Little Girl Lost
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| "Little Girl Lost" | |||||||
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| The Twilight Zone episode | |||||||
 Scene from "Little Girl Lost" |
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| Episode no. | Season 3 Episode 91 |
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| Written by | Richard Matheson from his short story published in The Shores of Space (1953) | ||||||
| Directed by | Paul Stewart | ||||||
| Featured music | Original score by Bernard Herrmann | ||||||
| Production no. | 4828 | ||||||
| Original airdate | March 16, 1962 | ||||||
| Guest stars | |||||||
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Robert Sampson: Chris Miller |
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| List of Twilight Zone episodes | |||||||
"Little Girl Lost" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
Contents |
[edit] Opening narration
| “ | Missing: one frightened little girl. Name: Bettina Miller. Description: six years of age, average height and build, light brown hair, quite pretty. Last seen being tucked into bed by her mother a few hours ago. Last heard--aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet put it. For Bettina Miller can be heard quite clearly, despite the rather curious fact that she can't be seen at all. Present location? Let's say for the moment--in the Twilight Zone. | ” |
[edit] Synopsis
A couple, Chris and Ruth, are awoken by the distant whimpering of their little girl, Tina, and Chris slowly gets up to see what the trouble is. The dog in their yard begins to bark. Chris finds her bed empty, though he can hear Tina's plea for help. Looking around the room, he says, "I'm here, where are you?" The dog barks again in the back yard.
Chris crouches next to the bed while trying to talk Tina out from underneath it, where he thinks she is hiding. He looks under the bed only to find that nothing is there. Chris can hear Tina (with a strange echo effect) and she can hear him, but neither can see each other. He explains to Ruth that even though they can hear her, their little girl is no longer with them.
The dog is now barking incessantly. Chris calls his physicist friend, Bill, for help and opens the door to let the dog into the house. The dog runs into Tina's room as Ruth, still in the room, watches it go under the bed. She bends over calling it back, but becomes quiet when she sees that it has disappeared. She can still hear the dog's barking (also with the echo now) and Tina's voice.
Bill comes over and examines the wall behind the bed. He taps the wall and finds an invisible portal to another dimension. He explains it by saying sometimes lines in our 3 dimensions end parallel with, rather than perpendicular to, the 4th dimension.
They try to call to the dog to guide Tina back, but that doesn't work. Finally Chris, despite Bill's warnings, leans into the portal and falls into the other dimension. Chris lands in a hazy, abstract place, where space and shapes are distorted, turning upside down and sideways. Chris sees Tina and the dog and tries to call them towards him, since he is standing right near the portal. On the other side, he hears Bill's voice telling him to hurry up. Finally he grabs Tina and the dog and is pulled back into the bedroom. Ruth takes the girl to another room.
Bill explains that Chris was actually only halfway in, despite Chris thinking he was standing up in the new dimension. Bill was in fact holding on to Chris the entire time. He was telling Chris to hurry because the portal was actually closing, and had Chris remained there for any longer than a few more seconds, he would have been cut in two as the portal closed with half his body in the other dimension. As Bill puts it to Chris, "Another few seconds, and half of you would been here, and the other half....."
[edit] Closing narration
| “ | The other half where? The fourth dimension? The fifth? Perhaps. They never found the answer. Despite a battery of research physicists equipped with every device known to man, electronic and otherwise, no result was ever achieved, except perhaps a little more respect for and uncertainty about the mechanisms of the Twilight Zone. | ” |
[edit] Preview for next week's story
| “ | Next week we again borrow from the considerable talents of Charles Beaumont, and we take a fast trot on the wild side. Picture if you will a man who wakes up in a strange world, knows everyone, knows every place, feels very much at home. The strangeness comes from the fact that no one knows him. Try this one for size on the next Twilight Zone. It's called "Person or Persons Unknown". | ” |
[At this point, Rod, cigarette between his fingers, originally slipped in a plug for "tonight's sponsor", Liggett & Myers' "Chesterfield":]
Habit is something you do when pleasure is gone, and certainly this is not the way to smoke. I prefer to smoke Chesterfields, and get the rich taste of '21 great tobaccos'- blended mild, not filtered mild. Smoke for pleasure...smoke Chesterfields.
[edit] Production notes
Matheson wrote the short story based on a real-life incident involving his young daughter, who fell off her bed while asleep and rolled against a wall. Despite hearing her daughter's cries for help, Matheson's wife was initially unable to locate her daughter.
The voice of Tina Miller, the "little girl" in question, was played by voice actor Rhoda Williams, who was then 22 years old.
[edit] References in other media
Little Girl Lost was parodied in Homer3, a segment of Treehouse of Horror VI, a seventh season episode of The Simpsons. Instead of recovering Tina from the fourth dimension, the two-dimensionally-drawn characters attempt to retrieve Homer (and later, Bart) from the mysterious "third dimension." The episode ends with Homer destroying the 3D world (by throwing a cone in the middle of the plane and creating a black hole) and getting jettisoned into the real world, where he's initially frightened, but forgets his troubles when he finds an erotic cake store. The episode was famous at the time for mixing 3D computer animation and live-action with the show's two-dimensional cel animation.
An only slightly similar event occurs at the end of the first episode of the second season of Primeval: Stephen Hart tries to return to the present through an anomaly in time (from the Cretaceous, after returning two rogue raptor dinosaurs there) but is being pulled back by one of the raptors. The other characters manage to pull Stephen entirely through the anomaly and it closes on the attacking raptor's neck, decapitating it, similar to what Bill had warned would happen to Chris had the portal closed on him.
[edit] Theoretical Basis
The hole into the other dimension is an example of a "Riemannian cut"[1], which is a type of wormhole formed by two spaces being joined at the same set of points. The uncertainty of whether the other dimension was the fourth or fifth would point to a question of the dimensionality of the space our three dimensional universe is connected to or embedded in.
[edit] References
- DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1593931360
- Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0970331090
- ^ Kaku, Michio, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the 10th Dimension Oxford University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-19-508514-0 p.42
