![]() ![]() Some peoples’ cars turn on with no drivers others’ empty house lights flicker. ![]() Though they toss dagger-sharp accusations out without a second thought, the conjecture is led along by a few factual indicators that something really is amiss on Maple Street. One man is accused of being an alien because he has been seen looking up at the sky at night, while neighbors posit that another man works on a project in his basement suspiciously often. Once they’ve bought the senseless premise of the alien invader novel, the panicked people of Maple Street, an idyllic middle-class community that appears to be threatened, race past logic into something more primal and dangerous. It’s a lesson in logic, and as is too often the case, many people fail it.įrom here, Maple Street’s social collapse is swift and shocking, like a kettle screeching to a boil. Another, with no grasp of the snowball effect his words might have, presents a complete fallacy. One of these voices is reassuring and rooted in reason. No, the boy counters, in the book there are threatening outsiders hidden among us, posing as a normal American family. The flash across the sky was a meteor, he insists, not a spaceship crashing. He seems like a trustworthy authority, but the seed of suspicion has already been planted in the minds of his neighbors. ![]() There must be a more logical explanation, a no-nonsense man named Steve (played by character actor Claude Akins) suggests. In all the novels, he says, the aliens who did this wouldn’t want to let us go. Under questioning, the boy admits that the “they” in question are aliens he’s read about in science fiction books. “They don’t want you to.” It’s a creepy thing to say, and the statement establishes a sense of pervasive dread that’s in sharp contrast to the brightly-lit atmosphere of Maple Street. Two men consider checking one street over to see if anyone else in the neighborhood is dealing with the same problem, but as they turn to leave, a boy in the crowd speaks up. There’s a crisis brewing, but the folks of Maple Street meet it with friendly conjecture and a united front. A group of concerned citizens quickly assemble, checking their radios, stoves, phones, and cars and confirming that they’ve all quit working. ![]() The tranquility doesn’t last in a flash, all the electronics on the block just stop. Friendly neighbors water lawns and tend to shiny new automobiles. ”Maple Street, USA,” as Serling calls the location in the narration, appears to be squarely all-American. It begins in an ordinary tree-lined suburban neighborhood. The aliens in the series-best episode “ The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” are memorable, but as with all the best trips to the Twilight Zone, it’s the humans who make the story. Aliens are everywhere in Serling’s America. In Serling’s dimension, would-be stock characters become the indelible storytellers through which we better understand our world: salesmen, drunkards, military men, cowboys, nervous women, and innocent children abound. It’s a dose of socially conscious medicine sweetened by an imaginative, surprising sci-fi exterior. The series regularly addresses the realities of a post-war nation on the precipice of major change, tackling everything from mental illness to the lure of capitalism to the double-edged sword of technological advancement. This essay is part of our series Episodes, a bi-weekly column in which senior contributor Valerie Ettenhofer digs into the singular chapters of television that make the medium great.įrom 1959 to 1964, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone was the boldest, smartest vision of America - what it has been, what it is, and what it someday could be - for better or worse. ![]()
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