Little Girl Lost

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Little Girl Lost”
The Twilight Zone episode

Scene from "Little Girl Lost"
Episode no. Season 3
Episode 91
Written by Richard Matheson from his short story published in The Shores of Space (1953)
Directed by Paul Stewart
Guest stars Robert Sampson : Chris Miller
Sarah Marshall : Ruth Miller
Tracy Stratford : Tina
Rhoda Williams : Tina's voice
Charles Aidman : Bill
Featured music Original score by Bernard Herrmann
Production no. 4828
Original airdate March 16, 1962
Episode chronology
← Previous Next →
"The Fugitive" "Person or Persons Unknown"
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 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 and Tina's voice.

Bill comes over and examines the wall behind the bed. He taps the wall and finds a portal to another dimension. He explains it by saying sometimes lines in our 3 dimensions end parallel, 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.

[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] Episode references and design information

 Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
  • 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.
  • This episode is parodied in a "Treehouse of Horror VI" episode of The Simpsons, Homer3, where Homer Simpson disappears into what Professor Frink dubs "The Third Dimension," eventually making his way to our world as a three dimensional rendering of his cartoon self. (Homer even describes the portal as "something outta that twilight-y show about that zone.")
  • Physicist Lawrence Krauss opens Hiding in the Mirror, his 2005 history of speculation about extra dimensions, with a reminiscence of the impact the episode had on him when he first watched it as a young boy.
  • Disney's Twilight Zone Tower of Terror has a wall in the basement area of the tower in which you can hear crying and a little girl calling for help along with the sound of wind and the feeling of air being blown at you from the wall.
  • The storyline line of "Little Girl Lost" is almost the precursor for Poltergeist including the dialog from several scenes and the daughter's voice coming from a TV set in the living room.
  • During Rod Serling's intro in the girl's bedroom, the marks from the diagram outlining the portal, drawn later in the episode, appear visible on the wall behind him.*

[edit] External links

[edit] Twilight Zone links

Languages