Favorite "Twilight Zone" episode?

Serling mined the then-existing cache of "modern" (as of 1960) Science Fiction and Fantasy literature, and basically brushed it off and presented it to a mass audience, for most of whom it was brand new and exciting...he had a bad habit of preferring surprise endings, many of them cheap...and he was capable of using the most worthless cliches of the field, such as "Adam" being an astronaut on another planet. But at the show's not-inconsiderable best, he got the feeling of modern SF/Fantasy very well, and could create a real atmosphere of both SF and noir...my own choice is a sleeper--I forget the title, but it had Vera Miles in a bus station in upstate NY, wondering if she's going mad. Martin Milner was in it, too, and it was a perfect little vignette... I've been in upstate NY bus stations in the middle of the night, and the atmosphere of that show was just right. What are your picks?

In which Billy Mumy portrays a child with the power to create or destroy at will. It's always been my favorite but now I have a deeper appreciation of how potent a metaphor it was for the abuse of power. Mumy's character turns people he doesn't like into monsters, corrupts nature, demands that everyone think good thoughts, and disappears -- banishes to the cornfield -- those who don't. It's not much of a leap to see the Bush administration personified in that child.

...they did a sequel to that episode a few years ago, with Mumy back...did you see it?

I'll have to make sure I catch it. I checked and it's playing 6/15 at 7:30 pm on INHD2.

It was good to see Billy, again. ;)

I'm not sure I see the Bush analogy. But I think the idea of a child having that much power...and not knowing the concepts of right or wrong...was frightening.

..."Monsters are Due on Maple Street" would be my first choice too.

:toast:

:bounce:

Hands down the best TZ of all time.

And I'll have mine rare, thanks!:9

Could you imagine being on the ship, knowing where you're going and what for?

Yuck!

at the house of a lonely old lady. (I think it was the Mother on "Bewitched.") The whole episode is about her fighting off these small men from outer space. And the surprise ending is that the flying saucer had the insignia "US Air Force."

Agnes Moorehead. ;)

spaceship from earth :thumbsup:

I really like a lot of them, but other than the most popular like "Time Enough at Last" and the Shatner ones, these stand out the most to me.

which is the one about the aging actor pining for the old days, and the way his dead old friends help him out.

aliens living among us, and at the end the passengers reveal extra arms, eyes... I was young, the memory is blurry but I was totally freaked out! :)

with Telly Savales was very good, Shatner's 20000 Feet is definitely up there and Eye of the Beholder too.

having to relive his torpedoing of a passenger ship every night for eternity.

Knocked out of its elliptical orbit and heading closer towards the sun, the Earth is in the grip of never-ending, sweltering heat. After most panicked citizens have left the city in search of colder climates, two women choose to remain in the New York City hotel they've long resided in to await their inevitable end. These two women, namely Norma (Lois Nettleton) and her landlady Mrs. Bronson (Betty Garde), struggle to maintain their grasp on sanity in a world gone insane with constant heat...heat enough to send anyone off their rockers. Soon news reports warning of cranks and looters roaming the city begin as sure enough Norma and Mrs. Bronson find they too have to deal with one such desperate intruder (Tom Reese). Is there any escape or is this the end?

It's the end of the world or one possible version of it. How much one enjoys this depends on how much tolerance one has for this type of vision, a vision of the end of things. Here we see desperation: desperation to survive, desperation to retain one's identity and sanity from the grip of stifling, unending heat, desperation caused by lack of adequate food and water, and finally the desperation caused by having no real defense against the thing that most threatens them all. Here, in terms of how such an extraordinary situation might affect people, what is presented seems more plausible and believable than most making this fascinating to watch.

Steeped in an atmosphere of despair, desperation and impending doom, this episode doesn't offer much that most will enjoy watching yet it comes across as real. Yes it's bleak but what else would one expect the end of the world to be?

http://www.scifilm.org/tv/tz/twilightzone3-10.html


And I love that twist at the end. :evilgrin:

I don't remember it

Spoilers!!!











Eventually it gets hotter and hotter. The older lady dies, then the paint on the younger woman's paintings melts down, the liquid in the thermometer explodes out as the temperature exceeds 120 or more degrees. The young woman screams and falls dead on the floor.

Then the scene changes. It's the same room but the older woman is standing at the window putting rolled up fabric against the crack to keep the draft out, as a blizzard is raging. She turns to speak to the doctor who is treating the younger woman, who is lying unconscious on the sofa. The doctor explains that her fever just broke. He and the older woman talk about how the Earth has left it's elliptical orbit and is now moving away from the sun and in a matter of days there may be no more sun at all. After the doctor leaves the younger woman wakes up and tells the older woman she dreamed about sunlight all of the time and unbearable heat. She's so glad for the coolness and the dark. The older woman just stands there with a look of dread on her face since she knows the truth.

:)

Is it okay with everyone that my favorite episode is a "new" one from the 80s?

"someone you don't even know" will die, but you'll get some huge sum of money?

That is a true classic in the mold of the original series.

A lot of the 80s TZs were pretty good, since Harlan Ellison was one of the story editors. The recent incarnation of TZ (with Forrest Whitaker) frankly blows.

Had that classic twilight zone twist to the ending, when the guy comes to take the button back, and he tells them it goes now to another person, "Someone you don't even know". It's my favorite, and a good morality/greed lesson.

It's the one where the Nazi visits the ruins of a concentration camp and he is put on trial and tortured by the ghosts he murdered. Also "A stop at Willoughby" and "The Hitch Hiker" were among many of my favorites.

Besides its iconic Twilight-Zone-ness, it features Donna "Ellie May Clampett" Douglas, an early crush of mine. It's also amusing today to see so many doctors and nurses smoking cigarettes in the hospital.

