Rod Serling was given to making stories that were full of resolutely middle-brow messages. You didn't have to be too sophisticated to get the point. Sometimes a simple knowledge of the ABCs would be enough.
"When the Sky Was Opened" isn't one of those stories that are, as one student called them, "deeply profound." Or -- if there is any message at all -- it's one that corresponds to a cartoon I once saw in The New Yorker. A space ship is about to be launched and from the puffy cloud above, a giant hand emerges and places its index finger on the tip of the rocket.
Anyway, the story has three astronauts -- Rod Taylor, Jim Hutton, and Charles Aidman -- have just returned from an orbit that included a blackout of twenty-four hours, which the men can't explain and the ground crew doesn't understand. All three land in the hospital. Hutton's leg was broken during the crash, so Taylor and Aidman take their leave of him and go out on the town.
It's Taylor's story, told mostly in flashback. In a bar, Aidman gets the feeling that he might disappear at any moment, and indeed traces of his existence are evaporating one by one -- he calls his parents and they never heard of him, his photo disappears from the newspaper, then Aidman himself disappears and no one in the bar remembers him.
Taylor rushes back to the hospital and spills all this to Hutton, who doesn't believe him. According to Hutton, there were only two astronauts in the ship. He's never heard of Aidman. Then, poof, and Taylor evaporates, and shortly Hutton himself is gone. No one on the hospital staff pays any attention because they don't remember any of the three.
I've always liked Rod Taylor, an Australian. He's handsome and masculine and reassuring, much like myself, but I admire his imperfections too -- those queerly shaped ears with those Darwinian points. He never really got to stretch his acting chops in Hitchcock's "The Birds." Here, he has a chance to turn from his sanguine personality into a neurological train wreck, and he does it pretty well. "It's a gag!" he keeps exclaiming. "It's a great big complicated gag." Even in the much later failed comedy, "Welcome to Woop Woop," in which he had aged until he was almost unrecognizable, his eyeballs about to pop out, he was magnetic.
It's one of the more enjoyable episodes. There may be no message behind it but it's entertaining as hell.
