This IS your father's TWILIGHT ZONE: Your favorite Episode

The (real) Twilight Zone: Your Favorite Episode. Which and Why?

"It's summertime, summertime,
Sum-, sum-, summertime
Summertime, summertime,
Sum-, sum-, summertime
Summertime, summertime,
Sum-, sum-, summertime
Summerti-i-i-iiiime.
. . . . ."

[And you knooooow I'm bored.]

Yes, it's summertime. Time for nasty hot weather, loud (and stupid) movies, and lots and lots (and lots) of repeats on television. How 'bout reliving some good tv for a change?

As far as I can tell from a search, it hasn't been discussed in depth in its own right here, so what about The Twilight Zone (1959-'64)? It's NOT "science fiction". (Rod Serling always went out of his way to say so.) It's not pure fantasy. It's not "horror". It's not "camp" (Well, for the most part. Let's try to forget about episode #101,"Cavender is Coming", with Carol Burnett.) However, it worked then and still works now.

What is your favorite episode of the real (i.e., original) Twilight Zone? What makes that episode your favorite?

If, for you, the episode you name typifies what appeals to you about the series in general, tell us in what way. (This involves stating your viewer premises and expectations, I would think.)

If you think it atypical of the series; tell us why. (This involves describing what you believe the series was all about.)

There are 156 episodes, I believe, so there's plenty to go around for everyone.

[Hint a good place to refresh one's memory about episodes of this series is tv.com's episode guide. I believe there is---or once was---an ultimate TZ Website run by a lady whose name I can't remember. In any event, I don't find it with a quick Google search. Someone else know of it?]
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It's hard to choose, but my all-time favorite (I think) would have to be episode #21, "Mirror Image", starring Vera Miles (pre-Psycho?) and Martin Milner (pre-Route 66).

Plot gist: A young woman, Millicent Barnes, is haunted by bouts of "experiencing" herself. Everyone around her thinks she's crazy. (I should not need to say more. The connoisseur-participants in this thread will without a doubt recall further plot details for themselves.)

TZ helped set the tone for this kind of program, and the fact that it was a sort of "grab bag" of genres and did it so well for so long means that the audience probably didn't get much in the way of a totally predictable list of plug-in features from week to week set in stone. We have come to expect a good dramatic tale, first and foremost, accompanied by enough weirdness to shake up the ol' "couch-potato" complacency.

"Mirror Image" does this strikingly well. A sense of alienation and isolation pervades this episode like no other. This is "horror" at its most intense and genuine. The themes of loss of identity---literal "identity theft"---and control over one's life ("Without your 'self', you're nothing"?) inform the plot. And, as always, the shadowy darkness of the photography makes this episode unreproducible by today's jaded and epigonal entertainment industry, in my not so humble opinion.

The best moment of the story: As in any good horror or science-fiction narrative, this occurs when someone---in this case the protagonist---offers a rationale for the events unfolding on screen. Millie wakes up in the darkened bus station after she has left the bus, screaming at the sight of her doppelgänger. The quiet, orderly creepy music---is that a flute accompanied by a cello or a bass?---goes on over the soundtrack while she speculates about "parallel universes" that sometimes intersect, with "duplicates of each of us", who must then fight for survival, all to the eye-rolling of the station attendant and the pity and sympathy of the helpful, but skeptical young executive type, Paul Grinstead (Marty Milner). A beautiful scene that even elsewhere in the Twilight Zone is never so well achieved.

The whole episode, like many another in this series, bears a dreaminess---a dreamlike quality---that not only allows, but almost compels, the viewer to forgive the "logical" flaws: Millicent, the heroine of the piece, could point out her double to skeptical observers at least twice in the episode, but runs away from the waiting bus or closes the women's restroom door, respectively, instead.

And, it's too coïncidental that two different duplicates of two separate people would show up in a short time frame in the same place, unless . . . . .

