Twilight Zone Day makes for great Star Trek stargazing
By Mike Poteet
Star Trek guest stars are, like, all over this Twilight Zone episode!
Every so often, The Twilight Zone serves up more than one face for Star Trek fans to recognize in a single episode.
Take the first season’s “People Are Alike All Over” (March 25, 1960), for instance.
A mission from Earth crashes on Mars. Astronaut Sam Conrad (played by a pre-Planet of the Apes Roddy McDowall) survives, but his crewmate, Warren Marcusson, dies.
Paul Comi plays the ill-fated Marcusson. A three-time Twilight Zone guest star, Comi played the bigoted Lieutenant Stiles in “Balance of Terror.”
To his relief, Conrad finds the people on Mars are friendly and welcoming, eager to provide for him. They even build him a house like the ones he’s used to on Earth.
Among the Martians is Byron Morrow, who twice played a Starfleet admiral (Admiral Komack in “The Trouble with Tribbles” and Admiral Westervliet in “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”—maybe they were twins separated at birth?).
Another resident of the Red Planet is played by Vic Perrin. In addition to playing the leader of the Halkan Council in “Mirror, Mirror,” Perrin voiced Nomad in “The Changeling” and the Metron in “Spectre of the Gun” (although the Metron’s warning buoy was voiced by James Doohan).
But the Martian who most captivates Conrad is Teenya, played by Susan Oliver—who, as Steve Rubin writes, “was a luminous presence in all of her film and television work.”
Star Trek fans can certainly agree. Her work as the multiple real and illusory versions of Vina, woman of Captain Pike’s dreams (and nightmares) in “The Cage” earned her an undying place in our minds and hearts.
Alas for Sam Conrad, but as is par for the course in The Twilight Zone, all is not as it appears to be. As you can see in the clip at the top of this page, though Teenya does not approve, her fellow Martians are as content to keep Conrad in a cage as the Talosians initially were to keep Pike in their menagerie.
Another prominent but more intimate example of multiple Star Trek guest stars in a single Twilight Zone episode was the fifth season’s “The Long Morrow” (January 10, 1964).
Robert Lansing—whom Trek fans remember as Gary Seven, the mysterious interstellar agent sent to stop a nuclear missile launch in 1968 in “Assignment: Earth”—plays astronaut Douglas Stanfield, an astronaut about to enter cryogenic freeze for a mission to a strange new solar system.
But before he leaves Earth, he falls in love with Sandra Horn, played by Mariette Hartley, who also played Zarabeth, the woman with whom Spock fell in love while marooned in Sarpeidon’s ice age in “All Our Yesterdays.”
In a twist worthy of O. Henry, Horn puts herself in suspended animation to wait for Stanfield’s return. But Stanfield, for love of Horn, exited his stasis early, thinking he’d be as old as she would be when he returned to Earth.