Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"
The Twilight Zone episode
William Shatner with Nick Cravat as the gremlin
Episode no.	Season 5 Episode 3
Directed by	Richard Donner
Written by	Richard Matheson (from his story, first published in Alone by Night, 1961)
Featured music	Stock from "King Nine Will Not Return" and "The Rip Van Winkle Caper"
Production code	2605
Original air date	October 11, 1963
Guest actors
William Shatner Christine White Ed Kemmer Asa Maynor Nick Cravat

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is episode 123 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone, based on the short story of the same name by Richard Matheson, first published in Alone by Night (1961). It originally aired on October 11, 1963.

Plot

While traveling by airliner, Bob Wilson thinks he sees a gremlin on the wing. Bob tries to alert his wife and the flight crew to the gremlin's presence, but every time someone else looks out of the window, the gremlin leaps out of view, so Bob's claim seems outlandish. His credibility is further marred because this is his first flight since his nervous breakdown six months earlier, which also occurred on an aircraft. Bob realizes that his wife is starting to think he needs to go back to the sanitarium, but his bigger concern is that, if nothing is done about the gremlin, it will damage the airliner and cause it to crash. He sees the gremlin tinker with the wiring under one of the engine cowlings.

After repeated attempts to warn the crew, Bob grows desperate, steals a sleeping police officer's revolver, and opens the window marked "Auxiliary Exit" to shoot the gremlin, succeeding despite being nearly blown out of the aircraft himself. Once the airliner has landed, everyone believes that he has gone insane. As Bob is whisked away in a straitjacket, he tells his wife that he is alone in his assurance of what happened up there. Rod Serling informs the viewers that Bob's conviction won't be long and the final shot reveals why: the gremlin has left evidence of Bob's story, in the form of the damaged wing.

Cast

• William Shatner as Bob Wilson
• Christine White as Julia Wilson
• Ed Kemmer as Flight Engineer
• Asa Maynor as Stewardess
• Nick Cravat as Gremlin

Quotations

Opening narration

Closing narration

Remake

The episode was remade in 1983 by director George Miller as a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Unlike Bob Wilson, whose credibility was compromised by a recent nervous breakdown in the 1963 version, John Valentine, played by John Lithgow, suffers from severe aviatophobia, again giving the flight crew added reason to disbelieve his wild claims.

The story begins with flight attendants attempting to coax Mr. Valentine from the lavatory as he tries to recover from what seems to be a panic attack. He is repeatedly assured by the flight attendants that everything is going to be all right, but his nerves and antics disturb the surrounding passengers.

As Mr. Valentine takes his seat, he notices a hideous gremlin (played by Larry Cedar) on the wing of the aircraft and begins to spiral into severe panic. He watches as the creature wreaks havoc on the wing, destroying the engine, losing more control each time he sees it do something new. When he sees the gremlin begin tearing off pieces of the engine's outer housing and throwing them into the engine's intake turbines (and creating massive showers of white hot sparks that shoot out the front of the engine), Valentine finally snaps, grabs a handgun from a security guard on board, breaks the window with a fire extinguisher (causing a breach in the pressurized cabin), and begins firing at the creature. This only serves to catch the attention of the gremlin, who rushes up to Valentine and promptly destroys the gun. After a tense moment in which they notice that the aircraft is landing, the gremlin grabs Valentine's face, then simply scolds him by wagging its finger in a "no, no" manner. The creature leaps into the sky as the aircraft begins to make an emergency landing. On the ground as a straitjacketed Valentine is carried off in an ambulance, the police, crew and passengers begin to discuss the incident, writing off Valentine as insane. The aircraft maintenance crew soon arrives however, and everyone gathers to examine the massive amounts of unexplained damage to the aircraft's engine, including the claw marks, the gaping hole in the engine's housing, and the heavily mangled and chewed up blades of the engine's intake fan.

In popular culture

Parts of this episode's plot have been repeated and parodied several times in popular culture, including television shows, films, radio and music.

In The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IV" (1993) is a segment called "Terror at 5½ Feet". It takes place on a school bus rather than an aircraft, and puts Bart Simpson in the role of Bob Wilson. An AMC Gremlin drives alongside the bus.^[1]

In the 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "Dick's Big Giant Headache: Part 1" (1999), William Shatner makes his first appearance on the series. John Lithgow's character meets Shatner's character as he gets off an aircraft. When Shatner describes something horrifying on the wing, Lithgow replies, "The same thing happened to me!"^[2] This references not only Lithgow's portrayal of the nervous passenger in the 1983 Twilight Zone remake, but also an earlier 3rd Rock episode "Frozen Dick" (Season 1, Ep 12, 1996) when he and Jane Curtin's characters were due to fly to Chicago to pick up awards before Dick panicked about something on the wing while the plane was still on the tarmac and gets them both kicked off the plane.^[3]

Keith McDuffee of TV Squad listed the gremlin as the ninth scariest television character, in 2008.^[4]

On the March 16, 2010 episode of Saturday Night Live, guest host Jude Law plays William Shatner's original role, while cast regular Bobby Moynihan is the gremlin on the wing of the jet. One scene features the musical guest Pearl Jam sharing a barbecue with the gremlin.^[5]

William Shatner had a cameo on the Whoopi Goldberg episode of Muppets Tonight on 7 Jul 1996 and was bothered by a monster Muppet while riding in a jet and he refers to this episode.

References

Notes

Bibliography

External links

• "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" at the Internet Movie Database
• TV.com episode page