This episode plays around with themes of mental illness, delusions, and the gaslighting of one man’s fragile state of mind. Happily, his conviction will not remain isolated too much longer, for happily, tangible manifestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even from so intangible a quarter as the Twilight Zone.” Wilson has that fear no longer… though, for the moment, he is, as he has said, alone in this assurance. Robert Wilson has ended now, a flight not only from point A to point B, but also from the fear of recurring mental breakdown. The trauma of the vent can be starkly seen on his face as the camera pans back to the damaged airplane wing. He smiles and notes that he is the only one who realizes everything is ok now. Julia reminds him that everything is ok now. In the final scene of the episode, Bob is carried off the now-grounded plane. He barely clings to his life thanks to his seat belt as the dead creature slides off the airplane wing. This happens several times until the creature begins ripping up the engine so Bob steals a sleeping police officer’s gun and opens his window, releasing the cabin pressure, while he shoots at the creature. In a panic, he alerts his wife and hails a stewardess but by the time they look out the window the creature has disappeared. Shortly after take-off, Bob gazes out the window at the gathering storm where he suddenly spots a hairy gremlin creature walking around on the wing. He hopes to have fully recovered from his breakdown so he can help Julia raise their children. He appears agitated as he sits next to the emergency exit. He has recently recovered from a mental breakdown on an airplane and has spent six months in a sanitarium. Wilson’s plan, happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone.”īob Williams (William Shatner) boards a plane with his wife, Julia (Christine White). Tonight, he’s traveling all the way to his appointed destination, which, contrary to Mr. Wilson’s flight was terminated by the onslaught of his mental breakdown. Wilson is about to be flown home-the difference being that, on that evening half a year ago, Mr. Wilson has just been discharged from a sanitarium where he spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown, the onset of which took place on an evening not dissimilar to this one, on an airliner very much like the one in which Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father and salesman on sick leave. In our latter-day age of flashy effects and seizure-inducing explosions, I am ceaselessly reminded of our Twilight Zone forbearers who accomplished far more with much smaller budgets and more rudimentary effects, instead relying on superior scripts and writers. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is a simple story but it is nevertheless an absolute classic and has since become culturally iconic. The somewhat ambiguous ending of this episode leaves the audience in a state of wonder, on par with other psychological mysteries in the series (“Where Is Everybody?” “Perchance To Dream,” “Twenty-Two”) as well episodes addressing air travel anxieties (“King Nine Will Not Return,” “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” and “The Arrival”). He plays a recent mental patient who is suddenly isolated with knowledge critical to the survival of an aircraft mid-flight. Enterprise in his second and final appearance in The Twilight Zone series. In another masterpiece by Richard Matheson, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” stars everyone’s favorite Captain of the U.S.S.
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