Except for the ending, this felt like one of the original 'Star Trek' series episodes. Crew arrives on a habitable location on Mars and tries to take stock of the place, but runs into various Martians who point them in different directions. Finally they arrive at a location where they are greeted like heroes, only to learn that they're stuck in an alien insane asylum! Try as he might, Captain Williams (David Birney) can't convince Mr. X (Gordon Pinsent) that the other members of his four man team aren't a figment of Martian imagination or some sort of hallucination. X is so perplexed by what he takes to be unreal, that he winds up shooting every one of the astronauts, just to convince himself that they don't really exist. When that doesn't work out, the leader of the Martian lunatic asylum takes his own life. The ending is abrupt enough to wonder what the point of the story was, suggesting there might have been something more to it when Bradbury first wrote it.
Review of The Earthmen
