How many famous actors, or actors who went on to be famous, did we meet in season one?
MDOD: This is the first where we can say there are any real actors who had, or would go on to, achieve fame. We have Martin Landau, Doug McClure and Jeanne Cooper, so that makes 3, and all in one episode! Then Ida Lupino and Martin Balsam in TSMS, so that’s 5, Ron Howard makes 6 when he appears as a kid in WD, Jean Marsh and Ted Knight in TL bring it to 8, Burgess Meredith in TEAL and Richard Conte in PTD rounds it out to 10. Patrick McNee in JN, Rod Taylor, Sue Randall and Jim Hutton in AWTSWO bring it to 14, Fritz Weaver and Denise Alexander in TFTS make 16, Jeff Morrow and Kevin Hagen in EL run the total to 18, and Vera Miles in MI and Claude Atkins in TMADOMS give us 20.
Howard Duff, Eileen Ryan and David Whyte in AWOD move it to 23, Kevin McCarthy in LLWJ makes 24, then Roddy McDowall, Vic Perrin, Susan Oliver and Paul Comi in PAAAO push it to 28, and Russel Johnson and John Lormer in EX take it to the round 30. Morgan Brittany and Joseph Perry in NAAC increase the total to 32, James Daly, Howard Irving Smith and Jason Wingreen in ASAW make it 35, while George Cooper Grizzard Jr and John Herrick McIntire in TC lift it to 38, and Jack Klugman and John Anderson in APFT make it 40. Orson Bean, Florence MacMichael, Charles Lane, Vito Soctti and William Schallert in MB bring the figure up to 45. Anne Francis in TAH and Jack Warden and Abraham Sofaer in TMC make it 48, Keenan Wynn in the final episode of season one, AWOHO, leaves us one shy of 50, at 49.
That is one impressive list! Look at the big names!
Klugman. McDowell. Howard. Lupino. Meredith. Landau. McClure. Serious stuff.
The final thing I want to do before I close is to check the
Bodycount.
That’s right: how many people died overall in season one? I should say, how many people are shown as dying? And this can be stretched to people losing their minds, just for the heck of it. In later seasons when I’m doing the overview we’ll be adding these and doing a cumulative bodycount, so we can see how many died over the entire series. Could be fun! For now, though…
WIE? - 0
OFTA - 1 (Bookman)
MDOD - 0
TSMS - 1 (Barbara - all right, technically she’s not said to be dead, but she may as well be)
WD - 0
EC - 2 (Bdeker and his wife)
TL - 0 (Unless you count a) Alicia which you can’t as she’s a robot and therefore not alive or b) Corry’s victim, which I’m inclined not to)
TEAL - 0 (I seriously can’t count all of Earth’s population, and while yes obviously his wife, his manager, that annoying customer etc all died, it seems a pointless exercise so we’ll gloss over this one)
PTD - 1 (Edward Hall)
JN - ? Not sure how to approach this one. Obviously Lanser dies, but later, possibly after the war, and I have no idea how many crew and passengers the Queen of Glasgow was carrying, so it’s hard to make a stab at it.
TOTAL SO FAR (with some caveats) = 5
On we go.
AWTSWO - 3 (Technically, as it turns out they are seen never to have existed, but we know they did, so let’s include them)
WYN - 1 (Renard)
TFOOAD - 3 (We know of the musician Johnny Foster, the musician whose identity Hammer takes, Virgin Sterig, who again he robs the face of, and then Andy Marshall, though in reality that person never died, Hammer just took his appearance, so he himself is number three, and in actuality it’s the three of us, not the four of us are dying)
TFTS - 0 (Again, the assumption is the whole planet, or most of it, will die, but we don’t even know the population of the planet so must ignore those deaths).
ISAAITA - 7 (The ship had a crew of 8; 4 died on impact, Corey killed 3 more)
THH - 1 (Nan is already dead when the episode begins, though she doesn’t know it)
TF - 1 (Franklin is the only one to die here in Vegas)
TLF - 1 (Decker goes back in time to give his life to save his friend)
TPT - 4 (Obviously it’s far more than that, but given this is wartime and we know nothing of the size of Fitz’s platoon, we can’t get an accurate count so can only look at the ones we actually see die. That’s the soldier in the bed in the hospital, Fitz’s CO and Fitz and presumably his driver at the end)
TOTAL NOW STANDS AT 26
EL - 3 (All three crew are murdered by Wickwire)
MI - 0
TMADOMS - 1 (The only one we see actually die is Peter Van Horn, who is shot as he returns to Maple Street that evening)
AWOD - 0
LLWJ - 1 (Walter himself)
PAAAO - 1 (Marcusson dies on the ship)
EX - 3 (Caswell, the professor and the thief)
TBTW - 0
ANPTV - 1 (Valentine)
TOTAL IS NOW 36
And finally
NAAC - 2 (Helen’s mother and Selden)
ASAW - 1 (Williams)
TC - 0
APFT - 0
MB - 0
TAH - 0
TMC - 0
AWOHO ? (Hard to say; if Victoria was a construct of Gregory’s mind, could she die? He could just bring her back again, as he did Mary).
FINAL TOTAL = 39
So there are - leaving out world populations, ship’s crews and marine battalions - more people killed in the first season of The Twilight Zone than there are episodes!
So ends our first foray into one of the most important and influential television programmes in history, and certainly in science fiction history. Five years on, a new and different phenomenon would take the world by storm, using and building on many of the themes expressed here, and looking to Serling’s moralistic, teaching nature for guidance on how to handle their own show, which would itself become a template and marker for science fiction and drama. By the time
Star Trek debuted
The Twilight Zone would have finished its five-year run (five-year mission?) and Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy and Co. would take up the baton, taking television audience where no man had gone before, and in the process predicting much of the future.
Like
Star Trek though,
The Twilight Zone would not stay dead and has been revived three times, the most recent being last year, although it must be said I found personally the quality of the episodes to be far below par, even compared to later incarnations of the show. But that’s all for later and we’ll get there in due course.
Feel free to continue to engage me and each other in conversations about the show - there’s certainly enough there to talk about - and I’ll be back before you know it.
Literally, if I can get this darned time machine working!
See ya some other time!
