A Memorable “Encounter”

George Takei will always be best known for playing Lt. Sulu on Star Trek. But before he ever stepped onto the bridge of the Enterprise, he took a short jaunt into the fifth dimension.

As the Tallahassee Democrat put it in a profile of Takei:

Before “Star Trek” turned him into a star, Takei was a character actor who appeared in small parts in movies and guest roles on TV shows such as “Playhouse 90” and “Perry Mason” during the late ’50s and early ’60s. One of his biggest breaks arrived when he co-starred with Neville Brand in an intense and controversial episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “The Encounter.”

Takei played a Japanese-American groundskeeper named Arthur Takamori who gets into a war of words with a World War II veteran who is rummaging through his attic. The conversation — which is more like a terse, two-man dialogue written by David Mamet — ends in violence thanks to a cursed samurai sword.

How the Kanamits Passed the Lie-Detector Test

When the Kanamits landed in the legendary Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man,” people were suspicious. And not simply because these alleged benefactors were nine feet tall and could talk without moving their lips. (Any market for basketball-playing ventriloquists, you suppose?)

No, they wondered: Could these visitors from outer space really have no ulterior motives? Did they truly want nothing more than to help us, as they claimed?

So the people of Earth fell back on a tried-and-true method — at least, to anyone who’s ever watched a police show. They had the head Kanamit take a lie-detector test.

As TZ fans know, the Kanamit passed it. But the ending makes it clear that he had to be lying. Which raises the question: How did he “beat the box”?