This might not last long. How do make science-fiction dull? You have the entire known universe at your disposal. If that isn’t quite enough, you can make a new universe designed to your specs. You can people it with plants, you can plant it with monsters, you can faun over the flora, be floored by the fauna, you can have it be devoid of life or have snotty omniscient beings. How do you take this canvas and come up with a Rothko painting? On the very first episode of a new series?
After the overbearing orchestral score dies down, the series opens with a shot of an empty leather office chair.
“How do you, do ladies and gentlemen? My name is Truman Bradley. At the moment you can’t see me. Why?”
Interesting. Is he invisible? Is he dead? Is he in another dimension? Did he teleport? I bet he teleported!
“Very simple. The camera is not pointed in my direction.”
Are you shitting me?
He walks into the shot and assures us that this is a work of fiction. Wow, they must have a real mind-bender for us tonight! “But the big question is, could it have happened?” Truman tells us that somehow this misdirection is a metaphor for tonight’s story. Actually, if that had been a director’s chair, I would have agreed.
We open with shots of experimental aircraft and the voice-over tells us we are in the California Desert. Hot damn — Edwards Air Force Base! This series immediately bought a ton of goodwill.
The FA-962 (code-named the XF because FA-962 is just too descriptive for a secret aircraft) is testing out a new fuel that should allow it to go unimaginably fast. Major Fred Gunderman will be yeagering this test flight. As Gunderman is flying a record-breaking 1,650 MPH, he sees another craft keeping pace with him. [1]
Gunderman reports that it looks like a missile or torpedo. As it draws closer to the XF, he launches his ejection seat and allows $750,000 of taxpayers’ cash to crash and burn. In the hospital, the other officers question his health, any double vision, nausea, anything that might have caused him to panic. He is adamant that there was another craft. He is not afraid to suggest, “it could have been a flying saucer.” But one of them missile-shaped saucers, I guess, as he describes it as cylindrical, silver, and twice the length of his ship. Sadly, it was not tracked on radar, but Gunderman is smart enough to suggest maybe it was invisible to radar, which might have sounded crazy at the time.
Just the kind of accurate, to-scale picture a professor of astronomy would have on their wall.
A board of inquiry is assembled to investigate the crash. Men are subjected to the same stresses as Gunderman to see if they dream of long cylindrical objects. Gunderman takes a polygraph. After a week, and despite a fact-finding trip to Hawaii at taxpayer expense, the board comes up with nothing.
They finally allow his wife to visit and even she is skeptical at first. Gunderman sends her to Cal-Tech to talk to professor Samuel Carson about UFOs. Luckily, she arrives during his 1:00 – 1:15 bi-weekly office hours. He is mostly useless, but does give some exposition about the size of the universe and how many planets could be sending ships here.
The board’s final conclusion is that Gunderman saw his own fountain pen floating weightless in the cockpit. They suggest he “assumed it was a large object outside the plane instead of a small object inside the plane.” They all have a good laugh and the Gundermen go home.
Another officer comes in, though, and shoots holes through that theory like so much swamp gas. First, radar determined the XF was never weightless. Second, the XF’s debris is now magnetized after being close to “an airship flying on magnetic power.”
So Gunderman thought he saw something — which we didn’t see. Then the government comes up with a ludicrous explanation — which was wrong. Then Gunderman is vindicated because an officer knows the effects of a magnetic power source — which they have never heard of.
I’m a sucker for 1950s – 1960s air & space tales, so I will take this as an introductory episode; a pilot episode, if you will where they are working the kinks out.
Post-Post:
- [1] This would indeed have been a record in 1955. A faster speed was not achieved until 1962. Kudos to the show for getting this right. It is hard to believe the silly Tales of Tomorrow aired only 3 years earlier.
- Later in the episode, we are shown mice on a rocket floating weightless. An officer says this is due to the thrust of the rocket. Unless the rocket was thrusting back toward earth, I’m going to have to deduct a kudo.
- Title Analysis: Didn’t work for Star Trek Beyond [2] and doesn’t work here. Again, I will charitably take it as a gateway to the series.
