I have often heard people refer to the episode of the Twilight Zone that first aired 50 years ago tonight as one of the most frightening they ever saw.
The episode was called "Twenty–Two," and I guess its ability to send that shiver down your spine depended on the age of the viewer.
Older viewers, for example, could remember the days when air travel was much more relaxed than it is today. A shift away from that was unavoidable. For a number of reasons, it became clear that air travel differed from — and couldn't be treated the same as — conventional forms of travel.
Someone living in the 21st century who has traveled (either frequently or infrequently) by air and happens to watch "Twenty–Two" today probably would laugh at the nonexistent security measures, the way passengers could stroll out casually onto the tarmac.
I'm sure it would be seen as impossibly naive to viewers today, but that is how things were done until hijackings began to happen with a certain amount of frequency.
I'm sure it looks odd to many people. It looks odd to me, too, and I should be old enough to remember — to a certain extent — the time when it was like that. In fact, the picture at left is of me with my mother as we were either boarding a plane or exiting one in the 1960s.Folks who are older than I am — if they did much traveling by air in those days — may get scared in a hindsight kind of way by the episode. It's a glimpse of just how vulnerable people were in the mid–20th century. Technology was advancing more rapidly than ever before, and common sense hadn't had time to catch up with it.
There really isn't any special significance to the number 22, either. I mean, the story isn't intended to convince people that 22 should be given the same kind of treatment as, say, 13.
It just happens to be the number that is assigned to the morgue in the hospital where a young woman is being treated.
The young woman has a recurring nightmare that involves the morgue, which baffles her doctor because he knows she has never been to the hospital's morgue before — yet she is astonishingly accurate in her description of it.
In the dream, a nurse at the morgue's door always says to the patient, "Room for one more, honey." But the doctor insists that no such nurse is assigned to the morgue.
Anyway, after the patient is discharged, she goes to an airport and prepares to leave for home when things begin to mimic her dream. As she is about to board her flight ("Flight 22") she encounters a stewardess who looks exactly like the nurse at the morgue. The stewardess says, "Room for one more, honey," and the patient/passenger runs screaming from the plane.
A few moments later, as the plane takes off without her, it erupts in a fiery explosion. A dream about death has saved a life.
It's a good story. It just never scared me. I don't even recall being scared when I saw it for the first time, whenever that was.
I don't know why some people think this was one of the most frightening of the original Twilight Zone episodes. Maybe it really is a generational thing.
It might seem shallow, but I think I may have been influenced, to an extent, by the quality of the production. The episode, as I understand it, was one of a handful of episodes that was shot on videotape and then transferred to film for syndication purposes. Apparently, this was done to reduce expenses, but it resulted in poorer quality and it didn't save enough money to be continued.
In my mind, that is a plus.
Maybe the story needs to be modernized and remade. If I saw a plane blow up after both passengers and luggage had to go through layers of rigorous screening procedures, I would be scared because that would mean that security had been breached and more research (probably a lot more research) would be necessary to restore that sense of security.
And that is what such a story, presented in 2011, surely would say because security measures have long been part of air travel — more extensively, I will admit, in the nearly 10 years since the September 11 attacks but they were in place prior to that.
No such procedures, not even the most primitive ones, were in place in 1961, however. Bags weren't checked. Passengers weren't screened. No one seemed to give any real thought to the possibility that someone might bring a weapon or a bomb on board.
If someone had thought of it at that time, maybe some of the notorious hijackings of the then–near future — like D.B. Cooper's still–unsolved 1971 hijacking in the Pacific Northwest — could have been prevented.
Maybe that is what prevents the episode from being the classic in my mind that it seems to be in so many others'. The explosion in the episode doesn't happen in spite of all attempts to prevent it because nothing has been done to prevent it.
That's what would make it timeless for me.
I would name many other Twilight Zone episodes as being more frightening and more thought provoking than "Twenty–Two."
But that's just me.
