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TV Database The Twilight Zone (1959)

OmegaMeistro
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5.00/5 1 Votes

Genre: Sci-Fi & Fantasy,Mystery,Drama

Director: Rod Serling

First aired:

Last air date:

Show status: Ended

Overview: A series of unrelated stories containing drama, psychological thriller, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, and/or horror, often concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist.

Where to watch

Show information in first post provided by The Movie Database
The Twilight Zone
Two
Season: 3
Episode: 1
Air date: 1961-09-15

Guest stars: Elizabeth Montgomery,Charles Bronson
A man and a woman, on opposite sides of a future war, encounter each other in a deserted town.

"Two" shows why the half hour format works instead of the one hour format later on, because even at 30 minutes, it still feels too lengthy for most audiences, as can be seen among the reviews.

For me, however, I feel like it's just right, with the right amount of intrigue to explore these two lonely souls using mostly body language as opposed to dialogue. If anything, I'd much prefer if the whole episode just went dialogue-free like the first half of WALL-E, though I guess that might have stretched the logic of this world a little bit.

I like that the woman is immediately spurred into hostility again when she saw the war propaganda posters, particularly the one that pegged her people as "the enemy." Really subtle commentary on how such propaganda spurred people into senseless war than anything else.
The Twilight Zone
The Arrival
Season: 3
Episode: 2
Air date: 1961-09-22

Guest stars: Fredd Wayne,Noah Keen,Bing Russell,Robert Karnes,Harold J. Stone,Robert Brubaker,Jim Boles
A plane lands safely, but all its passengers, pilot and crew are missing!

While the ending feels kinda abrupt and unpolished, I feel like it mostly works because of how creepy the twist turned out to be. That shot where Sheckly puts his hands in the plane propeller was intense.
The Twilight Zone
The Shelter
Season: 3
Episode: 3
Air date: 1961-09-29

Guest stars: Larry Gates,Joseph Bernard,Peggy Stewart,Sandy Kenyon,Jack Albertson,Michael Burns,Jo Helton,Moria Turner,Mary Gregory,John McLiam,Scotty Morrow
When a nuclear attack appears imminent, several suburban friends and neighbors fight over control of a single bomb shelter.

Jerry Harlowe: "Hey that's a great idea, block party, anything to get back to normal, huh?"
Dr. Bill Stockton: "Normal? I don't know. I don't know what normal is. I thought I did once. I don't anymore."
Jerry Harlowe: "I told you we'd pay for the damages, Bill."
Dr. Bill Stockton: "Damages? I wonder. I wonder if anyone of us has any idea what those damages really are. Maybe one of them is finding out what we're really like when we're normal; the kind of people we are just underneath the skin. I mean all of us: a bunch of naked wild animals, who put such a price on staying alive that they'd claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege. We were spared a bomb tonight, but I wonder if we weren't destroyed even without it."

It's an old trope that during times of crisis, humanity will eat itself, going back to the far more superior episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street". And I'm not convinced that the two aliens from the end of that episode weren't responsible for this episode's false alarm either.

This episode is slightly clunkier though with a lot more exposition dump, particularly Bill's contrived speech about how humans are all monsters or something. It's a good monologue... if it wasn't part of Bill's dialogue. I guess I could kinda overlook it because that's supposed to be this show's "charm" or something, but man, I'm surprised none of his neighbors just rolled their eyes and walked away, shaking their heads at crazy ol' Bill talking to himself like he's on a PSA or a CBS Special.

I enjoyed this episode on first viewing though, and I didn't really feel the clumsiness of the writing until I took a closer look at the dialogue, so that counts for something. I believe fiction should be an experience of the heart more so than of the mind, and if a story makes you feel something, maybe it's not that bad.

