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

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.

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.

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?????

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.