[This post is absurdly long. If you hate The Twilight Zone, abandon ship now.]
Between trying to avoid our house during the renovation that's been going on since the end of March, and being completely slammed with school instrument repairs during the summer break, I've spent an inordinate amount of time at work in the past couple of months. Many nights I'm there until midnight, which can be nice because it's quiet and I'm not interrupted by phone calls or people at the door and I can get a lot more done. It's also cooler at night, which doesn't hurt during such a long stretch of intense heat and humidity.
To keep me company during marathon repair sessions, I like to binge things. In recent weeks it's been the original classic Twilight Zone episodes. I've long ranked The Twilight Zone among my all time favorite shows, but wasn't sure if I'd actually seen them all. Now seemed the time to find out.
In case you care about spoilers for something more than 60 years old, this is your warning. In case you want to watch any of these yourself, they can all be found for free on Tubi, but they have ads. I watched nearly everything on Paramount+, except for an episode in season five that was actually a short film from France (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) that Rod Serling decided to share as part of The Twilight Zone, that for reasons I can't guess required an additional fee to watch, but was still free on Tubi.
The Twilight Zone was a spooky sci-fi fantasy show that ran from 1959-1964 on CBS, and was created and hosted by Rod Serling. There were five seasons that included 156 episodes. 156! I watch a lot of Star Trek, and miss the days of TNG and DS9 where there were as many as 26 episodes in a single season, and today we’re lucky to get ten of anything. It’s nice when every episode isn’t expected to knock it out of the park, and some odd story could be explored without being seen as a waste of valuable time. As I was making my way through the first season of The Twilight Zone, I kept waiting for the end around episode 26, but it just kept going to 36. Season three has 37 episodes.
I also didn’t realize that season four was hour-long episodes. Apparently The Twilight Zone got canceled at the end of season three, but was called back in mid-season to replace an hour-long drama. There are 18 of these that I’m not sure if I’ve ever watched, which would make sense since I only knew the show in reruns after school, and there wouldn’t have been a good way to put any of those longer episodes into a half-hour slot. A few of them were familiar to me as short stories, but were odd to see since certain details had been changed for TV. A couple I couldn’t tell if I’d seen them, or they were too easy to predict the twist so I felt like I’d seen them. Plus Jack Klugman appears in four different episodes including one in season four, so I am really not sure if his episode was familiar because I’d seen it before or not. Season five returned to half-hour episodes.
The show was all shot in black and white on film, except for six episodes done on new-fangled video as an experimental cost saving idea. (Those don’t look great, and they feel off somehow.) There were six different opening credit monologues, the first one being overly long, and by the end of that first season edited down to something brief. The famous four note repeated musical motif didn’t appear until season two.
Some episodes of The Twilight Zone hold up, some don’t, all were worth watching for various reasons. Here are some general impressions and themes I saw during this binge watch:
Astronauts and pilots don’t fare well.
Many grown white men wish they were still children.
Talking dolls are bad.
We all need bomb shelters. Or do we?
There are far more intentionally humorous episodes than I think most people remember.
Much of the style of the time doesn’t look as out of date as it did when I was a kid.
Depressingly, the lessons about racism and fascism are as relevant as ever,
Oh, and let’s talk famous actor appearances for a moment! Everyone is so young that they can be hard to recognize. Among Star Trek greats, William Shatner stars in two episodes, George Takei in one, and Leonard Nimoy makes a brief appearance as a soldier. Jack Klugman and Burgess Meredith star in four episodes apiece. Carol Burnett! Buster Keaton, Burt Reynolds, Telly Savalas, Robert Redford, Agnes Moorehead, Dennis Hopper, Robert Duvall, Don Rickles, Cloris Leachman, Billy Mumy, Peter Falk, Lee Marvin. The opening of the third season is called “Two” about a man and a woman from opposite sides of a great war that seems to have wiped out everyone but the two of them. They don’t share a language so there isn’t much dialogue, but the acting is good. I had to look them up because they were so familiar, and they turned out to be Elizabeth Montgomery and a insanely young Charles Bronson.
One of the things that I noticed over the course of all these episodes was how responsible the doctors and psychiatrists were pretty much across the board. During a lot of bonkers situations, most of them were honestly trying to do their best by their patients. There are also a lot of clearly neurodivergent people with surprisingly accepting friends and families trying to be supportive, which was sort of fascinating to see from the perspective of 2026. People who think autism is new simply didn’t label or identify it back then, and weren’t paying attention.