The scary part though is that you don't even need such high stakes crisis to tear people apart anymore. You simply have to offer them anonymity.
The Twilight Zone
The Passersby
Season: 3
Episode: 4
Air date: 1961-10-06

Guest stars: James Gregory,Joanne Linville,Rex Holman,Warren J. Kemmerling,Jamie Farr,Austin Green,David Garcia
On the road home from the Civil War, a Confederate soldier stops at a burned-out house and gets to know the owner, a recent widow.

Are all confederates evil?

It's perhaps a tone-deaf question to a rather complex subject, but it also shows how challenging it can be to talk about fiction that paints any confederate soldier in a positive light at all. Any. I found more than a few comments calling out the "problematic" nature of this episode, the way it somehow seems pro-confederate even, when it's (in Larry David's voice) pretty, pretty, pretty obvious that wasn't Rod Serling's intent, given his anti-war sentiments that were ubiquitous throughout many Twilight Zone episodes, and that the episode was far from the revisionist farce that was "Gone with the Wind", not to mention the fact that many confederates were just poor farmers dragged into the war.

The main episode in question though was beautifully shot by Elliot Silverstein. I particularly like how for much of the episode, it's less about the allegiances and misguided causes these people served and more about a lost soul spending time with a widow at a secluded cabin, just strumming his guitar away like they're the only two people in the world. Whether the road in the episode is an allegory for purgatory is irrelevant as the episode focuses more on these two companions' lonely sentiments, reflecting their past life and how they came to this point. In that sense, despite the "problematic" setting, there's almost a romantic atmosphere to the two's interaction.

The fact that the widow (Lavinia Godwin, played by Joanne Linville whom I just saw playing the Romulan Commander not a few hours ago in Star Trek, "The Enterprise Incident") shot the Union lieutenant out of vengeance kinda clues you in that this story is more about the senselessness of war on both sides, if Rod's whole bread and butter wasn't already obvious to you throughout the first two seasons. It's a well-executed script that flows well without playing sympathies to either side, keeping the politics out.

That was... until Lincoln arrived.

Honestly, that was probably the only part of the episode that felt jarring, but even then, taken as a whole, seeing him as the last man on the road to the afterlife does feel like an appropriate capper to end on, even if his motivation for the widow to move on cheapened her arc.
The Twilight Zone
A Game of Pool
Season: 3
Episode: 5
Air date: 1961-10-13

Guest stars: Jonathan Winters,Jack Klugman
Championship pool player Fats Brown returns from the grave for one last game.

I'll be the first to admit: I'm not a self-confident guy. There's even a pride in that acknowledgement because it's part of who I am as a person, how my childhood shaped my identity. People say you can change beyond what you grew up as. People say a lot of things. They don't really do as much often.

But that's what my mindset is like going into "A Game of Pool". Three guesses whose side I was on. Because of my lack of talents, I value the act of "working hard" a lot because there's value in attaining something that's within the realm of possibility with your own sweat and blood. The American dream. A self-made man. Jesse Cardiff (played by Jack Klugman, once again in a role as someone who has dreams of success) is obsessed with being the best, and I've read all these reviews and praises of this episode how the episode is great and magnificent even though it paints Jesse as in the wrong, that he's rightfully punished for his obsession. That's kinda a disingenuous message, considering all the successful men living in our time sipping champaign and living the easy life in huge billion dollar mansions, not to mention discrediting the legends who worked their ass off to get to where they are.

And I think, more than anything that bothers me, it's that it's just not a very fair conclusion or even a properly developed one for Jesse, the man who's merely trying to prove himself the best after living a life of mockery being belittled by the world, something I could relate to a lot. His act of diligence didn't come at the cost of killing or harming anyone, merely his own squandered time trying to prove the world wrong, that he's worth something in his existence, and the heavens saw to it to punish him for it. That's a rather unsatisfying ending, if you ask me, not to mention being very un-American.

I've pursued plenty of aspirations for my own satisfaction, things no one else had any knowledge of or were there to approve me of. So what? It's my life, and I didn't hurt anyone chasing my dreams. Who are you to judge me for it? Or Jesse? I get the message of the episode, that one shouldn't obsess over success, that there's more to life than fame and fortune, but the execution just feels so insulting due to a lack of development of Jesse's life outside of pool, to show us what he's missing, or whether he has any loved ones to miss at all to begin with.

