Fact is, as the story proceeded, after 10 minutes I thought it was shaping up to be one of the worst ever TZs and on a par with Plan 9.
Histrionic, affected, 'acting', gasping grunts and groans, endless stares upward, I mean " c'mon get on with it!" It then occurred to me it might be one of those wonky 50's 60's experimental artsy productions people occasionally could get away with in those days. Rod Serling letting his hair down.
It got so that I just kept jumping forward in 10 second increments. In a sense, Mr. Serling cheated a tad in the word he used to characterize the main (almost only) player. In the end, everything was clarified, even the strange pot that seemed to me less a boiling stew than a Halloween dry-ice caldron; the strangely uncertain food she was cutting, and the way she ate a piece... or didn't eat it, spending more time with the slice sticking out of her mouth like a redundant tongue.
The creature is an alien, the planet is alien; their psychology, even in solitude is alien. It's hard then to say whether Moorehead had turned in a stellar performance as a slightly addled hermit mute, or her speculative impression of how a denizen of some distant planet of some unknown star would behave. Perhaps these people are solitary by nature and procreate asexually. 'She' doesn't speak because they are non-social. Who knows?
The spaceship is ours. They are not little robots, they are full-sized men, in spacesuits. For all we know, 'her' atmosphere is composed of 50% chlorine, her knives blades of diamond, her fireplace burning silicon logs.
The ending is a familiar SF gotcha; Serling and Co. pull out all the stops to dress it up in an especially fresh attire. It's also one of the few TZ that is, in fact, science-fiction; it's an irritation to this writer that series has been alternately described as horror or SF. It is neither. It is solidly in the fantasy genre, with it's own special subcategory and Serling himself put it best: "...a dimension of M I N D." We always have the feeling the episodes are messing with our heads.
It got so that I just kept jumping forward in 10 second increments. In a sense, Mr. Serling cheated a tad in the word he used to characterize the main (almost only) player. In the end, everything was clarified, even the strange pot that seemed to me less a boiling stew than a Halloween dry-ice caldron; the strangely uncertain food she was cutting, and the way she ate a piece... or didn't eat it, spending more time with the slice sticking out of her mouth like a redundant tongue.
The creature is an alien, the planet is alien; their psychology, even in solitude is alien. It's hard then to say whether Moorehead had turned in a stellar performance as a slightly addled hermit mute, or her speculative impression of how a denizen of some distant planet of some unknown star would behave. Perhaps these people are solitary by nature and procreate asexually. 'She' doesn't speak because they are non-social. Who knows?
The spaceship is ours. They are not little robots, they are full-sized men, in spacesuits. For all we know, 'her' atmosphere is composed of 50% chlorine, her knives blades of diamond, her fireplace burning silicon logs.
The ending is a familiar SF gotcha; Serling and Co. pull out all the stops to dress it up in an especially fresh attire. It's also one of the few TZ that is, in fact, science-fiction; it's an irritation to this writer that series has been alternately described as horror or SF. It is neither. It is solidly in the fantasy genre, with it's own special subcategory and Serling himself put it best: "...a dimension of M I N D." We always have the feeling the episodes are messing with our heads.
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