"I shot an arrow into the air, where it landed, I know not where."
Director: Stuart Rosenberg
Writers: Rod Serling, Madelon Champion
Composer: Leonard Rosemann
One of the benefits of a black and white show is that otherwise obvious environments can be completely obscured due to the lack of any real color. Thus, it forces the actors to create a sense of setting and then allows for the setting to become more of an entity all of its own. In this episode, it would be fairly easy to recognize this as a desert environment, but until this is mentioned in the episode, it's totally believable that this could be an asteroid without any sand, and it's just rock expanses for miles all around.
This episode features the paranoia bred of the basic human instinct for survival. A crew of eight astronauts is shot into space riding very first model of a powerful space shuttle. The ship goes dark on the radars and the astronauts are revealed to be on a desert asteroid, and only four of them survived. One of them, Langford, is going to die from injuries and a rift forms. The commander, Colonel Donlin (played by Edward Binns), and another astronaut, Pierson (Ted Otis), want to give Langford a fighting chance, but Officer Cory (Dewey Martin) wants to just take the dying Langford's water, a rare resource, and move on.
That was a lot to unpack, but the brilliant part of something like The Twilight Zone is that they have to condense this into maybe a few lines of dialogue, but the rest is all visual. One of the first things that the viewer sees are the body bags and Langford laying atop one, a fairly obvious symbol, but a striking one nonetheless.
And this is a very visual episode. While there are fair amounts of dialogue, most of the weight of the episode comes in how characters express themselves, what they do, and how they respond to their environment. It's easy to see, just based on their dialogue, what sides of the spectrum that these characters are on, and that you have two extremes and one in the middle. But beyond that?
Dewey Martin's Officer Corey is easily the most memorable character from the episode, and not just because he gets the most screentime. He doesn't necessarily play a nuanced performance but delivers a strong one as a man who may as well have lost his mind the moment the rocket crashed. It leads the audience to wonder what it was like when they landed and how they got to this point, but the episode emphasizes that it's nice to wonder about that, but what's more important is what's happening right now. Corey is the ultimate symbol of that. He may have been perfectly fine and keeping his cool when they crashed, but now is when he gets interesting, now is when what he does really matters.
There is some level of uncertainty that comes with Corey's character. He plays the trickster, the deceiver, very well. He's one extreme of a survivalist: the one that's all about numero uno and everyone else can come second or not at all. Corey is the only other character in Season 1 to get a Rod Serling mid-episode dialogue about him, too, and this one is much heavier, much more intense.
Ted Otis plays the other end of the spectrum, the one who puts others way in front of himself. He's willing to give his own water to Langford and would probably ask the others to sacrifice theirs for a dying man. He's noble to a painful, possibly ignorant degree, and Otis plays it well. He plays it as if Corey is the villain (he's not wrong), but that they should be expending all of their resources and not trying to properly ration it out.
As such, we have Ed Binns as Donlin, the middle, the one in charge. While he does want Langford to live, he also understands the oddness of the situation. Donlin in most other episodes would likely be the main character of the episode but subsequent viewings reveal that Corey is actually the main character as we watching him descend into madness, with Donlin noting it all along. Donlin is the one we want to root for while we're occupied primarily with the goings-on of Corey. It's an interesting reversal.
What's just as interesting is how this episode handles isolationism. It's never mentioned but it's heavily implied that these characters believe that they are all the life there is on this asteroid, or planet, or wherever they ended up. As such, these resources may be all they have left. They are alone and without anything, and it's interesting to see how these characters respond in this situation. This episode takes several interesting plot twists to keep the viewer on their toes as a result.
One thing about this episode that may turn people off from it is how hollow the third act, at least until the ending, feels. It's powered by that strong Serling monologue but the audience is otherwise just watching some people move across the landscape. But it's never quite boring, just a bit uneventful. The music adds to the tension, to the stress.
That feeling of isolation is never so strong as it is then, especially because they reuse some of the same framing for certain shots that once had more people but then decrease in population. This reuse adds, also, to strengthen how characters act and appear compared to the earlier parts of the episode. It's an interesting method of, visually, showing how far they've come since the episode began.
"I Shot an Arrow into the Air" is a visually dense episode, and while the plot is rather small, the episode gets filled out by a great performance for its main, twisted character and a generally unsettling atmosphere.
***SPOILER SECTION***
Man, how good is Rod Serling's narration in retrospect? Obviously what Corey did is unspeakably terrible, but Serling's narration is the best way to set up the twist that is to come, and how truly twisted he is. There's still no excuse for what he did, but it can't help but make the audience at first go "ah, that makes sense" and then "oh, he killed them for nothing" all within a single moment. It's very strong storytelling.
What's even better is the line Corey has, where he calls out to Donlin and Pierson to see what Pierson already has: the telephone poles, the Reno sign. The twist that they're on Earth is a strong one but not one of the best ones, since it's pretty simple to put together if you think about it for a little bit.
But it's just such a cruel twist that makes it so great, and that makes the episode so memorable. The Twilight Zone is a relentless place where barely anything good can happen, and when you're a bad person, nothing good can ever happen. It's especially poignant in Corey's final words that he clearly did want to survive alongside his fellow crewmates, but be it the heat or dehydration getting to him that made him completely forget logic. His final words to Donlin are just assuring himself that he'll get a mere two extra days without Donlin weighing him down, which, given what we've seen, may not be a lot of time on "the asteroid."
This was one of the first twists I saw that made me realize just how mean this show could be, but how good this was thematically. It's a good prep for other twists to come, even if it isn't the most original twists. Then again, it's only unoriginal because another major piece of writing that Rod Serling had a part in is just much more famous than this episode. So it's neat to see that this actually predates that, and was the inspiration for it.
We'll continue along with the theme of paranoia into the next episode, as we move from astronauts to airplane pilots and the case of a missing flight. Where'd it go? Maybe it crashed on an asteroid. But the man on the job has always found the causes, and will have to step up once again in "The Arrival!" See you then.
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