The pacing in The Twilight Zone is tricky. Most of the time the point revolves around a surprising, simple twist at the end, and trying to find ways to stretch out an episode for that full half hour feels a bit much. This is the main reason the hour-long episodes in season four don’t work particularly well in my opinion. They often feel like they are repeating scenes or doing them too slowly. Any of them could have easily been edited down to half an hour and been better for it.
In any case, purely for my own amusement, here is a list of episodes of The Twilight Zone that stood out for me.
S1 E2: “One for the Angels” Written by Rod Serling, this one is very sweet. A kind old salesman with a soft spot for kids in the neighborhood is supposed to die, but manages to convince death that he needs to stay alive because he never got to make a really great sales pitch. The tradeoff turns out to be that a little girl he knows will die that night instead. He stalls death from collecting her soul by midnight by dazzling him with a “pitch for the angels” that saves her life, and makes him at peace with ending his.
S1 E5: “Walking Distance” is about a man who unexpectedly wanders into the world of his past, and while there tries to warn his eleven-year-old self to not take this time of life for granted. He’s confronted by his father who sternly tells him to go home since it’s not fair for to the boy who belongs there to share his world. It’s a nicely told story that sometimes feels staged like a play.
S1 E6: “Escape Clause” is not really one of my favorites, but I never forgot it. A man sells his soul to the Devil in order to live forever, feeling he’s beaten the rigged system since the Devil only gets his soul when he dies. But then the man gets bored trying to find new ways to cheat death and kills his wife to experience the electric chair. When he gets life in prison instead, he uses his escape clause in the contract to choose death, and the Devil appears saying “You look just like a man having a heart attack."
S1 E12: “What You Need” I love this episode. I feel like most of the time The Twilight Zone takes a compassionate view of its characters, but every once in a while they like to create someone who has no redeeming qualities. In this one, a terrible man takes advantage of an old salesman who specializes in giving people what they need before they know they need it. Spot remover, a bus ticket… and in the case of the awful man, he’s given a pair of scissors. He thinks this is ridiculous until his scarf is caught in an elevator and he cuts it loose to save his life. He then tries to threaten the old salesman to help him bet on horses, etc. The salesman eventually gives him a pair of shoes with slippery soles which cause the awful man’s death. There’s something haunting about this sweet old man with a power that he only wants to wield in simple, positive ways, being forced to defend himself with it.
S1 E14: “Third from the Sun” Two families fearing nuclear annihilation of the planet escape on a spaceship for a new home, which turns out to be Earth. What I like about this episode is the clues that this isn’t Earth are subtle. You notice, say, the phones look different, but you let it go. I’m interested in how many details we’re willing to overlook when we’re making assumptions about the whole.
S1 E20: “Elegy” isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s another one I remember in full detail, right down to the extras who are supposed to be frozen but blink. Three astronauts crash-land on an asteroid that is actually a cemetery. People there have been displayed in the form of their fondest wish, such as winning a beauty pageant, being mayor, or living on a farm. It’s just a confusing exploration of frozen people for much of the episode, until the caretaker (an android in the form of an old man) explains where they are, and they discover too late he’s poisoned them to display in the cemetery. He places them all in their ship as if headed home, which was where they all expressed they would most like to be.
S1 E21: “Mirror Mirror” is just classic Twilight Zone. A woman waiting in a bus station realizes she has a double there, and the reveal at the end is supposedly something about people being replaced by their counterparts from a parallel dimension, but really the episode is exploring an unsettling situation where it’s hard to imagine what you would do.
S1 E29: “Nightmare as a Child” is about a woman slowly regaining her childhood memory of her mother’s murder by having conversations with a child who turns out to be who she was as a girl. It’s not a perfect episode, but I liked the wise and steely performance by the young girl.
S1 E30: “Willoughby” is also good classic Twilight Zone. My only complaint is how many times they keep saying Willoughby. A man who is unhappy in both his job and his marriage keeps dozing off during his train commute and seeing a stop for a perfect little summer town called Willoughby. The staff on the train have never heard of any such stop, but he’s determined the next time he sees it, he’s getting off and staying there. We see him step into town and into his new happy existence, and the episode ends with his dead body being removed from the train and taken away by Willoughby Funeral Services.
