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| Where Is Everybody? | |
| Episode No. | Season 1 Episode 1 |
| Directed by | Robert Stevens |
| Written by | Rob Serling |
| Featured music | Bernard Herrmann |
| Cinematography by | Joseph La Shelle |
| Original air date | October 2, 1959 |
| Cast | Earl Holliman - Mike Ferris James Gregory - General Garry Walberg - Colonel Jay Overholts - Man |
| Previous | N/A |
| Next | "One for the Angels" |
"Where Is Everybody?" is the first episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It was first broadcast on October 2nd, 1959.
Plot[]
A man finds himself alone walking towards a diner. Inside he finds a jukebox playing loudly, and coffee hot on the stove, but no one else. He inquires for some breakfast, but no chef or waitress is to be found. He is dressed in an Air Force flight suit, but he does not remember who he is or how he got there.
After leaving the diner, he walks to a nearby town. The town seems deserted, but everywhere the man goes, he seems to find proof that someone had been there recently: food is cooking on a stove, water dripping in a sink, and a cigar is burning in an ashtray. He grows more and more unsettled as he wanders through the empty town, looking for someone—anyone—to talk to, all the while having the strange feeling that he is being watched.
In a soda shop after talking to himself he idly spins racks filled with paperback books until he comes to an already spinning rack filled from top to bottom with the same book: "The Last Man on Earth, Feb. 1959".
He finally collapses next to a street crossing and presses a button labeled WALK. It is revealed that the walk button is a panic button. The man is really a training astronaut named Mike Ferris, confined to an isolation room located within an aircraft hangar for 484 hours and 36 minutes, testing to see if he can stay sane cooped up in a small spacecraft for the duration of a trip to the Moon. The town was a complete hallucination, an escape valve for his sensory-deprived mind.
As Ferris is carried out of the hangar on a stretcher, he sees the Moon above him, and says wistfully, "Hey! Don't go away up there! Next time, it won't be just a dream or a nightmare. Next time, it'll be for real. So don't go away. We'll be up there in a little while..."[citation needed]
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