I watched it last night!

:hi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IldiAYhabIw&search=twilight%20zone%20eye

I saw "Eye of the Beholder" for the first time when I was 10 years old in 1965 and it scared me shitless. On the threshold of puberty with all the anxieties and insecurities, and in the day when women were only judged worthy by their attractiveness, my reaction was visceral.

Rod Serling was totally brilliant--one of the reasons Twilight Zone still resonates today, despite the cliches, naivety and Rod's heavy-handed pseudo noir commentary is because the man was a playwright and looked to literature as his inspiration. Many early TV shows were written by playwrights and the quality shines thru.

Oh, the days.....

Pig people!

as an example of "what is beauty"?

One was about a lady who bopped her husband in the head with a leg of lamb, killing him. She cooked the lamb and served it to the investigating police who were looking for the murder weapon.

The other one, and my favorite is about a old hillbilly who dies and goes to the nether world with his dog. He gets to the pearly gates and they wouldn't let his dog in. He said he ain't going in either. He walked down the road and came to another set of gates. They told him he could bring his dog so he went in. This was the real heaven, the other place was the entrance to hades.

I feel the same way. If I can't bring my dogs, I don't want to go.

It's another one of my favorites.

...instead of a twilight zone.

I watched them all. Not like we had a lot of options back then. 5 channels.

I remember that one too.

nt

from his short story "Lamb to the Slaughter".

Dahl wrote a lot of great Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including "The Landlady".

The hillbilly is a prince at the end of the world. The dog is in fact the god Dharma and rewards the prince's loyalty with a seat in heaven.

I have to say that a great deal of my enjoyment of these episodes comes from my love of Bernard Herrmann's music, though...

I never set my glasses on the couch or chair again!!

Awesome program.
Loved The Twilight Zone.

Oooooooohhhhhhh, that one was scary!!

Sometimes you don't win when you beat the other guy!!

...somewhere in the ruins...?...LOL...

Hell, he could just grind his own lenses if he had to. After all, he had "time enough at last".

...or possibly "Time Enough at Last."

She doesn't say a word, but great acting. :thumbsup:

People only remember Agnes Moorhead from "Bewitched". But she was a pretty damn good actress. "The Invaders" proves it. And like you said, not a word of dialogue.

He's a bank clerk with very thick glasses, who wants only to read books. He happens to be in the vault when They drop The Bomb. He comes out to destruction, and everyone is dead. He goes out and walks to the library and all the books are there for his reading, and he is thrilled beyond words . . . no one to bother him, no job, and all the books he wants, and he can just read, read, read. Then something happens and he breaks his glasses.

So sad.

I don't much remember the details... not one of the great episodes, but current events make me think of this...

about a year ago....

yeah - it reminded me of today - the "shadow" of Hitler - and how this skanky little nobody was able to create a cabal of hatemongers -

it's the one where he becomes addicted to the fortune telling machine

guess i always liked bill shatner

to do the one thing he has always wanted to do in his life. I think it was to invent something and then sell it. :shrug:

The other one was where there was a problem in the neighborhood and everyone turned on each other and blamed one another for what was going on.

I wish I remembered the episode names. x(

Oh, and I also liked "To Serve Man". That one I remember.

Classic Cold War paranoia like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but certainly all too relevant today...

Where the monks have the devil captured, and he manages to talk a visitor into setting him free.

:scared:

A man (Jack Warden) stranded on a prison asteroid receives a feminine android (Jean Marsh) as a gift to help pass the time. At first he detests her, rejecting her as a mere machine. In time, however, he learns to love her, and they become very close. When a ship lands on his asteroid to tell him that all such prisons have been abolished and that he is to come home immediately, he is delighted...until he learns that there isn't enough room on the ship for his robot. The ship's captain shoots the robot, and the man returns to Earth.

One of the interesting aspects of this episode is that I could not help but think of other endings that might have been used -- and maybe that was intended. Comments?

THERE WERE THREE OF US!!!

really sweet and touching with Ed Wynn as a salesman who makes a deal with Death.

There's another one about three crooks who have a camera that tells the future which I really liked. It eventually predicts their death(s). Dark humor.

But another one that I liked and really disturbed me is one the title of which I forget. It starred Earl Holliman as a guy who enters a deserted town, talking to himself the whole time; trying to find people to converse with, getting lonelier and lonelier until he's finally driven mad, endlessly punching a button over and over.

It turned out, he was an astronaut in training. He had been put into an isolation booth for weeks with no human contact, to see how long he could take being alone. When he couldn't stand it anymore, he was to push a button in the booth, and the scientists conducting the experiment would let him out.

that haven't been mentioned yet:

The dying wealthy old man who has a New Years Eve Party - where those (family?) he invited has to wear masks. They're mostly ugly/twisted - and they don't want to wear them - but he insists if they don't he'll cut them out of the will.

Just as it starts to strike midnight he tells them he picked the masks for to reflect what they were really like INSIDE - and they're magic. When they remove the masks at midnight - they look like what the mask looks like.... They're wealthy, but hideously ugly.

He dies. They remove his mask and his face is the same as it always was.




The other episode is the watch where the guy can "stop time". And then the watch breaks while he's stopped time so everyone/thing else is "frozen".

Archie Taylor, a member of an exclusive club, bets another member, Jamie Tennyson, half a million dollars that he can't stay quiet for an entire year. Jamie wins the bet but he can't collect because Archie went bankrupt several years ago. However, in order to ensure winning the bet, Jamie had his vocal chords severed.

This was one of the first ones episodes I saw after I discovered The Twilight Zone back in 1961 (I think they dropped the THE a few years later).