- [2] And beyond what, BTW. Same for Star Trek Into Darkness — what darkness? Isn’t 99.999999% of space dark? Lets go back to Roman numerals and colons in titles; you’re not fooling anyone!
- Available on YouTube. Kind of fishy that a 1955 TV show is letter-boxed, though. However, they were an early adopter of color.
Sam Whipple is reading a newspaper with the headlines KOREAN TRUCE NEGOTIATIONS STALLED and LIVING COSTS ZOOM UP. He comments that things are a mess, then turns to the camera and breaks the 4th cardboard wall.
Jarvis and his daughter Mary are able to observe the past on a TV screen. They actually witness the scientist making the faux pas that doomed the earth. Mary suggests time-traveling back to 1952 to stop this catastrophe, but Jarvis says that is impossible. Only someone from that prehistoric era can affect the past.
Whipple agrees to go back to 1952 and stop Dr. Thorne from making his fatal mistake. In the past, Whipple is able to burn Thorne’s notes which apparently contained directions and all known copies of plans for the cyclotron. He goes back home and straps on the time-vest. Unfortunately his sister has smashed the machine so he will stop acting like a kid.
Paul Tripp, who appeared as Whipple also wrote the script. Even aside from the 4th-wall bits, the episode gets a little meta. Mary Jarvis is played by Ruth Enders, who was married to Tripp for 53 years. When he introduces his new girlfriend at the end, he says her name is Ruth.
“Our story begins in Europe where Peter Wade has established a thriving air service.” It would have been nice for Karloff to tell us whether he meant Peter Jr or Sr. And just why would you write a screenplay and give two of the characters exactly the same name? “Hi, I’m Henry Jones, Sr. — they call me Indiana too!”
That night, Sr is having nightmares about the war and a B-17 crash that killed his friend Wally Huffner. Jr comes in to wake him up. Sr says they were in a plane that was hit by the Jerrys in WWII. Sr gave Wally his parachute and was able to pilot the damaged plane to the ground. Sadly, Wally croaked, or more accurately splatted as the chute didn’t open; or maybe it had been replaced by a share of 
Jr tells Sr that he saw Wally’s ghostly face and his voice. He shows Sr a parachute with the serial number 0-1636184. Jr uses this evidence to tell his father that another man died in that crashed plane — Wally Huffner. Sr took Wally’s parachute back in the war and Wally died in the crash. Well, at least, not long before the crash — Wally could not be captured by the Germans so he insisted Sr give him his cyanide tablet.
Newlywed Helen wakes up and reaches over for her new husband Phil. He is not in bed, which I guess accounts for them sharing a bed. On 1950’s TV, if he were still in bed, they would have had twin beds. That’s some catch, that 
Seconds after the door shuts — there is not even an edit — Pat returns and says, “Helen, I’m sorry.” There is just no way she could have known what just happened unless she was spying on them, hoping to witness some hot shipping-out-tomorrow sex.
Later, at a restaurant, Phil gives Helen a present from his mother — 
Helen, horrified: “Oh, no no no.”
There are multiple reasons for me to not like this. 1) After getting off easy with a 10-minute segment yesterday, I’m left with a 37-minute chore. 2) It stars an uninteresting actor from a so-so Star Trek series . . . as a kid. 3) It is the kindler / gentler Twilight Zone as seen in 
The next day as Charity and Peter are each outdoors recuperating, they are able to communicate. They learn that they both live close to Bear Rock near Harmon Brook in Massachusetts. However, one lives there in a dark time when there is a dull uniformity of thought, great oppression, taxation without representation, and a ruling puritanical elite which gets the vapors if thou expresseth any perceived heresy; and Charity lives in 1700. Heyooooo!
This is scientifically confirmed when one of the neighbors has a calf born with “a pinched up face and a third eye.” Squire Hacker tells her he must search her whole teenage body for witchmarks, and “the search must be thorough for the devil’s ways are cunning.” Charity belts him and runs as fast as her little buckled shoes will carry her.