Night Gallery: The Nature of The Enemy (aka Those Wretched Omnivorous Murids!)

The Night Gallery segment "The Nature of The Enemy" is another of those media specimens that you won't hear a positive word about, except on these pages. The general consensus among Night Gallery fans is that "The Nature of The Enemy" is the kind of witless tosh that gave the series, Rod Serling's attempt at a follow-up to his game-changing hit The Twilight Zone, its reputation as an ersatz paranormal anthology. Although widely regarded as one of Serling's lesser brainchildren, Night Gallery can claim some historical significance, in that on of the stories featured in the pilot episode, "Eyes", provided Stephen Spielberg with his first directorial gig and Joan Crawford with one of her final acting roles. And it should be noted that, despite its lowlier status in the television hierarchy, Night Gallery is still a reasonably iconic series, being referenced in both The Simpsons episode, "Treehouse of Horror IV" and the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "Night Ghoulery". Having said that, it seems that people are more enchanted by the series set-up (that is, Serling wandering around a deserted art gallery and delivering characteristically ominous introductions) than any of the individual stories. You seldom hear much discussion on the Night Gallery tales themselves as you do with The Twilight Zone, and while twist endings abound across both series, Night Gallery never had a twist that stuck in the public consciousness with anywhere near the same vigor as "It's a cook book!" or "I'm a mannequin!" But if any Night Gallery episode deserves to be remembered for its twist ending, it's "The Nature of The Enemy". Trust me, an ending this unashamedly, mind-bogglingly absurd is one to be cherished for the ages.

But then, I've mentioned previously just how enamored I am with rat horror, and "The Nature of The Enemy" offers a pretty unique entry into the rat horror canon. Once again, we find ourselves in the vicinity of Das Teufel Nagetier, only instead of attacking yuppies in their pristine suburban homes, this one lives on the moon and has a taste for NASA scientists. That's the twist, anyway. We're not supposed to know that this source of lunar terror is an oversized rat until the very end of the segment, so let's back up and take a look first at how we arrive at this confounding predicament.

"The Nature of The Enemy" first aired on December 23rd 1970 as part of the second installment of the show's first season. It was the final segment of the episode, following on from "Room with a View" (of which I struggle to recall the details) and "The Little Black Bag" (which has a fairly traditional plot in the Twilight Zone mold, but tonally there's something very off about it - the mean-spiritedness of its ending is matched only by the heavy-handedness of its moralising). It ran for a paltry ten minutes, making it one of the series' briefer offerings. The segment centres on a dialogue between NASA mission control leader Simms (Joseph Campanella) and an astronaut exploring the surface of the moon (Richard Van Vleet) as they attempt to uncover what became of two previous missions with whom contact has been inexplicably lost, although one of the two first managed to send out a distress call indicating that they were under attack. In between communications with the astronaut, Simms also must contend with a barrage of reporters (led by James B. Sikking and Jason Wingreen) demanding to know if the Russians or the Chinese are the most probable saboteurs. But of course they're thinking too small. The true identity of the assailant is hinted, wittily, in the segment's title, for the enemy is not concerned with any kind of national or political affinity but is in fact good old Mother Nature reminding mankind that, no matter how far he ascends up the technological ladder, there is to be no elevating of himself above her. By the end of the segment, it seems that Van Vleet's astronaut too has fallen victim to the mysterious attacker, but not before uncovering an equally baffling metallic artifact which was apparently assembled by the missing astronauts; mission control are left scratching their heads back on Earth...until a transmission enables Simms to get a clear glimpse of what they're up against. As it turns out, the astronauts were predated by a giant rat who resides on the moon, whom they unsuccessfully tried to bring down by constructing a giant mousetrap. The segment ends with Simms exclaiming in disbelief, "The enemy...that's the enemy!", as the rat rears upwards on its hind legs, becoming taller than the NASA-built contraption, almost as if taunting its terrestrial onlookers with its prepotency.

As noted, a large number of viewers revile this ending, and while I'll profess to having a great amount of affection for the segment, I can understand perfectly where its detractors are coming from. Tonally, "The Nature of The Enemy" is a bizarrely unbalanced piece, one which starts out with the promise of heading to darker and more sobering territory than it ultimately does. In his introduction, Serling describes the episode as "suggestive perhaps of some of the question marks that await us in the stars, and perhaps pointing up the moment when we’ll collect something other than moon rocks." And it has to be said that "The Nature of The Enemy" does appear to be taking itself completely seriously until the point that Van Vleet stumbles across that giant mousetrap; Campanella, certainly, plays his role with an entirely straight face throughout. With that in mind, I think a lot of viewers are disappointed to discover that this intriguing set-up amounts to such a hokey punchline. Even with the segment's brief running time, they feel cheated. There's the added issue that "The Nature of The Enemy" was written by Serling himself, and viewers generally have a lot of trust in his vision (after all, he penned the script to Planet of The Apes, a much more thoughtful and affecting examination of man's anthropocentric assumptions about the universe and what the age of space exploration could potentially mean for that). David Juhl, in his online review of the segment, complains that it "harkens back to the many cheap-o sci fi movies from the 1950s", although I would actually go a step further and assert that the sight of that giant mousetrap on the moon pushes it into the iconography of Tom and Jerry cartoons. And to my mind, that's a jolly good thing. Sure, it's inane, but there's a likeable kind of character to its inanity, a bemusing mix of the darkly ominous and the cartoonishly surreal.

