, and sand that stretch to infinity. The dungeon has an inmate: James A. Corry. And this is his residence: a metal shack. An old touring car that squats in the sun and goes nowhere—for there is nowhere to go. For the record, let it be known that James A. Corry is a convicted criminal placed in solitary confinement. Confinement in this case stretches as far as the eye can see, because this particular dungeon is on an asteroid nine million miles from the Earth. Now witness, if you will, a man’s mind and body shriveling in the sun, a man dying of loneliness.

The astronaut in “Where Is Everybody?” had some consolation in his solitude, even if he didn’t know it at the time: he chose it, and there was a purpose to it that he still believed in even after it was all over.

James A. Corry (Jack Warden¹) doesn’t have that kind of solace. He’s sentenced to his loneliness, and his only real respite comes from quarterly supply visits. Even the environment is inhospitable (the episode was shot on location in Death Valley): salt flats as far as the eye can see. No animals for comfort. No variation in scenery.

Four times a year, when a ship comes, he has to hope that it’s captained by Allenby (John Dehner²), who shows him the kindness and decency that he misses even more than company. On his own, he has his journal and a small stack of paperback books; he has the car he assembled from parts Allenby smuggled to him. He sits and honks the horn just for the sake of making noise to fill up the silence. When he hears the ship arriving, he immediately starts setting up his homemade chess board and checking that there’s beer in the fridge; he’s movingly eager to play host.

But this time, due to the orbital patterns, Allenby only has fifteen minutes: just enough time to tell Corry that while there’s no real good news, this kind of asteroid-exile is getting hotly contested back on Earth, with a lot of people recognizing its cruelty … and that he’s brought Corry something new, something to help “fight the loneliness.”

Again, we know that in the past he brought Corry the car parts and books—I can buy that the books were authorized, but the car certainly wasn’t. Neither is the sizeable mystery box he’s brought along this time; he specifically has to tell Corry not to open it where his less-charitable subordinates can see it.

Allenby’s a good man in a hard situation, unable to ignore Corry’s crushing loneliness and trying to do his best to alleviate it: “This isn’t an easy assignment to handle, stopping here four times a year and having to look at a man’s agony.” Caring about that at all makes him Corry’s lifeline.

“Allenby?” Corry calls as Allenby leaves him with the mystery box. “I don’t much care what’s in it. But for the thought, for the decency—thank you.”

And what is in it? A robot. Or, as the show persistently pronounces it to my eternal amusement, rowbutt.

Allenby muses that the robot could be an illusion or salvation—he’s not sure—and whether or not she’s an illusion is the crux of the episode. More contemporary SF would probably take for granted that this AI fashioned like a woman counts as a person, but “The Lonely” arguably positions her closer to Wilson the volleyball or, in very contemporary terms, a generative AI chatbot. Her human form gives her an inescapable pathos, but the always-present idea is that she may simply be an ideal screen for Corry to project his dreams on. The ambiguity of her status helps lead to one of the show’s most unsettling endings.

She looks real. She responds to the name Alicia, knows that she’s a machine, and claims to feel thirst, heat, cold, hunger, and pain. Jean Marsh³ gives her an unnerving, entrancing energy that blurs the line between “robotic” and “feral,” artificial and too untamed. She has expressive eyes and a droning, metallic voice, especially when she keeps repeating, “My name’s Alicia. What’s your name?”

At first, Corry is horrified by her. In place of real companionship, he now has a body pillow: “You mock me, you know that? When you look at me, when you talk to me, I’m being mocked,” and he’s “sick of being mocked by the memory of women.” She’s just one more masturbatory fantasy that’s a substitute for the real thing. His furious opposition to her—his resistance to accepting her as the best he has—falls apart as soon as she cries. Like Allenby, he can’t turn off his empathy; he wipes away her tears, and when she says she can feel loneliness too, he melts.

Eleven months later, Corry still isn’t sure whether Alicia is a woman nor a machine. His journal voiceover tells us that when he’s at his sharpest, he knows she’s really an extension of him, shaped by his preferences and taught to like what he likes. She’ll never have a hobby that he doesn’t introduce her to. She’ll never want anything he can’t give her. One of the recurring themes of The Twilight Zone is that too much gratification can smother you, but while Corry is insightful enough to know that his relationship with Alicia is too frictionless and that her personality is too dependent on his, she still provides an invaluable relief from the loneliness. The danger here doesn’t come from him getting sick of her.