The episode is competently acted out though by Klugman and Jonathan Winters in the (literally) heated game of pool as the two men continuously exchanged taunts and quips at each other in a game that's more psychological than physical. I particularly enjoyed Klugman's performance, channeling the same depressed desperation energy that we saw some of in "A Passage for Trumpet". I also had to look up the terms of pool as I'm not familiar with the terms, but thankfully, I have ChatGPT to assist me in simple English, laying out the rules in an easily understood manner.
The Twilight Zone
The Mirror
Season: 3
Episode: 6
Air date: 1961-10-20

Guest stars: Peter Falk,Antony Carbone,Will Kuluva,Arthur Batanides,Rodolfo Hoyos Jr.,Vladimir Sokoloff,Richard Karlan,Robert McCord,Val Ruffino
After a poor but ambitious Central American farm worker overthrows his country's tyrannical leader, he believes he sees assassins everywhere. A look in the mirror reveals his most dangerous enemy.

"The last assassin. They never learn... they never seem to learn." - Father Tomas (Vladimir Sokoloff)
I don't usually laugh at how bad an episode is watching The Twilight Zone. That experience is usually reserved for Star Trek. This episode's not nearly bad enough like some of Trek's worst to have me laughing from start to finish, especially without Shatner's hammy acting, but its writing is probably just as dumb the worst of Trek, so I got to laugh plenty thinking back on it. You literally have a man who overthrows a dictator only to become one himself through sheer paranoia, which is about as predictable as it comes. But the messaging feels so hollow because Serling's closing narration tried to paint Ramos as "all ambitious men and tyrants" when it's obviously Castro, except that Castro wasn't paranoid enough to start executing his inner circle, so that allegory doesn't fit either. Was it Hitler then, the zealot who believed in racial purity rather than the existence of assassins in every corner? Again, doesn't fit well with Ramos' character, especially if you wanna try and force their similar cause of deaths together.

It's a shame though because you could see inkling of some decent story there in the beginning when Ramos bitterly recounts how he was trapped under the oppression of tyranny and finally got the chance to correct that. There's a whole story potential there for the seeds of corruption amidst good intentions - but nope, batshit crazy time thanks to magic mirror. Father Tomas' unsubtle line about how tyrants never learn or something like he's a time-traveling Jedi who had seen many dictators was the cherry on top of this cringe-brûlée .

Headcanon: that's the same mirror from Snow White that drove the Evil Queen insane with vanity, and Snow White is next on the chopping block.
The Twilight Zone
The Grave
Season: 3
Episode: 7
Air date: 1961-10-27

Guest stars: Lee Marvin,James Best,Lee Van Cleef,Strother Martin,Elen Willard,Stafford Repp,William Challee
Before he died, notorious gunslinger Pinto Sykes put a curse on hired-gun Conny Miller. Miller returns to town and is challenged to visit the grave of Sykes, despite the curse.

The Grave tries to pull off that classic "vengeful ghost gets his due" narrative, but it falls apart under basic scrutiny. Pinto Sykes was already dead thanks to the townsfolk, so what’s the revenge angle here? Haunting a guy who didn’t even kill him? That’s like getting mad at the mailman because Amazon lost your package.

And Ione’s little “Aha! The wind isn’t blowing that way!” moment feels like it’s really trying to hammer in the supernatural element, but it just comes off as a weak gotcha. Like, sure, lady, or maybe it was just the wind shifting direction. Meanwhile, Conny gets guilt-tripped into proving his bravery for no real reason other than these chuckleheads egging him on. No stakes, no reason for the ghost to be pissed at him specifically, and a payoff that leans too hard on trying to force a spooky explanation.

