People Are Alike All Over

In 1959, the Apollo program to send a man to the moon was only two years old, while the public was just starting to realize that space exploration was no longer a mere comic book fantasy. I suspect that is one reason a bold science fiction concept like TZ was finally picked up by sponsors long wary of how such themes would play with unchallenged 1950's audiences.

This episode is an average one among the exploration themes. It's basically a one gimmick plot, moving toward an ironical ending. However the spaceship interior comes across as an impressively complex and cavernous one, while the director holds interest with some imaginative camera angles. The mysterious pinging on the ship's hull also adds a nice dollop of suspense.. Nonetheless, the fey Roddy McDowell makes for an unconvincing astronaut, while the half-togas worn by the supposed Martians made me think the ship had crashed in ancient Greece. Even so, the many nice touches, along with the haunting mood music, add up to a very watchable half-hour's entertainment.

Sam Conrad (Roddy McDowall) and Mark Marcusson (Paul Comi) go to Mars as imagined in 1960. Now we know that the planet could not have anyone like Susan Oliver on it so perhaps Barack Obama is right not to bother with going there.

I like the way the start prefigures the end of the story (visually too) with the question of whether people are the same everywhere? McDowall plays the reluctant adventurer of the two astronauts, well aware that he will have to make his home on Mars. The Martians are attired in an ancient Roman looking way and have a pleasant appearance (especially Susan Oliver).

One of the odd and enjoyable episodes but not one of the greatest. The contrast between the two astronauts is good. Well played by both actors. Rod Serling wrote the teleplay based on a story by Paul W Fairman, whose other writing credits are for z rated sci-fi films and TV. Serling went on to co-write the screenplay for 'Planet Of The Apes'. Will he make a monkey of Roddy McDowall in this?

This Twilight Zone episode features Roddy McDowall and Paul Comi as the two men on the first mission to Mars. Sad to say it is one of many stories on the big and small screen that have become dated with the knowledge we now possess about the red planet.

It's an optimist and a pessimist on the trip. McDowall is skeptical, but Comi says if there's life there they'll be like us because people are alike all over which is as the Deity intended.

Comi is killed in a crash landing but it's McDowall who finds out the truth of that proposition.

This is one good story and sadly one cynical view of humankind.

The subtlety of the episode is well crafted for those times I am sure most of the message is wasted on the similar plot like "The Cage" in Star Trek. The story, on the other hand, has a message about people and how we find any reason the isolate and ostracize others who look like us but have some unique distinction. Whether color, religion, or origin, we tend to keep people categorized when in fact we are all human beings. this message was boldly presented with McDowall's last lines. Many of the staff writers for TZ were victims of McCarthism and Nazism. The world was also turning upside down with equal rights emerging as a social concern. Writers like Roddenberry and Serling knew change was coming. They wrote these concepts of a world where everyone was considered equal and people accepted you as a peer based upon you and not what you looked like. On the other hand, the fact that the astronaut thought they were speaking English and instead he was speaking their language, maybe they only looked like humans from his point of view. Great episode which speaks volumes.

One of the most popular and frequently repeated topics in the acclaimed "The Twilight Zone" was the conquest of space and the encounter with extraterrestrial life. This is almost a matter-of- course, as the series was primarily a Sci-Fi and mystery show, and obviously few topics lend themselves better for mysterious Sci-Fi than the unexplored planets of our galaxy and their potentially menacing inhabitants. Still, it certainly must not have been easy to script an episode for this series, because Sci-Fi/mystery is usually complex and detailed, and yet there were only 25 minutes of running time available for each episode! Knowing this, it's truly amazing how practically all entries of this TV-format are so intelligent and engaging. "People are alike all over" is a nice example of this, in fact, since it's a very smart and meaningful tale that is compactly narrated in less than half an hour; - not longer than necessary! A still very young Roddy McDowell ("Planet of the Apes", "The Legend of Hell House") stars as the insecure astronaut/biologist Sam Conrad, who's about to embark on his first major mission to Mars and feels very nervous about what he might discover there. His friend and co-pilot Marcusson comforts him by stating that, even if do stumble upon another species, it will undoubtedly look and act likes them because that's how God created the universe. The mission doesn't run all that smoothly, unfortunately, as they crash on Mars and Marcusson dies before they can open the hatch. Sam is all alone now, but he receives a warm welcome from the Martians who do – like Marcusson promised him – look and act like humans on earth. Actually, they act EXACTLY like human beings from earth would… The great thing about these TW episodes is that, no matter how hard you see the end conclusion coming your way, the show still manages to surprise you with it! Quite early in the episode already, I was fairly persuaded that "People are alike all over" would finish the way it did, but it nevertheless still felt as a minor rush of adrenalin. The portrayal of Mars and its inhabitant is very basic and implausible, of course, but it ideally suits with the underlying message of the story. People ARE alike all over, and the nature of our kind is questionable to say the least.