S2 E3 "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” is simply some good acting. There’s a man in a hotel room who has made a mess of his life, and he’s arguing with a decent, confident version of himself in a mirror. He really feels like two different people. By the end of the episode they switch places, and the nervous man is now in the mirror and his more capable self is now in charge and hoping to make something of himself going forward. It’s inspiring in a Twilight Zone kind of way.
S2 E4: “A Thing About Machines” Okay, this one I do not get. I have looked up analyses and asked anyone who is interested, and I do not understand this episode. I get the main point, which is a man who is not particularly nice to either people or machines, dies and no one cares because he was a jerk. That part is obvious. However, this man who apparently makes a good living as a food critic is being harassed by all the machines in his house over a long period of time. The TV, radio and electric typewriter all tell him to leave. He is chased by his electric razor (which was a pretty good special effect for the era). He is finally chased by his car into his pool where he drowns. The cop and coroner who discuss the case over the body are puzzled why the victim was found at the bottom of the pool rather than floating. What is that supposed to mean? I feel like that’s the twist, but what twist? Was he a machine, so he sank? How would the coroner not notice he was a machine? Can a machine even drown? What kind of machine eats? Why did the machines want him dead? What is this?!
S2 E5: “The Howling Man” is about a traveler who is tricked into releasing the Devil into the world after its relatively brief imprisonment in a monastery. The man has spent his life tracking down and recapturing the Devil to return him to the monastery, but the last shot is of the housekeeper about to release the Devil again while the man is away. It’s a strange story that focuses on who to believe.
S2 E6: “Eye of the Beholder” is also classic Twilight Zone. Well filmed. It’s a world where everyone must resemble a pig-nosed deformed-faced leader, but we don’t learn that until the end. The main character is in a hospital, her head wrapped in bandages, and this is her last chance for her face to be made “normal” before they have to give up and send her off to live with “her kind.” The doctors and nurses are all in shadow. They face away, they look out windows, you never see any faces until the woman is unwrapped to reveal someone who looks like Marilyn Monroe and everyone backs away in horror. She’s collected by an incredibly handsome man (who everyone tries not to appear disgusted by) who says she may come to love her new community. They got right the futuristic screens in the hallways with the leader bloviating on them. This episode made me think of Mar-a-Lago Face.
S2 E9: “The Trouble with Templeton” This one makes me cry. An old actor, named Templeton, who has never gotten over the deaths of his wife and best friend decades earlier struggles with his current life. He exits a stage door at a rehearsal and finds he’s gone back in time to when his wife is alive. He rushes to meet her and his best friend at a speakeasy where they think he’s in stage makeup to look old. All he wants is to spend time with them somewhere quiet, and they are crass and uninterested in anything but drinking and dancing. Templeton is confused and upset, and eventually rushes out of the bar and back to his theater. There is a really effective scene where the moment Templeton is off screen, all the merriment stops. His wife and friend stand in silence looking after him as things go dark. Once back in his rehearsal space and in his own time, Templeton discovers a script in his pocket that he’d unintentionally picked up in the speakeasy. It’s titled “What to do when Templeton comes back” and recounts the whole event he experienced verbatim. At that point he realizes they were acting in order to get him to look ahead rather than back. He ventures off to rehearsal with new interest and confidence.
S2 E15: “The Invaders” is the one with the woman alone in her rural home and some tiny men arrive in a spaceship and terrorize her. She kills them all and destroys the ship as we hear the last of the “invaders” warn the Earth not to send anyone else here where there are giants, and the camera pans to the markings of an American space program logo on the side of the ship. This one reminds me of “Third from the Sun” in that most if it looks like what we know, but there are details here and there that suggest this isn’t Earth. The one that jumps out at me is she’s cooking in something like a cauldron with a weird amount of steam pouring from it. It’s quite an acting job for Agnes Moorehead since the lone actress never speaks and is only playing off tiny puppets.
S2 E22: “Long Distance Call” This one surprised me in rewatch. I remembered the basic plot of an old woman receiving mysterious calls in the night that scared her, and turned out to be from a grave that the phone line had blown onto. I didn’t exactly remember it being her dead fiancé, but that’s not surprising. They explain the whole backstory, where a week before their wedding many years ago, they went for a drive, she insisted on being behind the wheel and he let her because he always did what she said, and she lost control of the car and hit a tree. He died, and she lived the rest of her life in a wheelchair. When she figures out who has been calling her, she picks up the phone and asks why he hasn’t called her again, and he says she told him last time not to call anymore, and he always does what she says. She bursts into tears and tells him how much she’s missed him. The part I didn’t remember and can’t get over is how she is condemned in the final voice over. They say she finally gets to have consequences for her actions! Like she wanted him to die? Or she denied it? Or she didn’t care? What?! Her life was effectively over that day, too, so I think she suffered consequences. Not to mention the guilt over his loss that I’m sure she felt. It’s a great episode, but whoa, the conclusion is strangely heartless.
