The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Eleven “And When The Sky Was Opened”

Original Air Date: December 11, 1959
Writer: Rod Serling (based on “Disappearing Act” by Richard Matheson)
Director: Douglas Heyes

Loosely based on Richard Matheson’s short story “Disappearing Act” which was published in 1953 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “And When The Sky Was Opened” explores a frequent Twilight Zone series theme: the fluid nature of altered reality and the dangers of space exploration. In this episode, a crew of three astronauts are isolated and driven insane before their existence is slowly erased. It foreshadows modern theories of alternate realities and parallel universes, while also highlighting modern existential dread and reminding us that truly nothing is more horrifying than the prospect of being completely forgotten.

“Her name: X-20. Her type: an experimental interceptor. Recent history: a crash landing in the Mojave Desert after a thirty-one hour flight nine hundred miles into space. Incidental data: the ship, with the men who flew her, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four hours… But the shrouds that cover mysteries are not always made out of a tarpaulin, as this man will soon find out on the other side of a hospital door.”
-Rod Serling

A three-man crew piloting an experimental “interceptor” spacecraft called the “X-20 DynaSoar” suddenly vanish from radar screens for 24 hours during a test flight. They are later discovered after crashing in the Mojave desert. The incident sends one of the crew members, Major William Gart (played by Jim Hutton), to the hospital with a broken leg. While in the hospital, he is visited by his friend and co-pilot Lieutenant Colonel Clegg Forbes (played by at-the-time Hollywood rising star Rod Taylor, who later appeared in numerous films ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds).

“When you walked out of here yesterday morning, you walked out alone! There’s never been three beds in this room, only two. Yours and mine.“

Colonel Forbes seems agitated as he talks with Gart. He soon starts growing alarmed and asking about their third crew member, Ed Harrington (played by Charles Aidman). Forbes explains he is shocked and alarmed to discover there is no official record of Harrington. And Gart says he has no memory of him either. Ed Harrington has mysteriously disappeared and only Colonel Forbes seems to remember him. From here, the episode flashes back to the three men laughing and joking with each other after the crash inside the same hospital room before Harrington and Forbes head to a bar together. From here, Forbes recalls that he flirted with a woman at the bar (played by Gloria Pall) while Harrington had suddenly begun to feel strange. He dropped his beer in a dramatic moment and abruptly phoned up his parents. But on the phone, his parents didn’t even seem to know him, and they claimed they never even had a son. Ed Harrington started frantically muttering from inside the telephone booth: “It’s as if… maybe we shouldn’t have come back from that flight at all… maybe somebody, or something, made a mistake and let us get through when we shouldn’t have…” Suddenly, Ed Harrington disappeared entirely. Then Forbes looked down at a nearby newspaper to find the joint photo of their crew on the front page, only now it no longer featured Harrington. The bartender then claimed that Forbes actually entered the bar alone. Harrington was never even there. And when Forbes looked down on the ground, he saw no spilled beer on the floor. What happened to Ed Harrington?

Forbes then began to go mad. He briefly met up with his girlfriend Amy (Maxine Cooper) who received a telegram from Forbes asking her to meet him at the bus station. She arrived but waited around for hours, scouring bars and motels, until she finally found him. Furious, she confronted a deeply troubled Forbes who suddenly remembered the telegram he sent to her in which he mentioned Ed Harrington… however, when he found a copy of the telegram, he was horrified because even the telegram did not mention Ed’s name. And Amy said she didn’t know anybody named Ed Harrington. Forbes then started to cry, recalling that she and Ed had been together “a hundred times” at dinners and dances. Forbes then spoke on the phone with the General who also has no knowledge of an Ed Harrington. Forbes then became convinced this was all a practical joke so he ran back to the bar and broke in through the glass, wandering around and sobbing, looking for Ed Harrington.

