The Twilight Zone (1959) -- Season 2 Episode 7 (Nick of Time)

I remember reading once that if you removed the star signs from the newspaper’s horoscopes, most people wouldn’t be able to know which one was meant for them.  This is how vague they are.  If you take a step back, how could a set of vague sentences accurately guide the lives of roughly 8% of the population?  There are roughly 327 million  people in the US.  Do you really think that your horoscope can really be that effective for about 25 million US residents?  What about those living in the rest of the world?

Don and Pat Carter find themselves in a similar situation.  They’re passing through a small town when their car breaks down.  The mechanic has to order a part, leaving the newlyweds to explore the area.  They start with lunch in a diner, where they find a small fortune-telling napkin holder.  You can ask any question you want for a penny, provided that it calls for a yes or no answer.

Don is intrigued.  He starts with something simple:  Will he get the promotion he applied for.  The fortune teller responds that it has been decided in his favor.  When Don calls, he finds out that it already has.  One might chalk that up to a lucky response.  So, Don asks other questions with similar outcomes.  When asked about the car being fixed, Don is told that it has already been taken care of.

The answers are vague, but seem accurate.  Thus, Don becomes obsessed with the contraption.  Pat has to be the voice of reason, pulling him back from surrendering control.  What Don fails to realize is that the cards spit out by the machine were probably printed long ago in some factory somewhere.  Much like a fortune cookie or daily horoscope, the person writing the message is doing so for someone they will never even meet.

Most people can take a fortune cookie or horoscope as entertainment.  Even if you believe in such things, I don’t imagine that you’d live your life by either one.  You take it for what it is:  an inspirational message, at best.  For Don to make decisions based on what a simple machine says makes any outcome meaningless.  What good is a fixed car if Don won’t leave the diner?  What good is a promotion if it’s in another city?

There comes a point where you have to step away and accept that you don’t have all the answers.  The true measure of success isn’t in always being right or knowledgeable.  Instead, it’s how you handle what you don’t know and dealing with things that you don’t get right the first time.  Pat realizes this.  What does it matter knowing where they’ll live if they can’t enjoy it?

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The Twilight Zone (1959) -- Season 1 Episode 14 (Third from the Sun)

 WARNING:  Im going to give away the ending of the episode.  If you haven't seen it yet, you've been warned.

I remember reading about the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica and their decision to use things that we’d recognize.  This was particularly evident with clothing.  Someone wearing a nice suit probably means that he’s probably a lawyer.  If it looks like they’re wearing a uniform, they’re probably military.  I thought of this when I watched Third From the Sun.

The episode takes place on a planet that looks a lot like Earth.  They have factories with workers that go home to houses with wives and, possibly, children.  They play card games and have telephones.  In fact, two of the factory workers talk about all-out war being realized within the next 48 hours.  One of those men, Will Sturka, has a plan to steal a spaceship along with coworker Jerry Riden.  They’ll take their respective wives and Sturka’s daughter to a new planet, some 11,000,000 miles away, which happens to be called Earth.

It’s strange how some of the Twilight Zone episodes can seem somewhat dated whereas others, like this one, still seem relevant.  Consider that Hawaii just hat a threat of an inbound missile.  Such threats have always existed.  If you knew that a civilization-ending attack was coming, wouldn’t you want to get off the planet?

It may seem a little odd that the buildings look so familiar or that they have playing cards much as we do, but Most Twilight Zone episodes had less than 30 minutes to work with.  There’s not much time to waste on figuring out what’s what.  Those escaping go from factory to house to ship to Earth in short order.

This is why I’m a little hesitant to call out the fact that Earth is supposed to be so close to this other planet.  The distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 93,000,000 miles.  We don’t know that their mile is the same as ours, but we can assume that they’re similar insofar as this episode is concerned.  It seemed that The Twilight Zone wasn’t so good with astronomical distances.

When the wife serves chocolate cake and lemonade, it seems odd that they would have lemons and chocolate.  However, these details are minor.  What we call the refreshments is unimportant.  In all the major respects, the societies are similar.  So much so that we realize that the group of five people haven’t really escaped disaster.  At best, they’ve only delayed it.

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