the good old days

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is one of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone. A man, already teetering on the edge of insanity, spies a gremlin on the wing of an airplane.  No one believes him, so he has to take matters into his own hands.  Fear of flying is a major component of the plot.  In the roughly half century since The Twilight Zone was first broadcast, air travel has become ever more commonplace a phenomenon.  This storyline belongs to an era when flying was still considered an intrinsically risky way to travel.  The plot still works, but I suspect that it would have been even more effective when it originally aired.

The protagonist, Bob Wilson, is played by William Shatner.  He’s returning from a six-month stint in an insane asylum, after having had a breakdown on an airplane.  (Can anybody name the famous Wilson who later did have a breakdown on an airplane?)  As the plane sails into a thunderstorm, he peeks out the window, only to see a gremlin perched on the wing.  At first, he thinks he’s seeing things, but when he looks again, it’s still there, much closer.  Yet whenever anyone else looks out, the monster vanishes.  The gremlin begins to tamper with one of the engines, which terrifies Wilson.  Unable to convince the crew of the danger, he dives out the emergency exit and drives the gremlin away.  Wilson survives, but is sent back to confinement in a straight jacket.  After the action is over, Rod Serling’s closing narration is actually rather unusual.  Up to that point, the implication has generally been that Wilson was simply crazy.  Yet during the narration, Serling announces that the aircraft mechanics are soon to find evidence of the gremlin’s tampering, and the camera pans to reveal the damaged cowling the gremlin had pulled up.  Unlike many episodes, there is little ambiguity what happened; the magical explanation is the truth.

The episode is well written, a product of the strange mind of Richard Matheson.  In addition to his novels (including the remarkable I Am Legend, which has had three film adaptations, none of which conveyed the point of the original novel), Matheson penned a number of screenplays for Rod Serling.  Whoever the designer was for this episode, I’m not sure what he was thinking.  The gremlin doesn’t look like a traditional imp or monster, nor like the little devils that harassed the pilots of the RAF.  Instead, this gremlin resembles a miniature abominable snowman wearing a hannya mask, not the most affective antagonist.  Richard Donner directed, and he evidently paid special attention to the lighting. The setting is an overnight flight, and the cabin is dim, unevenly lit.  Flashes of lightning, rendered extremely well, add to the eeriness of the scene, as Shatner seems to descned further and further into madness.

And it’s Shatner’s acting that dominates the episode.  Most of the episode consists of him staring out the window, watching the malignant shape on the wing, or him remonstrating with his wife and the airplane’s crew.  It seems that before Star Trek, Shatner was practically typecast as a borderline nutcase, although how borderline was variable.  In this Twilight Zone, it’s established that he’s already been over the edge, even if the gremlin he now sees on the wing is real.  In his other memorable appearance on The Twilight Zone, in “Nick of Time,” he’s only just able to pull himself away from a penny fortuntetelling machine (on his honeymoon!).  Another probably less remembered role he had in the early 1960s was on The Fugitive, as a former cop.  By day, he runs the Boy’s Club; at night, his alternate personality takes over, and he guns down officers still on the force.  (By the way, I love The Fugitive.)  This typecasting is presumably related to Shatner’s well-known talent for overacting; his over-the-top technique works reasonably well for portraying a madman.

I understand why this episodes is so well thought of.  There are a lot of little things done quite well.  The rain outside looks realistic, as does the increasing sweat on William Shatner’s face, as his character grows more and more agitated.  It’s honestly not one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, but it’s definitely worth watching more than once.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Classic Nerd Television, The Twilight Zone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.