The Twilight Zone

It has been said that the series titled The Twilight Zone was the best TV series of all time. I cannot give my opinion, for I haven’t seen so many series, so I cannot compare them, but this is what I have read.

The series, which ran for five seasons between 1959 and 1964, was dedicated to fantasy, science fiction, psychological horror and the supernatural. It was created and presented by Rod Serling, who also wrote the script of 92 of its 156 episodes. Rod Serling is well known for the scripts of two famous films of the sixties: Seven days in May and Planet of the Apes. The spectacular surprise ending of the second film (which is not in the book on which it is based, Pierre Boulle’s novel of the same title) is at the same level as many episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Scientific mistakes in Planet of the Apes

In 1963, the French writer Pierre Boulle published a famous science-fiction novel titled Planet of the Apes, which was adapted to the cinema for the first time in 1968, with Charlton Heston as the protagonist and script by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, the latter famous for the TV series The Twilight Zone. A decade earlier, Boulle had published another bestseller, also successfully adapted to the movies: The Bridge over the River Kwai.

Boulle’s novel tells the story of three astronauts embarking on a two-year journey (measured in relativistic time) to a planet revolving around Betelgeuse (alpha of the Orion constellation) and find there an extraterrestrial civilization at a level similar to ours in the mid-twentieth century, where intelligent beings are three species of apes (identical to the terrestrial gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans) while human beings (also identical to us) are devoid of reason. Of course, the only surviving terrestrial astronaut finds it very difficult to convince the apes that he is an intelligent being.