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scioscribePeople Are Alike All Over (Season 1, Episode 25)
Directed by: Mitchell Leisen
Written by: Rod Serling
Based on: “Brothers Beyond the Void,” by Paul W. Fairman
Opening: You're looking at a specie of flimsy little two-legged animal with extremely small heads, whose name is Man. Warren Marcusson, age thirty-five. Samuel A. Conrad, age thirty-one. They're taking a highway into space, Man unshackling himself and sending his tiny, groping fingers up into the unknown. Their destination is Mars, and in just a moment we'll land there with them.
Spoilers abound, and this is a very twist-dependent episode. There's a summary available here.
This is one of those episodes defined by its twist—it has the structure of a bleak joke. Everything in it—the thematic concerns, the characterization, and even the SF elements—are all geared at getting us to the grim punchline of Roddy McDowall’s Sam Conrad in his habitat, a gawked-at zoo exhibit who has come to understand a bitter truth far too late. To some extent, that ultra-tight focus weakens the episode … but the sting in this episode’s tail is so brutally apt that I tend to give the weaknesses in this one a pass.
Which isn’t to say that they’re not there. In particular, the story’s narrowness doesn’t do its central performers any favors. Roddy McDowall succeeds at making Sam Conrad convincingly high-strung, so tightly wound by anxiety that he even makes us nervous, but he could do a lot more than that if the episode would let him off the leash a little. Instead, he’s ushered from plot point to plot point without being allowed to dwell on any of the emotional beats. If he feels a stab of conscience at keeping Marcusson (Paul Comi) from even glimpsing the world he died trying to reach, for example, we don’t see much of it. Even his most defining character trait—his alert, instinctive, and not irrational fear—takes a holiday when it’s convenient for the plot. Does he notice that the softhearted Teenya (Susan Oliver) keeps hesitating and looking guilty? Does it occur to him that a species with advanced technology and effortless telepathy might, worryingly, find him a little underdeveloped? Apparently not. That’s partly because the episode has to be compressed and streamlined—if Sam’s fears aren’t assuaged, him being suddenly, horribly vindicated in them doesn’t have as much impact—but it still leaves him a choppily developed character.
Paul Comi’s Marcusson is more consistent, though he too is driven by plot constraints to the point where a practical and moral belief, beautifully expressed at the start, eventually becomes a hobbyhorse. But—both in terms of writing and in terms of fate—he gets off easy by dying halfway through.
In a way, I think Marcusson might have made the more interesting protagonist: his tragic flaw is that while he’s absolutely right, he underestimates what that means. His blinkered optimism—which to some extent has to come from his vantage point as a healthy, middle-class, white, male American—gives him an all-too-limited understanding of what it means to be human. He assumes, in short, that a person will recognize another person and treat them well, that their common worth will be apparent. He doesn’t understand, at least not on a gut level, that it’s easy for someone to be confronted with someone else’s humanity and yet dismiss it.
“If they’ve got minds and hearts, then they’ve got souls,” he tells Sam—but having a soul, in whatever sense you want to define it, has never stopped anyone from doing evil. If anything, having a soul is kind of a prerequisite for committing truly evil acts. We don’t think of earthquakes as malicious, and we don’t—these days—arrest animals for murder. Humanity, on the other hand, has always had the capacity—often even the propensity—for unkindness, cruelty, and atrocity. It’s within the scope of what we do.
Usually, Rod Serling’s view of humanity, as expressed in his Twilight Zone episodes, emphasizes our better qualities: heart, warmth, and imagination. Serling recognized human kindness and believed that it sometimes got extended even in the darkest of places. He had a hope and a passion for people. But I think he had no patience with a certain kind of cheap, denialist optimism that refuses to admit people’s capacity for committing absolute horrors. He was, after all, a Jewish man who served in World War II; it would have been frankly bizarre if he’d had a sunny view of human nature.
So I think it’s unsurprising that he responded to Fairman’s story, with its bitter punchline that says more about us than about the Martians. People are alike everywhere … and think about how people really act. For that matter, people are alike everywhere … and look at all the things we’ve done to people. After all, there were human zoos on Earth, too.
It’s an ending that, for me, has enough resonance that I really can get over how the whole rest of the story gets made into a greased chute leading up to that final moment. It’s not just a momentary jolt—it actually has made me think. I like that it’s not “the Martians were the Other all along” but rather “oh, right—I just remembered the full scope of human behavior. Fuck.”
