Its Time for Twilight Zone Marathons and such, so let’s discuss space travel and its implications in TZ!

The Best and Maybe Only Space Travel in Twilight Zone Episodes. Not Spoiler Free (because why would you even care about any of this if you haven’t already seen this 60 year-old show?)

1. Third From The Sun:  A weapons scientist escapes the world on a space ship with his family and a buddy test pilot (who also takes his wife along). The world is on the brink of nuclear apocalypse. At the end it is revealed that they are not from the Earth, but going to Earth, ostensibly to escape endless war on their native planet (joke is on them). Great acting all around, but especially from Fritz Weaver and Ed Andrews (as the most conniving, evil boss ever, a role he’d repeat a few times). Flaws: distance scale is wrong. We’ll see this a lot on Twilight Zone. They are clearly speaking of other star systems which need to be at least 30 trillion miles away being only millions of miles away.
2. Death Ship: This one and the next get overlooked because they are from the much maligned 4^th season. However, “Death Ship” is one of the best from that year. The crew of space ship E-89 is investigating the possibility of life on a far away planet.  They soon come across a crashed ship that is a duplicate of theirs and even has a dead crew which seems to be them. They are constantly getting clues that they are already dead, but they, and the captain especially, are slow in accepting this as the answer.  The show is heavy with its fantasy elements, so its hard to really criticize on explicit flaws in astronomy or physics.
3. On Thursday We Leave For Home:  James Whitmore fuels this story with one of the best guest appearances in the Twilight Zone. He plays Benteen, the leader of an Earth colony on a distant and desolate outpost. Without any potential for the future on this planet, they request and hope for a rescue from Earth, which they get. However, once Benteen realizes he will lose all control over the colonists as they return to Earth, he decides to stay in the more comfortable realm of the colony. As the rest of the colonists and their rescuers leave, Benteen realizes his mistake and begs for them to take him. However, either unheard or unheeded, he is abandoned on the planet, presumably left to live out the rest of his life there alone.
4. The Lonely-A man (played by Jack Warden) is convicted of murder and banished to an asteroid. The man assigned to deliver supplies to Corey gifts him a female robot. He falls in love with the robot, but, alas, he’s pardoned. However, when he’s set to return to Earth, he’s told he can’t take the robot, and the robot is destroyed. The distance scales mentioned in the episode seem reasonable if they are really speaking of this asteroid being in the solar system. However, no asteroids in our solar system are massive enough to hold on to atmospheres, let alone breathable atmospheres.
5. The Invaders: A woman (played by Agnes Morehead) alone in a countryside house is invaded by a spaceship with tiny menacing aliens. She fights back and is able to drive out the aliens from her home. At the end of the episode we hear one of the aliens contacting his home base, in English, and uttering very Anglo-sounding names, and mentioning that he was attacked by a race of giants. On the side of spaceship, it is revealed that it says “U. S, Air Force.” So, it is we who are the aliens! This is a very visual episode since Morehead only grunts through the episode, so we never get a clue as to what her foreign tongue is. Also, the “aliens” are wearing suits that are completely covering them up, so no clues that they are really humans.
6. I Shot an Arrow Into the Air- A new space mission crashes on an asteroid. Most of the crew dies or is later killed off by an obnoxious astronaut survivor, Corey (is everybody named Corey??). As the survivor crosses over a mountain ridge he can now see highways and telephone poles. That is, they didn’t crash on an asteroid, but on Earth, in the Nevada desert.  Realizing he need not have killed those men in order to survive, Corey breaks down. As Marc Zicree points out in the Twilight Zone Companion, they really should have figured out faster (they can breath, they see a star like the Sun, etc.) that they were on Earth.
7. People Are Alike All Over- Two astronauts go to Mars and only one survives. It turns out the survivor is the more anxious astronaut, worried regarding the nature of any Martians they might encounter. He discovers though that the natives seem friendly and human like and even give him a home that seems similar to one he had on Earth. However, he soon realizes he’s essentially a zoo animal to be gawked at. Even being gawked at by the lovely Tinya (Susan Oliver) can’t sooth him (rendering the whole episode as beyond plausibility).
8. The Little People– Two astronauts land on a desolate planet that turns out to be inhabited by a near microscopic civilization. One astronaut wants to be a god to the little people, while the other just wants to make repairs and get out. Well, the god stays, but is soon mistakenly killed by giant visiting astronauts.
9. Elegy- Three astronauts land on an asteroid and notice something odd. They see an Earth-like environment, yet they can’t possibly be on Earth (they notice the two Suns characteristic of the star system they are visiting). They notice that people they encounter are all frozen in place (save for one). They soon realize they are in a planetary-scale mortuary. However, the android character decides to do away with them since the dead can not be “at peace” with Earth men around. I just can’t see why dead people would care that Earth people were around? Killing them seemed unreasonable to me.
10. Prove 7, Over and Out– Not the greatest acting by Richard Basehart and Atoinette Bower (who would later show up as a guest star in Star Trek), but has a fun ending. Yeah, this is the one where they are really Adam and Eve, a plot device used up in short stories well before this show aired.
11. The Fear-Similar to the invaders, but in reverse. That is, the aliens (tiny compared to us) are intimidated by us. An interesting idea, but not particularly well executed.    

I didn’t include such greats as “Eye of the Beholder” because, though it clearly must be on another planet, it doesn’t really involve space travel.  I also excluded “Midnight Sun” because though it involves an astronomy plot, it doesn’t really discuss space travel of any kind. Undoubtedly, I missed someone’s favorite, so let me know if I did, and we can discuss it!

And if you like this stuff, check out my (Steve Bloom’s) book, The Physics and Astronomy of Science Fiction.