And this is the countdown, the last five seconds before man shot an arrow into the air.Ī manned space flight crashlands on what the astronauts believe to be an unknown asteroid. She is the first manned aircraft into space. She represents four and a half years of planning, preparation and training, and a thousand years of science and mathematics and the projected dreams and hopes of not only a nation, but a world. He was mainly known for his work on Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie.Ĭlick here to return to my survey of The Twilight Zone series.Rod Serling: Her name is the Arrow One. This was the first of four episodes in the series directed by William Claxton.Actor Claude Akins previously appeared in The Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and Joe Maross appeared in a supporting role in “Third From The Sun.”. Unlike other episodes featuring barren asteroid scenery, this episode was shot on an MGM backlot rather than in the California desert.The stock footage of a rocket launch was of a test flight of a Mercury Atlas booster.This episode aired about a month after John Glenn became the first astronaut to attain orbit around earth.This episode makes allusion to the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels.As in many other Twilight Zone episodes, this episode uses several props and costumes originally created for MGM’s Forbidden Planet –including ‘blaster pistols’ and their tunic costumes.This episode is a fun bit of science fiction/space fantasy that leaves the audience with a more refined sense of perspective. This episode uses a familiar story-line in The Twilight Zone series: a group of astronauts lands on a foreign planet to discover something strange and previously unknown, owing a certain debt of gratitude to Ray Bradbury and his Martian Chronicles as well as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. A small exercise in space psychology that you can try on for size in the Twilight Zone.” In this case, the dream dies a little harder than the man. “The case of navigator Peter Craig, a victim of a delusion. Moments later, the little people tear down their giant statue of Craig over his lifeless corpse. They pick up a screaming Craig but toss him back into the dirt and return to their own ship for repairs. Just as Fletcher takes off in the spaceship, Craig maniacally lords over the little people until another spaceship lands and two gigantic human spacemen emerge. Fletcher attempts to persuade him otherwise, but it is no use. However, Craig pulls a gun on Fletcher and decides to remain with the little people. Craig and Fletcher get into a fight, but later the little people create a life-size statue likeness of Craig while Fletcher has fully repaired the ship. Craig has discovered they can communicate via mathematics and he begins to have delusions of grandeur, believing himself to be a god among these little people. Most importantly they discover a whole race of tiny people living alongside this little stream in a scene reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in while Lemuel Gulliver’s voyages to the miniature kingdom of the Lilliputians the story is explicitly alluded to in the episode). He has actually found a pure water stream up in the canyon, and there are microscopic trees and cars lining the stream. Later Fletcher notices that Craig has not been drinking water –Craig reluctantly shows Fletcher where he has been wandering. Suddenly, he hears voices on the asteroid. More than anything Craig longs to be free from loneliness –he wants to be around fellow humans again, perhaps at Yankee Stadium. Craig sits on a rock complaining about their food supply, and he decides to explore the asteroid while Fletcher diligently repairs the ship. Their ship has sustained damage in a meteor shower. Somewhere in space two men, Commander William Fletcher (Claude Akins) and Navigator Peter Craig (Joe Maross), make an emergency landing on an uncharted asteroid. Because they’re about to partake in a little exploration into that gray, shaded area in space and time that’s known as the Twilight Zone.” The other characters who inhabit this place you may never see, but they’re there, as these two gentlemen will soon find out. The cast of characters? You’ve met them: William Fletcher, commander of the spaceship his copilot, Peter Craig. “The time is the space age, the place is a barren landscape of a rock-walled canyon that lies millions of miles from the planet Earth.
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