The Lonely
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Template:Infobox TTW season one The Lonely is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.
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Details
Episode number:7
Season:1
Production code: 173-3602
Original air date: November 13, 1959
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Jack Smight
Cast
James Corry: Jack Warden
Alicia: Jean Marsh
Captain Allenby: John Dehner
Adams: Ted Knight
Synopsis
A man stranded on a prison asteroid receives a feminine android as a gift. At first he detests her, rejecting her as a mere machine. In time, however, he learns to love her, and they become very close. When a ship lands on his asteroid to tell him that all such prisons have been abolished and that he is to come home immediately he is delighted... until he learns that there isn't enough room on the ship for his robot.
Trivia
- The first of many episodes (including I Shot an Arrow Into the Air, A Hundred Yards Over the Rim and The Rip Van Winkle Caper) to be filmed on location in Death Valley. Unprepared for the terrible conditions they would face, the crew suffered extreme dehydration and heat exhaustion and director of photography George Clemens even collapsed, falling from a camera crane while filming continued.
- The following is an excerpt from Rod Serling's pitch to potential sponsors of his new show, The Twilight Zone. It was included as an extra on "Twilight Zone's" DVD release, and was transcribed by Matthew Cregg.
This is sand. It represents desert, the desert that you'll see on your screen in a story we call "The Lonely." "The Lonely" is about a man sentenced to a lifetime of solitary confinement. The confinement takes place on a sandy asteroid far out in space. It's the story about a man slowly succumbing to a kind of nightmarish loneliness. A gradual disintegration of mind and body because human beings have that palpable need for companionship. A most benevolent and compassionate official sends the prisoner a long, rectangular box containing, well, a machine. A machine inside of a robot built in the form of a woman. It's a robot that talks and acts like a human being. A robot that thinks like a human being. Gentlemen, I can only tell you that "The Lonely," which involves a man and a woman made out of plastic and wires with a machine for a heart, will provide a most bizarre experience. As to the physiological extensions of their relationship, that is man and female machine and what they do in their spare time, we're leaving this wide open.
Themes
A study in human nature concluding that man cannot survive and be happy alone: he must share the comfort of a community in order to be whole. Similar themes are explored in Where Is Everybody? and The Mind and the Matter.
External link
- TV Tome episode page (http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-237/epid-12591)
References
- Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)
Back to: The Twilight Zone, Episode List, Season 1