The Twilight Zone: "Elegy"

"The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They're looking for home. And in a moment, they'll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt."

Twilight Zone, "Elegy"

The first season of "The Twilight Zone" was an exceptional, classic, even definitive ride through the possibilities of storytelling in a half-hour television format. The episodes, the original 36 broadcasts between October 1959 and July of 1960, were so good, they must have made J.G. Ballard (who once quipped, "I don't want better television, I want worse!" or something to that effect) feel distinctly uncomfortable. "Elegy" is one of those episodes so indelibly etched into my subconscious, that it almost seems as if it is the visualization of a dream I might once have experienced. What is it trying to say? That the picture-perfect American landscape, with its quaint scenes that seem culled from some scriptwriter's fantasies, is a repository of something foul? Something rotten, lurking just beneath the surface, something, well, dead? Take it a step in the direction of George Romero's film Night of the Living Dead a decade later, and you'd be dealing with a similar subtext. But I'm getting way ahead of myself.

Elysium Fields

Three astronauts in a wonky 1960 comic book rocket ship land on an idyllic, Earth-like asteroid with wonderful parks, recreation centers, diners, etc. It's a small town, an all-American paradisical Norman Rockwell wonderland, but with a certain weird catch: everyone seems to be caught in a state of suspended animation. It's the darndest thing.

The three astronauts--the Captain, James Webber ("Little House on the Prairie" actor Kevin Hagen), and cohorts Kurt Meyers (Jeff Morrow) and Peter Kirby (Don Dubbins), happen upon an eerie house that looks like an old-fashioned funeral home. (Have you ever been to one of these? I went to a funeral at one in a creepy old Victorian in Sweetser, Indiana, back in the early Nineties. They had a little room off the main viewing room with an old-fashioned Coke machine and Coke pictures from the late eighteen- nineties and early nineteen-hundreds on the wall. Gibson girls. Maybe one of them was modeled on Mabel Normand. But I digress.)

One of the Inanimate Ones seems to be following them with his eyes. He then reveals himself for what he is: Mr. Wickwire, a charming Englishman who very politely explains why none of the citizens of ye fair village seem to be, well, alive.

It's because they aren't.

This is a giant graveyard, where the departed's final wishes are fulfilled by placing them in whatever "eternal repose" they can envision or desire. If they wanted to spend eternity fishing, fishermen they are, for all time. Forever. This is an interesting concept, of course. (Carry it one step further, and the future could see cybernetic "constructs"--to borrow a term from William Gibson's Neuromancer--that utilize AI to function as "living memorials". Could you imagine visiting a graveyard/amusement park where our dearly departed walk around and speak with us, wearing flesh-like "skin" and being virtually indistinguishable from our dead? But I digress yet again.)

Mr. Wickwire explains all this to our three astounded astronauts (this is the Year 2185, by the way), and then reveals something about himself that the audience has already guessed. I won't reveal the ending to you, although it makes a kind of macabre logic; I will say that the final line is so memorable even the casual viewer may take it with them:

"While there are men, there can be no peace."

Staring down the barrel of 2024, I'd say that's a correct assessment.

Elegy - Twilight-Tober Zone

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