CROSSING ZONE - "MIDNIGHT SUN" & "SEINFELD" AND THEN BACK AGAIN ON FLIGHT 33

We haven't done a "Crossing Zone" post so let's launch another one.

WARNING!  If you haven't seen the 'Twilight Zone'' episodes "The Midnight Sun" and "The Odyssey of Flight 33" and the 'Seinfeld' episode "The Gymnast", be forewarned - there will be SPOILERS!

Our focus for this Crossing Zone is "The Midnight Sun", which starred Lois Nettleton as Norma and Betty Garde as Mrs. Bronson.  

The Twilight Zone
- The Midnight Sun (1961) 

When the Earth falls out of orbit, two women try to cope with increasingly oppressive heat in a nearly abandoned city.

In a world that is getting ever nearer to the sun, people are trying to find ways to deal with the extreme heat. Most people have gone north with Norma and Mrs. Bronson the only two people left in their apartment building. There is little or no infrastructure remaining and water is one commodity that is very much in demand. They panic when an intruder breaks into Norma's apartment and holds them, at least for a few moments, at gunpoint. All is not as it seems however. 

Many episodes of 'The Twilight Zone' took place in the main Toobworld, but there were a lot of them that could only exist in alternate Toobworlds.  And "The Midnight Sun" is one of those stories.  In fact, I don't think that particular Toobworld exists anymore.

But even so, the people of that Toobworld (Terra Gelida) had doppelgangers back in Earth Prime-Time, the main Toobworld.  And while we met several others of the eight million stories in that world's 'Naked City' - the doctor, the neighbors, the intruder - we're going to be concerned only with the main players of this doomed little tale, Norma and Mrs. Bronson.

As she was the main character, we'll begin with Norma.  Let's see who she might have been in Earth Prime-Time......

Seinfeld
- The Gymnast (1994)

 ... Mrs. Enright

George's girlfriend's mom thinks he is a bum when she catches George eating an éclair out of the trash can, among various other coincidences.

We never hear what Mrs. Enright's first name was.  And we never learned what Norma's maiden name was either.  I'm going to suggest for this edition of "Crossing Zone" that Norma was divorced from Mr. Enright (a brother to Sgt. Charlie Enright perhaps?) already in that TV dimension; they were divorced before 1961 and had no children in that Toobworld.  In the long run, that was probably a blessing.

But in Earth Prime-Time, they remained married at least until after the birth of their daughter, Lindsay, in 1965.  Lindsay would grow up to date George Costanza, whom Mrs. Enright thought was a bum after seeing him eat an eclair out of the garbage and clean a car windshield with a newspaper.

"See that painting behind me?
I painted that."

We don't learn anything else about the life of Mrs. Enright, but it could very well be that she was a painter just as her doppelganger was in that frozen Toobworld.

Now let's turn our attention to Mrs. Bronson.  We don't even have to leave the parent series of 'The Twilight Zone' to find her again in the main Toobworld.....

The Twilight Zone
- The Odyssey of Flight 33 (1961)

 ... Passenger

Passing through the sound barrier a commercial airliner inadvertently travels back in time.

Global Flight 33 is en route from London to New York in what appears to be a routine flight in a modern jetliner. Suddenly however, the jet's speed increases to an incredible 3000 knots and they arrive in New York rather quickly. Neither the captain or his well-trained crew can explain what happened - a strange tail-wind perhaps - but they are certainly not prepared for what they find as they survey the land below them.

The name of that passenger never comes up during that adventure for Flight 33, so there's nothing to impede us from making the claim that she was indeed Mrs. Bronson.  Unfortunately, I don't think she fared any better than her doppelganger in Terra Gelida.  We never saw the outcome of that last attempt by the flight crew to pierce the temporal vortex and return to their own time.  But I don't think they ended up back in the Jurassic age nor did they return to the New York City of 1939. 

But the Captain was determined that they should not return to a world in which they might significantly cause an impact on the future of Mankind.  But wherever they did end up, it was going to be their last attempt; they just didn't have enough fuel to try again. 

I'd like to think they had to make an emergency landing in the New York area after the age of the dinosaurs but before the first stirrings of Early Man in the region.  There they would just have to live out their lives as best they could, with the agreed determination not to bring any more children into that timeline.

They would have had to cannibalize the airliner, of course.  That could accelerate the advancement of humanity once it was found, if only to be melted down to make weapons.  

And so, depending on whether or not she survived the plane crash, the Mrs. Bronson of Earth Prime-Time lived out what was left of her life - perhaps dying a million years before she was born......

BCnU!