On Twilight Zone Day, look for these familiar Star Trek faces.
Twilight Zone Day is May 11. Nobody knows why, not even the outstanding blog Shadow & Substance: “It’s not the date the show premiered (October 2). Or ended (June 19). Or anything else of particular note.”
Why should Twilight Zone Day matter to Star Trek fans anyway? For at least a couple reasons.
Creator Rod Serling’s landmark anthology used science fiction and fantasy elements to tell serious stories—stories about contemporary issues that mattered but that would probably have run afoul of network censors had they been told in a straightforward, realistic fashion. The Twilight Zone blazed a trail Star Trek would follow.
And because it aired only a few years prior to Star Trek (from 1959 to 1964), The Twilight Zone often featured actors who’d go on to appear in Star Trek episodes.
Some 75 actors appeared on both The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, according to IMDB. So this Twilight Zone Day, let’s spend some time celebrating a few of these performers’ contributions to two of TVs all-time greatest science fiction series.
William Shatner beams twice into The Twilight Zone
When it comes to Star Trek actors who made their mark on The Twilight Zone, no one takes top billing away from Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner.
Shatner was an up-and-coming, in-demand leading man during the Zone’s run, and he starred in two episodes widely acclaimed as being among the series’ finest.
In the fifth season, he played anxiety-plagued airline passenger Bob Wilson in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (originally aired October 11, 1963).
Desperate to warn his pilot about the strange creature on the wing of the plane and ultimately determined to take matters into his own hands, Wilson’s flight in the traumatic skies has become iconic.
Still, as I said when we recently celebrated William Shatner’s 90th birthday, I think the first and more understated of his two Twilight Zone turns is the better one.
In the first season’s “Nick of Time” (November 18, 1960), he plays a man so weighed down by his superstitious nature he almost loses his new wife and his new job to the printed prophecies of a penny-operated “fortune telling” machine.
Whichever of the two episodes is your favorite, there’s no denying William Shatner will always be remembered not just for his adventures on the final frontier, but also as a high-profile resident of The Twilight Zone.
Is there a Star Trek doctor in the Zone?
DeForest Kelley never appeared on The Twilight Zone—the only one of the original series’ four main stars (himself, Shatner, Nimoy, and James Doohan) never to do so. (Doohan appears in the fourth season’s “Valley of the Shadow.”) But both of his two predecessors in the Enterprise’s sickbay did.
Paul Fix played Dr. Mark Piper in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second Star Trek pilot.
Fix was a character actor who specialized in Westerns. Outside Trek fandom, he’s best known for playing Marshal Micah Torrance in The Rifleman and for being John Wayne’s acting coach. He appeared in 26 of Wayne’s movies.
In the fifth season Zone episode “I Am the Night–Color Me Black” (March 27, 1964), Fix plays small-town newspaper editor Colbey.
Colbey’s “very selective” coverage of a murder case, along with false testimony at trial from the sheriff and his deputy, have contributed to a man’s death sentence. On the morning the man, Jagger, is to be hanged, the sun never rises—an unusually unsubtle allegory about the power of hate and evil from Rod Serling.
You’ll recognize Fix looking sorrowful in the clip from the episode at the top of this page. He’s the man with the tear-stained face in the mob’s front row and the one who turns on the radio to hear about the darkness spreading around the world.
John Hoyt played Dr. Phil Boyce, Captain Pike’s “doctor bartender” in “The Cage,” the first Star Trek pilot.
Though Hoyt was also no stranger to Westerns, his credits range widely and include several forays into science fiction—some more respectable (for example, When Worlds Collide) than others (for example, Attack of the Puppet People).
Hoyt appears in two second-season Twilight Zone episodes.
Most memorably, he is the three-armed title character in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” (May 26, 1961). Not unlike the Talosians, Hoyt’s character is adept at illusion. He’s the advance scout for a Martian invasion force—yet he’s outwitted by a three-eyed Venusian soda jerk.
In “The Lateness of the Hour” (December 2, 1960), Hoyt plays Dr. William Loren, a brilliant, reclusive scientist who builds androids. (Trek fans know something about those, don’t we?) Loren’s daughter Jana vehemently hates the robots—which makes the episode’s twist ending inevitable.
In The Twilight Zone Companion, Marc Scott Zicree praises Hoyt’s performance, calling him “one of that small band of character actors who infuse individuality into every role they play” (p. 170).
Certainly, Star Trek fans who fondly remember Dr. Boyce from Hoyt’s one and only appearance in the role would agree.
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.)
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.
George Takei takes a controversial trip to the Twilight Zone
No discussion of Star Trek actors in The Twilight Zone would be complete without mention of “The Encounter” (May 1, 1964), a fifth season episode that proved so controversial it only aired once in the U.S., never to be broadcast again until SyFy did so during its annual New Year’s Day Twilight Zone marathon in 2016.
The two-person episode starred Neville Brand—a prolific actor and highly decorated World War II veteran—and George Takei, Star Trek’s own Mr. Sulu.
Watch Takei tell the tale of this episode that, as he says, “gained some notoriety” in the clip at the top of this page.
Takei says his character’s “realization” that his father signaled the Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor—an incident which, again, has no factual basis—was a fantasy sequence.
The episode itself may present the incident this way. But it may also present it as the actual truth—a truth parallel to the truth about Brand’s character, that he killed the Japanese soldier from whom he took a samurai sword in cold blood and not in self-defense, as he originally claims.
If this latter interpretation holds, it’s no wonder Japanese Americans objected to the episode. Takei himself has devoted much effort to dispel myths about Japanese Americans in World War II with his legacy project, the Broadway musical Allegiance. The idea that a Japanese American collaborated in the Pearl Harbor attack is offensive and dangerous.
Decades later, you can watch “The Encounter” and decide for yourself whether the episode actually advances it. Whatever you conclude, it’s arguably the most notorious time a Star Trek star took a trip into the Twilight Zone.
As you’ve seen, there’s simply no shortage of great episodes Star Trek fans looking for familiar faces can watch on Twilight Zone Day. The whole series is available on Paramount+, so the next time you finish streaming a Star Trek episode on the platform, take your own journey into this wondrous land of imagination!