The ending: The dénouement is quite Zone-ish, characterized, as it is, by ambiguity ("What happens next?"), exciting ambivalence in the viewer ("Would I replace a 'double' to survive?"/"What would I do to survive being replaced?"), and loaded with a myriad of unanswered questions (Is there an invasion of the "pod-people" going on? If so, how are they "crossing over"? Does the lightening have anything to do with it? Why or how do the invaders from another reality know about their own "duplicity", whereas their counterparts in this world do not? etc.)

It comes off a lot more effective than the typical ending in its namesake copycat series, late and unlamented, where every episode has to eventuate in a shallow shock. Week after week, once you see that kind of thing, you sit through the episodes waiting only for the shock endings, which grow ever more predictable. That's not the "real Twilight Zone", where subtlety, as well as shadow, reigns.

My favorite would be episode 2x15, The Invaders. Agnes Moorehead plays a woman whose house is invaded by tiny spacemen. I'm afraid I can't say why it's great without giving away the ending though.

The Invaders is a great episode and I believe really inspired the Hush episode of Buffy.
I enjoy the "simple life" episodes best of TZ I think.
There are so many that it is hard to pick a favorite!

Where to begin? Don't have much time for now, but I'll toss in "Little Girl Lost," "To Serve Man," "It's a Good Life," "The Midnight Sun" (goofy "science," but well done), "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (actually, an original short based on the Bierce short story, which later ran as an episode), "The Howling Man," "In Praise of Pip," and so many, many more. More to come.

There was one episode that not only worked really well as a "traditional" Twilight Zone episode (horror, high concept, etc), but also hit me on an emotional level. It was about a guy who was serving a prison sentence on the moon all alone. Every few months a ship would come with supplies and one time he brought a female android for companion. At first, the guy felt contempt for her/it, but he grew to love her.

The ending, though very predictable, was heartbreaking and wonderful.

Not the Moon, but an "asteroid" (again, Rod Serling wasn't much on science and it showed). Damn, but what is the title of that episode? I looked at it not quite four or five weeks ago. (I wish the DVDs were issued in chronological order.)

Google sez... The Lonely. I was bored and searched for the episode.

I haven't spent as much time on this set as I should, but off the top of my head, my favorite story might be Steel with Lee Marvin. While arguably not one of the strongest episodes, I have fond memories of the original story by Richard Matheson, who I believe adapted the story for the telecast.

- Walter.

I like The Bookworm one quite a bit mainly b/c of the tragic ending. The guy had everything he wanted at the end and than bam!

"The Obsolete Man," also featuring Burgess Meredith.

Serling made overt moralizing palatable!

"Last Stop Willoughby," "I Sing the Body Electric," "I Shot an Arrow into the Sky" (I may be mangling some of these titles and spellings), "The Telephone," and more.

Look, even with the subpar episodes, these things have become so ingrained in the popular culture that one just loves them. With the scientific gaffes in the so-called "SF" episodes, I employ a personal amnesty on the rigorous-science dictate. Who cares? The stories resonate so well.

"Death Ship" (one of the hourlong episodes in the penultimate season) is wonderful, despite Mr. Serling's having set it in the year 1997.

I also enjoy Rod Serling's many lapses into overwriting. Go back to the "Willoughby" episode. Note our protagonist's pushy wife and the way she talks. People don't talk like that; only writers do. Again, who cares?

(I can just picture Rod Serling pulling out the sheet from his typewriter, poring over his words, making revisions, etc., etc. He always viewed himself as a writer first and foremost. And it certainly shows in those scripts.*)


*What a stupid statement on my part. Who else would produce a script but a writer?

"The Piano." Love it.

So many:

"The Obsolete Man" - Man to be put to death by futuristic society for believing in God and books. Typical "comeuppance" episode of TZ.

"Time Enough at Last" - Bookworm survives nuclear war. Great TZ-style twist ending.

"To Serve Man" - probably the ultimate TZ "twist" ending.

