So, here\u2019s a lifeboat drama folded into an early space flight story.\u00a0 A rocket with eight astronauts is lost during the launch.\u00a0 It disappeared from the radar and all communication is lost.\u00a0 We next see the astronauts in a desert landscape, which we are told is an asteroid, near the smoking wreck of their ship.\u00a0 Four of the astronauts are dead, one is critically injured and three are unharmed.\u00a0 As senior officer Colonel Donlin takes charge of the survivors and orders his subordinates Corey and Pierson to bury the dead and care for the injured man.\u00a0 Corey balks at giving the injured man water because of its short supply.\u00a0 This sets him at odds with his fellows who come to see how selfish and inhumane he really is. \u00a0When the injured man dies Donlin sets Corey and Pierson to the task of exploring beyond the vicinity of the crash site and find if there is anything to help their plight.\u00a0 Hours later Corey comes back without Pierson claiming they went in separate directions and he didn\u2019t know where Pierson was.\u00a0 But when Donlin accused him of having Pierson\u2019s full canteen instead of his own empty one Corey confessed to taking it but claimed he took it after finding Pierson\u2019s dead body in the desert on the way back.<\/p>\n
Donlin takes Corey\u2019s pistol away at gunpoint and forces Corey to retrace his steps and show him Pierson\u2019s body.\u00a0 When they reach the spot, the body is gone so they follow a trail and find Pierson lying on the ground with a head wound and badly injured.\u00a0 Donlin drops his rifle and kneels down next to Pierson and asks him what happened.\u00a0 Pierson can hardly talk so he tries to draw a symbol to show what he found at the top of the mountain above them.\u00a0 It\u2019s a long vertical line with two short horizontal lines through it, sort of like a double armed cross.\u00a0 Pierson then collapses and dies.\u00a0 Meanwhile Corey has grabbed the rifle and trained it on Donlin.\u00a0 He admits that he attacked Pierson and now he would kill Donlin.\u00a0 He shoots Donlin and proceeds to climb the steep mountain in the hot sun.\u00a0 When he reaches the top, he sees that he is in Nevada and the symbol Pierson drew represented the telephone poles across from the ridge.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t on an asteroid.\u00a0 They had crashed back to Earth.\u00a0 He starts laughing hysterically because he has killed his comrades and will now have to answer for it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m going to put aside how stupid it is to think that somehow, they could crash into an asteroid while lifting off from Earth.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to ignore the absurdity of an asteroid that was too small to be noticed from Earth having the atmospheric pressure and gravity field of a full-sized planet.\u00a0 Putting those things aside you get the classic law of the jungle scenario of the sociopath murdering his friends to get to live last in the lifeboat.\u00a0 This has been explored before but we get the twist of the state of nature turning out to be an illusion.\u00a0 He hasn\u2019t escaped society.\u00a0 It will have the chance to set him straight.\u00a0 One observation, apparently the desert southwest is indistinguishable from another planet to astronauts of the nineteen sixties.\u00a0 Apparently, they hadn\u2019t seen any westerns on tv or the movies.<\/p>\n
As with several other tropes that will be reused in the series not knowing they are on Earth is used here for the first time so I\u2019ll give them a pass on that.\u00a0 This is a relatively lively drama so I\u2019ll give this a B-.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, here\u2019s a lifeboat drama folded into an early space flight story.\u00a0 A rocket with eight astronauts is lost during the launch.\u00a0 It disappeared from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237,4,244,240,1661],"tags":[1710,38,1355,1194,44,309,265,1691,154,1692,838],"class_list":["post-5960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-tv-reviews","category-twilight-zone","tag-i-shot-an-arrow-into-the-air","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-rod-serling","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-twilight-zone"],"yoast_head":"\n