Twilight Zone Day makes for great Star Trek stargazing
By Mike Poteet
Flawlessly logical Vulcans in the wildly illogical Zone
As we noted on what would have been Leonard Nimoy’s 90th birthday, the future Spock actor appears briefly in one Twilight Zone episode, the third season’s “A Quality of Mercy” (December 29, 1961). Nimoy plays a World War II GI named Hansen, a character for whom “peripheral” is an overly generous description.
But Nimoy wasn’t the only actor who played a Vulcan on Star Trek who traveled into that wondrous but highly illogical dimension between the pit of our fears and the summit of our knowledge.
Arlene Martel, who plays T’Pring in “Amok Time,” plays another young woman with men on her mind in the first season Twilight Zone episode “What You Need” (December 25, 1959).
She’s credited as Arline Sax, her birth name. But you’ll recognize Spock’s betrothed as you watch her in the episode abridgment at the top of this page. She tries to buy a book of matches and end up with a bottle of spot cleaner instead.
Martel made it back to the Zone in the second season’s “Twenty-Two” (February 10, 1961). She’s the menacing morgue nurse in Liz Powell’s nightmares who tells her, “Room for one more, honey!”
Martel is also the stewardess who says the same thing to Powell at the episode’s end, unwittingly saving her from boarding a doomed flight.
I suppose if Spock had run away screaming when he saw Arlene Martel the way Liz Powell did, “Amok Time” would have been a much shorter episode.
Speaking of “Amok Time,” Celia Lovsky plays the regal Vulcan matriarch T’Pau in that episode.
Lovsky fled Nazi Germany in 1933 with husband Peter Lorre (whose character in The Maltese Falcon inspired Felix Leech in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Big Goodbye”). After Lovsky and Lorre divorced in 1945, she started a nearly 30-year career as a Hollywood character actress.
The fifth season Twilight Zone episode “Queen of the Nile” (March 6, 1964) was one of her 200-odd TV appearances. She plays Viola Draper, the old woman who is actually the daughter of an immortal Hollywood starlet.
Barry Atwater played Surak—or technically, Spock’s idea of Surak, brought to “life” by the Excalbians—in “The Savage Curtain.”
But before he played the father of the logical Vulcan way, he played Les Goodman, one of the neighbors who fall prey to suspicion and panic in “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” (March 4, 1960).
In this clip from the episode’s end, Atwater is the one in the nice sweater who demands of Charlie, “What are you waiting for?”
Viewers rightly regard “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” as one of Rod Serling’s greatest efforts for The Twilight Zone. It’s an all-too timely parable about the ways fear and ignorance can lead people to turn on each other with tragic results. In The Twilight Zone Companion, Zicree says it “may well be the greatest piece ever written about mob violence in any medium” (p. 85).
If only Les Goodman and his neighbors had heard Surak’s philosophy of calm, ordered reason and logic! (And if only we would heed such wisdom, too.)