Juhl also states that "The sight of [a] giant mouse terrorizing the human colonists of the moon is an unintentionally hilarious one and ruins what had to that point been an intriguing enough story with a certain amount of tension over what the rescue mission would find on the moon." I have to disagree with Juhl on the "unintentionally hilarious" point, as I suspect that the undeniable humour of the ending was indeed all-too intentional. It's far too ludicrous and off-the-wall not to be. Having studied this segment ample times, I'm not convinced that it wasn't Serling's intention all along to bait the viewer with an ostensibly po-faced scenario, only to pull the rug out from under them at the end with this unexpectedly daffy conclusion. In other words, it was Serling's idea of a practical joke, a little light dessert to follow on from the longer, heavier (and far less digestible) "The Little Black Box". He may have misjudged just how effectively this would work in practice, however. I also note that Juhl identifies the animal we see at the end as a mouse. Rookie mistake. Coming away with the impression that those NASA astronauts were mauled by a mouse means missing out on a subtle bit of wordplay from earlier on in the segment, when Simms assures the reporters that the communication from the missing team merely sounded like "we're under attack" but that they were never able to verify that final word. The script exploits the fact that "attack" and "a rat" have the same number of syllables and identical vowel sounds. So the real message, implied by the ending, was "we're under a rat"! In retrospect, the segment begins laying the ground for its daft conclusion well in advance of that giant lunar mousetrap.

Still, I suspect what ultimately disappoints viewers about "The Nature of The Enemy" is that, for all the solemnity of Serling's introduction, it fades out with apparently nothing very much serious to say. It's a baleful science fiction short that willfully mutates into a particularly twisted Merry Melodies cartoon and comes to an abrupt halt, prompting the question as to whether there's any deeper meaning to be harvested beyond Serling's flippant sleight of hand. While I very much doubt that Serling considered predation by giant moon rats a potential hazard for humans venturing into outer space, in the early days of space exploration, "The Nature of The Enemy" might have tapped into the uncertainty as to what humankind might discover out there, and the possibility that, in leaving our world and venturing into the vast unknown, we risked forfeiting our status as the dominant species. The surface of the moon becomes the new wilderness, eerily barren and yet tinged with the uneasy sensation that there's something else out there lurking among those moon rocks. But even then, Serling appears to jokingly subvert this by taking the very familiar, domestic scenario of rodent control and planting it within the strange and alien context of lunar exploration. I think that, again, the title provides clues as to how we are to interpret this story, in prompting us to consider just what kind of enemy we are dealing with. We know from the start that all this talk of the Russians and the Chinese intercepting the mission will turn out to be a gigantic red herring and that the characters, too busy looking inward to comprehend the bigger picture, will swiftly discover that such earthly divisions are meaningless when weighted against the indifference of a wider universe. Ultimately, though, the point it appears to be making has to do with man's hubristic assumptions that he can disconnect himself from the rest of nature (I think the final shot of the rat standing taller than the trap is really key in this regard). I've seen it suggested that the significance of having a large murid roaming across the moon should be viewed as nothing more substantial than as a play on that old cliche about the moon being made of cheese, but I would contend that the ending goes a whisker deeper than that, in linking the conflict to man's age-old enmity with the creature that's long insisted on following him on his journey from wilderness to urban domesticity, and is reputed to never be more than six feet away from him. The other rat race, in other words. That these NASA astronauts meet their match in such a familiar household pest (as opposed to something genuinely alien) is basically the point - that hulking rat is there to remind them that Nature is still the more powerful force and that, by turning his attention to the stars, man is not transcending Nature so much as gearing up to continue their contention in a whole other setting.

In the end, it's probably futile for me to keep on banging my drum on "The Nature of The Enemy". Fact is, I love this segment for precisely the reasons that other people scorn it. It's about a giant man-eating rat that lives on the moon, and if you don't already see the charm in that, then I certainly can't help you.

Note: The 1980s Twilight Zone revival boasts a short segment entitled "The Elevator" which follows a similar structure to "The Nature of The Enemy", and gets about as much respect from that show's viewership. It was written by...Ray Bradbury, of all people. The story also involves giant rats, only these ones are all fresh out of the taxidermist shop and and are only "giant" in the sense that they're meant to be the size of house cats. Although I don't harbour anywhere near the same kind of fondness for "The Elevator" as I do "The Nature of The Enemy" - in part because stories centred on giant [redacted] don't appeal to me nearly as much as stories centered on giant rats - I'll say that the twist, while very shoddily executed, is actually a lot cleverer than people give it credit for. I can't claim that I lose any reverence for Bradbury watching it, because the script definitely has the makings of a simple but smart story. The meaning of the segment is again implicit in the title - a literal elevator does feature prominently in the segment, but for the purposes of this particular macabre tale it's also a metaphor.