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"The Twilight Zone" And When the Sky Was Opened (1959)


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19 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
That's Not the Way I Remember It, 4 juillet 2006
10/10
Author: dougdoepke de Claremont,USA

Space probe returns with three astronauts. However, strange things start happening to them as they glory in their triumph.

One of series' spookiest entries. It's fascinating to watch the byplay between the fun-loving astronauts spiral away from flyboy hijinks into the nervous hysteria of brave men caught up in the inexplicable. Some fine group performances, especially Rod Taylor's whose mounting panic reminds me of Kevin Mc Carthy's unhinged doctor in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The brief shot of this cool professional coming unglued while posed against a cosmic starscape could serve as an icon for the entire series. Note also the clever touch of posing Charles Aidman against a faintly blinking neon, implying that his stay on earth is shaky at best. Speaking of the bar scene, watch the busty babe's amusing what's-his-line-gonna-be reaction to Taylor's aggressive approach. It's this contrast between the seemingly normal and the emerging paranormal that heightens the show's effect. One teasing question presented is how much our sense of reality depends not only on what our five senses tell us, but on how much we can agree on. That is, a reality composed not only on what we've seen, but on what we can agree on having seen. Put the two in conflict and worlds, like Taylor's, come apart.

Outstanding episode. One of the series' best.

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10 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Very similar to "Private -- Keep Out!" a short story by Philip MacDonald, 1 juin 2006
9/10
Author: jayschif de United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The short story "Private -- Keep Out!" begins when the narrator bumps into his old friend Charles one day after work. At their old haunt for drinks, Charles nervously asks about a man named Adrian Archer. The narrator has no recollection of this man, however, which makes Charles extremely paranoid, since Charles claims all three were good friends and that Adrian Archer had become an overnight Hollywood star. Charles had hoped that the narrator would have remembered Adrian, but apparently no one, including Adrian's parents, believe he ever existed. At the narrator's ignorance of Adrian, Charles suddenly feels like he doesn't belong -- that he will be the next person to be wiped from existence! He goes to the phone to make a call, but doesn't return for 30 minutes. The narrator asks the bartender if Charles is still in the phone-booth, but the bartender has no memory of serving anyone else. Uneasy, the narrator gets a feeling that he will be the next to be erased. The Twilight Zone episode basically steals this story and juxtaposes it with paranoia over space flight. Shot in 1959, two years before the first man orbited the Earth, viewers may have felt such nervousness over what may lie out there in the great void. Personally, I like the short story much better, because it doesn't hint at a cause for the characters' disappearances. Although I wonder how Philip MacDonald felt about having his story ripped off, this episode is well done.

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Consummate Twilight Zone, 26 septembre 2008
9/10
Author: Hitchcoc de United States

This is a really wonderful episode. Rod Taylor has supposedly returned from a space trip with two of his fellow astronauts. Their ship has crashed. The story begins as he visits Jim Hutton in the hospital. He is beside himself because it seems that there was a third member of the team who, according to him, has disappeared. As a matter of fact, it's as if he never existed. We then go to flashback and are treated to an eerie sense that not only do these men disappear; then sense their own passage to nothingness. It is never explained to us, but we are quickly pulled into the psyches of the two remaining men. They try to figure out their sense of being and aren't able to do so. This is what The Twilight Zone was all about. It feeds us an enigma and then lets us try to put it all together. One can wax philosophical, but somehow these men disappear and we don't know why.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Are you really here?, 22 mai 2006
9/10
Author: scross-5 de United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This episode seems to me after several viewings a critical self questioning of existence, the feeling one would have being kicked out of an organization that one felt totally at home, for instance the human race. When as Harrington, the first to "Go Away", got the feeling that he wasn't supposed to be here anymore; maybe he was echoing what most folks of older age feel when they lose all their friends and family, feeling they don't belong here anymore. The premise of the episode, "something got the plane and it's operators for 24 hours, let them come back, then..." slowly snatched them back one by one is storying a science fiction angle to explain an earthbound reality.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Three astronauts return to a strange fate..., 6 avril 2006
Author: toyfreaks de Minneapolis

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This is one of my favorite Rod Serling scripts. Its "suprise ending" is known to the characters and audience almost the whole episode. Yet it is still somehow potently shocking. My gut still knots up every time I see it... because I know what is coming.

Three astronauts return from an aborted space mission. That they returned at all is a mystery which progressively unravels. As the improbability of their survival reveals itself, they begin to disappear, along with any memory of their existence.

Astronaut Colonel Ed Harrington is played in flashback by Charles Aidman, who later narrated the 1985-87 Twilight Zone series. He is the first to disappear, as witnessed by a distressed Colonel Clegg Forbes, played by Rod Taylor. Without any special effect at all, the character simply vanishes out of the story.

