The Arrival story
An FAA inspector and members of the airport staff investigate a plane that arrives without a single person onboard – and each sees it differently. Directed by: Boris Sagal. Story by: Rod Serling.
10 total · 1 choice · 6 major · 3 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| coping with personal failure | choice | In the end it appeared the whole morbid story was (whether real or not) in fact the haunted memories of Mr. Sheckly's one and only failure in his career. |
| attitude of superiority | major | Mr. Sheckly started out with a rather hubristic attitude of "always finding the causes", i.e., solving flight related mysteries. |
| descent into madness | major | Mr. Sheckly's failure to solve a certain aviation mystery early in his career as a federal investigator ate him up inside, ultimately resulting in him falling victim to the delusion that he was in the presence of a "ghost plane" of some sort. |
| haunted vehicle | major | An airplane landed on its own, its crew and passengers disappeared, the seats changed color, and people saw different numbers on its fuselage. In addition, the plane was described as "haunted" and the Flying Dutchman ghost ship is mentioned in the closing narration. |
| human vs. inexplicable adversity | major | The federal investigator Mr. Sheckly was left to explain how a passenger aircraft could have landed safely with no crew or passengers aboard. |
| obsession | major | Mr. Sheckly became obsessed with solving an aviation mystery. |
| pride goes before a fall | major | Mr. Sheckly was adamant that there was no mystery he couldn't solve. When a plane landed safety without any passengers, however, he failed miserably. |
| speculative hypnosis | minor | Mr. Sheckly proposed that everyone had been hypothesized. |
| what if I couldn't trust the veracity of my senses | minor | Since the three people saw entirely different planes in front of them, it follows that they couldn't trust their eyes with respect to that plane. |
| what if I told the truth and nobody would believe me | minor | After the illusion unraveled, Mr. Sheckly barged into an office and tried to convince two people of what had happened. They concluded he was a raving lunatic. |