"In His Image" - Man suffering from fits of sudden violence returns to his hometown to find it nothing like he remembers.

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" - Like I need to tell anyone what this one is about.

"Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" - Power failures cause paranoia.

"Eye of the Beholder" - Disfigured young woman is about to have her bandages removed after reconstructive surgery.

"The Odyssey of Flight 33" - TZ had good luck with stories about planes, didn't it?

Ah yes, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." Good choice.

The choice is easy for me: Eye of the Beholder. This episode was very clever in its use of light, shadows, and camera angles. I remember being riveted when I first saw it, not knowing what to expect. They drew out the first act for what seemed an eternity. Being TTZ, I knew a twist was coming but I didn't know how.

Then BAM! That is how hard it hit me when the twist finally came. I have taken many trips to the dimension of sight, sound and mind. I am still stirred by the images of this episode today.

And it most certainly was superior television to that dreadful remake of "Beholder" on the thankfully cancelled-, ill-advised UPN thing that called itself The Twilight Zone.

Two episodes seem to be indelibly imprinted in my memory from the original airings: The Invaders (interesting how often Serling used the spaceship from Forbidden Planet), and In His Image. The latter show gave me intense nightmares for some reason, such that I could hardly sleep that night.

Do not know episode #s or actual titles, but the episodes with the Dummy that took over its master; the Talking Tina doll with Telly Savalas; the one with the female mannequin; To Serve Man were the episodes that I always remembered for decades.

Steve Clark wrote (post #16):


That would be "The Dummy".


"Living Doll".


"The After Hours". Why, not by coïncidence, they were all released (along with "The Fever") on the same DVD (marketing theme: inanimate things that come to life).

Gee, I'm glad for the responses, but I'd sure like to see more detail from some of you about why you like specific episodes. Great "twist endings" are okay, but what makes for a great episode is how one gets to that ending. Some twists follow what has come before. Some don't.

Time Enough At Last w/Burgess Meredith. I read some years ago that it was the most popular show of the early years.
Sorry to be so predictable but it was certainly my favorite.
I was just about to turn 13 when that was broadcast. In Nov. 1959, while we hadn't gotten around the Cuber missile crisis yet, things were pretty tense "nuculer" wise. Then if you were already lost in science fiction and fantasy...and being alone to ramble the Earth on your own seemed like a swell idea..... .....and you wore glasses.

Jack Briggs wrote (post #9):


I like the concept and much of the execution of this episode, however, like most of the hour-longs, it comes off as at least a bit padded. By the way, Richard Matheson wrote the script, adapting his own story. I assume he set the story in that time frame.

As much as I love most of Richard Matheson's short stories, I find that too many of his TZ efforts tried to be "light-hearted" or "normal":

"Mute" (#107, hour-long) , "Steel" (#122), "The Last Flight" (#18), "A World of Difference" (#23), and "Once Upon a Time" (#78)(a comedic "misfire", if ever there were one).

Some ("Young Man's Fancy" (#99), "Spur of the Moment" (#141)) came off as just being "ho-hum"-inspiring, despite being based on good ideas. (Mr. Matheson doesn't seem to like these either.)

"Little Girl Lost" (#91) (merely "okay", in my book).

Very good-to-great Matheson:

"Nick of Time" (#43)
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (#123)
"Night Call" (#139) (based on his own story "Sorry, Right Number"; unfortunately he changed the ending from book to screen)

Much better, adapted by Mr. Serling from Matheson short stories, were "Third from the Sun" (#14) and "And When the Sky Was Opened" (#11) (a much improved version of Matheson's short story "Disappearing Act").

Mr. Matheson in recent years has spent too much time publicly bad-mouthing his own early work for merely "being about scaring people". Well, he was damned good at it. Why be ashamed of it?



Uh, there's no such title. Did you mean "Night Call" (lonely old lady haunted by phone calls) or "Long Distance Call" (#58) (little boy gets calls from the dead over toy telephone)?

