King Nine Will Not Return

The World War II B-25 Mitchell bomber King Nine has crashed in the desert. Captain James Embry finds himself stranded, alone except for the wreckage and the mystery of what happened to his crew, all of whom have disappeared. The movement of the plane in the wind and his visions of the missing men serve to heighten Embry's disorientation.

Embry finds the grave of one of his crewmen and sees, in the sky, Navy F9F Cougar jets, impossible for the time. He collapses in the sand, and we discover that he is actually suffering hallucinations from a hospital bed, 17 years after the crash.

Confident that Embry will recover, two doctors discuss that Embry's suffering has been triggered by a newspaper headline. The paper has reported the desert discovery of the long-lost King Nine, which had not returned to base from a mission during the war. Having come down with a fever just before he was to board the ill-fated flight, Embry had been replaced on the mission by another captain. Embry's sight of the headline has triggered survivor guilt, in which, we are to understand, he has imagined himself at the crash site.

The doctors assure Embry he has returned to the site only in his mind. A nurse, handling Embry's clothes for the doctors, discovers the shoes are mysteriously filled with sand.

Inspiration and production [edit]

The episode was based on the discovery of the B-24 Liberator four engine bomber Lady Be Good and her crew's remains, which had crash-landed at night, deep in the Libyan desert after running out of fuel, while returning from a WWII bombing mission over Ploesti, Romania. In the episode, the marker of a grave of a member of the crew of King Nine is dated "5 April, 1943," the day on which the Lady Be Good was lost.

The scary and suspenseful score by Fred Steiner was later used in other Twilight Zone episodes.

This was the first episode to feature the familiar Marius Constant Twilight Zone theme.

The bomber aircraft used in this episode was a North American Aviation B-25C-10NA 42-32354, which still exists in storage with Aero Trader, Borrego Springs, California.

Incidental to the story of discovery of the Lady Be Good is the 2012 discovery of a British RAF P40 Kittyhawk that went down in June of 1942. The photographs of the wreck cleary indicate the site has not been disturbed from that decade to this. There is evidence that the pilot tried to shelter in place, took the radio from the plane and tried to repair it or call for help. However, his remains were not discovered at the crash site and it is believed that they are yet to be discovered within a 20-mile radius of the downed fighter's crash site.^{[citation needed]}

External links [edit]

v t e Twilight Zone (1959) episodes

Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgement Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"

Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "The Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"

Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"

Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"

Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander With Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"

Contents

Plot [edit]

Inspiration and production [edit]

See also [edit]

Further readings [edit]

External links [edit]