What you have to keep in mind while watching these 'Tales of Tomorrow' is that they were made in the early 1950's with television still in its infancy. The sets look cheap and the stories are very minimal, but the writing for them managed to be fairly original, at least for the few I've seen. 'The Crystal Egg' starts out as a curio shop holdover from a 'pile of junk' as the shop owner's wife (Josephine Brown) described it, but when a tall stranger entering Cave's (Edgar Stehli) store expresses interest, it gives the shopkeeper the idea that he might be able to gouge the buyer for a few extra pounds. To be sure, he brings it over to Cambridge University professor Frederick Vaneck (Thomas Mitchell) to check it out and perhaps run some tests. To Vaneck's astonishment, the rather large crystal glows in the professor's study, and upon closer inspection, a landscape appears to form inside. From the positioning of what looks like the planets Neptune and Saturn in the egg, Vaneck surmises that what he's seeing is a portion of Mars! There's even a horrible creature that shows up peering out of the crystal, causing Vaneck to write up his research and have it published lest his colleagues think he's going insane. However, the original curio shop owner, anxious to make a profitable sale, takes back the egg while Vaneck fears for his life over the discovery he made. An off-screen gunshot and a mysterious hand breaking Vaneck's recorded study of the crystal egg prove his fear of being killed to be well founded. From what I can tell from the few 'Tales of Tomorrow' I've seen, the abrupt ending seems to be a hallmark of this anthology program.
Review of The Crystal Egg
