herp derp
Hey I think I'm done acting crazy and being all down on myself.
Good times with medication. I keep on forgetting how much better I feel when I'm on speed than when I'm drunk and morose.
Anyhow, back to bullshit about writing.
Syfy (sigh) runs The Twilight Zone at 1am. Tonight they played "The Lonely," a beautiful, heartbreaking piece about a man named Corry wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to fifty years solitary on an asteroid. When we meet him, he's spent four and a half years on the rock and he's slowly descending into madness brought on by his crushing desperation and lonliness.
Gee I can't say I know why this episode speaks to me or anything.
When out of the blue the captain of the rocketship that does a quarterly supply drop leaves with Corry a crate containing a gynoid named Alicia. Corry is at first offput by the machine, but as time passes he learns to accept her and appreciate her company, eventually coming to love her.
Another year passes and the rocketship returns, its captain bringing good news, Corry's been pardoned and he's to return home a free man. Only he has to leave Alicia behind.
Now, this is a great story, but it's crippled by the half-hour television format. The budding relationship between Corry and Alicia is only glossed over in a montage and the third act takes up barely two minutes of screentime. Instead of Corry anguishing over whether or not he's finally found happiness in his prison with his no-hot-like-'60s-hot (well, 1958) robot girlfriend and having to be convinced that he's fit to return to Earth society in what could have been a tense, gripping sequence in which Corry comes to terms with his place in the world and decides to stay - instead the rocket captain simply shoots Alicia in head, revealing her to be nothing more than a bundle of wires in the shape of a pretty girl.
It was a good story by one of my literary idols, Rod Serling himself, an early Zone (seventh episode of the first season), so it was a bit rough around the edges and not as polished as later episodes such as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and Richard Matheson's "The Invaders" (my two all-time favorite pieces of television-as-art) but "The Lonely" as a story seems to run contrary to Serling's own philosophy on writing.
Rod Serling has stated that all good stories start with a good ending then work their way backwards. You don't need an ironic twist, or a twist at all, just a good ending, a memorable way to end the story, as it's the only thing most people will really ever remember. Everybody remembers that To Serve Man was a cookbook, everybody knows that the self-absorbed asshole's glasses break in "Time Enough At Last" but who remembers the rest of the story?
"The Lonely" however is an inversion of this thesis, we have a great long first act, a short second act that's mostly a montage and a scant third act with no real twist and no denounment to speak of. The ending is nowhere near as memorable as the setup and rising action, the first act really makes the episode and then it just sort of faceplants off a cliff.
That said, I really love the episode, I just wish that it weren't a half-hour teleplay. As an hour-long format, we'd have had a lot more screentime to explore the relationship that Corry forms with Alicia and how he eventually learns that he's home here on his little asteroid. As an hour-long episode, the story could detail how Corry couldn't adapt to life back home, haunted by Alicia's memory or completely warped by five years of solitary that he honestly cannot deal with life back home. Alas, the story is indered by the half hour format.
What this episode reminds me is that even though the people I idolize are so much better than I am, they're also not infallible. They make mistakes, they learn, they struggle and stumble. Rod Serling didn't start out writing "The Monsters Are Due" or "Five Characters In Search Of an Exit" rather, cut their teeth on stories like "The Lonely."
Good times with medication. I keep on forgetting how much better I feel when I'm on speed than when I'm drunk and morose.
Anyhow, back to bullshit about writing.
Syfy (sigh) runs The Twilight Zone at 1am. Tonight they played "The Lonely," a beautiful, heartbreaking piece about a man named Corry wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to fifty years solitary on an asteroid. When we meet him, he's spent four and a half years on the rock and he's slowly descending into madness brought on by his crushing desperation and lonliness.
Gee I can't say I know why this episode speaks to me or anything.
When out of the blue the captain of the rocketship that does a quarterly supply drop leaves with Corry a crate containing a gynoid named Alicia. Corry is at first offput by the machine, but as time passes he learns to accept her and appreciate her company, eventually coming to love her.
Another year passes and the rocketship returns, its captain bringing good news, Corry's been pardoned and he's to return home a free man. Only he has to leave Alicia behind.
Now, this is a great story, but it's crippled by the half-hour television format. The budding relationship between Corry and Alicia is only glossed over in a montage and the third act takes up barely two minutes of screentime. Instead of Corry anguishing over whether or not he's finally found happiness in his prison with his no-hot-like-'60s-hot (well, 1958) robot girlfriend and having to be convinced that he's fit to return to Earth society in what could have been a tense, gripping sequence in which Corry comes to terms with his place in the world and decides to stay - instead the rocket captain simply shoots Alicia in head, revealing her to be nothing more than a bundle of wires in the shape of a pretty girl.
It was a good story by one of my literary idols, Rod Serling himself, an early Zone (seventh episode of the first season), so it was a bit rough around the edges and not as polished as later episodes such as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and Richard Matheson's "The Invaders" (my two all-time favorite pieces of television-as-art) but "The Lonely" as a story seems to run contrary to Serling's own philosophy on writing.
Rod Serling has stated that all good stories start with a good ending then work their way backwards. You don't need an ironic twist, or a twist at all, just a good ending, a memorable way to end the story, as it's the only thing most people will really ever remember. Everybody remembers that To Serve Man was a cookbook, everybody knows that the self-absorbed asshole's glasses break in "Time Enough At Last" but who remembers the rest of the story?
"The Lonely" however is an inversion of this thesis, we have a great long first act, a short second act that's mostly a montage and a scant third act with no real twist and no denounment to speak of. The ending is nowhere near as memorable as the setup and rising action, the first act really makes the episode and then it just sort of faceplants off a cliff.
That said, I really love the episode, I just wish that it weren't a half-hour teleplay. As an hour-long format, we'd have had a lot more screentime to explore the relationship that Corry forms with Alicia and how he eventually learns that he's home here on his little asteroid. As an hour-long episode, the story could detail how Corry couldn't adapt to life back home, haunted by Alicia's memory or completely warped by five years of solitary that he honestly cannot deal with life back home. Alas, the story is indered by the half hour format.
What this episode reminds me is that even though the people I idolize are so much better than I am, they're also not infallible. They make mistakes, they learn, they struggle and stumble. Rod Serling didn't start out writing "The Monsters Are Due" or "Five Characters In Search Of an Exit" rather, cut their teeth on stories like "The Lonely."