The Twilight Zone Review: The Arrival
By William Kozy
Everybody loves a good existential mystery puzzle to try and solve, or at least take pleasure in watching being solved by the characters in the work of fiction. It’s fun to let one’s imagination run loose, but it does put the pressure on the creator of the fiction to come up with a resolution that is sufficiently mind-blowing, and just as importantly, doesn’t violate the rules that were set up in such a way that the audience feels cheated. “The Arrival” is an episode that while providing a fairly logical explanation of the puzzle, doesn’t shock us all that much. It does however, to its credit, provide a decently unpredictable outcome. The episode received 6 votes in my survey of fans and writers asking, ‘What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?’ tying it with 11 other episodes for 106th thru 116th place of the 156 episodes.”
The puzzle to be unraveled here is that a small propeller-driven Douglas DC-3 commercial airliner Flight #107 of Trans East Airlines arrives from Buffalo, New York and lands at an airport. It taxis to a stop. The ramp agent George Cousins (played by Bing Russell, Kurt Russell’s father) receives no response from anyone inside when he knocks on the side of the plane for the crew/passengers to disembark. He goes inside and no one is aboard, not even a crew. It then falls upon Federal aviation investigator Grant Sheckly (Harold J. Stone) to figure out what happened.
The investigation begins with Sheckly addressing a roomful of those involved, the airline executive, the crewmen on the airfield, ramp attendant, tower operator, operations chief, the dispatcher from Buffalo, etc. Sheckly tells them just to talk facts, not to clutter things up by offering theories, because as he instructs them, “Theories happen to be my business.” He does come off somewhat arrogant, and I think this was perhaps designed to accentuate the tragic fall, the shock of seeing how someone so self-possessed with confidence could unravel into a distraught mess. A lesson in how being so lacking in humility can all the more lead a psyche to the opposite end of that spectrum. But what happens in this scene and throughout the rest of the episode is a miscalculated directorial choice of having all these men engage in a pissing contest as they snap temperamentally at each other. Here for instance, as Sheckly muses on why the pilot and co-pilot names sound so familiar to him, Airline Executive Bengston vouches for the two pilots saying they were good men. This gets under Sheckly’s skin for some reason as he barks unnecessarily, “I’m not casting any stones Mr. Bengston!” And then he quickly brings it down several notches, wondering “It’s just that the names are so…so familiar…” It’s a nice way to up the viewer’s intrigue as we wonder, “Aha, that’s going to have something to do with it!”
Sheckly dismisses everyone, and as they file out, for fun you can observe starting at the 7:40 mark, how the actors cast shadows against the wall outside the door that has a painting on it that is supposed to depict the airfield outside. And on the heels of that technical boo-boo, comes a writing snafu that has been pointed by many fans by now. Bengston introduces Sheckly to Paul Malloy the airline’s Public Relations representative. These two will jaw at each other for the remainder of the episode in a not very artfully acted way. But the conundrum here is a basic flaw in Rod Serling’s set-up of the eventual explanation. More on that in a bit.
Next, a small group of the men assemble in the hangar around the mystery plane, discussing the possibilities. I say discussing, but it’s more of a group hissy fit, with each focused on how everyone else is stupid. All the actors hammer their lines with such amateurish intensity. It’s as though director Boris Sagal told them to really raise the intensity: “All of you remember that your characters are under intense pressure, so let me really see that in your performances!” There is an eerie background to Mr. Sagal by the way. He is the father of actress Katie Sagal, famous for playing Peg Bundy on “Married With Children”, but Boris met a tragic death that is nearly simulated by a character in this scene. Sheckly will arrive at the decision that the plane is an illusion, that it’s not really there, that they’ve all been hypnotized to believe it’s there, and to prove it he will stick his hand in the spinning propellers. His theory proves correct, for as he does so, the plane suddenly disappears. Now, getting back to Mr. Sagal, he actually was killed in 1981, by the spinning blades of a helicopter when he got out of it after filming aerial shots for a TV movie called “World War III.” The irony continues when one considers that just one year after “The Arrival” aired, Mr. Sagal would film the pilot episode of the TV show “Combat” starring none other than…Vic Morrow. And just one year after Mr. Sagal’s 1981 demise, Vic Morrow would die in an infamous helicopter accident in 1982 while filming…yes, “Twilight Zone: The Movie.” Cue music: Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo…” Truth really can be stranger than fiction.
