It should come as no surprise that Twilight Zone and Star Trek are connected. Both shows were produced by CBS during the “Golden Age” of television (1950s-1960s), and both had connections to Desilu Productions (owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, but expertly helmed by Ms. Ball). However, my most recent Binge-Watch of Twilight Zone made the connections between the two shows crystal clear.
As I watched the episodes, I immediately recognized several of the stars and some supporting character actors from Star Trek. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the main stars of Star Trek who made the biggest impact on Twilight Zone.
William Shatner made two appearances on Twilight Zone that appear to presage his propensity for over-emotive performances as Captain James Tiberius Kirk in Star Trek.
In the episode “Nick of Time” (Season 2, Episode 7, November 18, 1960), Shatner plays Don Carter, a young man engaged to be married to a sensible girl, whose inability to be the “captain” of his future leads him to repeatedly consult a coin-operated fortune-telling machine in a small-town diner to help him decide what course of action to take in his new big-city job and his impending married life. After nearly losing his “girl” (“women” did not exist in television, then), Carter comes to his senses, and he and his fiancée drive off to their future, only to be replaced in the diner by another hapless couple. In “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (Season 5, Episode 3, October 11, 1963), Shatner appears as Bob Wilson, a married man taking his first trip on an airplane after a six-month stay in a sanitarium for nervous exhaustion caused by his hallucinations of a gremlin crawling around on the wing of a plane. His latest trip does not end well—Bob Wilson has a complete meltdown. Unable to wake up his sleeping wife after pretending to take a sleeping pill himself, he manages to steal a policeman’s gun, open the emergency door next to his seat, and shoot at the imaginary gremlin on the wing. After the plane finally lands and is disembarked, Wilson is carried off in a gurney, to be deposited into a waiting ambulance as the passengers, aircraft personnel, and policemen talk amongst themselves.
Shatner’s flare for hand-wringing, eye-darting terror is well played in both episodes.
Leonard Nimoy made a brief appearance in “A Quality of Mercy” (Season 3, Episode 15, December 29, 1961) as an American soldier, Hansen, demonstrating his trademark inscrutable facial expression. It was a strange time-warped tale about the fate of American and Japanese soldiers fighting in the jungles of the Philippines during the last days of World War II—specifically, August 6, 1945—the day Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bombs.
From the perspective of Hansen’s newly installed, gung-ho unit leader, the exhausted brothers in arms needed to rush into a nearby cave where an equally exhausted band of Japanese soldiers was holed up. But from the Japanese soldiers’ perspective, their positions were reversed. The time warp occurred when a Japanese officer was confronted by a misplaced soldier who proclaimed that the current date wasn’t May 1, 1945, but rather, the outcome-changing, fateful date of August 6, 1945.
James Doohan appeared briefly in the Twilight Zone story “Valley of the Shadow” (Season 4, Episode 3, January 17, 1963) as Johnson (aka Father), one of the elders of the off-the-beaten-track town of Peaceful Valley, New Mexico. Doohan’s bit part foretold his engineering genius as Scotty, the transporter operator, on The Enterprise! These founders/elders/keepers maintained the secrecy of both the location and the power of the town—replication of humans, other life forms, and objects—by disassembling and reassembling their atoms at will. All they had to do was to click a camera-like device with a microphone attached. Even the citizens—adults and children—could use the devices which were linked to a central computer in the Town Hall. The star of the episode, Ed Nelson, played Philip Redfield, a newspaper reporter whose wrong turn into Peaceful Valley gave him several up close and personal demonstrations of the town’s secret weapon of peace. First, his dog was disappeared and later revived and returned. When he tried to leave the town, his car was mangled by the invisible force field he ran into. After Redfield learned from the elders the secrets of the 104-year-old town, he used the device to replicate a gun to help him escape. In the end, not only did Redfield learn the good and evil uses of the device, but the wounds he sustained were treated with a precursor of the medical tricorder—a beam of light that not only removed the blood and scars, but also removed his memory of the entire trip! DeForest Kelley, the only Star Trek star who never appeared on Twilight Zone, would have been proud.
George Takei made his only appearance on Twilight Zone in the episode “The Encounter” (Season 5, Episode 31, May 1, 1964). Although this appearance is credited as one of his earliest acting roles, Takei also appeared in a 1959 episode of Perry Mason—another CBS show—in the episode “The Case of the Blushing Pearls”!
“The Encounter,” starring Neville Brand as Fenton, a World War II veteran, centered on a heated encounter between the veteran and his young Japanese-American neighbor Arthur Takamori/Taro, portrayed by Takei, only 20 years after the war. It was so controversial that it was banned from syndication for decades because of its open displays of racism, particularly against people of Japanese descent.
I view the controversy of this powerful drama with a much longer lens and a broader perspective. For one thing, Twilight Zone explored a wide range of human emotions, beliefs, myths, behaviors, and experiences in a myriad of situations ranging from normal to bizarre, and from realistic to improbable. I found “The Encounter” to be no more and no less controversial than “I Am the Darkness—Color Me Black,” which dealt with the equally controversial issue of racism against Black people in small-town America. But let’s face it: racism is humanity’s black eye.
That said, “The Encounter” looks anti-Japanese sentiment more squarely in the eye than did the episode “A Quality of Mercy,” another World War II story that featured a young Leonard Nimoy (discussed above).
So, what is “The Encounter” about? It’s about a double-edged sword (literally and figuratively) that represents the mutual, yet ironic, simmering hatred between the bigoted Veteran and his Japanese-American neighbor, rooted in both of their histories and cultures. The bigoted Fenton, who has just been dumped by his Asian (Thai) wife after losing his job as a Cat (earth-moving) driver, decides to rid himself of the junk cluttering his attic. The Japanese-American, Arthur Takamori, is looking for a lawn-mowing (earth-tending) job.
The focus of the conflict is a Samurai sword Fenton took from a Japanese soldier he killed in the war. Somehow, Arthur knows that the Japanese soldier’s death was cold-blooded murder because he had laid down the sword in surrender. But Arthur wasn’t as innocent as he claimed, either.
Arthur was from Hawaii, and as a boy, he had witnessed his father’s death in the Pearl Harbor attack that precipitated the U.S.’s entry into the War. Though he initially claimed that his father was trying to warn the American soldiers on The Arizona, he later admitted that his father was actually a traitor who was showing the Japanese fighter pilots where to drop their bombs.
While fighting over the Samurai sword, Arthur, now inhabited by the spirit of Taro, a Samurai, pushes the sword into the fallen Fenton’s gut and, in horror, jumps out of the attic window, shouting “Banzai.”
Honorable Mention – Celia Lovsky, who later appeared on Star Trek as Spock’s mother, T’Pau, also made a memorable appearance in the Twilight Zone episode “Queen of the Nile” (Season 5, Episode 23) as Viola Draper, the mother—and daughter—of the ageless title character, Pamela Morris/Constance Draper, whose immortality depended on her using a secret Egyptian scarab to suck out the blood of her enemies and in turn allowing the scarab to transfuse the blood back into her body. Ms. Lovsky’s thick Austrian accent is unmistakable: first on Twilight Zone, “I am the mother and daughter of Pamela Morris,” and, more famously, with the line, “Art thee Vulcan, or art thee human?,” on Star Trek.
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