This episode gives you a good idea of how The Twilight Zone would take a given concept and then rework it to produce a number of different stories. In the series' first season you had #1.18 - The Last Flight, in which a British fighter pilot from World War II found himself transported into a 1960's future via a mysterious cloud formation. Here the theme is used to generate a time travel story that carries an entire plane load of passengers back into the past while a worried Captain (John Anderson) valiantly attempts to set things right.
I found it interesting that the 1939 version of LaGuardia field cleared Runway 22 for the Global Flight emergency landing. The TZ episode aired prior to this one in 1961 was titled "Twenty Two", and ended with the mid-air explosion of Flight 22 after a harrowing story line. I have to wonder if this was all done on purpose by Rod Serling and his creative staff as some kind of nod and wink to the viewers. Pretty cool in any event.
The other cool thing watching early TV is catching references to place names of an era gone by, in this case, the mention of Idlewild Airport before it became John F. Kennedy International following the assassination of the President. I'm glad to see some viewers are learning a bit of history by watching one of their favorite shows.
Say, how come the cockpit crew managed to see dinosaurs on a prehistoric Manhattan Island and none of the passengers did? The bigger puzzler for me though was why the show ended the way it did without a successful resolution to the fate of Flight Thirty Three. The show did that occasionally, and I felt similarly perplexed with the ending of #1.11 - And When The Sky Was Opened. The outcome here is left hanging, perhaps allowing for the viewer to come up with an ending for themselves. But that's not the kind of short cut I was looking for here, and certainly not the fate those passengers should have expected to close out the story.
I found it interesting that the 1939 version of LaGuardia field cleared Runway 22 for the Global Flight emergency landing. The TZ episode aired prior to this one in 1961 was titled "Twenty Two", and ended with the mid-air explosion of Flight 22 after a harrowing story line. I have to wonder if this was all done on purpose by Rod Serling and his creative staff as some kind of nod and wink to the viewers. Pretty cool in any event.
The other cool thing watching early TV is catching references to place names of an era gone by, in this case, the mention of Idlewild Airport before it became John F. Kennedy International following the assassination of the President. I'm glad to see some viewers are learning a bit of history by watching one of their favorite shows.
Say, how come the cockpit crew managed to see dinosaurs on a prehistoric Manhattan Island and none of the passengers did? The bigger puzzler for me though was why the show ended the way it did without a successful resolution to the fate of Flight Thirty Three. The show did that occasionally, and I felt similarly perplexed with the ending of #1.11 - And When The Sky Was Opened. The outcome here is left hanging, perhaps allowing for the viewer to come up with an ending for themselves. But that's not the kind of short cut I was looking for here, and certainly not the fate those passengers should have expected to close out the story.