The Manifold
Childhood Memories
I was seven years old on January 15, 1960. My Dad was at a Minneapolis firehouse working a 24-hour shift. That evening, my Mom and I sat down to watch The Twilight Zone on TV. I was lucky; not every kid on the block got to watch this popular, but scary, show.
It was Season 1, Episode 15, that evening. The title is the opening line of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Arrow and the Song.
Rod Serling’s opening narration is “Her name is the Arrow 1. She represents four and a half years of planning, preparation, and training, and a thousand years of science, mathematics, and the projected dreams and hopes of not only a nation, but a world. She is the first manned aircraft into space, and this is the countdown. The last five seconds before man shot an arrow into the air.”
Space travel was still a dream in 1960. It wasn’t until April 12, 1961 that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first human in space.
This episode’s script is the only one based on a purchased idea. Serling met industry outsider Madelon Champion at a party where she outlined the plot. He paid her $500 for the idea and listed her as a writer in the closing credits.
The story is about the first manned space flight with eight crew members. They crash land on what the astronauts believe is an unknown asteroid, in an area of desert and jagged mountains. Only four of the crew survive the crash. One severely injured crew member quickly dies, leaving three men in a desert with only enough water for three days.
Order breaks down between three surviving crew members. One member of the crew murders the other two for their water. Ironically, the sole survivor discovers that they have been on Earth the whole time.
The idea of astronauts thinking they had crashed on an unknown planet, only to discover they had been on Earth all along, should seem familiar. Serling adapted it for his initial screenplay of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes.
My Memory
What I vividly remember from the episode is the desert. The location truly looked “out of this world”. And this one image of that alien-appearing desert really stuck in my mind.
The Photo
I had no idea in 1960 that much of this episode was filmed in Death Valley National Monument (now a National Park). The area around Zabriskie Point is prominently featured.
Despite a couple of earlier trips to Death Valley, my trip a year ago was different. As I climbed up the ridgeline from the Zabriskie Point viewing area, memories of that episode flashed into my head. I realized I was looking at the background of a scene from a 60-year-old TV show!
The prominent formation behind the two men is nicknamed “The Manifold.” I marveled at the fact that after all these years, I was actually seeing that “alien” desert location. And it brought back warm memories of evenings with my Mom as we waited for my Dad to return home safely the next morning after his 24-hour shifts.
Thanks for looking,
Chuck