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Where is Everybody? is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.
Details
Episode number: 1
Season: 1
Production code: 173-3601
Original air date: October 2, 1959
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Robert Stevens
Producer: William Self
Director of Photography: Joseph La Shelle
Music: original score by Bernard Herrmann
Cast
Mike Ferris: Earl Holliman
Air Force General: James Gregory
Opening narration
"The place is here, the time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we're about to watch could be our journey."
Main story
Mike Ferris, a man in an Air Force jumpsuit, is all alone in a strange town. He searches all over town trying to find someone. He finally collapses, pushing the "walk button" at a stoplight. The "walk" button is actually a panic button, and Ferris is an astronaut-trainee in an isolation booth. He has been in the booth for 484 hours, and has been hallucinating the whole town.
Closing narration
"Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in the Twilight Zone."
Trivia
- Although this was the first aired episode of The Twilight Zone, it is not the first one written. Rod Serling wrote an episode called The Happy Place, which was rejected because of its subject matter (a society where people were executed when they turned 60), which was considered too depressing.
- When Serling adapted this episode to short-story form in his book Stories From the Twilight Zone, he added an additional twist to the end by having Mike Ferris discover a movie ticket in his pocket after being carried away on the stretcher. A variation on this twist was later used in King Nine Will Not Return.
- The original cut of this epsiode featured narration by Westbrook Van Voorhis.
Themes
A study in human nature concluding that man cannot survive and be happy alone: he must share the comfort of a community in order to be whole. Similar themes are explored in The Lonely and The Mind and the Matter.
Critical response
- "Rod Serling, one of television's abler writers, has turned his hand to a thirty-minute film series entitled the Twilight Zone, which made its debut at 10 O'Clock last night on Channel 2. He depicted the nightmare of a man, played by Earl Holliman, who finds himself in a town where there is every evidence of life but no living people; as it turns out, this is the delusion of an Air Force sergeant, undergoing prolonged confinement in preparation for a trip to the moon. Mr. Serling conceived his playlet in imaginative terms and underscored his point that science cannot foretell what may be the effect of total isolation on a human being. Indeed, the play's situation was almost bound to be better than its resolution, which by comparison seemed trite and anticlimactic. In the desultory field of filmed half-hour drama, however, Mr. Serling should not have much trouble in making his mark. At least his series promises to be different." New York Times' review, October 3, 1959
- "...I read Serling's first script. It was, or seemed to be, an end-of-the-world story. Resisting the impulse to throw the wretched thing across the room, I read on. A man is alone in a town which shows every sign of having been recently occupied. He finds cigarettes burning in ash trays. Stoves are still warm. Chimneys are smoking. But no one is there, only this one frightened man who can't even remember his name...Old stuff? Of course. I thought so at the time, and I think so now. But there was one element in the story which kept me from my customary bitterness. The element was quality. Quality shone on every page. It shone in the dialog and in the scene set-ups. And because of this, the story seemed fresh and new and powerful. There was one compromise, but it was made for the purpose of selling the series." Charles Beaumont writing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction, December 1959
External links
References
- Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)
Back to: The Twilight Zone, Episode List, Season 1
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