Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Crash of the Moons (1954)

"Crash of the Moons" is a two-part episode of the 1954 television series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger that, when watched in sequence, makes for a 72-minute, movie-like experience. This episode finds titular hero Rocky getting word that two "gypsy moons," which are mutually locked together and drifting through outer space, are going to crash into one another. On one of the moons, Posita, the denizens are willing to relocate. However, on the other moon, Ophecius, the waspish female suzerain Cleolanta is set upon destroying Posita (and its inhabitants) before it crashes into her home. It's Rocky's aim to set things aright.

Richard Crane, seen here in
another role, plays Rocky

It might seem like what we have here is boilerplate black-and-white 50s TV sci-fi, and, for the most part, that assessment adequately characterizes this episode. But watching this last night, I will confess that this episode moved me nonetheless. When Cleolanta's minions start bombarding the moon opposite them with missiles, the camera cuts from an outer-space perspective of explosions on the surface of the planet to the ground-level happenings on the planet itself. Infrastructure clatters down and roofs cave in and Rocky Jones' female assistant and his twelve-year-old ingenue, Bobby, scramble for cover. And as they do so, the infant prince of Posita wails and shrieks.

Hearing this crying baby last night, I thought of the babies in Gaza—the Palestinian babies and the Israeli babies. The leaders of men can come up with all kinds of reasons why they should bomb their neighboring peoples, but the babies can only cry. Listening to those straining screeches, my chest seized up and my mouth became pinched. We have destroyed one another in the past, we destroy one another in the present, and we will destroy one another in the future. In fact as in fiction, too many babies are doomed on arrival, born into the insoluble and perpetual conflicts of angry rival cultures locked in one another's gravitational pull. Gravity's a metaphor here, of course; hate is the real and abiding attractive force. Destruction of another gets conflated with self-preservation. Perhaps we should listen closer to the babies' crying. Babies shriek the same way, then and now and forever. 

I guess what I am saying is that this boilerplate black-and-white 50s TV sci-fi legitimately affected me. This vision of the future from the past put me in the immediate present. I was moved enough to have my heart teleported 6,290 miles from my watching location to the Gaza Strip. So I'd recommend you watch and listen to the crying baby in this two-part episode of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and in life. Maybe it will move you, too. But probably not enough to make you do anything.

Babies cry and the skeletons smile.