Faith and the Fifth Dimension: "Where is Everybody?"
To celebrate the 65th anniversary of The Twilight Zone, I’ve started rewatching the series—and, in many cases, watching episodes for the first time.
I voraciously read Marc Scott Zicree’s Twilight Zone Companion as a teenager, spoiling myself on a good many of the stories before I’d ever seen them… and, in some cases, I still haven’t. Every time the Syfy New Year’s marathon rolls around, I discover one or two more episodes I know about, but haven’t experienced firsthand. Time to change that!
I’m also going to see what happens when I put episodes in conversation with the Bible. I don’t pretend Rod Serling envisioned his series as any kind of commentary on Scripture, but any material, even the most famous sci-fi and fantasy TV series of all time, can be grist for the theological and homiletical mill.
“Where is Everybody?” (first aired October 2, 1959)
Written by Rod Serling
Psalm 102
As I watch Mike Ferris (Earl Holliman) wander the empty town of Oakmont in “Where is Everybody?,” the first episode of The Twilight Zone, I can’t help but think of how the social distancing and lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early days emptied our public spaces of the public. Unlike Ferris, we knew the answer to the question that serves as this episode’s title. But we could easily relate to his apprehension and anger, his frustration and fear.
The people of the Bible knew loneliness and isolation, too, especially the psalm-singers. The tortured and terrified soul who first sang Psalm 102 with trembling voice, for instance, compared themselves to “a desert owl of the wilderness, [and] a little owl of the waste places” (102.6). “I am like a lonely bird on the housetop,” they lamented (102.7)—no doubt an image Mike Ferris could have identified with as he haunted Oakmont’s diner and drug store and police station, all devoid of other people.
Ferris never cries out for God, as the psalm-singer does. He yearns for any human voice to answer him speedily when he calls (102.2)—the only other voice he hears in Oakmont is the recorded voice of the “special operator” in a telephone booth! But, like the psalm-singer, Ferris emerges from his isolation with a surprising hope for the future.
After 484 hours, 36 minutes in an isolation chamber, as medics carry him away for care, Ferris looks up at the Moon—part of “the heavens [that] are the work of [God’s] hands” (102.25)—and tells it, “Don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.” Despite his harrowing experience, Ferris seems confident (certainly more confident than Rod Serling’s closing narration seems) that human beings will conquer the eons-old “enemy known as isolation” and reach “the vastness of space.”
The psalm-singer’s hope, however, is based not on a trust in what we can do when we look to the heavens, but on a trust in the God who looks down from heaven to hear prisoners’ groans and to liberate those doomed to die (102.19-20).
At one point during his hallucination, Ferris says, “I wish I could shake that crazy feeling of being watched and listened to.” The episode’s end reveals Air Force brass were passively monitoring him throughout the isolation trial—but people of faith know God is always watching and listening to us, even when we feel most alone, and answers when we call.