The Arrival

Description: Season 3, Episode 2

Air Date: September 22, 1961

Plot Summary: An investigator tries to solve the mystery of a plane's ominous landing without a crew or passengers.

Review: To TZ's credit, there haven't been many nominations for the worst episode list thus far. With that said, here's another entry for that list! Besides feeling like other episodes, the story makes absolutely no sense and blows whatever intrigue it had amassed in the first half. It felt like someone had a good idea, couldn't figure out how to resolve it, and rushed an ending right before shooting began. Oh well, as I've mentioned multiple times, they can't all be classics.

So the story begins with a plane landing just like normal until airport workers attempt to unload the passengers and the luggage. Curiously, they find no one on board and can't figure out how the plane could have even landed. An investigator shows up to figure out what happened--claiming he has never failed to solve a case. After gathering information and interviewing the various witnesses involved, the investigator looks at the plane itself. The investigator suddenly picks up on an odd detail whereby the witnesses each saw the color of the plane's seats as different; this leads to the realization that people see different serial numbers for the plane as well. The investigator believes they are somehow hypnotized into seeing a hallucination. To prove his theory correct, in the most roundabout way, the investigator walks into the propellers, but the plane disappears. Things were cool up to this point but everyone else then disappears. The investigator searches around the airport until he finds the people that vanished, however, they claim to have no recollection as to what the guy is talking about. We get about 10 minutes of questioning whether this guy is drunk, crazy, or an idiot. Finally, we learn that there was one case the investigator couldn't solve which involved his father dying or something. Hell if I know. Then the investigator just wanders about until the episode ends. Well...okay then. I don't know what else to say except that the story started off promising and plummeted into a realm deeper than the Twilight Zone.