The Arrival

Not a strong episode in my opinion, the twist was interesting but in retrospect didn't explain all of what happened. The storyline was therefore anticlimactic and confusing. Acting was decent.

I think if you went back over the Twilight Zone canon, you would find considerable attention paid to airplanes. They seem to represent a mystery. I suppose the isolation of being off the ground, the passengers at the mercy of the fates. The lack of control from the ground. In this one an FAA representative comes to investigate the landing of a plane where the crew and passengers have totally disappeared. Nothing seems to make any sense until he comes up with a seemingly preposterous theory. Once he tests it out, the fun starts. The problem with this episode is that it's never clear why he is in the position he is and what exactly did happen a long time ago. In this incidence, I don't think the writers played fair with the viewer.

Harold J. Stone portrays FAA investigator Grant Sheckly, who is called in on a most mysterious and perplexing case: a passenger airliner has seemingly landed without incident at an airport, but in reality, all the passengers and crew are missing, making it a ghost plane like the fabled Mary Celeste. Grant(who had one unsolved case on his resume) struggles to come to a logical explanation, along with the other airline personnel, until he hits upon a most fantastic possibility that he will risk all to prove... Uneven episode starts out most promisingly, but final outcome may be a big letdown to some, though this still remains an engrossing outing.

This episode had potential and some great moments, but ultimately goes down in flames. Flight 107 arrives at a major aiport (unspecified which) from Buffalo, NY but there's one snag. Flight 107, a DC-3, arrives with no one aboard yet mysteriously lands, taxis, and parks on it's own. Grant Scheckly of the FAA arrives to investigate. It's established that Sheckly has a formidable reputation during his twenty years with the FAA and openly speaks of his stellar track record solving plane crashes. But this one is a stumper. Sheckly confers with aiport PR man Malloy, AP Operations manager Bengston, and a handful of others to try to sort out the mystery of the self landing airliner, meanwhile expressing "something familiar" about the passenger and crew names. After exhausting any logical explanation Sheckly realizes the men have pointed out details about the plane that only they can see (different color seats, different tail numbers). Sheckly deduces this can mean only one thing, the plane is not real and sets off on an experiment to prove his point; theorizing the plane is only an illusion he walks directly into one of the spinning props and the plane vanishes, along with all the other men in the hangar. But this is where the episode loses me.

Sheckly finds his way back to the AP Operations office and confronts Bengston and Malloy about what had just happened to the plane. Neither of the men recognize Sheckly or know he's talking about. However Bengston does recall Scheckly is with the FAA it's soon realized that Scheckly was the investigator of the real flight 107 some 18 years earlier, a plane that vanished without a trace and ostensibly the only airline disaster Scheckly was never able to solve. Given this, we must assume Scheckly has just experienced some sort of alternate reality or grand delusion of which only he has memory of the events.

My problems are logic based. How does Scheckly remember Malloy and Bengston after the illusion vanishes but neither of them know Scheckly? All three met for the first time when Scheckly arrived. This doesn't make sense. Also, what was Sheckly even doing at the airport if all of this was a supernatural hoax? That's never really resolved. And neither is it ever established the timeline for this event, why an 18 year old plane crash matters at this point in time. Except that Sheckly has perhaps been obsessed with the "one crash he could never solve" all these years, still doesn't explain why now.

Rod Serling wrote most of the TZ episodes, some better than others. But he wrote enough that you can see patterns emerge in his plots, particularly airplanes and space travel. One of his favorite themes is time travel which he combined with airplanes in two other episodes (King Nine and The Odyssey of Flight). The Arrival also combines these elements but the purpose for which is unclear. It's part ghost story, part mystery, part cosmic lesson in redemption or maybe forgiveness or maybe torment, I'm not really sure. The ending is long and unsatisfactory and episode doesn't provide the viewer enough information to really understand the point of the tale. Overall The Arrival had some good ideas but I think it's also a sloppily written episode that leaves the viewer confused.

This episode is an excellent psychological horror drama and suspenseful exercise in existential story-telling. The improbability of an empty airliner arrival along with various interpretations of the meanings and causes adds to the tension throughout. The ending is completely unexpected but ultimately not surprising based on the unfolding mental state of the main character. "The Arrival" is often negatively reviewed and underrated mostly because it's not formulaic science fiction and not well understood. It's a superb drama revealing the deviations of the mental state of mind told in a well-written and acted horror story.