After a lesson on sound waves from host Truman Bradley, we cut to a maid vacuuming on the top floor of the King Tower Office Building.  She is startled when a flock of migratory birds crash through the window. Truman tells us the birds were “victims of progress.  If men didn’t build skyscrapers, then birds wouldn’t get confused and fly into them.”  More accurately, they were victims of having a brain the size of a pea.

Dr. Kennedy, an ornithologist from the local museum is called.  In a feat of stunning perspicacity, he identifies four of the creatures as bats.  They should call him Dr. BirdHouse.  He calls Dr. Osborne, an expert in aerodynamics and bird navigation.  One of the surviving bats is taken to his lab for examination.  He determines that something in the vicinity of the building created a disturbance to the bats’ sonar signal.  He should have studied the leadership qualities that enabled four bats to lead a flock of birds to their death.

Their equipment tells them the signal is stationary and coming from above.  They conjecture a hostile space station is the source.  They discover a mysterious signal and go to Dr. Milton, the inventor of the radar telescope.  He tells them his telescope could not be responsible for the signal they are investigating.

That evening at 2 am, the signal begins again.  Milton coordinates with every telescope in the US. Unfortunately, they find nothing and give up around 5 am when women in the neighboring high-rises lower their shades.

Drs. Osborne and Jeffries decide to catch breakfast.  A couple of other dudes are enjoying a nice game of pool at 5 am, giving them an idea that the beam might be bouncing around like a pool ball.  One quotes the Law of Reflection, “The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.”  He, however, dangerously forgets, the angle of the dangle equals the heat of the meat; and the booty-cutie corollary.

They go back to the General’s office.  Using a map and a string, they are able to determine that the beam is originating from the Johnson Park area.  They are unaware of anything in the area that would create this electronic signal.  They theorize that a hostile power with such an ability could enable their planes to fly atomic and hydrogen weapons into our country.

This episode was fairly excruciating up to this point.  There were 9 dull men and 1 dull woman.  The host and voice-overs took the place of dialogue for several minutes in the opening.  It was just difficult  for me to get excited about this buzz confusing the birds.  They had a chance to win me over at the end, though.

After the discussing the doomsday scenarios of commies dropping A-bombs and H-bombs on us, they cut to the source of the transmissions — a toy factory.  Had they they shown some remote control gizmo and ended episode right there, I would have been surprised and amused.  It would have also bred some suspense as no one would suspect the toys and they would go merrily on endangering the country.  I’ll say this for Tales of Tomorrow — they didn’t hesitate to destroy the earth.

Instead we get a short hum-drum ending where the toy factory is a cover for commies. In seconds, the cops come in and arrest them.  It felt like one of those neat Alfred Hitchcock wrap-ups where the network prevents anyone from getting away with murder.

I rate this:  Nowhere.

Post-Post:

• Available on YouTube, but why would ya?

After getting on my good side by starting off with old Air Force footage last week, SFT is going back to the well with more footage.  It is just a brief shot, though, and followed up by a picture of a busy highway and a modern home.  The theme is speed, uninterrupted journeys and the convenience of modern gadgets.

Al Brown gets a call telling him his test flight will not be ready until Monday.  I guess one of those modern conveniences is not a dishwasher as his wife Nell is up to her elbows. She gives him a honey-do list of chores and maintenance to do around the house before risking his life for his country.

They see their new neighbor pull into his driveway and look around suspiciously before darting into the house.  Nell had tried ringing their bell a few days early, but got no response other than some noises inside.  Nell suggests they might be criminals, but Al suggests maybe they are newlyweds and the wife was getting her bell rung.

Things get serious when electrical interference from the neighbor’s house disrupts Al’s TV picture.  Al walks next door and he also gets no response from ringing the bell.  Unlike almost every show I’ve watched for this blog, he does not open the door and waltz in uninvited.  This was the 50’s when people had manners and a sense of neighborliness and propriety.  So he peeks in the window.  To his surprise — and mine! — he sees a Roomba scooting around the floor.

The neighbor comes out and busts Al.  He tells him that the device is a “sonic broom” — so it really is a Roomba!  Holy crap, and it has a remote control!  His neighbor Ted tells him, “The pressure of the noise under the hemisphere disintegrates the refuse.”  A feature I will expect to be in the next model.  What a forward-looking series.

The next day, Al is fooling around in his garage and hears Ted trying to start his car.  He offers to help and has Ted pop the hood.  Al asks for a flashlight and Ted’s wife Ann appears with one 2 seconds later.  Before Al can meet her, she rushes back inside.  Al does whatever it is that guys do and the car starts.  Al can’t wait to tell Nell about the inventor who can’t fix a car, and his mind-reading wife.

Going downstairs to change a fuse, Al realizes he has hung on to Ted’s flashlight.  He figures this out when it projects a light that gives him x-ray vision.  He is able to see through the wall, and then his wife’s hand.  Al tries to take the flashlight apart, but it is sealed up tighter than an iPad.  He is again busted by Ted who demands his flashlight back.  Ted has a lot of suspicious questions about the local power grid where Al’s airplane manufacturing plant draws its power, how there radar is powered, and what they do in case of power failure.

Al shows him the wind tunnel in his garage.  Wait, what?  He cranks it up and demon-strates to Ted his problem that aircraft melt when they go faster than sound.  This is a little confusing as the sound barrier was broken 8 years earlier.  Al is searching for an alloy that, under pressure, becomes cold instead of hot.  Ted blurts out “corbolite” and bolts out.

That night, the two couples have dinner.  Ted is concerned the world is getting over-mechanized, too reliant on gadgets.  Al fears an anti-science backlash.  Ted tells him about a sci-fi story he is thinking of writing.  As he just gets the part about a time machine, a storm blows up and the lights flicker, which seems very troubling to Ted.

He continues his story about people using the machines to go back to simpler times.  As people fled the oppressive future, the government outlawed time travel.  They even sent out Timecops to hunt down the fugitives.  Large power grids and radar are able to hide the refugees.  Say, you don’t think . . .

That night, Al is spending a typical 1950s night in bed with his wife — they are in more clothes than I wear to work, in separate beds, and Al is smoking.  They hear a loud noise and go to Ted & Ann’s house.  They are gone and their future toys have been smashed.

A vast improvement over last week.

Post-Post:

• Meh.

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.