EW:No main characters are safe

[Greg Cox]

Yeah, but my memory of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits is not that they had a particularly pessimistic or dim view of humanity, just wildly imaginative views of a Universe perceived as dangerous.. In fact The Outer Limits tended to deliver human grace and courage on the part of at least one of the protagonists at the climax just about every week. They weren't bleak or nihilistic shows for the most part, even though Serling loved the sucker-punch..

ZONE and LIMITS were anthology series, of course, so some stories were more pessimistic (or optimistic) than others. Humanity doesn't come off looking too good in, say, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" or "The Shelter," while post-nuclear war plots were common, even if some had the survivors trying to get by as best they could. Still, just the fact that post-doomsday scenarios were a stock element says something about people's fears and expectations back during the Cold War.

More often than not, though, TZ often reflected reality by showing both the good and bad sides of humanity. See "The Obsolete Man," "Night of the Meek," "Steel," "It's a Good Life," etc.

 

[Mudd]

"It's A Good Life" is one of the really effectively scary and bleak episodes of TZ - and notably based on source material not Serling's.

And then one of the revivals went and did their best to ruin it with a sequel. The ultimate reset button.

 

[Spider]

Yeah, but my memory of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits is not that they had a particularly pessimistic or dim view of humanity, just wildly imaginative views of a Universe perceived as dangerous.. In fact The Outer Limits tended to deliver human grace and courage on the part of at least one of the protagonists at the climax just about every week. They weren't bleak or nihilistic shows for the most part, even though Serling loved the sucker-punch.

I'll give you The Invaders. The Irwin Allen shows, though, were flat-out pat and dependable family (that is, kid) oriented adventure. Everyone cared about everyone (even that idiot Doctor Smith, when the chips were down), everyone stood up and did what was required of heroes when the weekly challenge hit its climax, and then everyone shared a laugh at the end. And the "Gosh-wow, they're exploring space and time!" quotient was pretty high.

I was stumbling through jr. high and high school in the 60s, and The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Star Trek represented the best of scifi on TV back then. The Invaders was good, just not AS good, the rest pretty bad. I remember watching The Time Tunnel and having lots of "that's just terrible" reactions back then. LOL

And I pretty much hated anything Irwin Allen related. TOS was a breath of fresh air for scifi fans back then. Also, back then, I remember my perception of a divide between people of watched scifi on tv, but didn't actually READ any scifi. Those that read a lot of scifi seemed to me to be better judges of tv scifi, and didn't fall for crap like Land of the Giants and Lost in Space.

 

[Mudd]

Pre-Star Trek / pre-Star Wars was a vast media wasteland. We were grateful for morsels.

I mean, some of us remember when VTTBOTS "turned stupid." How's that for making fine distinctions?

 

[Spider]

I mean, some of us remember when VTTBOTS "turned stupid." How's that for making fine distinctions?

OMG. I DO remember that!

 

[Greg Cox]

"It's A Good Life" is one of the really effectively scary and bleak episodes of TZ - and notably based on source material not Serling's.

"Time Enough at Last" always struck me as the cruelest TZ ep. That poor henpecked bookworm didn't deserve what happened to him. He just got kicked in the teeth by fafe.

 

[Mudd]

Yeah, but I thought it was rather a comical story. What did he deserve? Put-upon he may well have been, and mild-mannered for sure...but you have to admit, it takes a pretty self-involved guy who perhaps lacks a certain empathy to react to the mass destruction of humanity with "Yippee, Snow Day!"

Trying to think of TZ eps without sympathetic characters - the one with all the ugly masks comes to mind. Still and all, the insinuation of a Just Universe there kind of invalidates it as essentially nihilistic.

 

[Greg Cox]

Yeah, but I thought it was rather a comical story. What did he deserve? Put-upon he may well have been, and mild-mannered for sure...but you have to admit, it takes a pretty self-involved guy who perhaps lacks a certain empathy to react to the mass destruction of humanity with "Yippee, Snow Day!"

