It's an enjoyable and suspenseful story. Steve Forrest is a major in the US Marine Corps and an astronaut. He has a loving wife, beautiful if dull home, and a little girl. His launch into space is normal until he is enveloped in some kind of flash and winds up in a hospital bed surrounded by his colleagues, unable to remember how he got there.
On his release, he goes home to find that everything is more or less the same. The "less" begins to irk him. His house is now surrounded by a picket fence that wasn't there when he left. He is now a full colonel instead of a mere major. His wife and child sense that he's somehow "different" without being able to explain exactly how. Puzzled and upset, he looks through an encyclopedia and finds that history is slightly changed. It is now a man named Anderson who built the Panama Canal, not Goethels. He inspects the space craft he was in, there is another flash, and he returns to an Earth in which Goethels built the canal. He concludes that he has spent almost a week in a parallel world in which everything is only more or less the same as on Terra.
It's not the first time that the narrative has an ordinary man finding himself in a puzzling new world, but it's always an interesting subject. And this time, the story is allowed to run for 48 minutes or so and it never becomes boring. It seems to NEED that much time to play itself out.
Steve Forrest, Dana Andrews' brother, is adequate in the role of Major (or Colonel) Gaines, and everyone else performs dutifully. The cast are all professionals. They hit their marks, assume the proper expressions, and speak their lines like the professional actors they are. They look and act like Hollywood actors, as did most of the performers in these TV series. The exception here is Jacqueline Scott, as Forrest's wife. She's not a stunning beauty, not modelesque, and she's saddled with Serling's sometimes stilted and predictably middle-brow dialog, yet she's more convincing than anyone else in the story. She makes that artifice seem effortless, which I think is called sprezzatura.
On his release, he goes home to find that everything is more or less the same. The "less" begins to irk him. His house is now surrounded by a picket fence that wasn't there when he left. He is now a full colonel instead of a mere major. His wife and child sense that he's somehow "different" without being able to explain exactly how. Puzzled and upset, he looks through an encyclopedia and finds that history is slightly changed. It is now a man named Anderson who built the Panama Canal, not Goethels. He inspects the space craft he was in, there is another flash, and he returns to an Earth in which Goethels built the canal. He concludes that he has spent almost a week in a parallel world in which everything is only more or less the same as on Terra.
It's not the first time that the narrative has an ordinary man finding himself in a puzzling new world, but it's always an interesting subject. And this time, the story is allowed to run for 48 minutes or so and it never becomes boring. It seems to NEED that much time to play itself out.
Steve Forrest, Dana Andrews' brother, is adequate in the role of Major (or Colonel) Gaines, and everyone else performs dutifully. The cast are all professionals. They hit their marks, assume the proper expressions, and speak their lines like the professional actors they are. They look and act like Hollywood actors, as did most of the performers in these TV series. The exception here is Jacqueline Scott, as Forrest's wife. She's not a stunning beauty, not modelesque, and she's saddled with Serling's sometimes stilted and predictably middle-brow dialog, yet she's more convincing than anyone else in the story. She makes that artifice seem effortless, which I think is called sprezzatura.