After hearing Forbes’s story, Gart still claims not to remember anyone named Ed Harrington. Both men start to suspect that their ship may have crossed over a forbidden boundary, something affecting the space-time continuum. Perhaps an altered reality. In fact, Forbes suddenly starts to feel unusual just like Harrington did in the bar. He looks in the mirror but sees no reflection of himself. He suddenly screams and runs out of the room, but just when Gart tries to follow him, the noise stops and Gart realizes that Forbes has also disappeared. Gart sees a photo in a newspaper but he is shocked to find it only shows a picture of himself. The newspaper headline reads: “Lone Astronaut Returns From Space.” Stricken with fear he lays down.

In an epilogue, the nurse speaks with a military officer (perhaps named Major Henderson?) who visits the hospital and asks the nurse for an empty room. She leads him to Room #15 where Gart once recovered only to reveal that the room is totally empty. Major Henderson asks her to prepare it for the malaria patients by ordering up some beds from “Q-M.” The experimental “X-20 DynaSoar” craft had actually disappeared and never returned. All three men have vanished, having crossed over into The Twilight Zone.

“Once upon a time, there was a man named Harrington, a man named Forbes, a man named Gart. They used to exist, but don’t any longer. Someone – or something- took them somewhere. At least they are no longer a part of the memory of man. And as to the X-20 supposed to be housed here in this hangar, this, too, does not exist. And if any of you have any questions concerning an aircraft and three men who flew her, speak softly of them – and only in – The Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “And When The Sky Was Opened”

What if reality is actually fluid rather than static? What would it mean for humanity? “And When The Sky Was Opened” is another haunting pre-space travel episode of The Twilight Zone. It speculates about what horrors might be unleashed when humanity goes venturing out into space. What multiple realities might we accidentally unleash? What terrors await us? In some ways, this episode is reminiscent of the pilot episode “Where Is Everybody?” in that both contemplate the potential dangers of space travel and they examine a man in total isolation while the world around him doesn’t make sense.

In this episode we bear witness to paranoid 1950s anxieties about space travel, brain-washing, memory loss, and the puzzling notion of non-being. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this episode is it’s ambiguity. The strange anomaly erasing Clegg Forbes, Ed Harrington, and William Gart is never actually explained. It remains a mystery. And if people can simply be erased from history, then the future of civilization seems hopeless. Memory is essential for the future of humanity. As such, nothing is more scary than the prospect of being completely erased and forgotten. In some ways, this episode brings to mind efforts led by the Soviet Union to wholly erase people from photographs and historical records –a sobering thought from another compelling episode of The Twilight Zone.

