Quarantine (The Twilight Zone)
| "Quarantine" | |
|---|---|
| The Twilight Zone (1985 series) episode | |
Scene from Quarantine
|
|
| Episode no. | Season 1 Episode 17b |
| Directed by | Martha Coolidge |
| Written by | Alan Brennert |
| Production code | 49 |
| Original air date | February 7, 1986 |
| Guest appearance(s) | |
|
Scott Wilson: Matthew Forman |
|
Scott Wilson: Matthew Forman
Tess Harper: Sarah
Larry Riley: Joshua
D.W. Brown: John
Jeanne Mori: Irene
"Quarantine" is the second segment of the seventeenth episode from the first season (1985–86) of the television series The Twilight Zone.
A man awakens from an apparently long sleep. His caretaker, a young woman, wants him to confirm that he was put in cryogenic sleep in June 2023. Then she reveals he's been asleep for 324 years; it is the year 2347. The woman, Sarah, brings the man, Matthew, outside to see a small farm town. He is confused as to why he wasn't brought to a city, but she claims there are no more cities, freeways or factories. Sarah takes him into what she calls the surgery area, where surgery is performed without need of anesthetic or instruments. She and two others use psychic abilities to take out the cause of the incurable disease that required him to be put into the cryogenic sleep. Matthew is overwhelmed when he sees Sarah reach into his body and pull out the cancerous tissue painlessly. Although they are no longer technologically advanced, humans have made progress in 300 years. Theirs is a world in which technology is replaced by advances in human awareness and spiritual growth, where the organic replaces the mechanical, where they live in balance and harmony with all life on the planet in what Sarah refers to as a "biological gestalt".
Matthew begins learning more and more about the agrarian post-apocalypse community where Sarah lives. Every need there is met through genetic engineering, psionics, and super-science in harmony with Nature. However, Matthew becomes confused as to why they brought him out, because he has no way of serving their completely agrarian society. They explain to him that a meteor, sufficient to alter dramatically the entire ecosystem of Earth, is about to crash into the Indian subcontinent. His work with a satellite defense system from the past can help destroy the meteor. He becomes angry, however, when they say that if it hadn't been for this problem, they wouldn't have brought him out and cured him. They show Matthew what happened after he was put in sleep: In 2043, a nuclear exchange wiped out eighty percent of the human population, amongst other incredible damage. The survivors, now amounting to only 200,000, have sworn to never let machines have the trust of the world again, as it had been before.
...
Wikipedia