Plot
The rocketship MR-1 (for "Mars Rocket 1"), returns to Earth after the first manned flight to Mars. Thought first lost in space, when the rocket reappeared, mission control couldn't raise the crew by radio. Its ground-crew land the rocket successfully by remote control. Two survivors are found aboard: Dr. Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden) and Colonel Tom O'Bannion (Gerald Mohr), his arm covered by a strange alien growth. The mission report is recounted by Dr. Ryan as she attempts to find a cure for Col. O'Bannion's arm.
While exploring Mars, Ryan was attacked by a carnivorous plant, which was killed by O'Bannion; They also discover, after mistaking its legs for trees, an immense bat/rat/spider creature, who is later repelled by a freeze ray fired by Weapons Officer Jacobs. When they return to their ship, the crew finds that their radio signals are being blocked and the MR-1 is grounded by a force field. O'Bannion leads the crew to a Martian lake with a city visible on the other side. They cross in an inflatable raft, only to be stopped by a giant amoeba-like creature with a single spinning eye. The creature kills Jacobs and infects O'Bannon's arm. The survivors escape to the MR-1 and starts liftoff. The survivors then return to Earth, where O'Bannon's infected arm is cured using electric shocks.
When they examine all of the data brought back by the expedition, the mission scientists find a recorded message. An alien voice announces that the MR-1 crew were allowed to leave so they can deliver a message to Earth. The Martians are watching human development and believe its technology has outpaced cultural advancement. They warn humanity to never return to Mars or Earth will be destroyed in retaliation.
Read more about this topic: The Angry Red Planet
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)