S2 E23: “A Hundred Yards over the Rim” Pioneers on the way to California in three wagons need water, and the son of the main character is dying. He walks over the ridge to see what might be there, but the other side is in the present day with a road and power lines. He makes his way to a diner where people try to help, including giving him penicillin. They think he’s crazy and cops come to take him to a hospital, but he grabs the medicine and runs. In his time in the diner he learned not only was there a natural spring nearby, but while reading an encyclopedia discovers his son grows up to be an important doctor. Over the rim again he’s back in his own time where he cures his son and leads his group safely onward. The rifle he left behind instantly ages a hundred years in the diner. I liked how people genuinely wanted to help, but only knew what to offer in a modern, normal context. (Because they don’t know they are in a dimension of sound, of sight, of mind…)
S2 E25: “The Silence” This one made my assistant (who had never seen The Twilight Zone before) gasp when she walked over to my bench in time for the reveal at the end. Two men make a bet in a gentleman’s club. The older one is sick of hearing the younger one talk, so the older man bets him he can’t speak for an entire year for a large sum of money. A glass cubicle is set up in the club where the younger man can be provided with whatever he needs, but he’s monitored 24/7. The older man cannot believe the younger one could actually last a whole year, and tries to bribe him to give up. It turns out at the end that not only did the older man not have any money, the younger man also didn’t think he could do it and had had his vocal cords severed. It’s kind of a Twilight Zone O Henry story.
S2 E29: “The Obsolete Man” This one is staged very much like a play. I can imagine a high school trying it. It’s one of the episodes with Burgess Meredith, who plays very different people in each of his Twilight Zone appearances. In “Time Enough at Last” he plays the bookish fellow who survives the bombing of the world and is happy to finally be able to read in peace, only to have his glasses shatter at the end. In “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” he’s a simple guy that aliens make very strong, then very smart. In this one, he’s a deep and quietly rebellious man. Anyone the state declares obsolete is executed. Reading is forbidden, religion is forbidden. At his trial where he is declared obsolete for claiming to be a librarian in a world with no books, he is allowed to decide the method of his death. He requests that only one man know how to kill him, that it be in his own home, and that the execution is to be televised. He also requests that the judge who condemned him visit him in the last hour. He does, but when the door shuts behind him it locks, and the Obsolete Man explains that at midnight a bomb will go off in the apartment. The intent is to show the fearlessness of the man who is about to die, spending his time reading the Bible aloud, and contrasting that for the audience the representative of the state who is scared to die. The judge gets desperate at the end and begs and pleads and is let out of the room in the nick of time. But he is now a poor representative of the state, and is himself declared obsolete at the end. I like how stripped down and surreal this episode is. There is no attempt at world building beyond a few ideas.
S3 E3: “The Shelter” Happy gathering of neighbors at the house of a doctor is interrupted by the threat of nuclear war, and the doctor is the only person with a bomb shelter. People joked about how he spent his spare time building it for his family, but then they all want in. He explains in earnest that he can’t help. All the friends from minutes before turn on one another, spout racist things, and destroy the house in their frenzied panic. As they smash down the door to the shelter the announcement comes on the radio that it was a false alarm. The neighbors apologize and promise to help pay for the damage. The doctor says he doesn’t think this kind of damage can be undone. Many things about this episode felt unsettlingly current.
S3 E4: "The Passersby" I can’t decide if I like this one, but the ending is moving. The Civil War is over, and a seemingly endless stream of soldiers are trudging down a road in the dark past a house where a woman watches from the porch. One of the men stops to talk with her, and eventually it becomes apparent that everyone on the road is dead and heading for whatever comes next. Eventually the road empties except for Abraham Lincoln, who describes himself as the last casualty of the war. He helps her accept that she’s also dead, and encourages her to walk the road with him.
