Top TZ Episodes: Where Is Everybody?
This episode is the very first episode of the Twilight Zone. It was initially recorded as the pilot episode. It was filmed on the Universal lot as opposed to the rest of the show filmed at MGM.
It's about a guy who finds himself all alone in a small town. Not in a forever alone, dramatic kind of a way, but in a no one around for miles sort of way.
It would be a ghost town, except it doesn't even seem to be a place where the spirits tread. It weirdly looks like everyone just left. The guy wanders through the empty town with no memory of who he is, or why he is in this place. He is in a flight suit and has a vague recollection that he is in the Air Force.
The most unsettling thing is he starts to feel like someone is watching him. This becomes more evident as the day wears on. All this results in a twist ending you won't see coming.
I won't spoil the ending, but it has to do with imagining what will happen with the new and exciting frontier on humanity’s horizon. Science, the Cold War, new technology and isolation are all topics and themes that will be visited multiple times throughout the season and the series.
That is what I love about this show, the ability to take you to a time and place.
In my case, the early 1960’s was before my time, yet they could really paint a picture of what that world felt like then. A world where new technology and the new frontiers of space and the existential dread of the Cold War all first came into the light.
It's like the writers looked at the spirit of the times and thought; “What will happen next?”
A lot of the time, in this episode and the series as a whole; the main character wonders if the threat or the paradigm shift is external, in their own mind, or supernatural in origin.
Things were changing rapidly in the early 1960s. People looked to the world and events of the time with a sense of disbelief. Anything seemed possible both good and bad.
This sentiment was something I could not relate to… until recently that is.
Who hasn't turned on the news lately and wondered if any of this is real; or is it in one's own mind?
That is truly the essence of the Twilight Zone.
Mike O.