Like so many others, I used to really like "The Invaders" (#51), but I now have to agree with what Mr. Matheson himself has said about it. And, I might add, that it, like "Eye of the Beholder" (#42),---which had not just a shock ending, but a wonderful racial subtext to it, unlike the stupid remake that was, literally, almost a word-for-word copy of the original script except that it left out the very dialog that hinted at the racial subtext ("'Congregated'?!? You mean 'SEGregated', don't you, Doctor?")---these have very powerful "twist endings", and here, in my opinion, the endings are so powerful as to be detriments to repeated viewing. But, maybe that's just me.

I mangled my titles! "Night Call," that's correct.

"The Jungle." "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." "Black Leather Jackets."

Damn, I even agree with what Stephen King said about this series in his Dance Macabre. But the thing is, I love the stories, even to the point of tolerating the lesser episodes. It's not a case of being less than critical, though. Just forgiving.

"Twenty-two."

Where does it end? Just so many episodes yet it seems like so many more.

As for explicating, gimme a day or so!

My favourite episode is "The Big Tall Wish", a wonderful little fantasy about a young kid's strong faith in a washed out boxer. A genuinely magical episode.
Other favourites of mine include "A World of Difference" ( about a guy who realises that his entire life is just a tv show ) "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet" ( classic Gremlin on the wing ep ) and "One Hundred Yards Over the Rim" ( about a pioneer from the 1840s who ends up in the 20th Century ).
To be honest, there's far too many great episodes of TZ to make compiling a list possible. Fantastic series.

Rex, surprised to see you didn't like "Little Girl Lost." Such a neat, atmospheric little piece. So SF, so from the decade that preceded its airing. The Twilight Zone had such heart it even made kitsch appealing. It was edgy in a sly, seductive way.

I hope this thread gets into picking individual episodes apart, discussing what made them work and not work. (This is the warm-up phase!)

FYI. Sci-Fi channel is running a TZ marathon today. It should be on now.

Jack Briggs wrote (post #22):


I don't dislike it. The idea of intersecting dimensions is intriguing, but the execution doesn't come off here. I don't like the hysterical wife (pretty standard stereotype of the time, I know). I don't like the decision to get a "cover voice" for the little girl. And, I know they didn't have money for weird designs and all, but I thought the depiction of the "fifth dimension", or whatever it was supposed to be, came out just crappy and unconvincing. Distorting mirrors and strange camera angles don't do the trick for me.

And, can dogs see, hear, and/or sniff in five (or whatever) dimensions?????

The very quaintness of those "special effects" is part of what I like about the episode. Sort of the same way Joseph Stefano and crew were forced to make do with their own limited budget on The Outer Limits. Though they were unable to indulge in state-of-the-art special effects, they resorted to some of the techniques used in stage productions, all to truly literary effect.

With "Girl," I like the 1950s-ishness of its look. It's Atomic Age fiction. And not bad for television SF really.

Also, the race-against-the-clock effect with the closing window to the other dimension is handled beautifully with the deft use of dramatic irony. When the father's neighbor demonstrates how close a call it was, the viewer experiences the ol' breathe-a-sigh-of-relief effect.

In my view, an excellent episode.

That would be, The Lonely. I agree with you completely Jack, it is heart rending and accomplishes what I feel Spielberg and Kubrick couldn't in A.I..

Some of my faves are:

It's A Good Life, Nick of Time, Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?, The Midnight Sun, The Hunt, To Serve Man, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, The Dummy, Number 12 Looks Just Like You, and finally, The Invaders (Moorehead again proving what a stellar actress she was).

The Twilight Zone on occasion, managed to strike fear and dread in me unlike any other show. The quality of the production was just plain eerie. When I saw them as a kid some of the images would just not leave my brain.

"My name is Talkie-Tina™ and I don't like you." - T. Tina, Living Doll.