Trying to think of TZ eps without sympathetic characters - the one with all the ugly masks comes to mind. Still and all, the insinuation of a Just Universe there kind of invalidates it as essentially nihilistic.

Well, in general, I don't think you can (or should) find a consistent POV in an anthology series, particularly one featuring originals scripts and adaptations from a diverse array of writers--Serling, Matheson, Beaumont, Earl Hammer Jr., Bradbury, etc. I mean, just look at Matheson: some of his stories have happy endings ("Night at 20,000 Feet," "Nick of "Time," "Little Girl Lost," others do not ("Young Man's Fancy," "Spur of the Moment") and some are ambiguous: "The Invaders," "Steel."

Depends on the story.

In most case, though, I think there's a large middle ground between "grim and scary" and "nihilistic." TZ could certainly be unkind to its characters at times . . . not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

[Mudd]

"What Are Little Girls Made Of?" is about as downbeat an sf story as most of TZ. Roddenberry had a lovely escape hatch in the earlyanthology-like episode format that worked for Trek: All Is Lost At The End but we still get to see our characters laughing it up on the bridge anyway.

 

[Greg Cox]

"What Are Little Girls Made Of?" is about as downbeat an sf story as most of TZ. Roddenberry had a lovely escape hatch in the earlyanthology-like episode format that worked for Trek: All Is Lost At The End but we still get to see our characters laughing it up on the bridge anyway.

But not always, and that's not an aspect of TOS that's aged particularly well. A lot of the better episodes, like "Balance of Terror" or "City on the Edge of Forever"
ended on somber notes. Heck, even the much-reviled "Catspaw" (also written by Bloch) ends with Kirk grimly acknowledging the redshirt who died in the opening teaser.

That's probably preferable to something like "The Apple," where umpteen redshirts die but Kirk is grinning and cracking sex jokes at the end, while McCoy teases Spock about his ears.

 

[fireproof78]

"Time Enough at Last" always struck me as the cruelest TZ ep. That poor henpecked bookworm didn't deserve what happened to him. He just got kicked in the teeth by fafe.

hated that episode so much that I pretty much stopped watching TZ for a long time.

 

[Greg Cox]

hated that episode so much that I pretty much stopped watching TZ for a long time.

It's a great episode, that we're still taking about decades later, but it breaks my heart, too.

Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, it's a testament to how well it works.

 

[ancient]

Star Trek: The Edge

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

The one ship/two ships argument can simply be solved this way, and the (already dead) characters can recur in flashbacks the main character has, kind of like Person of Interest kept going back into Finch's past, even if people who still appeared in many episodes were dead or had moved on. The Shenzou is the past, Sarek and Amanda are even older past - only the Discovery is the "present".

 

[psCargile]

There's main character death, and there is Bobby Ewing turning around in the shower, grinning at a very confused Pam.

 

[BeatleJWOL]

"Time Enough at Last" always struck me as the cruelest TZ ep. That poor henpecked bookworm didn't deserve what happened to him. He just got kicked in the teeth by fafe.

"Time"ly! That was just on last night. Yeah, what a downer. I got the moral of that episode as "when humanity fucks up, everyone loses"

 

[Mr. Adventure]

It would explain why there's so many young captains and command crew in Starfleet. And everyone loved Armus, right?

 

[Voth commando1]

Am not a fan of this or really the GOT zeitgeist in general deaths should sparing and hence meaningful when they occur.

 

[fireproof78]

Can I ask a dumb question? Was death every sparing in Star Trek? I mean, I've read all over the place how Star Trek played it safe and never took risks, but in TOS entire starship crews were whipped out in the blink of an eye. Aurora, Valiant, Constellation, Intrepid, Defiant, among others. Death is only meaningful when its a part of the main cast?

I, personally, think it just means that the specter of now looms over everyone not just unnamed crewmembers, giving a more realistic feel.

 

[The Wormhole]

Was death every sparing in Star Trek?

Well, there's pre-Xindi attack Enterprise which went to great lengths to avoid good guys being killed to the point of it being ridiculous, but otherwise, no