AND WHEN THE SKY WAS OPENED was a chilling Season One episode of the original Twilight Zone series, first aired in December, 1959...I was only three at the time and wouldn't see it until years later. This is television that is pinpointed in history, a speculation about what might happen should humans endeavor to go into space...a little more than a year before that actually happened with the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin in April of 1961. In this episode, a three-man astronaut crew fly an experimental space plane some 900 miles above Earth...but during its flight radio contact is broken for several hours and the plane is found crash-landed in the desert, all hands on board alive with one crewman, Gart, suffering a broken leg. In the hospital the expedition leader Forbes, played by Rod Taylor (who would star in the original Time Machine movie the following year), tries to convince his bedridden colleague that there were THREE of them on the mission...but even the newspaper shows only two. Taylor then recounts what happened to the other man, Harrington, an old friend, as they both left that same room the day before with the paper (pictured above) showing all three of them. But at a nearby bar with Forbes something happens to Harrington's thinking...as if he didn't belong there...and he vanishes. Distraught over his buddy's disappearance, Forbes finishes his story to Gart and then starts to feel the same way as Harrington. The ending was unexpected and ingenious...
When this episode first came out, no human had ever ventured into space and returned. So it was intriguing to consider whether "something or somebody out there" didn't want us to ever leave our home planet and might take measures to prevent it. And then there's the notion that maybe the worse thing to no longer existing is to never have existed at all. And When the Sky Was Opened is my all-time favorite episode of one of my all-time favorite TV series...
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