S3 E8: “It’s a Good Life” Famous one with “the monster” played by a really young Billy Mumy. (He has other episodes later called “In Praise of Pip” and "Night Call" I liked him in Lost In Space, and later in Babylon 5.) Little boy with the power to do anything does what a little boy would do, and nothing exists beyond his little world, everyone is terrified, and anything disturbing gets wished into the cornfield. The episode attempts a scary effect of a man being turned into a jack-in-the-box (before being wished away into the corn) where they show him only as a shadow on the wall, and it tends to elicit laughter the way the big reveal in Psycho does with modern audiences. Was the jack-in-the-box shadow scary in the 60s? If it happened in real life I’m sure it would be scary, but I’m not sure it does what was intended in the show. Or maybe it does, since it had to be something a little boy would come up with, and a jack-in-the-box fits. The disturbing part of this episode is imagining where it all goes, since nothing is resolved and nothing changes. There’s a cute little boy that nobody can teach to be better without dire consequences, so it ends as it begins, and you have to wonder.
S3 E10: “The Midnight Sun” Feels like a pretty relevant global warming episode. A woman in her apartment continues to paint as the world is rapidly heating up to deadly levels. I remembered this mostly for the image toward the end of all her paintings beginning to melt at once. Turns out she has a fever, and the reality is the world is rapidly getting too cold outside.
S3 E13: “Once Upon a Time” This one was a surprise! I don’t remember ever seeing it before. The episode was written by Rod Serling specifically for Buster Keaton, who was a big comedy silent film star, and I believe at the time of this episode he was rather forgotten. (He had a revival later, and if you haven’t seen “The General” or any of his other films, they are still HIGHLY entertaining. I love Buster Keaton.) The episode begins and ends in silent film style, and is the story of Buster Keaton’s character jumping into the future for a while, then returning home more appreciative of the quieter life in the 1890s. What a treat it was to discover this one. (It also featured the actor who sold Uhura a tribble in the original Star Trek.)
S3 E16: “Nothing in the Dark” A very young Robert Redford plays death. An old woman who has been evading death for years is tricked by him in this handsome form to let him into where she’s been hiding. He’s gentle and kind, and doesn’t take her until she’s ready so she isn’t scared.
S3 E17: “One More Pallbearer” This one didn’t seem familiar, but I liked it. It was fun to imagine any of the current terrible figures ruining the world in the main character’s place. A wealthy man assembles three influential people from his life into a bomb shelter, and fakes that a nuclear war has started so they will beg him to stay and be safe. But each of the people, such as a former teacher that he didn’t think treated him well, explains why they considered him a terrible person whom they couldn’t reform. They reject the idea of staying in the bomb shelter and insist they would rather die with their families than remain with him. He’s furious that he didn’t get to watch them beg, and then it appears the war sounds he’d arranged to fake were real. He wanders above in the streets lamenting the destruction and the loss of everyone, but it turns out it’s all in his mind. No one can reach him with reality, and he’s stuck in his delusion.
S3 E19: “The Hunt” I don’t think I would have appreciated this one before I had my dog. A cutely bickering old couple share a meal in their little home when the man decides to go out with his dog to hunt raccoons. In a dubious scene trying to paint the raccoon as the villain, the dog drowns, and the man goes after him and also drowns. It takes him a while to figure out he’s dead, but then he follows a fence to a gate, where he’s told he can enter the afterlife. However, the dog isn’t allowed in, he has to go to special dog heaven up the road. The man won’t go anywhere his dog’s not allowed, so he passes on the insistent invitation to go through the gate. Farther along the fence he’s greeted by an angel who explains the gate he’d reject was actually hell, and they couldn’t let the dog in because the dog would smell the sulfur and warn his owner. Of course his dog is allowed in real heaven. And apparently his wife would be joining him soon, which we’re supposed to be happy about. Anyway, I barely want to go to stores that don’t allow my dog, let alone an afterlife that doesn’t have room for Domino.
S3 E24: “To Serve Man” This is probably the most classic of all classic Twilight Zone episodes. Is there one more iconic than this one? Aliens arrive and gain everyone’s trust by ending all wars and disease and famine. Some government translators obtain a copy of a book the aliens left behind, and it’s unclear whether they meant for people to see it or not. The translators get as far as the title—“To Serve Man”—before the world essentially rolls over because the aliens have improved life so much. People from Earth begin to travel to the alien planet on vacation, joking that it sounds so nice they might never come back, and stepping on a scale before boarding the spaceship. One of the translators is alerted by a friend as he’s climbing into the ship, that “To Serve Man” is actually a cookbook. He’s encouraged to eat on the flight, but instead he continues to cynically make log entries for viewers like us so we will not be fooled. I can’t watch this episode now without thinking of the Simpson’s Halloween spoof where confusion about the alien book unfolds as the title gets expanded from “How to Cook Humans” to “How to Cook for Humans” to “How to Cook forty Humans” and finally “How to Cook for forty Humans.” The aliens are innocent and insulted in this version.
