There’s a simple trick here that we have to glaze over once the punchline is revealed.   Prior to that, Probe 7 Over and Out was a new experience for me.  Somehow, I neither knew what to expect, nor had I any predictions while watching it.  Colonel Adan Cook crash lands on a random planet in a distant galaxy. He’s injured and alone and is begging for help from General Larrabee back in what looks like Cape Canaveral.  Unfortunately for Cook, Larrabee says they have a crisis of their own: the world is at war.  In a chilling line, Larrabee tells him that with war declared, the only question now is if they will have a quick death or a slow one.  It is a heart-rending concept.  Cook is basically all that remains of mankind.  I’ve thought about it a lot over the years: one big catastrophe and humanity is wiped out of the cosmos, forgotten.  We’re little more than a blip in the galactic playground.  With only Cook left, mankind is about to be forgotten.  Larrabee offers him one wish: “Whoever you’ll meet there, however you’ll meet them, I hope it can come without fear. I hope it can come without anger. I hope your new world will be different. I hope you’ll find no words such as Hate. I hope there’ll be…”  And then silence.  Cook’s home is presumably no more.  He is utterly alone.  And then he meets a woman!

I was immediately reminded of Matheson’s I am Legend.  Matheson is a frequent contributor to the Zone and I am Legend has a similar moment with the protagonist, the last man on earth, meeting a woman. But this isn’t a Matheson episode; it’s written by Rod Serling.  That was the first big surprise when watching this one.  At no point did I think Cook was a jerk, the tell-tale sign that an episode was written by Serling.  Yes, Adam doesn’t get it right completely, grabbing a weapon just as this injured woman is starting to trust him, but that’s a mistake, not the act of a jerk.  As soon as he realizes what he’s done, he flings the stick into the woods.  However, it was enough to scare her off.  The sheer loneliness of this episode was mesmerizing to me.  It’s my own personal hell, I can tell you!  We’ve been in these lands of desolation before with the Zone,  but that was a very long time ago.  This is like one of the early classics, before writing about jerks was all Serling seemed capable of.

As I watched I had a number of other movies pass through my mind: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil for one.  The Quiet Earth for another. The idea of a planet with only two people on it is really too big an idea for me to take in.  The questions mounted and the wonder never stopped, which was better than a lot of the episodes of the last 2 seasons.  When Cook finally catches up with the woman, he is able to communicate with her in a very rudimentary way.  He finds out that she’s from another planet too, left here in some way when her planet left the orbit of the sun – I wasn’t sure about that.  Was this Space: 1999?  But even he realizes it doesn’t matter.  They are here, and they were lucky enough to find one another.   Then he says that whichever of them is smarter will need to learn the other’s language.  To make it easy, he grabs a mound of dirt and asks what she calls it.  She utters a word: Earth.  Ok, so we’ll call this planet: Earth.  She introduces herself as Eve and they walk over to a tree where she picks an apple for him and hands it over.

Mind blown!    I honestly didn’t see it coming.  When the rebooted Battlestar Galactica came out, I had guessed the ending a full season before it happened.  That’s for real.  This was only 25 minutes long and I didn’t see it coming, and it had a very similar idea in mind.  And what makes this even more special to me is that I’ve often wondered about the very idea that we didn’t originate here.  I didn’t believe that, but I’ve speculated about it.  So when we are hit by that big reveal at the end, it’s a real doozy for me.  But it does leave a few nagging questions.

First off, why did we hear English and see so many things that looked like the Earth we knew?  Does that mean it was part of our race memory and we were always destined to get back here one day?  And does that mean our world may one day be on the brink of planet-wide war?  But wait, there’s more!  There’s a very important point to be made around the language: if we’re hearing English, it means the woman was the smarter of the two and she learned his language, since we never hear more than a few words from her but we know he speaks our language (well, at least to those watching in countries where this was broadcast in English, but the point is, he’s speaking a language known on our world.)   However, he takes her word for Earth and names the planet after it.  Hmm.  She doesn’t say “apples” however; she reverses it (nearly) and calls them sepplas.  So, he mustn’t have liked that very much and changed it back to English and the rest follows.  Maybe that was the deciding factor for her to learn English and prove herself smarter than him.  Either way, I was delighted by this episode and have started to come around to thinking that maybe there’s more truth in this story than I would have initially thought.  Maybe I am beginning to believe this is a true story!  You see, the most important story point is almost glazed over.  We have a story that proves once and for all that men and women are from different planets!  Rod Serling, you tricky devil you.  Oh, does that make him the snake in the garden?  Probably doesn’t pay to think about it too much, but this is one episode that I think is a must for all fans of good, thinking fiction.  ML

The view from across the pond:

Gosh this was a depressing series to watch, so much of the time. On the rare occasions that an episode isn’t about a complete jerk getting his comeuppance, instead it’s often about apocalypse scenarios. It’s not difficult to understand the obsession about this kind of thing at the time. The possibility that the human race could destroy itself completely was very real and very new. But I’ve never quite understood the impulse to take that terror and make it a part of their evening entertainment.

At least this one ends on a positive note. I can’t really comment on how well the twist in the tale works, because I just rewatched Prove 7, Over and Out, and remembered the twist. As for the first time I watched the episode, that was many years ago and I can’t remember whether I guessed it or not, but it would appear to be reasonably guessable, certainly as soon as we are presented with one man and one woman on a deserted paradise planet. Of course, it’s not necessarily an actual paradise, but if you’ve watched many Twilight Zone episodes, you’ll be used to alien planets being portrayed usually as barren, lifeless rocks, so even the sight of a few trees is enough to bring the book of Genesis to mind. I don’t think it particularly matters if it’s guessable or not, because the twist works well either way, and it’s just refreshing at this point to have a twist in the tale at all. Something that Twilight Zone used to do every week has now become a rare treat.

There is a downside to that. The episodes that really rely on a twist often give us that and nothing much else. They are rarely the ones that provoke the most thought. Instead they are simply an exercise in getting the narrative to where it needs to be, in order to deliver the surprise (or at least an attempt at a surprise). This is definitely one of those, but it does have a few things to say about the human condition beyond the obvious message. Firstly, there’s the problem of how fragile our existence is. It’s not just the apocalypse going on back home. Cook is in a metal box, with a broken arm, running out of food. Just by luck, he ends up on a planet with breathable air and some fruit growing on the trees. Imagine if he hadn’t. That alternative fate is a terrifying thought. Then we have the human need for company. Loneliness is a terrible thing, and the general with whom Cook communicates wisely suggests they stay in contact, even when there is no hope of rescue, because interaction with another human being is probably all that stands between Cook and total despair.

Most obviously, though, this is about how one human being responds to another. Everyone wiping each other out with weapons back home is the big picture, but the smaller picture of Cook and Norda is actually more interesting. Norda’s first instinct is to throw a rock at Cook. Even the sight of another human triggers the fight or flight response, and it doesn’t take much for Norda to run away, misunderstanding Cook’s intentions when he has a stick in his hand. It shows the extent to which fear rules us, but it also shows how that can be conquered: communication. Even when two people don’t speak the same language, they can find a way to get their point across, and if their intentions are peaceful then there’s a chance things might work out fine. Not everything has to end badly.

So the story here is about Adam and Eve, last survivors from their races. In the case of Adam, his people all wiped each other out, but he gets a chance to start again. Together they create a new race, from which new civilisations will spring up. Could there be a happy future for the descendents of Adam, full of peace and love, far away from the war that killed everyone he ever knew?

How’s that working out then?    RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms