Rod Serling's Unproduced Twilight Zone Pilot Finally Aired In Season 3
"The Twilight Zone" enthusiasts might vaguely remember an episode titled "The Gift," a sci-fi tale about "a rootless little boy" named Pedro (Edmund Vargas), who stumbles upon an alien from a distant planet. "The Gift" is not one of the anthology series' better episodes, as it hamfists a twist ending while indulging in some problematic character stereotypes. However, there's a sense of beauty in a story about a lonely child who finds solace in the company of an extraterrestrial and is willing to treasure the gift given to him without learning its true purpose. The locale where the events unfold, a remote mountain village in Mexico, accentuates the loneliness that Pedro embraces and adds further meaning to the unlikely bond forged with the alien who crash lands in this space.
According to Marc Scott Zicree's "The Twilight Zone Companion," "The Gift" was not originally a standalone episode written as the series progressed but an "additional, hour-length pilot script" written by series creator and host Rod Serling himself. This pilot was initially titled "I Shot An Arrow Into The Air" — a title repurposed for another episode with a completely different story — and went into greater detail about Pedro's childhood and overarching sensitivity. Here, Pedro is "shunned by his peers" after the death of his father in a rocket ship accident and goes on to meet the wounded alien and become friends with it. As this particular script was not used for the pilot, Serling altered several aspects of the tale and changed the location to Mexico, which eventually birthed "The Gift."
Let us look into the themes of "The Gift" to parse what Serling might have meant when he wrote a story about unlikely friendships and mankind's tendency to fear and shun anything that doesn't fit the mode of established normalcy.
A gift to mankind
The alien, who refers to himself as Mr. Williams, crashlands outside the village and gets involved in an altercation with the local authorities. One officer is killed in the process, and Mr. Williams collapses in a nearby bar after sustaining grave injuries. A local doctor operates on the wounded alien out of sympathy, while Pedro (who works at the bar and is an orphan in this version of the story) befriends the alien, who gives him a peculiar gift that remains unexplained at this point.
After this, "The Gift" devolves into problematic territory. The residents of the Mexican village are painted as superstitious to the point of committing acts of murder, as they end up shooting Mr. Williams out of distrust. Despite the clear indication that Pedro and the alien have forged a bond, they view the gift as the mark of the devil without even understanding its value. While Serling meant for this aspect to symbolize themes of xenophobia and distrust for anything deemed the "other," the thoughtless recontextualization of the location, unfortunately, perpetuates harmful stereotypes, while the twist reveal feels cheap and unearned.
This brings us to the gift in question, which turns out to be a vaccine against all forms of cancer. "We have not just killed a man; we have killed a dream," the local doctor says after the gift is destroyed. While this idea is a strong one, Serling has conveyed it in much better, constructive ways in episodes like "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," which also boast taut script-writing and memorable performances. Unfortunately, "The Gift" has nothing valuable to offer except for the ghost of a tender sentiment, where the depth of a solitary child proves to be much more profound than the pointed disdain of the masses.