Pinto’s ghost needed a better post-mortem revenge plan, and the episode needed a plot that made sense. I get that Conny is the "leader" of the townspeople whom they sent out to kill Pinto, and the fact that he turned out to be a yellow-bellied weasel who's all talk does sort of fit the series' dramatic irony, but I think it's just the fact that Ione acted like Conny got what he deserved that pushed the episode a little bit too far into silliness, like the leader of some dumb kids who got more than he bargained for at the graveyard (which makes sense since the story was an ubiquitous folk tale that often features kids and a cemetery).
The Twilight Zone
It's a Good Life
Season: 3
Episode: 8
Air date: 1961-11-03

Guest stars: Alice Frost,Cloris Leachman,Max Showalter,Jeanne Bates,Lenore Kingston,Thomas Hatcher,John Larch,Bill Mumy,Don Keefer
Little Anthony Fremont controls an entire town with his ability to read minds and make people do as he wishes. Which is a real good thing.

As Trey and Matt put it, kids are assholes. The problem with the innocence of a child, as I've mentioned before in my "And The Children Shall Lead" review, is that said innocence would sometimes equate to naivety or even moral ignorance. And when you're a literal god, there's not a whole lot your parents can do to course-correct you.

But the great thing about this episode is its thematic fluidity, because more than just another "enfant terrible" storyline, it could also be interpreted as an allegory for totalitarianism distilled into a six-year-old psychopath with a bowl cut.

Peaksville is a town living under absolute, paralyzing fear, forced to perform joy and compliance under threat of instant erasure. It’s basically North Korea, if Kim Jong-un were a petulant first grader who could bend reality instead of just rewriting history books. You can’t criticize, you can’t complain, you can’t even think the wrong thing—because if Anthony senses a single bad vibe, boom, cornfield. That’s the essence of fascism: an all-powerful leader whose whims dictate reality, and everyone else is too terrified to do anything but smile and nod.

It’s funny how this episode came out in 1961, but it still applies to every modern dictator and authoritarian cult today. Just swap out “the cornfield” for a gulag, a prison, or a digital blacklist, and you’ve got a horror story that never stopped being relevant.

The scariest part though comes when Dan Hollis accuses Anthony's parents of being the one who gave birth to the little monster, which could also be taken as every citizen that put Hitler in power (or Donald J. Trump, I guess, depending on your political flavor), because now it's not even entirely the monster's fault, but the people who allow him to do it.

I like the subtle attempts to showcase Anthony's powers (I kept thinking which universal-level being could beat Anthony without being OPed), particularly the case with the Jack in the Box, but I also kinda wish Rod went hog wild with it and just showed us all kinds of crazy things Anthony could do (see Robert Daly in USS Callister), but I guess the budget wouldn't allow Rod the privilege. Ah well.
The Twilight Zone
Deaths-Head Revisited
Season: 3
Episode: 9
Air date: 1961-11-10

Guest stars: Joseph Schildkraut,Kaaren Verne,Oscar Beregi Jr.,Ben Wright,Robert Boon,Gene Coogan,Jimmie Horan,Chuck Fox,David O. McCall,Arthur Tovey
A former Nazi SS Captain returns to the ruins of a concentration camp to reminisce, and is met by one of his victims.

"All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth." - Rod Serling

I'm a Chinese Singaporean, so I have as much stake in the Lost Cause ideology as a Gen-X American has on Singapore's independence from British colonialism. That said, I don't believe in erasing part of our history just because it's uncomfortable. That's for the performative woke crowd who wants to preach about moralism without actually doing anything. Instead, much like the multilingual "never again" memorial at the Treblinka extermination camp, one should merely repurpose "problematic" historical monuments to better educate someone. Erasure is convenient and irresponsible. It ensures that the lessons of yesteryears are given an excuse to be forgotten. Sure, we have our textbooks, but it's the principle of it all, because it might be statues today, and textbooks tomorrow.

