Season 4, Episode 6
(#108 overall)
Cayuga Production #
4850
Originally aired
February 7, 1963
“Since the beginning, man has looked into the awesome reaches of
infinity and asked the eternal questions:
What is time? What is space? What is life?
What is death?”
--- Opening narration,
Portrait of Jennie (1948)
The above quote sounds like a
Control Voice narration from The Outer
Limits, but I’m using it here on my Twilight
Zone blog because it fits perfectly:
in different ways, tonight’s episode asks all four of those questions.
Richard Matheson’s “Death Ship,”
which turns 50 tonight, finds a crew of three astronauts on a deep space
mission, cataloging planets for potential colonization sites. Waiting for them on the 13th
planet of Star System 51 is perhaps the greatest mystery of all, wrapped in the
trappings of the deepest horror known to man. “Something glittered down there,”
says Lieutenant Mason as he scans the planet’s surface. Lieutenant Carter is excited at the possibilities that may await them, but Captain Ross is reluctant to bother. Protocol demands that they investigate, however, so they land.
Upon landing, the trio discovers
a crashed ship that looks identical to their own. They venture inside and discover a trio of
corpses that match themselves in every detail, right down to their ID cards.
Mason and the third crewman,
Lieutenant Carter, immediately assume that they are dead. In Matheson’s original short story, this was
in fact the truth: they were essentially
ghosts discovering the nature of their own deaths. In fleshing out the story for The Twilight Zone’s new hour format,
Matheson takes things in a different, somewhat more ambiguous direction.
You'll find Matheson's original short story in this collection, circa 1961.
Unfortunately, I’m gonna have to
spoil the ending in order for the rest of my comments to make sense. Without giving too much detail, the reality
is that, because of Captain Ross’ iron-willed refusal to accept death, and his
intense determination to discover an alternate explanation, he (and his hapless
crew along with him) is stuck in an endless loop in time, reliving these events
over and over again throughout eternity.
It’s kinda like season one’s “Judgment Night,” but in space. It’s not necessarily the most satisfying
ending, but the real sparks come from the stellar performances by Jack Klugman
and Ross Martin.
What can I say about Jack Klugman
that I haven’t already said in this blog?
I love the man. He’s one of my
favorite actors of all time (TZ or
otherwise), and he was excellent in everything he ever did, period (1957’s Twelve Angry Men, TV’s The Odd Couple and Quincy, M.E., the list goes on and on and on). He’s visited The Twilight Zone twice before (season one’s “A Passage forTrumpet” and season three’s “A Game of Pool”), and we’ll see him again in
September for the season five opener (“In Praise of Pip”). Captain Ross is a bit of a departure for him;
his other three TZ roles find him
inhabiting variations on the same type of character: down on his luck, rough
around the edges but lovable; here, he’s all stone and steel, tough to love and
impossible to defy. Mason and Carter
clearly fear and hate him, but they sure as hell do what he says.
Klugman passed away very recently
(Christmas Eve), and I’m still mourning.
For whatever self-delusional reason, I always thought I’d meet him one
day.
Ross Martin visited The Twilight Zone previously in season
one’s “The Four of Us Are Dying,” a relatively forgettable appearance, but here
he shines in one of my favorite TZ
performances. Watch his face fill with
teary-eyed joy as he comes face to face with his deceased wife and daughter,
and later, mournful despondency as he realizes the truth behind the episode’s
central mystery. Mason played the
creepy-as-hell “Red” Lynch in 1962’s Experiment
in Terror, which was recently released on blu-ray from Twilight Time.
I believe you're going... my way?
Fredrick Beir, playing the
slightly-dopey Carter here, played another astronaut the same year on The Outer
Limits (“The Man with the Power”). He
and Klugman would cross paths again eight years later on The Odd Couple (“Felix’s Wife’s Boyfriend”).
Martin (as Mason) has a wonderful
moment outside the wrecked ship in act one:
after surveying the craft’s hull damage, he imagines the disaster. Over a close shot of his face, we hear the
deafening roar of the engines as the ship descends and crashes (as he imagines
it). It’s interesting to reflect on this
after the episode ends. Is it his
imagination, or is it an actual memory echoing through their endless time loop?
There’s an (unfortunately)
obvious cut in the shot in which Mason first reveals his duplicate’s corpse in
the wrecked ship. I tried to get a screen
capture for illustration’s sake, but there’s too much motion to get a clear
shot (it happens at time stamp 11:57; you really can’t miss it). There’s
probably no way they could’ve pulled this off seamlessly in a single shot, but
it’s a bit disappointing after the marvelous split screen work achieved on “In His Image” a few weeks back. They
could’ve simply blocked the shot differently and avoided the cut (interestingly, we get some great split screen shots mere seconds later). It’s really the only blemish on an otherwise
excellent episode, one that I count among my top 10 favorites.
Next: The incomparable Anne Francis does some
betwitchin.’
5 comments:
Definitely the best of the season and one I couldn't fathom seeing working as a half-hour nearly as well.
Shortened to half an hour, "Death Ship" would still be great, but then you'd lose all the characterization (which to me elevates the material above a simple clever ghost story).
Yeah it probably wouldn't be much different from an episode like Elegy without all the character interaction, and its the character stuff that really makes Death Ship for me.
First-rate episode; it really is a quintessential Twilight Zone type of story.
Thank you all....One of the BEST and a wonderful addition to the precious few TZ "space shots" of the Right Stuff Era , TVs best spacey time (from around MEN INTO SPACE to the first 3 Star Wars movies)...The sheer joy of 1960s and 1970s space shows was in their determined optimism in placing so many tales in the "1980s" and "1990s". Gave a kid something wonderful to look forward to (even ST:OS chose "200 years" instead of following S F W A 's insistence that such trips are impossible or will be feasible only millenia from now . . .)
So the question goes begging : "Dude , where s my Flying Car?" Since X FILES brought it up I feel free to do so too. . . Who's sitting on the "future"? (Note the interesting Outer Limits study found at "Secret Sun" plus forum)...
Thanks too for being good to Fred Bier...he has gotten some flack on this role and I liked him a lot on The Outer Limits.
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