This is another one of those iconic Twilight Zone episodes.\u00a0 Roddy McDowall was a pretty well-known child actor in the 1940s and was fairly recognizable to the tv audience. \u00a0Later on, between his part as Cornelius the Chimp in Planet of the Apes and some other motion pictures (he was Augustus Caesar in the big budget Liz Taylor\/Richard Burton disaster Cleopatra) he become a popular star of tv and Broadway.<\/p>\n
Here he plays Sam Conrad who along with Warren Marcusson are to be the first two men to land on Mars.\u00a0 Conrad is very nervous.\u00a0 He\u2019s a scientist, not a pilot, and he frets about the danger and what they will find on Mars.\u00a0 Marcusson tries to allay his fears by telling him his belief that \u201cpeople are alike all over.\u201d\u00a0 Conrad\u2019s fears are well justified.\u00a0 The ship crash lands and Marcusson is critically injured.\u00a0 Conrad can hear something on the outside of the ship banging on the door.\u00a0 He tells Marcusson that he is afraid to open the door but Marcusson begs him to open the door.\u00a0 When he does so he finds people that are indistinguishable from humans.\u00a0 They go to help Marcusson but find that he has died.\u00a0 They tell Conrad that they will bury Marcusson and then they will provide him with shelter.\u00a0 He meets a Martian woman named Teenya who shows compassion for him.<\/p>\n
They leave Conrad at the ship over night and the next day they return to tell him that they have prepared a home for him that they hope he\u2019ll like.\u00a0 They bring him to a duplicate of an American 1960s home, complete with television, wet bar, refrigerator and gas stove.\u00a0 They ask him to remain there while they prepare him to see their city.\u00a0 While they are leaving Teenya is noticeably upset but the rest of the group are almost jubilant.<\/p>\n
Conrad makes himself at home and makes himself a scotch highball and smokes a cigarette that he lights off the stove.\u00a0 But while wandering around he finds that all the doors are locked and there are no windows.\u00a0 He starts banging on a door to get out when one of the walls retracts to reveal a wall of bars facing a crowd of Martians staring into his \u201chome.\u201d\u00a0 A sign in front of his enclosure reads, “Earth Creature in his native habitat.”\u00a0 He\u2019s in a zoo.\u00a0 Teenya is in the crowd and is the only one distraught by his new status.\u00a0 Conrad calls out to his dead comrade he says \u201cMarcusson, you were right people are alike all over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Interesting coincidence, the actress playing Teenya, Susan Oliver also played Vina, the woman who was injured in a crash and kept in captivity by aliens in the Star Trek episode \u201cThe Menagerie.\u201d\u00a0 She was bait for Captain Pike in that episode.\u00a0 Coincidence?\u00a0 I wonder.<\/p>\n
The surprise ending in this episode is pretty easy to guess and the dialog is only fair.\u00a0 But I have fond memories of this as one of my earliest real science fiction stories.\u00a0 I\u2019ll give it a B+.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is another one of those iconic Twilight Zone episodes.\u00a0 Roddy McDowall was a pretty well-known child actor in the 1940s and was fairly recognizable<\/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":[1732,38,1355,1194,44,309,265,1691,154,1692,838],"class_list":["post-6092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-tv-reviews","category-twilight-zone","tag-people-are-alike-all-over","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