Despite the powerful message Rod presented at the end with his monologue, this episode, however, is largely a simple ghost story where a monster gets his comeuppance. I'm a bit mixed when it comes to voyeuristic revenge stories. Even if it's about a Chinese getting his revenge against some racist for an entire 30 minutes, I would still find it to be questionable entertainment, because by some point, it just becomes self-indulgent.

That said, I think this episode paints over the justice of it all effectively. A Nazi escapes punishment from the law, and he gets what he deserves, especially when he has the arrogance to revisit an internment camp for "nostalgia's sake." Ugh. And thankfully, Oscar Beregi Jr. played Captain Lutze realistically enough to prevent him from becoming a caricature, which would have turned the heavy subject goofy. We got to see his pride over his horrendous war crimes and how he revels over it not with cheesy Dr. Evil villainous glee, but a very human kind of pride over his sadistic crimes.

It's an effective mood piece at a time when WWII was not that long ago, and people still bear the scars of an inhumane period of history, one we should never forget.
The Twilight Zone
The Midnight Sun
Season: 3
Episode: 10
Air date: 1961-11-17

Guest stars: William Keene,Lois Nettleton,Betty Garde,Jason Wingreen,Juney Ellis,Tom Reese,Robert Stevenson,Ned Glass,John McLiam
The Earth's orbit has been changed, drawing ever closer to the sun and promising eminent destruction.

Radio Announcer: "From the weather bureau: the temperature stood at 110 degrees, at 11:00 this morning. Humidity, 91%. Forecast for tomorrow... forecast for tomorrow... hot. More of the same, only hotter."

Welcome to Singapore, I guess. 😎

But seriously, there's something amusing when it comes to American shows crying about a hot and humid weather when watching it from a Singaporean's perspective. I guess the central plot here is a little more apocalyptic, but you can see many reviews commenting on this episode talking about their American version of heat, when we Singaporeans (and the rest of us living near the equator like Malaysians) have dealt with that nonsense all of our lives. There's just a hilarious "First time?" vibe to it I can't help make fun of.

But yeah, heat sucks. There's a reason why I left my AC on most of the time out of the 24 hours. I can't leave it on going to bed though because 20 degrees celcius can get too cold and I'd sometimes catch a cold that way. The way this episode presents its apocalypse levels of heat though makes enough sense without becoming goofy, even if it has some clunky dialogue, like the intruder swearing he's a decent man like he's Joss Whedon defending himself on Twitter, or Mrs. Bronson's exposition dump at the end of the episode, laying out what's what for us in the audience. The ending twist also feels unnecessary and more like a cheap twist to subvert the horrendous situation with another similarly hazardous one.

But that said, I appreciate most of what worked here, how you can see and feel the sweat from Norma and Mrs. Bronson, not to mention that disturbing penultimate scene where the paintings started melting. It's haunting imagery that makes you grateful the aircon was invented, especially in a little zone called Singapore.
The Twilight Zone
Still Valley
Season: 3
Episode: 11
Air date: 1961-11-24

Guest stars: Gary Merrill,Ben Cooper,Mark Tapscott,Jack Mann,Addison Myers,Vaughn Taylor
Confederacy scout Sgt. Joseph Paradine finds a town full of Union soldiers, and an old man who claims he used witchcraft to paralyze them.

Here we have another episode centered from the confederacy's perspective, so that's fun. I don't think Rod Serling was a Lost Cause supporter, since he's no fan of tyranny, but he certainly liked to tread these murky territories that dealt with a war that lacked ambiguity as to whom the bad guys were. Sure, there were probably those in the South who weren't supporters of slavery caught up in the conflict, but if you are going to touch on a conflict known for one of the worst atrocities of mankind (possibly topped only by the holocaust), then you better make sure there's a story worth telling.