Instead, it comes the next time we see Allenby, who is thrilled to bring Corry the latest news. He’s been pardoned, as have a bunch of other asteroid-marooned prisoners, and Allenby is taking him back home. They don’t have long—orbital patterns again—and all the returning prisoners means that Corry can’t take much, only fifteen pounds of personal belongings. Corry, exuberant, doesn’t think that’s a problem. He’ll take his journal, and he and Alicia can—

We watch the horror sink into Allenby. “Oh, dear God, I forgot about her.”

Alicia, of course, weighs more than fifteen pounds. (The classic science fiction story “The Cold Equations” has been criticized a lot over the years, and its rigged logic is obviously in play here, but at least these ships presumably weren’t originally designed to carry this many people. They’re pushing a four-person car to fit eight, effectively, so the background engineering and safety standards aren’t as ridiculous. This is still a wildly impractical prison setup, though.) Allenby and Corry go back and forth about whether she’s a robot or a woman. Corry thinks leaving her alone here would be murder, and that if she can’t go, he won’t either.

Then comes the ending, an excellently ambivalent combination of resolved plot and unresolved feelings. Corry begs Alicia to prove that she’s human, but all she can do is look at them in confusion.

Allenby, unwilling to let Corry miss his chance at freedom, shoots her in the face, blowing away the image of humanity and revealing smoking circuits and machine parts; it feels shockingly brutal. Is she a talking doll he needed to break—as cruel as that feels—to save Corry from staying behind and wasting away? Or is this murder after all? Allenby firmly believes she was both Corry’s illusion and salvation—that fake company was better than none—and that the danger was her becoming his damnation, too. He had to believe the illusion enough to derive comfort from it, but that belief doesn’t come with a simple on-off switch toggle. Corry loved her, and she’s dead, and when he looks at this now-faceless mess of wires and metal, he can’t see her anymore. There’s a hole inside him. She’s worse than dead; she’s gone. She’s gone in a way that makes him doubt that she was ever really “here” in the first place.

And he doesn’t know how to feel about that.

“All you’re leaving behind is loneliness,” Allenby tells him.

Corry, lifeless and stunned, can only try to commit to this idea he can’t yet manage to believe. It’s a fact without feeling; his feelings are lying at his feet. Alicia’s “body” isn’t buried, instead becoming one more abandoned object in a bleak landscape.

“I must remember that,” he says numbly and without conviction. “I must remember to keep that in mind.”

Jack Warden is phenomenal in this episode, covering Corry’s complex emotional upheaval so deftly that it’s easy to see why he was so much in demand. The rare voiceover here, giving us his journal entries, is used really well; he mulls over the ambivalence and ambiguity and gives voice to it. (And it fits thematically, too: of course he has to talk to himself.) It’s one of my favorite performances of the series.

I never want to make these episodes entirely about how they reflect on the present moment, but revisiting this in 2026, I keep thinking about how uncannily and sympathetically this captures the peril of humans forming “relationships” with what branding has led us to call “AI.” There’s no real intelligence there, but some people nonetheless respond, almost to the point of addiction, to having such a reliable influx of pseudo-personalized positivity and support. Corry is smart enough to be aware, in his clearer moments, that Alicia’s seeming sentience is little more than a reflection of his own, but given his circumstances, who can blame him for overlooking that and coming to think with his heart than his head? Humans are built for attachment. (I brought up Wilson earlier, and I’ve always cried when Wilson “dies.”) A lot of art, as I said, has considered what would happen if humans invented another form of intelligent life and then refused to see it as such; it’s much rarer to explore the destabilization and heartbreak that comes from us inventing something much less but seeing it that way anyway, and needing it to the point that it breaks us.

Closing: On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man’s life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines he used. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that act upon them. All of Mr. Corry’s machines, including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete—in The Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Jack Smight

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: Time Enough at Last

1. Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, plus a generally storied career: there’s no way Rod Serling wasn’t an immense fan of 12 Angry Men, in which Warden appeared, for example. We’ll also see him again in “The Mighty Casey,” under sad circumstances. (Even sadder ones than “I have to rewatch ‘The Mighty Casey.'”) ↩︎
2. Dehner had a very long career as a bona fide “Hey, It’s That Guy,” appearing in many, many shows and films, but his best legacy may be on the radio, starring in Have Gun — Will Travel. ↩︎
3. Classic Doctor Who fans may recognize her from her appearances there or as Jon Pertwee’s wife (1955-1960), but while she worked a lot and in varied places, her Emmy Award-winning work on Upstairs, Downstairs is the obvious standout. ↩︎