A small detail I really like is the seeming adoration that Teenya beams at Sam in an early scene. Teenya eventually develops enough of a soft spot for him to feel a little guilty about luring him into captivity (although not, at least of the ending, guilty enough to do anything about it—she’s a sentimentalist, not an activist), but this isn’t that, not yet. The first time through, it looks like a crush, like a slightly annoying lapse into the presumption that of course the alien woman will immediately fall for the Earth man. In retrospect, the look is much closer to the way you would coo over a particularly adorable dog, especially one doing something like standing on its hind legs: “Aww, how cute, he thinks he’s people!”
The horror of the ending is also well-handled. When Sam frantically pulls back the long drapes, looking for a way out, and discovers only blank walls behind the curtains, it’s legitimately chilling, even before the walls slide back to reveal the bars and the surrounding crowd. The falsely expansive habitat, with its doors that don’t open, is another good detail. Of course they would underestimate the amount of space he needs, just as they overestimate how content he’ll be to trade freedom for an environment they assure him will be “familiar” and “comfortable.” The silent crowd—telepathically communicating with each other, and no longer making any effort to reach out to him—is great, especially since the episode makes sure to include a fair number of a children. These are people on a pleasant family outing, getting a little nervous when the tiger lunges at the bars. Eventually, these kids will get an ice cream cone and write the whole thing up for a school paper, and life will go on.
Closing: Specie of animal brought back alive. Interesting similarity in physical characteristics to human beings in head, trunk, arms, legs, hands, feet. Very tiny undeveloped brain. Comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself Samuel Conrad. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found The Twilight Zone.
MVP(s): Director Mitchell Leisen. There are some great shots in this, but even more importantly, there’s a deftly executed sense of horror—the script is fine, but with slack direction, it wouldn’t work at all. Leisen makes it sharp and memorable.
Astronaut Survival Rating: Two stars. You might live, but you’ll probably wish you hadn’t.
Costuming: I’m still not over the fact that the Martians are all wearing togas. It’s a Star Trek-esque detail, and while I love original Trek, the “we borrowed these costumes from a historical picture filmed by the same studio” approach is sort of unintentionally hilarious here.
Personal Tier: Solidly Enjoyable to Good.
Up Next: Execution.
Directed by: Mitchell Leisen
Written by: Rod Serling
Based on: “Brothers Beyond the Void,” by Paul W. Fairman
Opening: You're looking at a specie of flimsy little two-legged animal with extremely small heads, whose name is Man. Warren Marcusson, age thirty-five. Samuel A. Conrad, age thirty-one. They're taking a highway into space, Man unshackling himself and sending his tiny, groping fingers up into the unknown. Their destination is Mars, and in just a moment we'll land there with them.
Spoilers abound, and this is a very twist-dependent episode. There's a summary available here.
This is one of those episodes defined by its twist—it has the structure of a bleak joke. Everything in it—the thematic concerns, the characterization, and even the SF elements—are all geared at getting us to the grim punchline of Roddy McDowall’s Sam Conrad in his habitat, a gawked-at zoo exhibit who has come to understand a bitter truth far too late. To some extent, that ultra-tight focus weakens the episode … but the sting in this episode’s tail is so brutally apt that I tend to give the weaknesses in this one a pass.
Which isn’t to say that they’re not there. In particular, the story’s narrowness doesn’t do its central performers any favors. Roddy McDowall succeeds at making Sam Conrad convincingly high-strung, so tightly wound by anxiety that he even makes us nervous, but he could do a lot more than that if the episode would let him off the leash a little. Instead, he’s ushered from plot point to plot point without being allowed to dwell on any of the emotional beats. If he feels a stab of conscience at keeping Marcusson (Paul Comi) from even glimpsing the world he died trying to reach, for example, we don’t see much of it. Even his most defining character trait—his alert, instinctive, and not irrational fear—takes a holiday when it’s convenient for the plot. Does he notice that the softhearted Teenya (Susan Oliver) keeps hesitating and looking guilty? Does it occur to him that a species with advanced technology and effortless telepathy might, worryingly, find him a little underdeveloped? Apparently not. That’s partly because the episode has to be compressed and streamlined—if Sam’s fears aren’t assuaged, him being suddenly, horribly vindicated in them doesn’t have as much impact—but it still leaves him a choppily developed character.