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Credits

• Director: Douglas Heyes
  • This was the first Twilight Zone episode directed by Douglas Heyes.
  • Douglas Heyes (1919-1993) was a longtime television director and writer. His career began with various 1950s kids programs like The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin and Circus Boy, as well as shows like Naked City and Maverick. He directed a total of nine episodes of The Twilight Zone (“And When The Sky Was Opened,” “Elegy,” “The Chaser,” “The After Hours,” “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room,” “The Howling Man,” “Dust,” “Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Invaders“). He and his wife Joanna Heyes had one child together, Doug Heyes, Jr. Douglas Heyes died in Beverly Hills in 1993 due to congestive heart failure.
• Written by: Rod Serling based on “Disappearing Act” by Richard Matheson (a short story which was originally published in the March 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), click here to read my review of “Disappearing Act”
• Music: Leonard Rosenman
• Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
• Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
• Art Directors: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
• Film Editor: Fred Maguire
• Assistant Director: Edward Denault
• Set Decorations: Henry Grace and Rudy Butler
• Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino
• Casting Director: Mildred Gusse
• Cast:
  • Rod Taylor…..Lieutenant Colonel Clegg Forbes
    • Rod Taylor (1930-2015) was born in Australia and arrived in the U.S. five years prior to filming this episode. Over his career, he appeared in more than 50 feature films, including Young Cassidy (1965), Nobody Runs Forever (1968), The Train Robbers (1973), and A Matter of Wife… and Death (1975). He decided to become an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier in an Old Vic touring production of Shakespeare’s Richard III and made his feature film debut in the Australian Lee Robinson film King of the Coral Sea (1954). He soon started acting in television films, portraying several different characters in the 1950s anthology series Studio 57. He gained popularity after starring in The Time Machine (1960) as “H. George Wells.” He later voiced the dog Pongo in Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). In one of his most famous roles, he played Mitch Brenner in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). By the late 1990s, Taylor had moved into semi-retirement. His final film role was in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) in which he portrayed Winston Churchill. He was married three times and had one daughter, Felicia Taylor, who became a CNN correspondent. She died in 2023 at the age of 59. Rod Taylor died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills in 2015 at age 84.
  • Charles Aidman…..Colonel Ed Harrington
    • Charles Aidman (1925-1993) appeared in various television shows like The Virginian, Gunsmoke, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and Little House on the Prairie. He appeared in two Twilight Zone episodes (“And When the Sky Was Opened” and “Little Girl Lost“). Notably, Charles Aidman later stepped into Serling’s role of narrator for the 1985-1987 rebooted Twilight Zone television series (he was eventually replaced by Robin Ward). He died of complications from cancer in 1993 in Beverly Hills at the age of 68.
  • Jim Hutton…..Major William Gart
    • James “Jim” Hutton (1934-1979) grew up in Binghamton, New York just like Rod Serling. His father was an editor and managing editor of the Binghamton Press, however his parents divorced when he was an infant and he never knew his father. He was apparently a troubled kid, getting expelled from five high schools and a boarding school; he was also later expelled from Syracuse University after drunkenly driving a bulldozer through a tulip garden near the library. He served in the U.S. Army before turning to acting. He was best remembered for his role as Ellery Queen in the 1970s TV series of the same name, and his screen partnership with Paula Prentiss in four films, starting with Where the Boys Are (1960). They were sometimes regarded as the tallest screen couple in Hollywood (Hutton was 6’5″ and Prentiss was 5’10”). His role as Major William “Bill” Gart in “And When The Sky Was Opened” was only his third professional role on camera. He was the father of Oscar-winning actor Timothy Hutton who appeared in an episode of the 1980s reboot of The Twilight Zone. Jim Hutton died of liver cancer in 1979 at the age of 45.
  • Maxine Cooper…..Amy, Colonel Forbes’s girlfriend
    • Maxine Cooper (1924-2009) was perhaps best known for her film debut in the role of private detective Mike Hammer’s secretary Velda in the 1955 film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. She was also a photographer and an activist who helped organize civil rights marches in support of Martin Luther King Jr. She passed away at her home in Los Angeles in 2009 at the age of 84 (her LA Times obituary identified her as “Maxine Cooper Gomber”).
  • Sue Randall…..Nurse
    • Marion Burnside “Sue” Randall (1935-1984) spent her seventeen-year acting career primarily working in television. Her best-known role was as the kindly Miss Alice Landers, Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver’s elementary-school teacher on the sitcom Leave It to Beaver. She appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone (“And When the Sky Was Opened” and “From Agnes – With Love“). She was married twice and had two children. She died from lung and larynx cancer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1984 at the age of 49.
  • Paul Bryar…..Bartender