S3 E25: “The Fugitive” This is one of the few humorous episodes that I think really works. An alien in the form of an old man befriends a girl (being looked after by a resentful aunt) who wears a leg brace. He can do magical things, but hasn’t fixed her leg because it would draw the attention of people from his planet looking for him. Fearing he will be captured soon, he heals her leg before he leaves, but the people pursuing him undo the healing to draw him back again. It turns out he is his planet’s beloved king and they want him home. They insist the girl can’t come along, but the king asks them to step outside for a moment to say his goodbye. When they return, the king has made himself into an identical copy of the girl, and they can’t figure out who is who, so they must take them both. It’s surprising and sweet.
S3 E26: “Little Girl Lost” This one is trippy Twilight Zone being trippy Twilight Zone. A little girl crawls under her bed and ends up in a different dimension. The dog goes after her. The parents call a friend who maps out the hole in the wall with chalk. Dad ends up stepping into the hole to help pull his daughter out, and it works, but apparently half his body was still in their own world as the hole was closing. A new hole could appear anywhere! What did we learn? Not sure, but it was weird in all the best ways.
S3 E33: “The Dummy” This is a contender for creepiest episode ever. A ventriloquist’s dummy learns to talk on its own after years of being used in an act. The dummy wants control. The ventriloquist tries to switch to another (non-sentient) dummy, but winds up destroying it while thinking he is destroying the talking dummy. This episode made me scared to play with my stuffed animals for fear I was teaching them to be real. Eventually I decided that playing nicely with my toys should count for something and I needn’t worry, but still. This dummy was SO CREEPY. Things I didn’t remember from this episode included the conversations about schizophrenia (so there was some question about what was real and concern about the ventriloquist getting help), and the fact that the dummy and the ventriloquist switch places at the end, which was more odd than scary.
S3 E34: “Changing of the Guard” This is another one that makes me cry. An old English professor at a private school for boys is asked to retire. He feels he hasn’t made a difference with his life and is about to kill himself, when he see the lights on in his classroom and he goes to investigate. Once there, deceased students from his past appear, several who were killed in war. They all attest to how words he taught them shaped their lives and gave them comfort and inspiration. He arrives home to find his current students (who were worried about him) outside his window to sing him carols to cheer him up. My dad taught at the St Paul School for Boys. I wonder if any of his former students remember his words.
S3 E37: “Cavender Is Coming” This one is like a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life. An angel tries to earn his wings by helping Carol Burnett improve her life. He gives her wealth and status that she never wanted, and she convinces him to return her imperfect life filled with friends and fun. The angel learns not to jump to conclusions about makes people happy. This is a rare Twilight Zone with comedic sound effects. It’s not great, but it’s fun seeing a really young Carol Burnett.
There is not much to discuss about season 4. The stories are okay, but too long. There’s one about a submarine where a guy on it is supposed to be dead, so he ends up dead, and they keep dragging it out by hearing banging sounds and sending out a diver and hearing banging again and sending him out again and it is annoyingly long. There's one where Jack Klugman crashes a spaceship with two other guys and he can’t accept that they are dead so they are caught in a horrible loop where they find their dead selves then escape in the ship only to crash again. We figure out way ahead of them that they are dead and it's frustrating waiting for them to catch up.
I will mention S4 E5: “Mute” because the short story version was about a little boy, and I thought it was interesting they changed it to a little girl. S4 E14 “Of Late I Dream of Cliffordville” the short story was definitely better. It’s a deal with the Devil story about a rich man who is bored and wants to do it all again but with knowledge from the future. The Devil in the show is played by Julie Newmar, and she is captivating.
