When Major Robert Gaines (Steve Forrest) launches in his spacecraft, he expects to make a few orbits of the planet, then come back down again. Sure there is some risk, but that’s nothing new. What he doesn’t expect is to black out in the process and wake up in a hospital bed.
But that’s nothing compared to waking up as a Colonel. Or getting home, only to find a fence in front of his house. Or learning that his wife and daughter seem the same, but something isn’t right about them. Or any of dozens of other small changes that simply can’t be explained. It’s as if he’s in the right place, but just a few minor things have been changed along the way.
Naturally when he points these things out, he seems crazy, so he’s reluctant to do so. But then the higher-ups notice the same sort of thing about his ship. It’s basically the same, but internally there are a few minor differences here and there, and collectively they make for a completely different craft. They ask him to check it out so they can try to determine if he is the same person (if he spots the differences) or if he is a different person (if it looks the same to him).
When he approaches his ship, he begins to hear sounds that no one else can hear. As he gets closer, they get louder, until finally when he is right next to it, he is back in his ship again, as if nothing changed – he is still in orbit. He comes down again, and then he’s back in bed. It’s as if he was never gone. But he is told that he was out of communication for six hours, not the week that he was missing.
The major tries to explain what happened, but naturally they don’t believe them, until they receive a radio signal from a Colonel Robert Gaines. That makes for an interesting end, but it would have been even better had the major returned to a world that was almost identical to the original, but then a tiny tweak indicated that he still wasn’t home. Morbid, yes. But it would have been an even better ending.
You mean like the remake of Planet of the Apes?
In either the original or in the remake of Planet of the Apes, the changes were rather drastic.
Here, it seemed as if the Major had finally arrived home, but his alternate (the Colonel) had made it into his world, while he switched places with him.
I think it would have been entertaining if at the end there was something that showed that perhaps he had jumped into still another alternate reality.
I don’t know what exactly, perhaps they called him General. Maybe the picket fence around the house was still there. But something. That just would have been a nice twist. As it was, the episode was good. That would have made it excellent.