Episode 1 - Where is Everybody? Transcript
To listen to Episode one, click here
"The place is here. The time is now. And the journey into the shadows that we are about to watch could be our journey."
A man is silhouetted against a country road and we are told this is a journey into the shadows only to have the man walk into the light, pick up a stick, as anyone might do. We hear big band music, subverting our expectations that something is wrong. The deserted country road gives way to a roadside café, a reststop. An injection of civilization into the wild, taming it, subduing it. A hop in the man's step betrays an assumption of familiarity. He knows what to expect as he opens the front door. How quickly is that expectation is subverted by a diner which has all the sensory information it should; the checkered table clothes, the music, the smell of coffee on the stove, but absent is the reason for this sensory input. There is no one here.
He hops the counter after getting no response to his entrance, calling out his arrival. He just knows someone has to be here. The jukebox is playing. There is coffee, percolating and steaming on the stove, baked pies sitting next to the coffee. He reaches for a cup and the first bit of disorder is injected into the world. He knocks off a clock, placed oddly in the edge of a shelf next the cups, which breaks as it hits the floor. He stoops to retrieve it and the music stops, the jukebox goes dark. Rejecting this variance, he pours himself a cup of coffee and calls out his order to the person who must just be around the corner. Just as easily as he rattles off his order, the man explains that he doesn't know who he is, nor even how he got here. He thoughtfully drinks his cup of coffee, still talking out loud but to himself now, and concludes that he is sure he is going to wake up any minute.
The man exits the dinner, after pausing the turn the sign in the window to "closed", and continues down the highway. Eventually the man finds himself in a town, greeted by a ringing church bell, marking the time to be 7:00. The town looks to be exactly as it should be with the exception that it is completely deserted. Open store fronts reveal appliance stores stocked with new refrigerators, fresh baked goods in the window of the bakery, the doors wide open yet not a person to be seen. The town, much like the café, does not look to be abandoned, there just isn't anyone around at the moment. He walks from door to door until, at last, he sees a woman sitting in the passenger seat of a van across the street. He begins to explain his dilemma as he makes his way across the street, stopping from time to time as the strangeness of the details weighs heavy on him for the moment. He continues towards the van and leans in on the door, inadvertently opening it, causing the woman to fall to the ground. He looks down on the face of a mannequin. He is startled for a moment before recovering.
He returns the mannequin to the van and continues his search for someone, anyone. He slowly scans the town square and then thinks to check the van for the key.
Nothing.
Suddenly, the pay phone in the square begins to ring, He rushes to it, picks up the receiver and hears nothing. He puts in a coin and calls the operator only to hear a recorded voice telling him the number is not in service. He pleas with the recording that he just wants to know where he is before slamming the receiver back into its cradle. The amusement in his voice at his situation has given way to nervous terror. Something is wrong, terribly wrong. He opens the phone book to find only an alphabetical list of names. He pushes against the door of the phone booth and it resists. He pushes hard, asking for help or to hear the punchline of the joke the town is playing on him because it beginning to wear thin. A final push reveals he needed to pull the door in the entire time. Free of the booth, he wanders into a police station, with the feeling that someone his watching him.
Calling out his own APB on the police station radio, he sees smoke rise into the air from a cigar on the counter. It looks freshly lit. He searches the back room, filled with empty cells; empty except for the cell with water running in the sink and the implements for shaving prepared for who must have been smoking the cigar. Telling himself he is going to wake up now, the shadow of the door to the cell slowly closing behind him causes his run from the station in the town square.
Cigarette in hand, he walks aimlessly down the street. He pauses, quickly looks behind himself, continues on before repeating the pause and quick turn. There just has to be somebody there. The feeling of someone watching him is painted clearly on his face. The church bell rings out the four o'clock hour and he hides behind a wall and turns, hoping to turn quick enough to catch the person he is sure is watching him. He continues into a five and dime and proceeds to make himself a sundae, talking to himself in the mirror about his plight. He remembers a bit of Dickens, comparing his current situation to that of Scrooge trying to talk away the ghost of Jacob Marley. His levity is short lived as the tension finds its way back into his tone.
In an attempt to walk off his feeling of impotent frustration , he begins to spin racks of paperbacks before he comes to one he did not spin, which is filled with many copies of the same book, The Last Man of Earth. The implications of the title weighing heavy on him, he runs back into the street calling out for someone, anyone to hear him.
After night has descended on the empty town, the man plays tic-tac-toe in the sand when the lights of the town come alive. The blinking lights of the Savoy movie theatre arrest his attention, the marquee advertising the feature Battle Hymn. He stops to look at the movie poster, looking at a man in an Air Force uniform, which he sees matches his own. Emboldened by grasping onto a forgotten puzzle piece of himself, he calls to anyone who might hear "I'm in the Air Force" while running into the theatre only to find himself alone among the empty seats. Pondering the implications of his newly acquired bit of identity, he speculates that a nuclear bomb has gone off but wonders why everything isn't destroyed. He is interrupted by the dimming of the lights and the start of the projector. He calls out,"Who's running the picture?" The emptiness of the projection rooms causes him run down the stairs and headlong in to a mirror, shattering it. He runs stumbling from the theater. It is not clear if he is running from or to something. Tripping, he falls and stares up into an all-seeing eye on the window of an optometrist and screams. He crawls to his feet again before collapsing onto a traffic signal, pressing the crosswalk button.
