The subtlety of the episode is well crafted for those times I am sure most of the message is wasted on the similar plot like "The Cage" in Star Trek. The story, on the other hand, has a message about people and how we find any reason the isolate and ostracize others who look like us but have some unique distinction. Whether color, religion, or origin, we tend to keep people categorized when in fact we are all human beings. this message was boldly presented with McDowall's last lines. Many of the staff writers for TZ were victims of McCarthism and Nazism. The world was also turning upside down with equal rights emerging as a social concern. Writers like Roddenberry and Serling knew change was coming. They wrote these concepts of a world where everyone was considered equal and people accepted you as a peer based upon you and not what you looked like. On the other hand, the fact that the astronaut thought they were speaking English and instead he was speaking their language, maybe they only looked like humans from his point of view. Great episode which speaks volumes.
