Well, you never know…something like that could be a writer’s ill attempt at sarcasm. Now, if they did something really really stupid – like putting a bunch of mutated bugs in charge of security – that would be a problem.
I think my favorite Twilight Zone error is really only one in hindsight. Almost every time that the show features astronauts exploring a planet, the astronauts are your average everyday Joes. Common mugs. As if they went out and hired a bunch of truck drivers and stuck them in a rocket ship. They’ve got the vocabularies of high school dropouts and there’s usually at least one who goes to pieces almost immediately.
Compare and contrast to the highly trained and disciplined astronauts in, say, Apollo 13.
Soylent Green, the book where the movie got it’s title, not the book the movie was based on.
The original Soylent Green had to do with an executive at a food manufacturing corporation reporting that it’s soybean based artificial foods did a good job of replicating the real flavor of meat as designated by color: yellow, red, or brown for Chicken, beef, and pork etc. However Soylent Green was not only a totally artificial flavor but also the corporation’s best seller! After months of experimention, they have concluded Soylent Green replicates the flavor of human flesh! :eek:
Tastes vary. More for me. *
I always thought the big hint came from the pictures showing how to debone…
*Yeah? Well how do YOU know? 
“To Serve Man” also breaks down because, really, whether or not the humans found out about the book that day, the next week or whenever didn’t make a bit of practical difference. The aliens were much too powerful and their nefarious plans would not be affected one way or the other. In fact, it could be argued that the translators did themselves a disservice by robbing themselves of blissful ignorance much earlier than they needed.
It’s no more ridiculous than the pilot episode of Lost in Space. The Jupiter 2 is only under way for a few hours and yet somehow ends up who knows where in the galaxy.
The Robot was programmed to go nuts at the 8 hour mark in the trip. Assuming the ship could instantaneously reach light speed at launch, it would only be about 5 billion miles out, which would put it about 1 billion miles past Pluto (or thereabouts).
I thought that was the stupidest misunderstanding of interstellar distances - until Space 1999 came along.
Asteroids with atmosphere were a staple of 1940’s early 1950’s pulp fiction, the kind you’d find in Planet Stories. TZ was following an old tradition.
You’re just not cooking it right. C’mon over the the Ukulele household for a barbecue.
Whocan forget the one where Margie writes a fake letter saying there is uranium on some property Freddie has inherited so Vern will give him a job; Vern finds out what she did and turns the tables by making Margie think their is uranium behind their apartment building?
“You’re traveling through another dimension; a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. There’s a signpost up ahead… next stop: the Twilight Zone!”
This is a total lie. Watching the program simply does not result in any measurably abnormal dimensional phenomena. This can be easily demonstrated with two synchronized atomic clocks. Place one in front of a 24-hour *Twilight Zone * marathon, while allowing the other clock to view an equivalent amount of Cheers, or a box of Quaker Oats. If the first clock were truly experiencing any sort of relativistic displacement, a discrepancy between the two clocks would quickly become apparent in accordance with the so-called Twin Paradox prediction of Special Relativity.
Why do you keep lying to me like that, Serling? Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.
De gustibus non est disputandum, of course. But consider the possibility that you may just have gotten a bad one. It happens.
Yet more proof (as if any more were needed) that Richard Kiel makes anything better.
I can’t believe I’m defending “Lost in Space”, but . . . I suppose if the Jupiter 2 could get up to a significant percentage of lightspeed right off the bat, then you’d have to take time dilation into account, i.e. the first 8 hours shiptime might correspond to a much longer time on Earth. (What was the ship’s mode of propulsion, anyway?)
What am I doing? Hell with it. The whole show was moronic, top to bottom, start to finish.
And I understand the concept of fiction pretty well, I think. But if you’re going to set a show in, say, New York City and then casually mention that San Diego is a twenty-minute bicycle ride away, it’s going to jar. Kinda takes away from the verisimilitude.
Remember the “Twilight Zone” episode with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery?
Baldwin - I sure remember that episode. It was called “Two”.
Even though it was stated that the story may be about any 2 countries and might not even be confined to Earth, didn’t you get the distinct impression that Charles Bronson was the American and Elizabeth Montgomery was the Russian? Now that I think of it, there were no glaring errors in that episode.
Re: Two. Her only line was in russian. Really an excellent episode. Bronson can act. Which given his eighties output came as a bit of a surprise to me. Also, Elizabeth Montgomery is smoking hot, even covered with dirt.
I don’t think Shatner is ever on the wing. Hanging out of the window, yes. The gremlin is on the wing, but gremilins can do that kind of stuff.
Of course it happens. You HAVE to eat only the bad ones!
Have you never heard the saying "You can’t keep a **good **man down?
One thing that always bugged me about this story:What are the odds that in the alien language, the verb “serve” would coincidentally have exactly the same double meaning as in English?
Darren – see my first post. Even Damon Knight admitted that this was a stretch, and states in his story (by way of explanation) that “some idioms were the same in both languages”. It’s not inconceivable – “Derecho” in Spanish and “Right” in English have the same two meanings, although they’re probably related somewhere down the line. It’s a lot less likely with a completely alien tiongue.
Tastes do vary from person to person.
The last line of a Robert Bloch story along the very same lines. 
You mean “The Feast in the Abbey,” from The Opener of the Way? (Supposedly Bloch’s first published short story)
[spoiler]"…I can never bear the menace nor the memory of what I saw when the abbot Henricus lifted up the lid of the small silver platter to disclose the rest of the meat…
“It was the head of my brother.”[/spoiler]