The Arrival
- Episode aired Sep 22, 1961
- TV-PG
- 25m
Federal aviation investigator Grant Sheckly must deal with a mystery when a plane lands at an airport without pilots, passengers or luggage.Federal aviation investigator Grant Sheckly must deal with a mystery when a plane lands at an airport without pilots, passengers or luggage.Federal aviation investigator Grant Sheckly must deal with a mystery when a plane lands at an airport without pilots, passengers or luggage.
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaA tragic coincidence connected with this episode: at one point Sheckly deliberately walks toward a moving propeller blade. The episode's director, Boris Sagal, would be killed in 1981 when he accidentally walked into a helicopter's moving blades.
- GoofsAfter Sheckly meets with the airline personnel in Bengston's office, he dismisses them saying "stay around where you can be reached". As the personnel file out the door, the studio lights cast their shadows on the backdrop outside the door of what is supposed to be the airport grounds.
- Quotes
[opening narration]
Narrator: This object, should any of you have lived underground for the better parts of your lives and never had occasion to look toward the sky, is an airplane. Its official designation: a DC-3. We offer this rather obvious comment because this particular airplane, the one you're looking at, is a freak. Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled. On rare occasions, they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other. Now, yesterday morning this particular airplane ceased to be just a commercial carrier. As of its arrival, it became an enigma, a seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire, and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing. In just a moment, we're going to show you the tail end of its history. We're going to give you ninety percent of the jigsaw pieces, and you and Mr. Sheckly, here of the Federal Aviation Agency, will assume the problem of putting them together, along with finding the missing pieces. This we offer as the evening's hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime - in The Twilight Zone.
- ConnectionsEdited into Twilight-Tober-Zone: The Arrival (2022)
Sheckly finds his way back to the AP Operations office and confronts Bengston and Malloy about what had just happened to the plane. Neither of the men recognize Sheckly or know he's talking about. However Bengston does recall Scheckly is with the FAA it's soon realized that Scheckly was the investigator of the real flight 107 some 18 years earlier, a plane that vanished without a trace and ostensibly the only airline disaster Scheckly was never able to solve. Given this, we must assume Scheckly has just experienced some sort of alternate reality or grand delusion of which only he has memory of the events.
My problems are logic based. How does Scheckly remember Malloy and Bengston after the illusion vanishes but neither of them know Scheckly? All three met for the first time when Scheckly arrived. This doesn't make sense. Also, what was Sheckly even doing at the airport if all of this was a supernatural hoax? That's never really resolved. And neither is it ever established the timeline for this event, why an 18 year old plane crash matters at this point in time. Except that Sheckly has perhaps been obsessed with the "one crash he could never solve" all these years, still doesn't explain why now.
Rod Serling wrote most of the TZ episodes, some better than others. But he wrote enough that you can see patterns emerge in his plots, particularly airplanes and space travel. One of his favorite themes is time travel which he combined with airplanes in two other episodes (King Nine and The Odyssey of Flight). The Arrival also combines these elements but the purpose for which is unclear. It's part ghost story, part mystery, part cosmic lesson in redemption or maybe forgiveness or maybe torment, I'm not really sure. The ending is long and unsatisfactory and episode doesn't provide the viewer enough information to really understand the point of the tale. Overall The Arrival had some good ideas but I think it's also a sloppily written episode that leaves the viewer confused.
- dgl1199
- Jun 18, 2016
Details
- Runtime25 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1