    • Gabriel Paul Barrere, a.k.a. “Paul Bryar” (1910-1985) started his career in the silent era, making his debut in the Harold Lloyd comedy Professor Beware (1938). He appeared in three movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, including Vertigo (1958), where he had an uncredited role as the friendly Police Captain who accompanies Jimmy Stewart to the coroner’s inquest. The other two Hitchcock films he appeared in were Notorious (1946) and The Wrong Man (1956). He also appeared in a 1955 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He was often typecast as a policeman, as in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). He also appeared in the opening scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and in television shows like Bonanza, Batman, Little House on the Prairie, Emergency!, Bewitched, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Leave It to Beaver, Kung Fu, and Hart to Hart. He was married to Claudia Bryar who played Emma Spool in the film Psycho II (1983). They had three children together. He died in 1985 at the age of 75, she died in 2011.
  • Joe Bassett…..Medical officer (uncredited)
    • Joe Bassett (1910-1997) was best known for appearances in television shows like Down Three Dark Streets, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Have Gun – Will Travel, and many other shows (primarily Westerns). He died of heart failure in Santa Cruz, California at the age of 86 in 1997.
  • Gloria Pall…..Girl in bar (uncredited)
    • Gloria Pall (1997-2012) was an American model, showgirl, actress, author, and businesswoman. Prior to acting, she attended the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics to learn to be an aircraft mechanic during World War II. She was employed by the USO headquarters office on the 56th floor of the Empire State Building in NYC when a U.S. Army B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed into the 79th floor in 1945 killing fourteen people (she narrowly escaped). She then worked as a showgirl in both Reno and Las Vegas, and dated Howard Hughes for a time, before embarking on an acting career in television shows like Sky King and The Twilight Zone, as well as feature films like Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation (1953), Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), The French Line (1954), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Jailhouse Rock (1957), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Elmer Gantry (1960). She was a two-time centerfold in Esquire and developed a racy television show called “Voluptua” which was cancelled after seven weeks. Gloria then turned to the real estate business in 1962, opening her own office on Sunset Strip (she kept a prominent sign that read “Call Pall”). Funnily enough, her fellow actor in this episode, Jim Hutton, later became one of her real estate clients. They went out driving together and she got a ticket for speeding that day. Jim Hutton told her he would take care of the ticket, but apparently he never did. Gloria was married and divorced twice and she had one son. She died of heart failure in 2012 in Burbank, California at the age of 85.
  • Elizabeth Fielding…..Blond Nurse (uncredited)
    • Elizabeth Fielding, or simply Lisabeth Field (1923-1996), was known for appearances in Mannix (1967), The Invaders (1967) and The F.B.I. (1965). She was married to fellow actor Logan Field.
  • Oliver McGowan…..officer, perhaps named Major Henderson (uncredited)
    • Oliver McGowan (1907-1971) was known for appearances in shows like Maverick, Lassie, One Step Beyond, Playhouse 90, Gunsmoke, Route 66, The Virginian, The Lieutenant (a show created by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry), Perry Mason, Bewitched, The Wild Wild West, The Monkees, The Brady Bunch, My Three Sons, and many other shows. He appeared in the classic episode of Star Trek “Shore Leave” as the “Caretaker.”
  • S. John Launer…..Mr. Harrington (uncredited)
    • Saul John Launer (1919–2006) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was an American television actor (often appearing in uncredited roles) best known for playing a criminal court judge on Perry Mason. He also appeared in television shows like Batman, The Wild Wild West, Peyton Place, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Bonanza, and many others. He appeared in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). He appeared in four episodes of The Twilight Zone (“And When The Sky Was Opened,” “Third From The Sun,” “The Purple Testament,” and “In Praise of Pip“). In his later career, he was badly injured in a stagecoach accident on the set of the show Laramie in 1960, an incident that led to his co-actor, Bert Spencer, requiring a leg amputation. Interestingly enough, Launer supplemented his acting career with real estate investments and an invention called the “Kelly Klozer,” a device he built and marketed that automatically closes a sliding screen door. He invented it when he got frustrated with letting out the family dog, Kelly. Launer and his wife had two children. He died at the age of 86 in 2006 in Tarzana, California of natural causes. His son is screenwriter, producer, and director Dale Launer (1952-present) who is primarily known for his work on comedy films like My Cousin Vinny (1992).
  • Bernard Sell…..bar patron (uncredited)
    • Bernard Sell (1908-1993) was born in England. His father was a musician and went to school with Charlie Chaplin. Bernard worked as a seamen where he met Errol Flynn on a voyage to Tasmania. Flynn convinced him to work in motion pictures. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Sell worked as a stand-in at Disney studios and later as a stuntman and extra in Hollywood. He died in 1993.
      

