Twilight Zone: And When the Sky Was Opened

[Deledrius]

They have their entire existence erased, any memory of them wiped, and all just because they were able to come home.

Except that's not REALLY why whatever is happening to them is happening. It can't be. If they were just supposed to die in space, well, the "Corrector" could accomplish that SUPER easily - whatever the Corrector is, it has the ability to manipulate very fabric of space and time on a phenomenally precise level. It could just hop back a week and make their plane explode on re-entry, no muss no fuss. Instead, it goes though considerably more effort to execute the most complete Damnatio Memoriae imaginable. Either those men managed to do SOMETHING infinitely more egregious than surviving without realizing it...or maybe they didn't do anything at all, and this sort of thing just happens all the time without anyone noticing, because we can't notice.

I think this is the most interesting part of the episode for me. It's just the right edge of no explanation for a short story. There's a strong component of the unknowable (not the unknown) which defies logic, and since that's not the main focus it's okay. The horror is in the feeling of hopelessness and the inevitable in the face of some ineffable process.

[Scififan]

Regardless of the fact that we know more about space then we do now there is still a lot more out there that we don't know. The true horror of Lovecraft for instance isn't the tentacled monsters and the like but the realization that we don't matter in the grand scheme of things. In this episode not only do we have non-existence being a problem to deal with the fact that their non existence has no effect on the world. The horror, the true horror is that we do not matter.