-
Retro SciFi Film of the Week…
The Twilight Zone, To Serve Man (1962)
A lot of people rate this episode as one of their favorite Twilight Zone episodes. It's about a first contact with an alien species that comes to Earth. I recently found out that this was based on a short story of the same name written by Damon Knight a dozen years earlier and it pretty much follows very closely to that story, accept in the short story the aliens are humanoid pigs while in the Twilight Zone episode they're just tall, 350-pound humanoids called Kanimits.
The Kanimits don’t talk like humans, they use a voice synthesizer. They promise the people of Earth that they will share their advanced technology with humans for the betterment of humanity. But people are skeptical and they give the alien representative a lie detector test which the alien passes.
This episode is highly recommended.
- - - - -
Accessible video description:
a black and white video of one of the aliens who is seated with wires hooked up to him taking a lie detector test, the alien is dressed in a white robe and has a large, bald head with dark circles under his eyes, two humans are in the room operating the equipment which shows the needles of the chart recorder on a polygraph machine.
(fair use clip from the episode in which the alien demonstrates how to pass a polygraph test.)
- - - -
#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #ET #extraterrestrial #firstcontact #epicurian #UN #crypto #LostInTranslation #TruthBeTold
spoiler - Twilight Zone, To Serve Man
There's a huge plot hole in this episode. The whole point of the thing is that the word "serve" has two different meanings in English but the aliens don't speak English. So in their language the same word wouldn't have the two different meanings, so the whole point of the plot twist doesn't make any sense. Also they are using cryptographers to try to decode the alien language which is stupid because the aliens wouldn't use cryptography to write their book, it would just be encoded in their language, not encrypted.
