Recap
Commander Douglas Stansfield is about to take a long journey into space. It is expected to last forty years. Just before leaving, he meets a woman, Sandra Horn. They have fallen in love, but he will be gone forty Earth years, when he returns he will be the same age but Sandra will have aged. Douglas goes about his mission, thinking daily about his lost love. When he returns they discover Douglas had not been in suspended animation as expected, and aged forty years. He did this so he and Sandra could resume their lives together. But she had been in a state of suspended animation in order to be young as Douglas when he returned. But instead he is old, and she is young. ..
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Episode Notes
Mariette Hartley did a series of Kodak camera commercials with James Garner in the late 1970s and early '80s.
Edward Binns was also in "I Shot an Arrow into the Air."
Episode Quotes
Opening Narration
Narrator: It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears. Case in point: the scene you're watching. This is not a hospital, not a morgue, not a mausoleum, not an undertaker's parlor of the future. What it is is the belly of a spaceship. It is en route to another planetary system an incredible distance from the Earth. This is the crux of our story, a flight into space. It is also the story of the things that might happen to human beings who take a step beyond, unable to anticipate everything that might await them out there...Commander Douglas Stansfield, astronaut, a man about to embark on one of history's longest journeys--forty years out into endless space and hopefully back again. This is the beginning, the first step toward man's longest leap into the unknown. Science has solved the mechanical details, and now it's up to one human being to breathe life into blueprints and computers, to prove once and for all that man can live half a lifetime in the total void of outer space, forty years alone in the unknown. This is Earth. Ahead lies a planetary system. The vast region in between is the Twilight Zone.
Closing Narration
Narrator: Commander Douglas Stansfield, one of the forgotten pioneers of the space age. He's been pushed aside by the flow of progress and the passage of years--and the ferocious travesty of fate. Tonight's tale of the ionosphere and irony, delivered from--the Twilight Zone.