The first sound the prisoner makes is a car horn.

It arrives early, before we have been told anything worth knowing, and it lands inside somebody else’s sentence. Rod Serling has begun the introduction to the seventh episode of The Twilight Zone‘s first season, and he is midway through the phrase that identifies the man we are about to watch — the dungeon has an inmate — when the horn cuts across him. Serling recovers and supplies the name: James A. Corry. But for a moment the narration has been interrupted by the very thing it was about to describe, and the interruption takes the form of a noise designed to be heard by a stranger.

That is what a car horn is. It has no private function. It is not a tool for driving; it is a tool for addressing the driver of another car, a device whose entire purpose is to make somebody else look up. Corry has spent a year assembling the automobile it belongs to out of parts smuggled in by a supply captain, and the automobile does not run, and there is nowhere on the asteroid it could go if it did. What he has built, over a year, is a machine that cannot travel, fitted with an instrument that can only be aimed at people who are not there.

He honks it anyway. That is the whole episode compressed into two seconds of sound effect, and “The Lonely,” which first aired on CBS on 13 November 1959, spends the following twenty-odd minutes finding out what happens to a man who has been making that noise for four years, when something finally answers.

Serling wrote the teleplay. Jack Smight directed it. The photography, shot largely on location in Death Valley, is by George T. Clemens; the score is Bernard Herrmann’s; Buck Houghton produced. Jack Warden plays Corry. John Dehner plays Captain Allenby, who commands the supply ship. Jean Marsh plays Alicia, and what Alicia is constitutes the episode’s central instability, so it is worth resisting the temptation to settle it in the second paragraph of anything.

For the Record, Let It Be Known

Before a single character speaks, the episode has been entered into evidence.

Serling’s opening is not, in its grammar, a description. It is a proceeding. He instructs us to witness, which conscripts the audience into a legal role rather than a spectatorial one; then he shifts registers and asks that it be known, for the record, that James A. Corry is a convicted criminal placed in solitary confinement. That is docket language. It states a status, gives the full legal name with middle initial, and declines to give the offence. And having read the record into the record, Serling adds a clause that no clerk would supply: that the man is dying of loneliness.

The narration therefore performs two incompatible offices in ninety seconds. It affirms the conviction, and it grieves the sentence. What it does not do — what it pointedly refuses to do — is tell us whether Corry killed anybody unlawfully. That question is left to Corry himself, who will assert his innocence twice in a single speech — and to whatever the audience decides to do with an unsupported claim.

This matters more than it first appears, because it establishes the terms on which the episode will operate for the next twenty minutes. There is a version of “The Lonely” in which the audience is told, authoritatively, that Corry is innocent; that version is a wrongful-imprisonment story, and it would be a lesser one. There is another version in which we are told he is guilty; that version is a story about a murderer who is granted a doll, and its irony would be cheaper and quicker. The episode declines both. It gives us a man whose account of himself has never been ratified by anyone with the power to ratify it, and then it puts a second unratifiable claim in his mouth and watches what happens.

The word witness is Serling’s, and he uses it twice in the opening. Nobody else in the drama will use it at all. There are no witnesses on this asteroid. That is not a metaphor for Corry’s isolation; it is the precise administrative fact of his situation. He is a man convicted on a story he could not corroborate, serving a sentence in a place where nothing he does can be corroborated either, and the narrator’s first act is to hand that office to us.

The One Thing He Knows Is Real

Corry’s first extended speech is a journal entry, spoken in voice-over as he writes. It is dated by count rather than by calendar — the fifteenth day, the sixth month, the fourth year — the way prisoners date things, and it opens with the observation that the days and months and years are indistinguishable.

Then it does something more interesting than complain. It reasons.

He hopes the incoming ship is Allenby’s, because Allenby is decent and brings things. Allenby brought the parts for the antique automobile. It took a year to put together, such as it is. And then Corry says the sentence on which the entire remainder of the episode turns: he can look at the car out there, and he knows that it is real.

Reality, he says, is what he needs. ...