{"id":103279,"date":"2021-04-28T14:04:12","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T19:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/?p=103279"},"modified":"2021-04-28T14:04:38","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T19:04:38","slug":"the-twilight-zone-review-the-arrival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/?p=103279","title":{"rendered":"The Twilight Zone Review: The Arrival"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<!-- RSR AD 1 --><br \/>\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" style=\"display: block;\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-1545664804358300\" data-ad-slot=\"7759247395\" data-ad-format=\"auto\" data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins><br \/>\n<script>\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\n<\/script><\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/?p=103279\" rel=\"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/?p=103279\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-103280 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/download-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"184\" height=\"274\" \/><\/a>By William Kozy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s fun to let one\u2019s 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\u2019t violate the rules that were set up in such a way that the audience feels cheated. \u201cThe Arrival\u201d is an episode that while providing a fairly logical explanation of the puzzle, doesn\u2019t 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, \u2018What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?\u2019 tying it with 11 other episodes for 106th thru 116th place of the 156 episodes.\u201d<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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, \u201cTheories happen to be my business.\u201d 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\u2019s skin for some reason as he barks unnecessarily, \u201cI\u2019m not casting any stones Mr. Bengston!\u201d And then he quickly brings it down several notches, wondering \u201cIt\u2019s just that the names are so\u2026so familiar\u2026\u201d It\u2019s a nice way to up the viewer\u2019s intrigue as we wonder, \u201cAha, that\u2019s going to have something to do with it!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019s set-up of the eventual explanation. More on that in a bit.<\/p>\n<p>Next, a small group of the men assemble in the hangar around the mystery plane, discussing the possibilities. I say discussing, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s as though director Boris Sagal told them to really raise the intensity: \u201cAll of you remember that your characters are under intense pressure, so let me really see that in your performances!\u201d 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 \u201cMarried With Children\u201d, 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\u2019s not really there, that they\u2019ve all been hypnotized to believe it\u2019s 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 \u201cWorld War III.\u201d The irony continues when one considers that just one year after \u201cThe Arrival\u201d aired, Mr. Sagal would film the pilot episode of the TV show \u201cCombat\u201d starring none other than\u2026Vic Morrow. And just one year after Mr. Sagal\u2019s 1981 demise, Vic Morrow would die in an infamous helicopter accident in 1982 while filming\u2026yes, \u201cTwilight Zone: The Movie.\u201d Cue music: Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo\u2026\u201d Truth really can be stranger than fiction.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cblue seats\u201d inside\u2014Sheckly 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\u2019s side. Sheckly cocksuredly springs his theory of mass hallucination on the group. He determined that \u201csomeone somewhere told us that a DC-3 is inside this hangar and that it landed this morning.\u201d And he tells the men that they all pictured in their minds what that plane would look like, but of course they all couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s serial number. Whoever hypnotized them just couldn\u2019t inject all those details into each man\u2019s 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\u2019t it possibly follow that the illusion might continue\u2014that they\u2019d all imagine his hand getting chopped, and Sheckly would then scream in pain? Why wouldn\u2019t that be an outcome of his experiment?<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s office asking what happened. Bengston has no idea what he\u2019s talking about, and then recognizes that he\u2019s Sheckly of the FAA. Sheckly is angry and flummoxed as he recounts the events, pausing suddenly to wonder, \u201cWhat else doesn\u2019t exist?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014that way it would make sense that when we meet the real Malloy, he\u2019d look different. But I suppose the producers thought that would be too confusing for the audience to parse? But even then, it still wouldn\u2019t explain how Sheckly even knew there was a Malloy to imagine! He\u2019d never met nor heard of him, so why would he imagine him? This writing issue was a turbulent bump in the script.<\/p>\n<p>Bengston and Malloy insist that they\u2019re 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\u2014the only one in his career that he wasn\u2019t able to \u201cbutton up.\u201d Sheckly\u2019s meltdown is complete. He whimpers as he heads toward the door, babbling and repeating over and over how he\u2019s \u201cnever been licked on a case\u201d and \u201cwe\u2019ve always found the causes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sheckly wanders around the airfield under the night sky calling to Flight 107, \u201cWhere are you?\u201d, and \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you leave a clue?\u201d \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>The episode\u2019s unfortunate acting performances and writing miscues keep it from soaring high. It receives a rating thusly of only 4.9.<\/p>\n<p>[si-contact-form form=&#8217;2&#8242;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s fun to let one\u2019s imagination run loose, but it does put the pressure on the creator of the fiction to come up with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26404],"class_list":["post-103279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boxing-news","tag-the-twilight-zone-review-the-arrival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103279"}],"version-history":[{"count":-3,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}