The withheld world of “Third from the Sun”
Four adults are playing cards. The table is glass, and for a moment the camera is underneath it, looking up through the surface at hands and faces, at the undersides of the cards, at four people seen from a position no one in the room could occupy. Then the camera is above the table again, moving slowly around it, resting on one face, then another, then another, each held a beat too long for a game of cards. Lemonade has been poured. A cake will be brought out. Nobody at the table is thinking about the cards. In roughly a day and a half, they believe, the planet they are sitting on will be destroyed by the weapons that one of them helps to build, and in a few hours, if nothing goes wrong, the four of them and a teenage girl will steal a spacecraft and leave. Somebody knocks at the door.
Everything in this room is familiar. The upholstery, the lamps, the way the women hold their cards, the way the men sit back in their chairs, the lemonade itself, a drink that in American television of 1960 practically amounts to a passport. The one thing that refuses to behave is the frame. The room is shown from too low, or through a surface, or at a tilt, or in a slow revolution that turns a round table into something like a hub. The furniture keeps insisting that we are at home. The camera keeps declining to agree.
“Third from the Sun,” which CBS broadcast on the evening of Friday, January 8, 1960, as the fourteenth episode of The Twilight Zone, has one of the most celebrated last-minute reversals in the history of American television, and the reversal has a peculiar property that separates it from most of its kind. It changes nothing in the story. Nobody was lying, nobody was dreaming, nobody turns out to be dead. The five people in the spacecraft are exactly who they seemed to be, and the world they left is exactly as doomed as they feared. What changes, in the final minute, is the name of a planet, and with it the location of the audience. For twenty-four minutes we assumed that we were watching a version of ourselves. We were watching someone else’s version of us, and they were coming here.
The episode’s subject is therefore not, or not primarily, the world it depicts. It is the habit by which a viewer decides where a story is taking place. Nobody in “Third from the Sun” ever says that the setting is Earth, or the United States, or the year 1960. There are no flags, no maps, no place names, no dates, no newspapers, no newscasts. The evidence for “here” consists entirely of manners, objects, and idiom, and every one of those was supplied by a viewer who had been trained, by a decade of domestic television, to regard a living room of a certain kind as the natural center of the world. The revelation punishes that training. It also, more interestingly, explains what the tilted camera has been doing all along. The images were disagreeing with the furniture because the furniture was never evidence of anything.
“Third from the Sun” is, in short, a study in how the ordinary is mistaken for the known, conducted with unusual rigor by a script that withholds one word, a camera that refuses to sit level, and a set of performances that keep dread just under the surface of good manners. The episode’s politics, which are real and which belong to a specific moment in the American nuclear imagination, are inseparable from this formal problem. A society that has made annihilation into a job, and suspicion into a neighborly courtesy, is a society in which the ordinary has already stopped meaning what it appears to mean. The families who flee it are not escaping to a better world. They are escaping to ours, at the very moment when ours was building the same bombs and holding the same card games. That is the sting of the ending, and it is sharper than the twist itself.
Quitting Time
Rod Serling’s opening narration is an inventory. Quitting time at the plant, time for supper, time for families, a cool drink on a porch, trees that screen out the moon, a summer night. The list is delivered in the cadence of a Norman Rockwell caption, and it is meant to be. Each item is a token of a recognizable American evening, and the accumulation of tokens does the work that a title card reading “Anytown, U.S.A.” would have done more crudely. Then the narration turns. Underneath all of it, behind the eyes of the men, hangs “a horror without words.” This is “the eve of the end.” [1]
Listen to what the narration does not say. It does not name the country, the town, the year, the war, or the enemy. It does not say “America.” It does not even say “men and women,” but “families,” and “the plant,” a phrase so generic that it could describe any industrial facility on any world where people clock out. The specificity is all in the sensory details, the porch and the drink and the rustle of leaves, and the sensory details are precisely what the viewer is invited ...
