"The Twilight Zone" Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? (1961)

Director:

Montgomery Pittman

Writers:

Rod Serling (creator)
Rod Serling (writer)

TV Series:

"The Twilight Zone" (1959)

Original Air Date:

26 May 1961 (Season 2, Episode 28)

Genre:

Drama | Fantasy | Horror | Mystery | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Plot:

Following a frantic phone call about a crashed spaceship, two policeman try and determine who among the passengers of a bus at a snowed-in roadside diner is from another world.

Plot Keywords:

Bus | Diner | Spaceship | Police Officer | Alien

Cast

John Hoyt	...	Ross
Jean Willes	...	Ethel McConnell
Jack Elam	...	Avery
Barney Phillips	...	Haley
John Archer	...	Trooper Bill Padgett
William Kendis	...	Olmstead (as Bill Kendis)
Morgan Jones	...	Trooper Dan Perry
Gertrude Flynn	...	Rose Kramer
Bill Erwin	...	Peter Kramer
Jill Ellis	...	Connie Prince
Ron Kipling	...	George Prince

Runtime:

25 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Filming Locations:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios - 10202 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, California, USA

Company:

Cayuga Productions

Trivia:

Near the start, just after Rod Serling's intro, the name of the bus company is glimpsed: Cayuga Buses. This also happens to be the name of this TV series producers: Cayuga Production Company

Quotes:

Avery: Didn't figure us Martians would know nothin' about the great American pastime, did ya?

Movie Connections:

References "To Tell the Truth" (1956)

Will the real martian please stand up...? We're gonna have a problem here...

I love the twilight zone episodes that deal with extraterrestrial life and things like time travel and monsters and whatnot, although despite being highly entertaining, this is one of the weaker ones. It's a fun story and it flows smoothly, but is nevertheless rife with problems.

A bus breaks down on a wintry February night, and all of the passengers find themselves stranded in a nearby diner while they wait for the weather to clear up. It seems that the bus driver only picked up six passengers but there are seven people in the diner, which means that one of them was not on the bus.

Yeah, it takes place at night and they all give flimsy reasons for why they weren't paying attention to who was on the bus with them, but are people really that non-observant? A lot of the characters are caricatures, such as the crazy guy, the cute young couple, and the impatient businessman, but not ONE of them can look around and see someone that wasn't on the bus? Not even the driver? Come on...

In his opening monologue, Serling says that finding a Martian in a diner is more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack, but after having seen this episode, I have to say that I doubt that that is actually true, since it gives that all too common feeling that the characters didn't consider the most obvious possibility, at least given the reports of a spaceship landing nearby and the subsequent efforts to figure out who the alien was. There's a clever twist at the end that reminds me of the exact same twist on a preceding episode, Mr. Dingle, The Strong.

Like that episode, this one imagines alien visitors to be humanoids with negligible differences from human beings (more in this episode than that one, I suppose), with no real difference except having three hands or three eyes. Clever episode but not exactly mind-blowing material. Serling has done a lot better, but this is still a high-entertainment episode.