Col. Forbes recounts the vanishing to third astronaut Major William Gart, played by a baby-faced Jim Hutton. Maj. Gart, of course, has never heard of Ed Harrington, and the newspaper headline remembers only a two-man space mission.

Col. Forbes' detached confusion is punctuated by his own sudden departure. It is Gart's abject terror at Forbes' disappearance, and the realization that he is next, that sells the whole story home.

Director Douglas Heyes had a dynamic style that brought a Film Noir quality to television production. I will have to check out some more of his television work.

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typical yet intriguing, 19 mars 2009
7/10
Author: HelloTexas11 de United States

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'And When the Sky Was Opened' is a good example of a story type that has been used many, many times, not only on 'Twilight Zone' but in seemingly hundreds of other TV shows and movies. It's one where the main character (or characters) experience something that nobody else does and almost inevitably, they break down and at some point scream, "I'm NOT insane! Why won't anyone believe me?" or something similar. In this case, three test pilots go up in an experimental aircraft and when they come back down, one of them disappears. But nobody notices except one of the other pilots. As usual for this kind of plot, there is the desperate effort of trying to prove the man existed and went on the flight as well, to no avail. Despite the well-worn storyline, 'And When the Sky Was Opened' manages to hold interest with some clever dialogue and visual tricks and a fine, manic performance by Rod Taylor. Rod Serling's teleplay (loosely based on a short story by Richard Matheson) throws in some diverting speculation as to why what's happening is happening as well.

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1 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
An Episode which Shakes our Sense of Reality, 22 septembre 2008
9/10
Author: philhodgman de East Lansing, MI

Rod Taylor and Jim Hutton give appropriately creepy performances in this tale which explores the tenuousness of perceived reality. Three astronauts are in the hospital after their spaceship crashes to earth. The spaceship had been out of communication with Mission Control for some time prior to its being found in the desert with all three astronauts alive.

As the astronauts are released from the hospital, the world as they know it turns upside down, one astronaut at a time. By the time the episode ends, the viewer is left questioning basic premises of our existence, such as memory, observation, existence itself.

Rod Taylor's character is strong and confident, then confused and unsure, and finally desperate and panicky as he tries to figure out what is happening to everyone's memory.

The story poses large, existential questions, of "another dimension," worthy of portrayal in the Twilight Zone.

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2 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
A great episode with a few glitches, 21 février 2007
8/10
Author: (magicunicorn@spanky.co.uk) de Lincoln, England

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

'And When the Sky Was Opened' is a much better episode than its appalling title would suggest. Serling's script is loosely based on a short story by Richard Matheson. Matheson was the other main contributor of scripts to 'The Twilight Zone' alongside Serling and Beaumont, but in the case of this episode he merely contributed the germ of an idea and Serling ran with it.

The story of three astronauts who return from space after a mysterious blackout, only to find themselves disappearing from existence, 'And When the Sky Was Opened' focuses mainly on Colonel Clegg Forbes, the only person in the world who can remember his former shipmate Ed Harrington. Told in flashback as Forbes attempts to convince the other astronaut of Harrington's existence, the episode brilliantly portrays a sense of slowly encroaching fear. In the part of Forbes, Rod Taylor is excellent. Forbes is a desperate man driven to a breakdown so severe that it culminates in him leaping through a glass door and Taylor is thoroughly convincing in his slow descent into madness. The rest of the cast is adequate, save for James Hutton as third astronaut William Gart and Paul Bryar as a bartender. Hutton's performance is over-dramatic, making the final moment in which he disappears laughable rather than terrifying. The problem with Bryar's performance is more to do with his inability to pull drinks, an essential asset in convincing people you are a barman. The beers he pulls for the astronauts are at least 80% head.

It is obvious throughout the episode what is going to happen at the end and Serling makes no attempt to hide this, throwing in a clever scene in which Taylor backs away against a night sky and looks like he will disappear at any second but ultimately does not. Many people found the climax unsatisfying because it offered no explanation of why exactly the astronauts were disappearing but such a thing is unnecessary. The power of the episode stems from the viewers own answer to that question. Perhaps Ed Harrington is correct when he suggests that they should not have returned from the mysterious blackout they experienced. Is this the Twilight Zone realigning existence as it should be? It's up to us to decide where these space heroes end up and this air of uncertainty is far more effective than tying up the plot with a neat bow would have been.

'And When the Sky Was Opened' is an excellent episode but it is sadly marred by a cock-up that blights the climactic scene even more than James Hutton's performance. Rod Taylor does a lovely job of portraying the experience of disappearing as if it is a pleasurable feeling which he almost gives in to too easily. He snaps out of it and runs to the mirror only to find he has no reflection. Or that's how it should have worked. Instead, we can clearly see Taylor's hand and some of his arm in the mirror. It's a muffed perspective trick which makes Taylor's terrified reaction seem a little strange. "What was his problem?", the viewer ends up thinking, "I could see him clearly enough!"

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