I’ve been watching some of the old “Twilight Zone” reruns lately. Time and again, there have been inaccuracies mentioned that can’t be excused by the fact that these were produced some 45 years ago.
For instance, in one episode, “The Lonely,” a convicted murderer is kept in solitary confinement on an asteroid with enough mass to have earth-like gravity, and it’s described as being 9 million miles from earth.
9 million miles? Surely, in 1959, people knew that there was no such object a mere 9 million miles from earth (and the implication that the distance is constant is even more baffling).
Why didn’t they make an attempt to get a little more accuracy into the show? They’d be better off just not mentioning the distance in the first place.
The episode “The Midnight Sun” has the Earth moving closer to the Sun and thereby getting hotter and hotter. Okay, that’s at least within the realm of possibility but we are then told it is midnight while the Sun is shining brightly overhead. (We are also told that the Sun never sets). If that’s the case, there must be some spots on the Earth that are in total darkness (and damned cold) all the time. There could also be some temperate places where they are in a continual dusk/dawn. Nonetheless it was a good episode. (45 years later and I still watch them)
JoeSki
Yes it was. And in the final scene, the Earth is getting colder and it looks very dark outside. We are told that the Earth is moving away from the Sun and therefore the Sun never appears *anywhere *on Earth anymore. :rolleyes:
(Same mistake - different direction)
Even as a kid the cases where they have earth-gravity asteroids close to earth, or people crashing on nearby planets always bothered me. But even then I realized that it was dramatic license, of the same sort that let planet Mongo be so close by in the Flash Gordon comics and serials. Heck, even Heinlein was still writing about habitable Mars and Venus into the 1960s, when it was already pretty clear that was far from likely.
I remember some cheesy scifi flick where aliens abduct some boneheaded jock-type nuclear scientist and a bimbo who wouldn’t even admit to having slept with him and take him off to their planet to make nuclear fuel. What a far-fetched idea. What was that “scientists” name anyway?
Damned if I know. I’ll tell you what, though – suspending disbelief is one thing, but if they did something downright stupid (like, say, naming a cat “Neutron”, “Because he’s so positive”) then I’d be justified in lobotomizing the bunch of 'em.
You got most of it. It was a fever-induced dream and the new ice age was being caused by Earth getting further from the sun. I’d give them a pass considering the circumstances.
Don’t blame TZ for the shortciomings of To Serve Man. Like many TZ episodes, it started life as a science fiction/fantasy short story with a twist/punch. In this case the story was by Damon Knight, who admitted to its status as a “light” story and a bit of a kludge (“their idioms are very much like outs”, indeed! Incidentally, his aliens looked more like the Gamorrean Guards out of Return of the Jedi and less like a pre-“Jaws” Richard Kiel with a built-up forehead). It was never supposed to be a serious or deep story – it was piece of fluff with a sting in the tail, a diversion.
That could happen, well, sort of. It would be theoretically possible for the Earth to move far enough away from the Sun so that the Sun just looked like another star. Then there would be no day, so effectively the Sun would never appear anywhere on Earth anymore.
You couldn’t move the Earth close enough to the Sun that the Sun would be overhead everywhere on Earth all the time without having the Earth actually inside the Sun.
And how exactly is that relevant? Nothing in that review discusses the science or other “errors”; it describes bad storytelling: characters behaving like morons.
So, evidently, if Twilight Zone had terrible stories, but they were free of “glaring” errors, it’d be OK with you.
JThunder
Regarding the episode “To Serve Man”, maybe the Kannamits have different standards of culinary appreciation. Also, perhaps their taste buds and olfactory senses work differently from ours.
Staying with that same episode, the alleged code-breaking - how could they do it? They have one book. Where is the inter-stellar Rosetta Stone that would translate one language to the other? Did they go to Barnes and Noble and find a Kannamit-English / English-Kannamit dictionary? And how could they manage just to translate capital letters and be unable (until the very end of the episode) to figure out the lower case?
Again, as I said, it’s easy to pick these apart but I still have fun watching them (except for the really crappy ones like “The Bewitching Pool”)
Incidentally, Lloyd Bochner, the star of “To Serve Man” passed away about 6 months ago. Whenever you saw him in anything else did you always think of that TZ episode? I did. It was great that he was able to reprise his role in one scene from Naked Gun 2 ½ - the Smell Of Fear.
This is why I said what I did in my post above. The way they “translate” the alien language isn’t like linguistics at all, but like code-breaking. Marc Scott Zicree made the same complaint in The Twilight Zone Companion. It falls apart if you think about it too much. It’s not deep, reasoned, science fiction, with clever insights about the Human Condition, it’s basically just a joke. But that’s OK – jokes have their place, too. This one is obviously deeply embedded in the public consciousness, and so it has to have struck some sort of nerve. How many people remember individual episodes of My Little Margie?
(By the way, this “foreign language as a code” concept isn’t unique to this story/episode. I’ve encountered it many times. Look up a 19th century “Lost World” novel called The Goddess of Atvatabar)