I posted this yesterday. I had a Freudian slip. I was thinking/wishing it was Thursday already. The marathon is today.

Go out and find your new fav episode.

If I were going to recommend any one episode of TZ to typify for a novice what is good and complex in TZ, it would be the following: "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" (#64).

Although it is not my favorite TZ episode, it has so many congenial elements---from the fake snow and phony stock winter backgrounds to the jokes and peppy repartée between the characters---that I don't see how anyone could not like it.

Now, I am not much a fan at all of the show's many attempts at humor over the seasons. The humorous episodes of the series include:

"Once Upon a Time" (#78), a petty, unfit paean to the silent film and Buster Keaton, in particular.
"Mr. Dingle, the Strong" (#55), a pushover becomes superstrong, then supersmart, due to the interventions of experimenting extraterrestrials. It doesn't seem to do him---or us---any good.
"Cavender is Coming" (#101), actually intended as a pilot for an angel-on-Earth sitcom that, along with its ridiculous laugh track, thankfully sank out of sight forever.
"Black Leather Jackets" (#138), an attempt at humor or just plain camp?
"Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" (#95), a "Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!'"-story that just doesn't work.
"Showdown with Rance McGrew" (#85), with the annoying, loud-mouthed Larry Blyden as the over-the-top eponymous character, an equally loud-mouthed Hollywood "star" who's "into" his phony image.
"From Agnes with Love" (#140), love-sick mechano-philia, not really anything.
"The Brain Center at Whipple's" (#153), brain-dead narrative on the "dignity of man".

Some of these are drekky, but most of them are just plain embarrassments to the program, as far as I'm concerned.

What I consider to be reasonable attempts at humor that work to some good effect are "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" (#88) (fairly successful, although stereotyping rural people as superstitious idiots), "The Hunt" (#84), if you even consider it primarily a humorous episode, and "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" (#152) (it "cheats", but has some funny lines). Is it an accident that the more effective humor episodes involve "rubes" or ("real") Western settings?

As with The X-Files (e.g., "Bad Blood", "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose", "José Chung's From Outer Space"), the humor in TZ works best when the spooky or weird context of the program is also effectively retained.

"Will the Real Martian . . . .?"

Plot gist: The plot turns upon the proposition that one of the supposed bus passengers in the HiWay Café in upstate New York hasn't gotten off of the bus, after all. The "seventh passenger", everyone concludes, must be an alien that crawled from a UFO crashed in nearby snowy Tracy Pond. Two state troopers are sent to investigate.

First of all, there's Trooper Bill Padgett, who looks and sounds like a character out of Highway Patrol. (Where's Broderick Crawford when you need 'im?). Despite that '50s "American-male" look and gravelly voice, the episode lets us know already in the prolog, when he joshes his partner, Trooper Barry, "You don't suppose [the bus] came out out of that pond, do you?", that this isn't going to be a stock UFO story. And when, later on, he tells the "professional dancer", bus passenger Ethel McConnell, "Lady, . . . . We go off on a lot of nutty assignments, but this one . . . . WOW!", the thoughtful viewer is left to wonder, with that "hippie"-like delivery, whether old Rod isn't really striving for out-and-out parody. Seems like it, but it never has become clear to me whether the actors playing the parts of the state troopers are supposed to be playing it straight or not.

Then there's the central, or turn-key, character of this episode, which is Jack Elam's gooch-eyed, irreverently cackling "old-timer", "Grampa", whose dialect-spoutin', wisecrackin', joky speculations and declarations drive the exchanges between the characters during most of the story. The main feature of these exchanges is his constant jabs at the supercilious businessman, Mr. Ross, who wants to rush on to Boston for his next-day meeting (or so he claims), but no one is spared his cutting and witty comments. When the dancer is questioned as to her identity, "Grampa" chimes in: "How many legs?!? Ho-o-o-ow many legs?!?"

