Description: Season 4, Episode 6
Air Date: February 7, 1963
Plot Summary: A crew of three men, exploring the galaxy for habitable planets, strangely stumble across their own ship's wreckage.
Review: I like the idea behind this episode, but it really should have been shortened to the original 30 minutes. The way the story is structured fits TZ's old formula perfectly and the ending wouldn't have felt as lackluster had they cut to the chase so to speak. The efforts to make the plot more drawn out are noticeable with unnecessary tangents padding out the running time. On the positive side, Jack Klugman returns for another performance as the captain of the three men.
In a nutshell, a crew is scanning various planets trying to find places to colonize. When passing over a planet that is habitable, one of the crew members detects a faint glimmer. Believing this to be their first contact with aliens, the crew is shocked to discover it is wreckage from a human ship. Upon further inspection, the crew comes face to face with their own dead bodies--the crashed ship is their own! Trying to formulate various explanations as to what is occurring, the crew experiences instances of, what can only be described as, entering a ghostly plane of existence. The captain reassures the crew that they are most certainly not dead, and there must be a rational explanation such as a time warp or illusions by aliens. I wish the episode played around with these ideas or at least kept things vague, but, alas, the most obvious explanation is the correct one: they are, in fact, ghosts. The explanation for why they continue on is due to the captain convincing them to the contrary. Meaning, the captain's ghost is preventing his crew from embracing and realizing the truth about their deaths. As the episode ends, we learn that they are trapped in a loop--probably for eternity. Ehh...it's really not a bad episode at all. The premise is good, but it overstays its welcome when you know how it will end by the 15 minute mark. They could have toyed with the audience more but oh well.
This episode has some things in common with "The hitchhiker" with a character already dead and in ghost form but not realizing it yet. I actually didn't think that the 3 guys in "Death ship" were already dead at first, I was toying with the idea that they somehow warped to the future and saw their future crashed ship and future dead bodies. And the guys would then take off again, warp back to the present time and then crash back down onto the planet and be killed. And then, their earlier time traveling live bodies would come down and see it, as we saw it earlier in the episode.
ReplyDeleteOnce the guys started blowing off the time travel idea though, it's then that I realized that there'd be a different twist, and that it would indeed be their ghosts seeing their dead bodies. Me realizing that was around the time that one of the guys had just seen his deceased wife and child, and the Jack Klugman character stated that he now believed that they never time travelled. He then went into the off-beat idea on aliens creating illusions, which I never really went for. I like what the twist really was since I like the episodes that explore the topic of the afterlife. "A stop in Willoughby" was also, in my opinion, revolved around the topic of the afterlife, except there, the main character was alive for most of the episode and didn't get to the afterlife until the end of the episode, even though he got 2 glimpses of it earlier when passing out on the train (Willoughby was his afterlife)