The only season four episode that kind of works is S4 E17: “Passage on the Lady Anne” It’s like a small weird movie. A couple takes a ship to London that is filled entirely with old people who have all traveled on the Lady Anne since she first sailed fifty years ago, and they are visibly upset the young couple is there and try to convince them to leave. The young couple is having marital problems, but their experiences on the ship repair them, and the old people then put the young people into a life raft along with champagne and a promise that help is coming. This is the last voyage of the Lady Anne and it never arrives. There are odd problems in this episode, but at least it keeps doing new things that make it watchable the whole way through. Most of season four I had to pause out of boredom and come back to. So apparently not a problem that these likely didn’t air when I first watched The Twilight Zone.
Season five returns to half-hour episodes.
S5 E3: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” This may be the only other quintessential Twilight Zone that could represent the series. William Shatner has just been released from a mental institution and is flying with his wife on a plane in a storm. He’s the only person who manages to see somebody messing with the wing of the plane. He knows it’s impossible and people are right not to believe him, so he privately forms a plan and stops the creature from causing the plane to crash by opening the emergency window and shooting it. Shatner's character is hauled off to a hospital at the end, and the last shot is of the real damage done to the wing. The first time I saw this episode I was home alone in the late afternoon. I think the rest of my family was at a school function, and I started watching TV when it was light, and by the time The Twilight Zone was on the room was dark, and I didn’t want to move to shut it off. The jump scare when Shatner opens the curtain to his plane window and the face of the crazy creature is right there completely freaked me out. Now, that creature looks like an oversized monkey plushie with a weird face and is really silly looking. It is obvious as Shatner is steeling himself to open the curtain that the face will be there, but it still works. More interesting to me on the rewatch was how understanding most people were trying to be to a man they think is having a breakdown. In general, people who seem insane in the Twilight Zone are treated rather respectfully. Also, one of my favorite jokes in all of TV was on Third Rock From the Sun with John Lithgow. Lithgow played the same role as Shatner in a remake called “Terror at 20,000 Feet.” Third Rock From the Sun is about a group of aliens disguised as a family on Earth, and Shatner guest starred on the show as their supreme leader. Shatner is met at the airport by Lithgow who asks how the flight was. William Shatner says dramatically, “There was a THING! On the WING!” And Lithgow says in a shocked voice, “The same thing happened to ME!” And then they just go on from there and never mention it again.
S5 E4: “A Kind of Stopwatch” This one isn’t great as it’s going, but the end kept me and my brothers talking for days. An unimpressive man who craves attention is given a stopwatch that freezes everyone in time except himself. He can pause the world and move things around, etc. (Does anyone else remember “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”? Same idea.) He has a grand plan to rob a bank, and in the midst of it he breaks the watch. Everything is frozen, and runs about desperately looking for anyone to acknowledge him. I think I’d spend my time in a watch maker’s shop and see if I could learn how to fix it, but it’s a pretty terrifying ending. You could eat and survive, but how lonely and strange and awful.
S5 E5: “The Last Night of a Jockey” This one starred Micky Rooney alone in a room. He’s a disgraced jockey who is tired of being made fun of for being small, so he wishes he were big. Next thing he knows he barely fits in the room. This one was mostly interesting for the props, since they recreated the room to make him look huge. He then, of course, is offered the chance to ride again and realizes he can’t now that he’s big. Not one of my favorites, but interesting to watch.
S5 E6: “Living Doll” This one stars Telly Savalas as a really rotten husband and step-father whom his wife should just leave. The daughter gets a talking doll that starts threatening him when no one else is around. He tries to destroy it, but he winds up tripping over it on the stairs and dying. The mom (who has done nothing bad to the doll or her daughter) is then threatened by the doll. We’re kind of rooting for the doll up to that point, but talking dolls are bad so we shouldn’t be surprised.
S5 E9: “Night Call” This is another one with Billy Mumy, this time as a young boy with an overly attached grandma who gives him a toy phone as a gift before she dies. She is able to talk to him on the phone from beyond the grave and tries to convince him to kill himself so she can be with him again. He runs in front of a car and later nearly drowns. The mom is convinced it’s the dead grandma’s fault, and as the boy’s life lies in the balance, the dad picks up the toy phone in desperation and pleads with his mother to let his son grow up and have a full life. It’s never made explicitly clear that grandma is actually on the other end of the fake line, but after the dad’s pleas, his son recovers. This one is just good and spooky, and watching the frustrating family dynamics in the beginning is entertainingly frustrating.
