This is somewhat of a spoiler of the episode. An essay that tries to interpret the many ideas expressed by the episode. Enjoy.
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The pilot episode that started it all. Twilight Zone is an anthology series in the middle of sane and insane. And this first episode shows us what that means.
We first encounter a man walking in the middle of the road. He is wandering, wondering, and walking as I have stated in the first sentence.
We get little information of who he is, only that he is a man who is hungry and has money to spare. He enters a diner, asking why the music was playing too loud, to a counter that had no tender present. The man repeats himself over and over to the empty kitchen, finding out he had been talking to nobody but the thin air surrounding him. He was alone in the diner. A few scenes later, and he together with we, discover that he was ultimately alone, not just in that diner, but that of the whole city. No sign of life, no sign of movement, but his own. He wanders off every store. Looking for people to talk to. Looking for someone to have a conversation with. Looking for answers to his questions.
We then learn that the man doesn’t even know he is, but upon looking at a mirror, recognizes the face, but not the name. He doesn’t know how he got there. Only that he remembers walking in the middle of the same road we first see him at.
We, together with the lonely man, start to question the unusual absence of people. He starts to stir up. His mind slowly cracking. His sanity beginning to break. At the end, or at the peak of it all. He loses it. And we feel the same way. There was no end to his misery. No telling when someone would pop up. The unusual signs of life that lurk in the city tests the man.
Who played the Jukebox?
Who rang the phone?
Who turn on the lights?
Who was behind that film projector?
Who left the cigar lit and unused?
Who was the man?
In his last moments, we see him push a street signal. And we get to see a patrol of men sitting and observing him.
We see the man, sitting inside a metal box. Multiple wires placed on his head and body. We see him pushing a button that mirrors that of the street signal. We see him accept defeat. Asking for mercy.
He is taken out of the box. And we get to learn that it was all a simulation. A simulation of the town, of the city, of it’s intricate details. We learn that it was to test the man’s limits. To see if he, revealed to be a pilot being trained, could outlast the time it would take for an astronaut to reach the moon. And that he failed, when reaching the end of that journey.
The simulator explained that even with their advanced technology, they could recreate every environment, every detail, every ambiance possible. But they could not replicate, or compensate, that of man’s hunger for companionship.
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