I usually dislike "eye-winking" and "in-joky" story-telling, but here it reigns to maximally good effect. The knowing or parodic dialog includes the following:

(a) Haley, the diner's proprietor (played by the large-eyed Barney Philips), denying he has had anything to do with the strange occurrences in the café: "I don't know anything about science fiction."

(b) "Grampa" (between cackles): "She's just like a science fiction, that's what she is; a regular 'Ray Bradbury'. Six humans and one monster from outer space."

(c) A parody of old World War II movies: When "Grampa" slyly answers, apparently correctly, the troopers' test question about the winner of the American pastime's previous year's championship, he darts his eyes around at the others and, with his usual cackle and bug-eyed maniacal wink, declares to them: "I get it! I get it! . . . . Sharp boys! Real sharp boys! Didn't figure us Martians would know nothin' about the great American pastime, did ya?"

(d) A spoof of clichéd sci-fi dialog: "Grampa" salutes the jukebox, which, along with the lights, has gone heywire several times: "Take me to your leader. Take me to your leader."

(e) Trooper Padgett and the busdriver share a knowing ogle at Ms. McConnell's rear end as she boards the bus. They count 7 passengers, to which "Grampa" adds, "Betcha by the time we get to Boston, there'll be seventeen."

"Eye-winking" at the audience doesn't get any funnier than this.


Episode's shortcomings:

(1) As great an episode as it is, it has a central dramatic glitch: The Martian's motive for getting the bus going over the dangerous bridge, the collapse of which results in all the humans' deaths, remains a big mystery, since even he seems genuinely perplexed that it happened at all.

(2) The all too usual TZ 1940's big-band music is heard playing from the jukebox in the diner, even though the story is set in the early 1960's. I've long since concluded that TZ must've had a music-royalty rights problem throughout its run, since that's about all that one ever gets to hear on it.

(3) One false note for scientific verisimilitude of the episode:

Haley: "But you're not even wet."
Martian: "'Wet'? What is 'wet'?"

If the Martian has a command of the English language, then why not also a command of the basic obligatory human concepts that are attached to it? Why does he need to have the concept of WET explained to him?


dénouement: This episode features a surprising take-off on the anticipated ending, but one that has been clued through the questioning and the speculation we've already heard from one of the ensemble characters. "The Martians are coming, the Martians are coming, . . . but . . . ."

Warning Spoiler! Click to show Not very menacing. But, then too, it was never intended to be, I think.

As far as I'm concerned this is the flat-out funniest TZ episode of all. It never fails to induce the guffaws and the belly-laughs. It is a science-fiction connoisseur's treat (as it was obviously intended to be). Somewhere, Rod Serling is still winking at us viewers.

About the "what is wet?" issue: Agreed. Sort of the same way in various Star Treks where we are confronted with aliens or androids with an exhaustive knowledge of human history yet, when in dialogue with a human, he/she/it will say, "'Love'? What is 'love'?" Even Data was employed thusly.

But I did like "Martian."

I'm a little easier on the "humor" episodes than you are, Rex. "Myrtlebank" is a grin-inducer.

Twilight Zone was a soapbox for its creator, though. One theme to which Mr. Serling would return occasionally is the Holocaust, for example.

Continuing in my desultory fasion in this post, I don't think "Black Leather Jackets" was intended as humor, nor is it an unwitting exercise in camp.

Wow, thanks for bringing up so many memories. I was more of a casual fan but I have a question that maybe one of you can help me with. Does anyone remember a TZ where it is shot in b&w and it deals with a car salesmen trying to sell a car to another man? I believe there was something "strange" about the car. The setting was I would guess the 1950's but as I am not positive on that. I am sorry my description is so vague but it one of my earliest memories of the TZ. Out of all the TZ I remember, that is the only one I don't know the name of and it has bothered me for some time. I don't think it is a classic, but it holds sentimental value with me. I appreciate any help you can give, and even just for reading.