Rod Serling: Portrait of a honeymoon couple getting ready for a journey – with a difference. These newlyweds have been married for six years, and they're not taking this honeymoon to start their life but rather to save it, or so Eileen Ransome thinks. She doesn't know why she insisted on a ship for this voyage, except that it would give them some time and she'd never been on one before – certainly never one like the Lady Anne. The tickets read 'New York to Southampton,' but this old liner is going somewhere else. Its destination: the Twilight Zone.
Air date: May 9, 1963
Alan Ransome (Lee Philips) and his wife Eileen (Joyce Van Patten) board the Lady Anne, an aging passenger ship traveling on a 13-day transatlantic passage from New York to London, where Alan is going on a business trip. Eileen insisted on taking the Lady Anne precisely because it's the slowest route to London available, and she's depending on the slowness of the trip in the hopes of saving her and Alan's marriage, which has become notably strained thanks to Alan's nonstop commitment to his job as a financier. The Ransomes discover that the Lady Anne's passengers all appear elderly, as well as the crew, who intitially bribed them to leave. They also discover that the Lady Anne has a special magic that rekindles love between couples, as well as a final destination from which she will not return, prompting the other passengers to get them off the ship before it's too late.
Passage on the Lady Tropes:
- Adaptational Backstory Change: In the short story "Song for a Lady" by Charles Beaumont, the Ransomes are newly-married and very much in love, and take the Lady Anne to their honeymoon spot. In the episode, they've been married for six years, and their love is falling apart since Alan is more concerned with his job than with Eileen.
- Adaptation Name Change: In the short story, the McKenzies' names are Jack and Sally. In the episode, their names are Toby and Millie.
- Afterlife Express: The Lady Anne is a non-train variation. She had been operating normal routes for most of her lifespan, but her final voyage is set to take her passengers, most of which are elderly couples whom had travelled aboard her at some point, on a one-way trip to the afterlife. When the Ransomes inadvertently book passage on the ship, unaware of her true destination, the other passengers make a plan to stop them from leaving life too early.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Part of the episode's plot is seeing the Ransomes' relationship go from rock bottom to greatly renewed, gradually realizing they still love each other after all.
- Composite Character: In the episode, Ian Burgess and Colonel Van Vylman are merged with Burgess, who fulfills the roles of both characters. In "Song for a Lady", it's Van Vylman who makes the speech lamenting that the Lady Anne's time has gone, due to people spending most of their time rushing about.
- Cruel to Be Kind: The passengers and staff of the Lady Anne pull this with Eileen and Alan, forcing the couple to leave the ship at gunpoint. This is only because they want to keep the two young lovers from prematurely sharing their fates of being brought to the afterlife.
- Death by Adaptation: In the short story, Burgess' wife Cynthia is still alive and accompanies him on the Lady Anne's last voyage. In the television adaptation, she died several weeks prior to the cruise. This change is a result of Burgess' character being merged with Colonel Van Vylman.
- Divorce Is Temporary: Played with. Alan and Eileen aren't divorced yet, but their marriage hasn't been up to snuff in the last six years. Nonetheless, their decision to split up doesn't last long, as they have plenty of time to cool off and reconcile.
- Dramatic Irony: In-Universe. The elderly passengers are desperate to get Alan and Eileen off the Lady Anne before it's too late, knowing that when the ship "reaches harbor", they'll be stuck in the afterlife.
- Foreshadowing: After showing Eileen a photograph of his recently deceased wife, Burgess says that he'll be with her again soon. This is because it's revealed the Lady Anne is heading to the afterlife.
- Happily Married: All the couples who traveled aboard the Lady Anne have had extremely happy marriages. Millie credits the ship herself with enhancing her love for Toby, her husband for 53 years, and believes that every other couple onboard owes the Lady Anne a similar debt.
- Insistent Terminology: Whenever Eileen refers to the Lady Anne as an "it," the McKenzies tell her that the ship is a "she."
- Locked Out of the Loop: Everybody aboard the Lady Anne, barring the Ransomes, knows that the ship is going to the afterlife.
- Married to the Job: Alan has paid considerable amounts of attention to his job as a financier instead of his marriage to Eileen over the course of the last six years. It had gotten to the point that they barely saw or spoke to each other, so Eileen arranged their voyage on the Lady Anne and their trip to London in order to save their troubled marriage.
- Workaholic: Alan is one of them in the beginning. In fact, the whole reason he and Eileen board the Lady Anne in the first place was because he had a business trip in London.
Rod Serling: The Lady Anne never reached port. After they were picked up by a cutter a few hours later, as Captain Protheroe had promised, the Ransomes searched the newspapers for news – but there wasn't any news. The Lady Anne with all her crew and all her passengers vanished without a trace. But the Ransomes knew what had happened, they knew that the ship had sailed off to a better port – a place called the Twilight Zone.
