People Are Alike All Over

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.

This is one I asked myself if I ever had seen before? Wasn't sure until the surprise ending. Roddy McDowall gives a strong performance as the apprehensive scientist Sam Conrad on the mission. You just have a feeling from the beginning he's destined for trouble. "The Andy Griffith Show" fans get a treat seeing knockout Susan Oliver from "Prisoner of Love". She's absolutely mesmerizing as a female Martian here also. The top dog Martian was Bryon Morrow who also did TAGS and many classic TV shows. I really enjoyed the story's tense uncertainty throughout. What worse could happen then to have the spaceship's captain bite the dust in the crash landing? They seem all like such nice people.

This "TZ" episode from 1960 features late great character actor Roddy McDowall(from 1980's "Fright Night" fame) as Sam a guy getting ready to go on a space mission to Mars. And his high hope is to find life of aliens and that of martians. Only when the spacecraft is one the planet Sam finds that life and the people are a little different it's not what he expected or what things seem to be. Overall okay episode that twist still it's entertaining with it's science fiction theme that involves aliens and space plus it's some good early work from Roddy McDowall.

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.

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.