The 27th Day (1957) & The Space Children (1958)

An alien abducts five people off the street, hands each of them a box of capsules

that can kill every human being within three thousand miles, and says he very much

hopes they won't use them. He is not being straight about the odds. He has already

decided what humans do with a loaded gun, and he has come to collect the planet

afterwards.

A year later a different alien turns up on a Californian beach as a glowing brain

the size of a football. It says nothing at all. It quietly recruits the children of

the men building a nuclear satellite and takes the thing apart from the inside.

Two American films, one year apart, both asking who should be trusted with the end

of the world, and landing in completely different places. By 1957 the friendly alien

film has a job to do, and there are really only three positions available on the

bomb. There is Klaatu's, which is sort it out yourselves or we will do it for you.

There is The 27th Day's, which is here is a bigger gun, let's see what you're made

of. And there is The Space Children's, which is simply no.

The trouble is that The 27th Day thinks it has written a happy ending. Humanity

passes the test by working out how to fire the weapon at everyone the newsreader

describes as an enemy of human freedom, the aliens turn up delighted, and the film

signs off on thirty thousand intelligent worlds living in peace. Nobody on screen

asks who drew up the list. It is the bleakest thing we have covered in this series

and it is presented as a utopia. That is not peace. That is enforced peacefulness.

In this episode we get into an alien who introduces himself as "the alien" and gets

straight to business, why a lock that only you can open is useless the second it is

open, Eve Wingate throwing hers in the sea inside five minutes and remaining the

smartest person in the film, shaving off a moustache as a witness protection

programme, one genuinely nuanced Soviet soldier standing next to one cartoon Soviet

general, a volunteer who poisons himself so the experiment can go ahead, the

Thunderer sitting in orbit with an H-bomb strapped to it, why Jack Arnold's alien

never once speaks to an adult, a stepdad who has it coming, and a last two minutes

that explain the whole film to you when nobody asked.

Don't poke it with a stick, and settle in.

Listen now.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and

Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films

at a time.

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