And there isn't really much of a story worth telling here, unfortunately. The setup worked initially, with an eerie setting of Union soldiers wonderfully acted out by a bunch of extras, and instead of just massacring those damn Yankees on the spot, Sergeant Joseph Paradine (Gary Merrill) just decided to take a stroll around town to figure out what's going on, and it turns out black magic's in the works. The idea that the Devil is being used to perform the works of the Confederacy should have been a powerful symbol, but towards the end, Paradine was a little too fast to renounce the magic simply because it would mean renouncing God, a nuance that didn't quite work for me because of how abrupt it happened, and how little Gary's performance did to justify the sudden change, regardless of whether it made sense or not.

This was probably because the episode spent a little too much time on the exposition of it all for that little number at the end to have enough screentime to make it work. Had the infodump been a little quicker instead of wondering at the magic of it all, we might have gotten a tighter episode.
The Twilight Zone
The Jungle
Season: 3
Episode: 12
Air date: 1961-12-01

Guest stars: Emily McLaughlin,John Dehner,Donald Foster,Walter Brooke,Jay Adler,Jay Overholts,Howard Wright
Alan Richards plans to build a dam in Africa on a tribe's ancestral land. The tribe's voodoo doctor puts a curse on him.

There's an interesting perspective watching this episode from an Asian perspective like mine. Usually, among Singaporean stories, black magic and voodoo aren't treated as a foreign aspect of our first-world society, but as very much alive even today among our civilized society. We have a long tradition of superstition in this country, and I would remember a lot of shows where some poor sob gets cursed by some black magic even in the '90s, or gets haunted by some ghost for something awful he did. It's usually a guy too because women aren't usually villains in these types of shows, but I digress.

The thing I'm trying to say is that the racial aspect didn't usually come into play the way a western supernatural story would have. The "white panic" of it all, painting African tribes as sinister voodoo priests looking to punish you with black magic is unrelatable for someone like me because we Asians were already raised to at least be somewhat wary of supernatural traditions. American shows like The Twilight Zone, however, seem to be more cynical when it comes to urbanites as the supernatural that wasn't science-based seemed to stem from broad stereotypes like African tribes, which is obviously offensive even for its time.

But at least the episode is almost well-crafted enough for it to work. The atmosphere and suspense of Alan Richards (John Dehner) strolling his way home in the deserted streets have a sufficient sense of danger to make it feel grounded, even without the supernatural stuff. The ending does come off a little goofy though, as I didn't really feel threatened there so much as confused how the creature got in there. It didn't feel scary. Ah well.
The Twilight Zone
Once Upon a Time
Season: 3
Episode: 13
Air date: 1961-12-15

Guest stars: James Flavin,Buster Keaton,George E. Stone,Robert McCord,Stanley Adams,Jesse White,Gil Lamb,Arthur Tovey,Milton Parsons,Warren Parker,Norman Papson,Harry Fleer
Woodrow, a janitor living in the year 1890, accidentally activates a time travelling helmet which transports him to 1962 - then promptly breaks down!

I've never seen a Buster Keaton movie. Part of a result of being born in 1990, I guess. Twilight Zone is one thing, but silent films are a step too far for this Millennial. And besides, we've got Jackie Chan now, and he sings his own theme songs! Sure, his support of China's atrocities is questionable, and sure, the plot of his movies are almost as thin as post-Mission Impossible 1 Tom Cruise films, but hey, it's Jackie Chan, the man America calls a national treasure...

Sarcasm aside, I'm not a fan of either, to be honest, Jackie even less so for his boring movies. Movies with pure action and thin plot are a snooze-fest for me. But I digress. Rowan Atkinson's funnier than both of them anyway. Ricky Gervais even more so. "To each his own," as Serling said this episode.

This episode is basically "Back to the Future" but backwards and set in 1890 (so maybe more like "Back to the Past"). Keaton is funny enough with his antics and kept the episode from being a snooze fest with its thin plot, but for the most part, because I don't have any nostalgia for Buster, it just feels kinda draggy, with Woodrow Mulligan experiencing culture shock for a few scenes before stuck in some mechanic store and a cop chase slapstick. At least if it had leaned more into that "future shock" element, it might have been more interesting. But as it is, it's merely mid. Comedy's not my favorite genre, clearly.