Sheckly arrived at this theory with some reasonably clever writing; he deduced it after observing, that none of the passengers had anyone making inquiries as to where they were. Also it struck him odd when a crewman commented on the “blue seats” inside—Sheckly checked inside and noticed the seats were a different color from when he first noticed them. Further experimentation with the men revealed that they all saw different colored seats and they all read off different numbers on the aircraft’s side. Sheckly cocksuredly springs his theory of mass hallucination on the group. He determined that “someone somewhere told us that a DC-3 is inside this hangar and that it landed this morning.” And he tells the men that they all pictured in their minds what that plane would look like, but of course they all couldn’t possibly imagine all the details exactly the same as the others because they were all picturing their own version, from the colors of the seats to the plane’s serial number. Whoever hypnotized them just couldn’t inject all those details into each man’s spell. Sheckly reasoned that if the plane is an illusion then so are the propellers. Naturally the illusion should be dispelled if he sticks his hand in the propellers. Or is that really so? Wouldn’t it possibly follow that the illusion might continue—that they’d all imagine his hand getting chopped, and Sheckly would then scream in pain? Why wouldn’t that be an outcome of his experiment?
In any case, the ploy works, and the plane vanishes, despite that in the wide shot, Sheckly is far from making contact with his hand. The tactic works a little too well however, as then, one by one, the other men all vanish as well. Sheckly, alarmed, calls out their names. He runs out of the hangar and rushes into Bengston’s office asking what happened. Bengston has no idea what he’s talking about, and then recognizes that he’s Sheckly of the FAA. Sheckly is angry and flummoxed as he recounts the events, pausing suddenly to wonder, “What else doesn’t exist?”
Bengston asks if Sheckly is drunk, and Sheckly asks where Malloy is. Bengston points out Malloy lying on the couch with a newspaper, whose headline confirms that Flight 107 from Buffalo arrived safely this morning with famous actress Penny Jackson disembarking. So the flight arrived complete with passengers. But here’s the problem: Since it turns out that Sheckly has imagined the whole event, how was he able to picture Malloy looking exactly like the real Malloy? Sheckly had never met Malloy in reality, and more that that, never even heard of him. So how was Malloy able to be a part of his imagined event? It’s hard to think of what the production could have done to fix this. Logically, they could have had a different actor portraying the imagined Malloy, representing what Sheckly imagined Malloy to look like—that way it would make sense that when we meet the real Malloy, he’d look different. But I suppose the producers thought that would be too confusing for the audience to parse? But even then, it still wouldn’t explain how Sheckly even knew there was a Malloy to imagine! He’d never met nor heard of him, so why would he imagine him? This writing issue was a turbulent bump in the script.
Bengston and Malloy insist that they’re not missing any planes, and Sheckly starts sweating it out, his bubble of egotistical posture deflating, ready to crash and burn. Sheckly presses the matter and Bengston then recalls that oh yes, they did lose one flight roughly twenty years ago. It was lost in a fog and never found, and Sheckly was the investigator on that case—the only one in his career that he wasn’t able to “button up.” Sheckly’s meltdown is complete. He whimpers as he heads toward the door, babbling and repeating over and over how he’s “never been licked on a case” and “we’ve always found the causes.”
Sheckly wanders around the airfield under the night sky calling to Flight 107, “Where are you?”, and “Why didn’t you leave a clue?” “Why didn’t you?” he sobs over and over and drops to his knees, a beaten man. Beaten by the unsolvable in a world he prided himself on being able to decipher anything.
The episode’s unfortunate acting performances and writing miscues keep it from soaring high. It receives a rating thusly of only 4.9.
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