Re: “I Shot an Arrow into the Air”
That was yet another great episode from the original Twilight Zone series. Just about every episode was excellent to great IMO. How our country and pop culture has changed since those days. Damn shame.
Re: Post 20
It was removed, possibly because of the photos.
Here it is again without them...
“Where Is Everybody?” is the first episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It was first broadcast on October 2, 1959.
Plot Summary:
A man finds himself alone on a dirt road, walking towards a diner. Inside he finds a jukebox playing loudly, and a pot of hot coffee on the stove, but there are no other people. He inquires for some breakfast, but no chef or waitress is to be found. He is dressed in an Air Force flight suit, but he does not remember who he is or how he got there.
After leaving the diner, he walks to a nearby town. The town seems deserted, but everywhere the man goes, he seems to find proof that someone had been there recently: food is cooking on a stove, water dripping in a sink, and a cigar is burning in an ashtray. He grows more and more unsettled as he wanders through the empty town, looking for someone—anyone—to talk to, all the while having the strange feeling that he is being watched.
In a soda shop after talking to himself he idly spins racks filled with paperback books until he comes to an already spinning rack filled from top to bottom with the same book: “The Last Man on Earth, Feb. 1959”.
Day turns to night and the man is still alone in the town. Street lights turn on all around him. Even the movie theater is illuminated. As he goes into the theater, he sees a poster advertising the film playing Battle Hymn, which causes him to remember that he is in the US Air Force. Finding no one in audience or the projection booth, he desperately runs through the theater until he crashes into a mirror. In a panic, the man runs through the streets, until he finally collapses next to a street crossing and presses a button labeled WALK. As he whimpers for someone to help him, It is revealed that the walk button is actually a panic button. And the man is not alone in a deserted town, but is instead in an isolation booth being observed by a group of uniformed servicemen.
His name is Mike Ferris, an astronaut in training who has been confined to an isolation room located within an aircraft hangar for 484 hours and 36 minutes. He has been undergoing tests to determine his fitness for spaceflight and whether he can handle the psychological stress of a prolonged trip to the Moon alone. The town was a complete hallucination, an escape valve for his sensory-deprived mind.
As Ferris is carried out of the hangar on a stretcher, he sees the Moon above him, and says wistfully, “Hey! Don’t go away up there! Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it’ll be for real. So don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Is_Everybody%3F