Also, Serling's "Stay in your own backyard" is shockingly insensitive to Keaton, considering that Buster went bust because the talkies busted his career.
The Twilight Zone
Five Characters in Search of an Exit
Season: 3
Episode: 14
Air date: 1961-12-22

Guest stars: Susan Harrison,Murray Matheson,William Windom,Kelton Garwood,Clark Allen,Carol Hill,Mona Houghton
A hobo, clown, bagpipe player, ballerina and military officer are trapped in a huge cylinder.

Ballerina: "Maybe we're on another planet. Or maybe we're on a spaceship going to another planet. Maybe we're all insane. Or maybe this is a mirage, an illusion."
Hobo: "We're dead, and this is limbo."
Bagpiper: "We don't really exist. We're dream figures from somebody else's existence."
Clown: "Or we're each of us having a dream, and everyone else is part of the other person's dream. You call it. You can have it. That's the one thing we have an abundance of: possibilities. An infinite number of possibilities."

"The thing is that it represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential. And what I love about this (mystery) box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination." - J.J. Abrams

This is possibly the most perfect example of why this show worked, and it's an even better argument for why the shorter half hour format worked (as opposed to its one hour format in later seasons). It's long enough to leave you wondering, but short enough to not be boring with unnecessary exposition. And as the titular five characters expressed, the script flowed in such a way that it remained an engaging mystery why the characters are there and whom they are, with just enough little clues to tease the audience, but with a far more satisfying payoff than an entire season of "Lost".

The vagueness of it all though was the real gem of the episode because it's literally an empty room. It's not even a jungle like "Lost" or a trap-filled container like "Cube", but a circular empty room, so the possibilities of where the characters are could be a myriad of things. I really loved it when the characters started expressing the fluidity of their possible circumstances too in a meta way.

But perhaps it's that ending that's the most striking and memorable, if only because it makes so much sense in our modern pop culture where you could draw similarities with other esoteric stories about other lost souls finding their way in a Lynchian world. It's also such a bizarre outcome at the time too, I'm sure, one that's more Twin Peaks than your typical Twilight Zone revelation. Naturally, Pirandello and Sartre inspirations tend to have that kind of effect on a story, and Rod wisely incorporated those elements into one of the most thought-provoking piece of television, period.
The Twilight Zone
Nothing in the Dark
Season: 3
Episode: 16
Air date: 1962-01-05

Guest stars: R.G. Armstrong,Robert Redford,Gladys Cooper
A lonely old woman refuses to leave her apartment for fear of meeting "Mr. Death."

Woody: I have no choice, Buzz. This is my only chance.
Buzz Lightyear: To do what Woody? Watch kids from behind glass and never be loved again? Some life.

Kimberly Corman: I think you're a coward. You hide out in here because you're too damn bitter and selfish to help any other person. In my opinion, you're already dead.

Death and existentialism have always gone hand in hand. We've had plenty of stories where the characters contemplated the frightening notion of death and chooses immortality, or at least some semblance of that in this episode's case. It's the oldest fear of all: the unknown. It's my own reason for fearing death as well, not just the pain of a heart attack or a stroke that makes the passing that much more frightening.

But as our dear Robert Redford expressed here this episode, it's nothing to be afraid of; it's peaceful, he's sure, even if death itself is as unknowable as the existence of spirits and aliens. It's a romantic notion for sure, one for the more sentimental heart, but it's well-acted and written enough that I like it despite my own cynicism. And I'm sure Gladys Cooper's Wanda Dunn is a nice enough old lady that she would go to heaven anyway, making her fears even more baseless, but that's admitting the belief in eternal damnation for the sinners out there and we'd just open a whole other can of worms.

