"ED HARRINGTON!"
Director: Douglas Heyes
Writers: Rod Serling, Richard Matheson
Composer: Leonard Rosenman
Monsters and ghosts and freaky things are frightening. Blood and gore is horrifying. Odd occurrences and warped realities can terrorize, but the thing that is truly scary, the thing that is universally unsettling is the unknown. H.P. Lovecraft, the famous author of the early 20th-Century, mastered this style of story-telling with his succinct short-stories that got readers into a strange setting and pulled the plug on it just before they too could learn too much.
But one of the things Lovecraft, and this episode of The Twilight Zone, do exceptionally well is having characters live in the unknown and display their inability to do anything about it. The main character knows everything that people do not but doesn't know why. And the phenomenal part of the episode is that neither do we.
Based on Richard Matheson's short story "Disappearing Act," "And When the Sky was Opened" sees Col. Clegg Forbes visits his fellow astronaut and co-pilot Will Gart in the hospital after their experimental rocket crash-landed back on Earth; they were jettisoned hundreds of miles into space and went off the radar completely for a full day before it appeared and they landed on Earth. However, Forbes seems to be remembering someone that doesn't exist: Ed Harrington, the supposed third pilot that led the mission. Gart has no memory, and as the episode shows, neither does anyone else: it's as if he just disappeared from all existence.
Forbes, played by Rod Taylor, is the character we are closest connected to and the one whose eyes we see the majority of the episode through. He's an interesting character, too, and is rather well-adapted by Serling for the silver screen. He's a man that's clearly just an average guy, maybe not too great of a person as we find out in some of his antics at the bar, but just a normal pilot. He's clearly trying to get back to a sense of normalcy with his pals Harrington and Gart, but the events of the episode turn him into what would appear to be a nutcase.
His decline into insanity may seem a little fast and out of nowhere, but the beauty of the episode is the framing device of Forbes telling the story to Gart, so the audience can see that he is a man desperate for answers already. Having the middle chunk of the episode take place as a flashback not only explained the situation to the audience, be it real or not, and shows the rapid decline of Forbes into the manic state that he arrives in at the beginning of the episode. It's important to juxtapose a man who is clearly out of his mind with the confident man that just survived a plane crash.
Taylor's performance is also downright phenomenal, one of the best of the entire series. He goes everywhere with this performance: confident, happy, giddy, flirty, serious, confused, scared, sad, angry. Forbes feels all the more human because of this performance, it plays like this is just some guy trying to make sense of a senseless situation. He is the Lovecraftian "hero" who is in way over his head and will never understand the inner mechanisms of what is happening, but keeps wanting to, despite all signs that he should just look away, turn away.
However, with a mystery as compelling as this one, who could blame him? This is arguably one of the best, if not the best, grand mystery of the show. It's faceless, and as mentioned before, senseless. What's causing Ed Harrington to disappear, and for nobody, nobody to remember him? His name is even wiped from newspapers and telegram reports.
Is it indeed some sort of Lovecraftian monster that's bending reality? Are aliens making it so everyone forgets and they get pulled back into the wormhole they probably went through? Maybe history and time is catching up with them after their crash and leaving them behind? Maybe they've landed in an alternate reality and are being warped back into their proper world, where they belong? The only clues we get to what's really going on is the sensation of feeling lost, or a lack of belonging. Harrington says that he just doesn't feel like he belongs anymore, and then it's confirmed when everyone else forgets about him somehow.
Therefore, it is quite easy to get on Forbes' side and try to figure out what's really going on, but the brilliant part of the episode is that there are few other clues to go on, so you can only imagine what's going on in Forbes' head as he deals with all of this in real time and fails to elicit the responses he wants out of everyone.
Douglas Heyes' direction in this episode is also brilliant, moving the camera around to really good angles and shots. There are some really good shots that look straight down at a character or some higher-up ones that follow characters through a building. The lighting work is also very well executed here as well, bringing on heavier shadows as the night draws closer and as the big moment with Harrington also draws near.
The scene where Forbes returns to the empty bar is also downright unsettling. It's the perfect shot, perfect moment, to display how he really feels about the situation, and Taylor knocks it out of the park with his performance of a frustrated, tired man that's been worn down and beaten up.
"And When the Sky was Opened" is an episode that must be watched by horror fans, Lovecraft fans, or just fans of good mysteries. It's tightly written, well-directed, and has an amazing lead-actor leading the charge through this unsettling tale of disappearing men, and the complete back-break of reality that's going on.
***SPOILER SECTION***
Oh I love how Rod Taylor just screams "HARRINGTON!" in the bar, it's SUCH a good moment. Sometimes when I get angry I'll do the same thing, just raise my fists and scream "ED HARRINGTON!" And nobody gets it because he's not real anymore o.O
Sort of. Maybe. As I mentioned before, the ending is completely up to interpretation. It's clear that these men and this mission have been wiped completely from history, but, why? By whom? Where they called back? Maybe they made a daring escape of some messed-up alien world that finally caught up to them.
How easy would it be to ruin this story with a reveal that it was aliens all along? How disappointing would that be? The fact that the mystery remains and nobody is the wiser for it is what gives it weight and gives it that extra kick of terror. Because nobody noticed what happened, nobody noticed what was essentially the will of God right in front of them.
Another unsettling moment is the one where the Medical officer and nurse inspect Room 15 and it is completely empty. No sign of Gart anywhere, not even his bed. He's just gone, right after he realized what was happening, maybe even realized what it was that was going on.
This is an episode that just gets better the more that I think about it. It's one that I love to rewatch and dissect and just come back to in general. I often thought of it as an "okay" episode but the ending, from Forbes realizing he's no longer real to Serling's closing narration is top-notch stuff, but it's matched by an episode that's just as good!
Next time we return to the land of the unreal, but this time, the explanation doesn't really matter. What matters is this: life, or death. And it'll all be decided as we discover who really is the greatest there is, Fats Brown or Jesse Cardiff in "A Game of Pool." See you then!
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