Ep 1. King Nine Will Not Return
- TV-PG
- September 30, 1960
- 43 min
-
6.6 (3,099)
In The Twilight Zone season 2 episode 1 titled King Nine Will Not Return, a World War II bomber pilot named Lieutenant King finds himself alone and stranded in the desert with no memory of what has happened. The only thing he knows for sure is that his plane has crashed and his crew members are missing. As he struggles to piece together what has happened, he starts to experience strange occurrences and encounters with figures from his past.
Lieutenant King's mental state begins to unravel as he desperately tries to figure out what has happened and where his crew is. He starts to see hallucinations of his fellow soldiers, including the ones who have died in combat. King tries to differentiate reality from his imagination, but his experiences seem too real to write off as mere figments of his imagination.
As the night wears on, King's mental state continues to deteriorate. He becomes increasingly paranoid, fearing that he may be stuck in a time loop and may never escape the desert. King starts to see and hear things that indicate that he may be going insane, but he remains determined to keep his wits about him and find a way to survive.
Throughout the episode, the viewer sees flashbacks to King's life before the war and his relationship with his girlfriend. As King tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to his crew, he is forced to confront his own demons and come to terms with the fact that the war has changed him and may have left him unrecognizable to the people he used to know.
The Twilight Zone season 2 episode 1: King Nine Will Not Return is a haunting exploration of the costs of war and the human psyche. As King's mental state deteriorates throughout the episode, the viewer is left wondering whether he will be able to survive and make it back to civilization, or if he will succumb to his own demons and be lost forever in the desert. The episode is a testament to the power of the human spirit to persevere in the face of hardship and the importance of maintaining one's mental health in the toughest of times.
