It’s like people posting aren’t even reading the other posts. Just run with your “I’m smarter because I know it’s only a show!” I’m not sure what that gains anybody. At its logical conclusion, that mean NO criticism is valid. “It’s only a story”. Characters on TV shows could just pop in and out if thin air, defendants on Law and Order could turn into dragons in the witness stand, you can breathe in a vacuum, submarines can fly, characters make meth out of peanut butter and anti-freeze, LA has blizzards and NYC is a suburb of Paris. Name your absurdity! Who cares! It’s only a show!
While audiences in 1960 might not have know about asteroids, people who actually would travel there did. It wasn’t a mystery whether there were asteroids with 1.00 g gravity and blue skies and the sun as big as your thumb. Everyone knew there weren’t. Astronauts know how long and how much fuel and how much life support it would take to get there. And the characters in the show should certainly know.
No one is complaining, for example, about “And When the Sky was Opened”, where three astronauts return and one by one vanish as if they never were. Everyone know space travel doesn’t make you disappear from existence, yet it is an interesting episode. Why? Because while the situation is absurd, the characters aren’t stupid!
What I want to know is how do YOU know there are no asteroids and/or planets out there with Earth’s gravity and atmosphere? Have you visited each and every one?
So it’s plausible that an asteroid might maybe have Earth’s gravity and atmosphere. Isn’t it? Huh?
The thing is, based on this thread (I haven’t seen the episode, so correct me if I’m wrong) the fact that it’s supposed to be an asteroid has no actual bearing on the plot, right? I mean, if you scratched out every appearance of the word “asteroid” from the script and replaced it with the “exoplanet” or “parallel dimension”, would you have to make any other changes?
It would have to be either incredibly large (Earth- or Venus-sized) or very, very dense (high mass, strong gravity). I think the largest known asteroid is Ceres, 473 km in diameter, just large enough to be spherical.
Since no one has corrected this bit of ignorance: Serling was not just an actor. He was a very well known writer, and the creator of the show. He was an actor in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock was in introducing his show, and perhaps less since he wrote lots of the scripts.
Hamlet spoke Elizabethan English instead of Danish, but that’s beside the point because that’s not what Hamlet is about.
There’s a whole book by Leonard Stern, the critic, called A Martian Wouldn’t Say That, consisting of memos from TV executives who don’t get what the stories are about. Some details are critical. Some are just conventions, in order to have the story in the first place. Obviously that can be abused, and bad art abuses it. But special effects budgets are limited, and so you have to assume Earth gravity and not spend the whole budget on sets or rewrites to revamp details that don’t matter to the plot.
It’s like the Sherlock Holmes stories. Once the housekeeper’s name was Turner. Sometimes Watson’s war wound was his leg, sometimes his shoulder. In The Red Headed League, the pawnbroker starts work in April, works for two months, and the notice that the Red Headed League is dissolved is dated October 9.
But that’s not what the stories are about. Pick it apart if you want. If it spoils your appreciation, I’m sorry.
This grotesquely mischaracterizes Serling’s role in The Twilight Zone.
Serling was the creator of the show, and basically the Show Runner. He started out as a writer, first and foremost. He penned some of the best (generally non-SF/fantasy) teleplays of the 1950s ( Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight). It seemed like a serious career turn when he went into genre television, but he was brilliant at it, like everything else. Serling frequently wrote or rewrote TZ scripts himself. He certainly oversaw themall, then got in front of the camera to “present” them.
He wasn’t a shill, hired to mouth words for the show. To a large extent, he was the show. If there were scientific inconsistencies, they were definitely there with Serling’s knowledge and consent.
Reading Marc Scott Zicree’s Twilight Zone Companion you get the feeling that the effort for putting on the show was a massive, full-time one, which they kept up for FIVE freakin’ seasons (including one with hour-long episodes). They had TV’s endless maw to feed, and little enough time to do it. I’m willing to cut him some slack when he steps outside the bounds of reality.
IIRC, while the 3 surviving astronauts wander around in the beginning, they comment on the lack of a moon, and the odd luminous haze that blocks starlight at night…
Serling had aan observation, sort of a “rule”, which I think is a good judgement on any show: if a third of the episodes are great, a third are good, and a third crap, you’re doing great. The original TZ certainly follows this ration. IMO the 1986 revival was more like 60-30-10, so even better. By some opinions, ST:TOS follows the ratio as well.
TZ had three great writers penning most of the episodes: Serling, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.
Serling DIDN’T want to be the host. No one else would do it, so someone had to. He’s very stiff, but it works. Charles Aidman did well in the revival.
Rod Serling was no scientist and no science fiction writer. In 1958 he wrote a script that was vaguely similar to some science fiction he had read (although he hadn’t read much of it). CBS liked it and did it as a one-hour TV movie. It looked good to the CBS executives, so they got Serling to do a TV series with the same sort of ideas, and that was where Twilight Zone came from. He wrote some scripts himself and got some science fiction writers (that Ray Bradbury, an acquaintance of Serling, introduced him to) to write some additional scripts. It later became clear to Bradbury that Serling was using ideas taken from science fiction stories he’d read in his own scripts, although he was probably doing this unconsciously. Serling wasn’t really interested in science. He was just using vague science fiction and fantasy ideas he had picked up somewhere to make the political and social points that he earlier made in non-science fiction scripts:
Your use of hyperbole to distort my point is weak. That’s not what I’m saying nor is anyone else as far as I can tell.
Any criticism of any story must take into account the audience it’s written for, the context it’s written and the when it was written. That’s what most of the others are saying on this thread as well, read their comments. To criticize a 1960’s TV show because highly educated and trained astronauts / scientists at that time would have known something the general public probably didn’t is ridiculous.
The modern equivalent is saying “The Martian” is a shitty book and movie because the author deliberately misrepresented some the science for the sake of the story: Every astronaut and NASA scientist would know the Mars dust storm, even at those speeds would never do that kind of damage. (Which is true and a deliberate “misrepresentation” admitted by the author for the sake of dramatic tension.). So in your mind is that a legitimate criticism that makes it a shitty movie for the general public? Not to me, I thought it was great.
The Twilight Zone is set in a magical world where, in many episode, mystical things happen that couldn’t in real life. I see no reason for this not to be the same. In the Twilight Zone, the law of gravity is probably not the same.
