To Serve Rod
The Twilight Zone changed everything.  The famed science-fiction TV show was the first of its kind, and since its popularity peaked in the 1960's it has found imitation in everything from The X-Files to The Outer Limits.  The reasons for its success are numerous, and include the fact that The Twilight Zone capitalized on the paranoia and suspicion that marked the Cold War Fifties.  The show's popularity continues even after the Cold War, and this is due in no small part to the highly stylized, disciplined writing by the show's creator, Rod Serling.  An examination of drafts for one of the show?s most famous episodes, To Serve Man, shows how Serling strove to balance competing plots on a thematic scale, and reflects his belief that in the Atomic Age no one is ever truly safe.
To Serve Man is a tale told in the periphery.  Based on a story by Damon Knight, the episode centers around a visit to Earth by peaceful aliens called Kanamits.  The Kanamits' stated purpose is simply "to serve man."  They give to humans amazing technology that makes war, famine, and (in the screenplay) disease a thing of the past.  But, as we?re told in the opening monologue, the Kanamits' intentions are not what they appear to be.  Slowly, they win over even the most skeptical of Eathlings, allowing them to carry out their real mission: transporting humans to their home planet so that they can be cooked and eaten according to recipes in their pun-titled book, To Serve Man.
The face of the swindled Earthlings is the unfortunate code breaker Mike Chambers, whose ignorance of the alien threat and inability to decode their cookbook leads to his demise.  Chambers disregards the concerns of his friends and coworkers, saying that they are "looking a gift horse in the mouth."  He is not completely aloof; at one point he even comments on what he calls "the fantastic ease with which human beings make adjustments."  His narrative progression is tragic because he is constantly aware that he is being brought to water; he literally plays Cat's Cradle while acknowledging ?"he strange and complex sanity of man," knowing full well that the Kanamits have an agenda but refusing to believe it is anything but the great humanity they claim.
Chambers' antithesis is Gregori, the USSR delegate to the United Nations.  Gluttonous, crude, and boisterous, Gregori is everything Chambers is not, including skeptical.  When other delegates are asking the Kanamits about the form of their aid or their choice of planets, Gregori is asking the important question: why are they here?  Even his skepticism cannot last, however, and soon enough we see him using his diplomatic visa to budge the line to the Kanamits' spaceship.
These two plots are distant, and it is obvious through the drafts that Serling worked hard to balance them. Gregori's and Chambers' actions only tacitly affect each other, and it is safer to say that they are both on the receiving end of actions perpetuated by the Kanamits.  These actions, however, are disguised in montage.
Serling packs a world of change into his story, and as a result this episode features significant use of the montage.  It is a montage which first alerts us to the Kanamit arrival, another that shows their amazing gifts, and still another that reveals the world's acceptance of them.  These sequences are almost a third plot unto themselves, for if taken as a whole they embody the first half of the episode?s primary theme: that man can be easily persuaded by promises, true or false.
The thematic idea of false promises is replicated aesthetically throughout the episode.  Everyone from the UN delegates to Chambers is lit with bright lights, signifying the bright future they all hope for.  The bright lights, however, also cast long shadows, indicative of the unseen motives of the Kanamits.  Indeed, our first experience with one of the creatures is the sight of the huge shadow he casts.  The only darkly-lit scenes of the entire episode occur at the Kanamits' ship, where they load passengers on their final voyage.  Other details within the story alert us to what we aren't seeing.  The Secretary General's announcement of the landing outside Newark, New Jersey is a reference to the famed panic-inducing War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles, and is a powerful clue that things are awry.  After the Kanamits establish world peace and prosperity, Chambers? coworker Pat holds a newspaper whose headline reads "4-HOUR POWER FLARE BRINGS CHAOS."  Only briefly visible, the headline is more a jab at the audience than it is at the characters, but it is a tell-tale sign nonetheless.
The second half of the theme is that man can just as easily be duped, and this is embodied by Chambers.  Though he is the only identifiable protagonist, his plot consumes less than half of the total screen time.  Chambers seems like an add-on; Serling no doubt wanted to go into greater detail about the alien visitors, as his first draft contains facts about their language and planet that were omitted from the final.  His original script called for the Kanamits to never be in the same shot as humans. Their tall stature would be established by forced perspective through their "relationships to other objects like chairs, tables, ashtrays, etc."  The Kanamits, as they finally appear on the screen, are in shots with humans, a fact made possible by Serling lowering his height requirement from the humanly-impossible ten feet to the rare-but-plausible nine feet, then casting an actor who was probably eight feet tall.  Serling scrapped much of the Kanamit back story, most likely to make room for a protagonist with whom the audience could relate.  His final draft includes bookend soliloquies by Chambers (who is, ironically, in a chamber) in which he reiterates the thematic idea that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
The audience's attachment to Chambers depends on the strength of these soliloquies, and it is unfortunate that they do not appear in the early drafts.  Nonetheless, we can study them as they appear in the episode.  The opening scene is mysterious; we establish that Chambers is in space and detained.  He compares his existence to a nightmare.  The entire process takes two and a half minutes, and it is another seven minutes before we see Chambers again, this time extolling the virtue of the Kanamits for three and a half minutes.  After that, he disappears for another five minutes, returning only to declare that he is going to the Kanamit planet, and then learning the horrible truth.
Chambers' plot - and the episode as a whole - is marked not by conflict but by the lack thereof.  This is not a Twilight Zone that focuses on nuclear war, alien invasions, or time travel, but simply on the coming of peace, and that as much as any plot device contributes to the audience's suspicions of the Kanamits.  The first act ends simply with the entrance of a Kanamit into the United Nations; within the next five minutes we arrive at the major beat: it is simply the establishment that Chambers trusts the Kanamits and his friends do not.  The rest of the episode is merely a race to see who is right.
In the end, of course, it's Gregori, and this cannot be overlooked.  To Serve Man aired on March 2, 1962, but the original story by Damon Knight appeared twelve years earlier in Galaxy Magazine.  It can be assumed, then, that Knight concocted the story in the post-World War II environment, when a victorious American society was promising new and exciting technologies that would make the world "a Garden of Eden," as Chambers puts it.  Microwaves, DDT, television, the suburbs, all came about in the short period between the war and 1950, and to many they were as welcome a change as world peace and plenty are to Chambers.  To Serve Man can be read as Knight?s suspicious indictment of the technology being made available to him, as well as a critique of his countrymen who bought the promises of that technology at face value.  The piece is backlash to the false pledges of progress. That Gregori ? a member of the arch-nemesis of the US and a communist ? is right all along is a blistering attack on the idea of American capitalist progression.  Of course, an American TV show in 1962 would be insane to romanticize the Soviet Union, so Gregori gets eaten along with everyone else.
The popularity of To Serve Man (and of The Twilight Zone as a whole) can be accredited to Serling?s ability to combine social commentary with entertaining science-fiction.  Episodes like The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street or The Shelter achieve poignant endings through literary tactics similar to those used in To Serve Man.  Serling would not openly admit this.  When he picked up my hitchhiking father in 1970 (which itself is a Twilight Zone-worthy occurrence), my father said to him, "I'm an old Twilight Zone fan."  Serling self-deprecatingly replied, "You have to be old to be a Twilight Zone fan."  We know today, of course, that he was wrong.
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