His cries for help continue desperately as the scene shifts to a darkly lit warehouse. Men, their faces in shadow, watch a screen where we see the lone man, wires taped to his face and chest, begging for help. These men watch impassively, seemingly unaffected by the cries of the man on the screen. Finally, an officer stands and calls to get the man out of there and the men break from their stupor. Another man calls into a microphone for the subject to be released and we see a box, separated from the shadows of the warehouse by a single spotlight, connected to equipment on distant tables by thick cables, manned by men in uniform who jump into action at the command. A stretcher in the foreground, left there in anticipation of its usefulness, is picked up by two men. Inside the box, the lone man continues to press a button, his head leaning against the smooth metal of the box, his other hand listlessly hitting a clock over and over again. He has broken the glass face and it is the same clock as the one he knocked over in the diner, stopped at the same time of 6:17. Two men remove electrodes from the lone man's face and chest as he sits listless but awake.
The officer who called for the end of experiment asks for a report of the lone man's status and elapsed time of the mission; 484 hours and 36 minutes. At the conclusion of the report, the press enter and ask about the success or failure of the mission. They, too, watched the mission on camera, saw the man's reaction. After being told that the time was sufficient for the a trip to the moon, several orbits and the return, the press asked what happened before he pressed the button.
The man is carried out on a stretcher and the officer and those assembled crowd around the men taking him away to check on his status. The man, Mike Ferris, asks what happened to him.
Mike looks at the box again, the door left open, the light just highlighting the edges of the interior. He observes that next time, it won’t just be a box. He is told no; that next time he will really be alone. The men with the stretcher take Ferris out of the warehouse and he sees the moon.
Segment 2 - The Response
So begins the Twilight Zone. One wonders if Rod Serling, speaking in the opening narration, is talking about the series as a whole, instead of just this episode. There is so much in this episode that is the in the very DNA of the entire run of the Twilight Zone. It feels that this episode could be dropped anywhere in the series and it wouldn’t feel out of place.
The first act of this episode feels almost cliché; a man suffering from amnesia finds himself in a world he does not recognize. The opening scene of Dark City comes to mind. However, in my attempt to return to the simple experience of viewing this show at face value, without trying to bring it forward into a modern context, I am reminded that this is first time that I can remember this story being told. So much that came after this show was inspired by and copied from this show, that going back can seem you are walking on a well trod path only to realize that you are following the original footsteps back to the beginning of the journey. This is not to say that this is the first show to tell this story, but it is the first that told it to me.
Once you have seen the end of the episode, each subsequent viewing is a process of gathering details that have previously unrecognized significance. The broken clock seems to be the most highlighted of these details, being mirrored in the broken clock in the simulator. The question remains; knowing the empty town to be a construct of his mind, did he break the clock in the simulator before it was broken in the cafe or were the events simultaneous? Throughout his delusion, little details creep into the construct, linking him back to reality; the broken clock, the movie, the book in the five and dime, the eye on the window of the optometrist , the crosswalk button. All these details are cracks in the alternate reality his abused and lonely mind has tried to create. In contrast to the abnormality of his situation, he seeks to create normality in its absence but cannot fully escape the reality of his isolation. He can create the diner, decked out with fresh coffee and pie, just no one to sell it to him. He can create the main street, complete with church bells and ice cream counter, but only a mannequin for a companion. A lit cigar, but no lips to smoke it. The razor and hot water prepared, but no neck for the blade.
Does this argue the limits of man? Can he only create so much? Will his reach extend too for? As we break free of the confines of our environment, we must remember that not all of our needs can be met by through by the work of our hands. We truly are not an island, but rather a bit of the main, even or especially when thrown into the larger ocean when of the universe. I love the closing narration, which posits the idea of loneliness, or isolation, as the danger waiting for us out amongst the stars, not some conquering alien civilization or Lovecraftian elder god. This is this aspect of the show, of Serling’s writing, that feels almost Shakespearian in its insight into the nature of the human experience, or to borrow a favorite expression of good friend, the frailty of the human condition. Is this the message of the episode? Perhaps, perhaps not. I offer it only as an interpretation.
Epilogue
I hope you enjoyed this first full episode of The Signpost Up Ahead. Unlike “Where is Everybody” I imagine in time, listening to this episode will definitely feel like listening to an early episode. Consider this a public work in progress where I am experimenting, learning, what form these episodes will take, what direction this podcast will eventually head. If you did not listen to Episode Zero, where I briefly talk about my introduction to the Twilight Zone and my goals for this podcast, the short version is that I am trying to get back to the time when I first discovered the series in my room in the middle of the night. Trying to take look at each of the episodes as they were meant to be experienced before we had a metaview of the entire series, the world around it, and all the minutiae of production. All that information is available to any who wants it.
This will be a difficult process for many reasons. For one, I can’t unsee the episodes. Another, I can’t unsee all the things that have been influenced by it over the years, which I am sure are now part of the tapestry of my understanding of the show. Also, I am an English teacher, a breed of viewer that can’t help themselves when it comes to deconstructing everything and seeking meaning for everything, or creating it more often than not, so it will fit into some thematic or literary construct we have made for other people’s work. Mind you, I am not trying to be anti-intellectual in my approach. Instead, let’s say that I am trying to avoid being meta-intellectual about it. I want to be told a story and I want to be entertained by the story, not by its wikipedia or IMDB page. Well, so much for that being the short version.
If you enjoyed yourself, please leave a comment in iTunes or if you really enjoyed it, consider subscribing in your podcast app of choice. My goal is to release an episode every two weeks. That may be a little inconsistent until I get my podcasting sea-legs. In the meantime, you can follow the show on twitter @signpostpodcast or email at thesignpostpodcast at gmail.com.