The first thing the broadcast shows is a covering. Before any face, before a name spoken by someone who could later be asked to repeat it, there is a shape under canvas on a hangar floor, a barrier keeping the floor around it clear, and a voice reciting particulars in the order of a placard: her name, her type, her recent history, incidental data. The voice is Rod Serling’s, doing what it did at the top of every episode of the series he had launched ten weeks earlier, which is to make the strange sound as though it had been entered somewhere and could be looked up. Attend to what the recital contains. A name, X-20. A type, experimental interceptor. A history consisting of a flight nine hundred miles into space and a crash landing in the Mojave Desert. And then the item the voice calls incidental, that the ship and the men who flew her were gone from the radar screen for twenty-four hours. Incidental is the first word in the episode spoken in a tone that asks you not to hear it. A day in which no one on earth could see three men is not incidental to anything that follows; it is the opening through which everything that follows will drain, and it is placed last in the recital and lowest in the voice, as the important thing in a report so often is. The voice then leaves the covered ship for a man walking a hospital corridor and remarks that the shrouds that cover mysteries are not always made of tarpaulin. The word for what is laid over the dead is applied, in the second breath of a program about three living men, to the canvas over a machine, and the sentence has moved on to its hospital door before the word has finished landing.

That door is where Serling hands Lieutenant Colonel Clegg Forbes to us, and the handing is exact: this man will find something out on the other side of it. Forbes, played by Rod Taylor with a sweat that never quite dries in twenty-five minutes, is recognized on his way in. A nurse knows him for one of the men who flew the X-20; the hospital knows his face because his face has been in the newspaper. He goes through the door to Major William Gart, who is in bed with a broken leg and the sourness of a young man kept in a bed, and asks him a question Gart cannot understand. Does Gart remember Ed Harrington. Forbes has known Harrington for fifteen years. Harrington sat in this room yesterday. Gart, plainly puzzled, says that there were two of them on the flight, himself and Forbes, and Forbes puts the newspaper in front of him, and the newspaper agrees with Gart. Two faces, two names. The photograph has not been blacked out or torn; it is a photograph of two men, composed as photographs of two men are composed, with no gap where a third might have stood.

What follows is a telling. Forbes begins the previous day for Gart, and the picture dissolves into it, and for most of the episode’s middle we are inside a story that one man is trying to lodge in another man’s head. Television inherited this shape from radio, and radio from the pulps, and the pulps from the confession, and in 1959 an audience knew its rules from the pictures: the doomed man narrates. In Double Indemnity the narration goes into a dictaphone; in D.O.A. a man walks into a police station to report his own murder and tells it from the beginning; in Sunset Boulevard the narrator is already face down in the pool. The consolation of the form is that the telling outlasts the teller. Somebody is writing it down. Serling takes the form and removes the somebody. Gart is not taking notes. Gart is not the law, or the doctor, or posterity. Gart is a man with a broken leg who was there for part of it and remembers none of it, and Forbes’s telling has no destination except Gart’s memory, which is the one place in the world least able to hold it, because Gart’s memory has already been corrected. The confession is being delivered to the single witness whose failure to corroborate is the whole of the emergency.

This is the teleplay’s structural discovery, and Serling makes it three times so that we will feel it as law rather than incident. Harrington, in the bar, tells Forbes that something is wrong with him, and Forbes offers the things one offers a friend who has not drunk enough to be this strange: rest, nerves, the weight of what they have been through. Forbes, in the hospital, tells Gart that something is wrong with the world, and Gart offers him the same things, in nearly the same words, from the same position of affectionate disbelief. The skeptic’s chair is a single chair, and the man in it is always the next man to need it. When Forbes has run from the room and Gart has hobbled after him into an empty corridor, there is no one left to sit in the chair and tell Gart he is tired, and the teleplay, which has been rigorous about this, invents no one. The nurse who helps him back into bed offers to ...