Paul Comi’s Marcusson is more consistent, though he too is driven by plot constraints to the point where a practical and moral belief, beautifully expressed at the start, eventually becomes a hobbyhorse. But—both in terms of writing and in terms of fate—he gets off easy by dying halfway through.
In a way, I think Marcusson might have made the more interesting protagonist: his tragic flaw is that while he’s absolutely right, he underestimates what that means. His blinkered optimism—which to some extent has to come from his vantage point as a healthy, middle-class, white, male American—gives him an all-too-limited understanding of what it means to be human. He assumes, in short, that a person will recognize another person and treat them well, that their common worth will be apparent. He doesn’t understand, at least not on a gut level, that it’s easy for someone to be confronted with someone else’s humanity and yet dismiss it.
“If they’ve got minds and hearts, then they’ve got souls,” he tells Sam—but having a soul, in whatever sense you want to define it, has never stopped anyone from doing evil. If anything, having a soul is kind of a prerequisite for committing truly evil acts. We don’t think of earthquakes as malicious, and we don’t—these days—arrest animals for murder. Humanity, on the other hand, has always had the capacity—often even the propensity—for unkindness, cruelty, and atrocity. It’s within the scope of what we do.
Usually, Rod Serling’s view of humanity, as expressed in his Twilight Zone episodes, emphasizes our better qualities: heart, warmth, and imagination. Serling recognized human kindness and believed that it sometimes got extended even in the darkest of places. He had a hope and a passion for people. But I think he had no patience with a certain kind of cheap, denialist optimism that refuses to admit people’s capacity for committing absolute horrors. He was, after all, a Jewish man who served in World War II; it would have been frankly bizarre if he’d had a sunny view of human nature.
So I think it’s unsurprising that he responded to Fairman’s story, with its bitter punchline that says more about us than about the Martians. People are alike everywhere … and think about how people really act. For that matter, people are alike everywhere … and look at all the things we’ve done to people. After all, there were human zoos on Earth, too.
It’s an ending that, for me, has enough resonance that I really can get over how the whole rest of the story gets made into a greased chute leading up to that final moment. It’s not just a momentary jolt—it actually has made me think. I like that it’s not “the Martians were the Other all along” but rather “oh, right—I just remembered the full scope of human behavior. Fuck.”
A small detail I really like is the seeming adoration that Teenya beams at Sam in an early scene. Teenya eventually develops enough of a soft spot for him to feel a little guilty about luring him into captivity (although not, at least of the ending, guilty enough to do anything about it—she’s a sentimentalist, not an activist), but this isn’t that, not yet. The first time through, it looks like a crush, like a slightly annoying lapse into the presumption that of course the alien woman will immediately fall for the Earth man. In retrospect, the look is much closer to the way you would coo over a particularly adorable dog, especially one doing something like standing on its hind legs: “Aww, how cute, he thinks he’s people!”
The horror of the ending is also well-handled. When Sam frantically pulls back the long drapes, looking for a way out, and discovers only blank walls behind the curtains, it’s legitimately chilling, even before the walls slide back to reveal the bars and the surrounding crowd. The falsely expansive habitat, with its doors that don’t open, is another good detail. Of course they would underestimate the amount of space he needs, just as they overestimate how content he’ll be to trade freedom for an environment they assure him will be “familiar” and “comfortable.” The silent crowd—telepathically communicating with each other, and no longer making any effort to reach out to him—is great, especially since the episode makes sure to include a fair number of a children. These are people on a pleasant family outing, getting a little nervous when the tiger lunges at the bars. Eventually, these kids will get an ice cream cone and write the whole thing up for a school paper, and life will go on.
Closing: Specie of animal brought back alive. Interesting similarity in physical characteristics to human beings in head, trunk, arms, legs, hands, feet. Very tiny undeveloped brain. Comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself Samuel Conrad. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found The Twilight Zone.
MVP(s): Director Mitchell Leisen. There are some great shots in this, but even more importantly, there’s a deftly executed sense of horror—the script is fine, but with slack direction, it wouldn’t work at all. Leisen makes it sharp and memorable.
Astronaut Survival Rating: Two stars. You might live, but you’ll probably wish you hadn’t.
Costuming: I’m still not over the fact that the Martians are all wearing togas. It’s a Star Trek-esque detail, and while I love original Trek, the “we borrowed these costumes from a historical picture filmed by the same studio” approach is sort of unintentionally hilarious here.
Personal Tier: Solidly Enjoyable to Good.
Up Next: Execution.