S5 E16: “Number Tweve Looks Just Like You” This one is like a bookend to “Eye of the Beholder.” In this world, when people reach 18 they undergo surgery to make them beautiful and healthy and live very long lives where they don’t appear to age. There are only a few models to choose from, so lots of people look identical and they all wear name tags. The only men present or mentioned in this episode (a dad, an uncle, doctors…) are all played by the same actor who does a good job of creating different mannerisms for each. The plot is a young woman who is fine with how she looks trying to refuse the procedure. Her own father felt it was wrong and committed suicide after his. She’s forced into it anyway, and becomes as vapid and shallow as everyone else.
S5 E25: “The Masks” This is one of my favorites. An old man with an obnoxious family invites them to his lavish home during Mardi Gras, where he tells them they will inherit everything he has when he dies soon, under the condition they wear special masks until midnight. He tells them the masks represent the opposite of who they are, but in fact reveal their true hideous personalities. He dons a mask of death. At midnight he dies, and the faces of his family are transformed permanently like the masks they wore.
S5 E29: “Caesar and Me” The creepy talking dummy from “The Dummy” returns as a different creepy talking dummy! This one also includes a creepy girl who teams up with him at the end. Not a good episode, but I can’t believe they recycled the same talking doll.
S5 E32: “Mr Garrity and the Grave” Of all the humorous episodes, this one is the best. A con man (Garrity) in a wagon shows up in a small western town claiming to be able to raise the dead. He convinces them he’s brought back all their loved ones from the cemetery up the hill, and in turn each of the townspeople pay him to undo it, because they really don’t want the “beloved” dead wife back, or the drunk annoying brother, etc. As Garrity leaves town with his confederates he bids the cemetery adieu and apologizes to the dead he couldn’t really raise them. After the wagon departs, the dead do rise saying it’s too bad the man doesn’t know his own powers, and they all head down toward town.
S5 E33: “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” I’m not sure I remember seeing this one originally, but it feels obvious what will happen so it’s hard to know. It also feels relevant to the world keep talking about with AI. The manager of a big factory keeps replacing workers with machines in the name of efficiency and profits. He’s unmoved by any discussion of people’s jobs and lives. In the end he’s also replaced with a machine, and he still doesn’t seem to get it, he’s only upset for himself.
S5 E34: “Come Wander With Me” This is the other episode that made zero sense to me every time I saw it as a kid. On rewatch I think I understand it better, but it’s still odd. Many people cite it as their least favorite Twilight Zone, but I think it’s intriguing. Part of what I probably didn’t catch when I was younger was the problem with appropriating other artists’ work. The story (as best I can figure out) is a young rockabilly guitar player shows up in a rural town where he wants to find folk tunes to turn into modern hits. He doesn’t notice walking past his own grave at one point, and it’s implied that he’s dead and experiencing a time loop. There is a music shop in a barn with an unresponsive old man who I guess runs it. The musician meets a young woman singing “Come Wander With Me” and he records her. She appears to love him, he appears to be flirting enough to get his recording of the music he wants to steal. When the recording plays back, the lyrics are different. A tale unfolds about his death, and he’s disoriented by it. The woman says she is “bespoke” and when the man she is promised to shows up, the two men fight and her betrothed is killed. The musician runs back to the music barn to escape the brothers who are now after him. When the old man there doesn’t respond to his pleas to hide him, he kills the old man and crawls under a bunch of instruments. The instruments start to play, revealing his location, and he’s killed by the brothers. The story may actually be the woman’s because she seems aware of the time loop, telling the musician to not run this time, or to leave with her, because if he does something different it might “not all happen again.” The first time I saw this I was baffled. Now it just seems surreal, but there is a certain cohesion to it that I didn’t used to see. I can think of many episodes far worse than this, but I can understand why people would not like it.
Okay, so it looks like I just described all 156 episodes, but it was really only about 40, which is way more than I intended to talk about when I started this post, but I had fun.
Final shout out to the aliens that made me laugh out loud in "Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up,” and “The Fear.”
And a mention of someone I hadn’t heard of until I Googled “Who appeared most often in The Twilight Zone?” (Besides Rod Serling who is in all of them.) An extra named Robert “Bud” McCord was in somewhere between 65 and 75 episodes over the course of the series! In terms of speaking roles, someone named Jay Overholts shows up about half a dozen times.
I’m glad I watched through all of these. How lucky we are to live in an era where we can find such things to watch again on a whim. Many of the current shows I like best all seem to have one foot of their own in the Twilight Zone. It lives on, and I’m glad.
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