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• In the original script, Rod Serling wrote about a crashed spacecraft but apparently the idea was deemed too expensive. Also in the original script, Rod Serling suggested that transportation to another world (as it happens to the three protagonists) would be a painful experience, but lead actor Rod Taylor and director Douglas Heyes argued it would be more of a euphoric experience. Thus, Rod Taylor performed his disappearance as if in a state of ecstasy.
• This episode was only a vague thematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s short story “Disappearing Act” which was a writer’s epistolary account of how everyone and everything around him continues to erase itself from existence. The story ends with a single sentence abruptly cut-off as the writer himself ceases to exist. Serling kept the overall premise intact but he constructed an entirely new plot around the idea. In fact, Matheson later stated “‘Disappearing Act” was not really adapted at all, only the smallest aspect of its premise being used.” For reasons unknown to me, “Disappearing Act” was not included in the Penguin edition of Richard Matheson’s collected short stories but I tracked it down in another collection (feel free to read my review of the story here).
• When Richard Matheson initially sent the short story “Disappearing Act” to a reading agent for review, it was returned to him, torn in pieces. Still, he remained undeterred in sending it out to agents.
• Richard Matheson revealed he was inspired to write the story by a 1949 story entitled “Private- Keep Out” by Philip MacDonald.
• This episode title ‘And When The Sky Was Opened” is a parody of a line from the children’s nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” The original line in the rhyme goes as follows: “When the pie was opened, The birds began to sing; Wasn’t that a dainty dish, To set before the king?”
• Rod Taylor later recalled that it was director Douglas Heyes who initially reached out to him with a copy of the script, wondering if he would be interested in the part. Although Taylor did suspect that Rod Serling had him in mind for the part because Taylor had appeared on Playhouse 90 where several celebrated Serling scripts were performed (including Serling’s Peabody and Emmy-award winning script “Requiem for a Heavyweight”).
• The scene of Forbes busting through the glass door of the bar was encouraged by Rod Serling and director Douglas Heyes, though it was not in the original script.
• The hospital room number in this episode is #15.
• The vanished Ed Harrington is said to be 36 years old. Lieutenant Colonel Clegg Forbes had known him for 15 years and Colonel William Gart had known him for 5 years (according to Forbes, though Gart does not remember Ed Harrington).
• Ed Harrington’s dad is identified as James Harrington of Des Moines, Iowa (per Ed Harrington’s phone call).
• The drinks that Forbes and Harrington buy at the bar apparently cost about thirty cents (but the bartender tells them their “money is no good here” since they both are the famous astronauts who recently survived the crash).
• In the Blu-Ray audio commentary for this episode, Rod Taylor fondly remembered working on The Twilight Zone. He said they didn’t do too many takes for each scene and he mentioned that Douglas Heyes was also a talented artist in addition to being a smart director.
• This was Jim Hutton’s television debut.
• As mentioned above, actor Charles Aidman later became the narrator of The Twilight Zone reboot series in the 1980s.
• Director Douglas Heyes became good friends with Rod Taylor around the time of this episode. They both later did the television special “Powderkeg” together to kick off a new show called Bearcats!
• As with the episode “Time Enough At Last,” this episode features the same newspaper called The Daily Chronicle.” Some of the headlines include “Board of Education Submits New School Bonds Issue” and “Contests Delay Choice of New City Chairman” and “Spacemen Safe in Crash on Mojave” and “Engineer Is Killed As Limited Crashes” and “Gem Thieves Strike in London Fog” and “Quakes Terrify Town” and “Bond Market Steady With Rails Leader” and “Food To Cost Less” and “Sir Haven Wins Annual Classic.”
• The most expensive set for this episode was the bar which cost $450.
• Apparently this episode was initially titled “The Aftermath.”
• The initial script for this episode featured an X-6 rocket but this was later changed to an X-20 Dyna-Soar (short for “Dynamic Soarer”), a spaceplane vehicle that was actually designed by the U.S. Air Force for various military missions.
• In one of the more notorious bloopers in The Twilight Zone, when Rod Taylor’s character walks up to the mirror, it was filmed at an angle to make it appear that he has no reflection. However, his hand and arm can clearly be seen in the corner of the mirror.

Click here to return to my survey of The Twilight Zone series.

Click here to read my review of Richard Matheson’s “Disappearing Act.”