The Invaders (The Twilight Zone)

"The Invaders"
The Twilight Zone episode
Agnes Moorehead and an Invader
Episode no.	Season 2 Episode 15
Directed by	Douglas Heyes
Written by	Richard Matheson
Featured music	Original score by Jerry Goldsmith
Production code	173-3646
Original air date	January 27, 1961
Guest stars
Agnes Moorehead: Woman Douglas Heyes: Invaders (voice)
Episode chronology
← Previous "The Whole Truth" Next → "A Penny for Your Thoughts"
List of Twilight Zone episodes

"The Invaders" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

Opening Narration

“

This is one of the out-of-the-way places. The unvisited places. Bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse - handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas. A house untouched by progress. This is the woman who lives in the house. A woman who's been alone for many years. A strong, simple woman whose only problem, up until this moment, has been that of acquiring enough food to eat. A woman about to face terror, which is, even now, coming at her from...the Twilight Zone.

”

Plot

An old woman (Agnes Moorehead) is apparently living alone in a very rustic cabin. She is dressed shabbily and there are no modern conveniences in evidence. After hearing a strange noise above her kitchen roof, she is accosted by small intruders that come from a miniature flying saucer that has landed on her house, equipped with two tiny people in spacesuits. In proportion to the old woman, the intruders appear to be only a few inches high.

She battles them for many minutes, finally killing one and following the other back to his ship. There she hears one of the space-suited intruders, speaking in English with an apparent American accent (voiced by Director Douglas Heyes), send off a desperate warning to other potential invaders that the people from the planet are giants and very difficult to defeat, after which she destroys the ship with a hatchet and then, exhausted, collapses. (Before this scene, the episode has no dialogue.)

The camera pans and we see the side of the ship display U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1.

Closing Narration

“

These are the invaders - the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe, only to be imagined. The invaders, who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag. And we have just seen it entered in a ledger that covers all the transactions of the universe. A bill stamped "paid in full," and to be found, on file, in the Twilight Zone.

”

Trivia

This is the only episode with only one person and no spoken dialogue at all (except at the very end); Agnes Moorehead performs primarily in pantomime.

Although NASA was formed in 1958, a US Air Force logo appears on the ship.

As in many episodes, props were recycled from Forbidden Planet (1956). Most noticeable here is the United Planets Cruiser, in the form of one of the original visual effects models used in the movie, complete with lights on its underside and a moving ramp. The audio commentaries on the Blu-Ray containing this episode confirm that in the scene where Moorehead appears to destroy the model, a purpose-built (and more fragile) replica was used.

See also

• "Third from the Sun", a Twilight Zone episode in which two families flee their planet on the verge of a nuclear war.
• List of The Twilight Zone episodes

References

• Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)
• 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

External links

• Escape: "The Invader"
• "The Invaders" at the Internet Movie Database
• TV.com episode page
• Full video of the episode at CBS.com