The idea of Death visiting you as a charming fellow to help you pass along more easily is an endearing idea though, as you can see from the many reviews of this episode thirsting for Redford. If I get to choose, I'd have mine be Jessica Alba. Invisible Woman, YAS.
The Twilight Zone
One More Pallbearer
Season: 3
Episode: 17
Air date: 1962-01-12

Guest stars: Joseph Wiseman,Trevor Bardette
Paul Radin has invited three people to join him in his bomb shelter.

I hate feeling humiliated. Having grown up being bullied and physically disciplined by my Asian parents, my self-esteem wasn't exactly the most stable. So if someone happened to cross me, I'd probably be holding that grudge for a while.

That said, I doubt I'd hold it for decades like Paul Radin (Joseph Wiseman) though. The man makes Logan Paul look mature, and that's saying something. Kinda amusing though that Rod Serling basically predictable social experiments (and home theater systems) decades before YouTube came out. My initial attention watching this episode was much more drawn to the elaborate prank the '60s Logan Paul had concocted, which made it all the more disappointing and anticlimactic with how the plot developed.

Furthermore, the karmic irony just doesn't work all that well here either because the accusations Paul's victims had thrown at him were either vague or questionable. Mrs. Langsford (Katherine Squire) ironically chastised what the adult Paul did as a kid who didn't know better, and Col. Hawthorne (Trevor Bardette) felt like every jingoistic military type, his accusation of Paul refusing orders too vague to hold any water. Similarly, Reverend Hughes' (Gage Clarke) accusation of Paul causing a girl's suicide should have been more detailed if the episode really wanted me to feel that his comeuppance is earned. To be fair, there's only usually one way a woman would be driven to suicide in these types of stories, but if you want to hand out karmic justice, him being kinda a millionaire creep isn't really satisfying enough to justify the punishment.

As a result, the three's statements of dignity and honor just feel hollow in the end, more sermonizing and performative than holding any weight, and that's more troubling in our cancel culture landscape where the implications of immorality are taken at face value for a witch hunt, never mind the due process of the judiciary system. I'd even dare to say it's that kind of thinking that led to certain assassination attempts that have occurred over the past year, but I digress.

I think the format of The Twilight Zone also didn't help much, as many of Rod Serling's stories seem more suitable for audio dramas due to their expository nature, with Rod himself even admitting to using the dictating machine to utilize his Talking Draft Method. It made sense then why many of Twilight Zone episodes can felt preachy and more "tell" than "show" in terms of storytelling, as a narrated story doesn't translate perfectly to a visual format, and it's here in this episode where we get to see that exemplified, with the speeches of the three "honorable" people at the end serving as the supposed punchline to the karmic tale.

This episode could have been fun in seeing a scumbag nailed to the wall for his despicable sins, but instead, what we got was a sermon that told us how naughty Paul was, and how he deserved his fate. Instead of watching a monster meet his reckoning, we watched a man get ghosted by three smug boomers in a Cold War LARP.
The Twilight Zone
Dead Man's Shoes
Season: 3
Episode: 18
Air date: 1962-01-19

Guest stars: Warren Stevens,Joan Marshall,Ben Wright,Florence Marly,Susie Garrett,Richard Devon,Ron Hagerthy,Joseph Mell
A vagrant steps into a murdered gangster's expensive shoes and is taken over by the dead man's ghost, who vows to remain on Earth to seek revenge against his killer.

Since it's a half hour format, the best Twilight Zone episodes delve less into character studies and more into the twists and gimmicks, exploring interesting sci-fi and supernatural concepts and getting the most entertainment out of them. Here, we have a good high-concept story that could potentially be mined for several anthology movies, each with a different pair of shoes and life story. In fact, the showrunners seem to think so too, as this concept was used again in the '85 revival and the '02 revival as well, with a gender-swap and a change up of the gimmick (woman's shoes and dead man's eyes respectively). The idea of the dead possessing the living through his possessions sounds like an old folk tale, so I'm surprised this script wasn't adapted from some old storybook or something, because I'm pretty sure I've seen something like this in much of Asian horror cinema.

The execution of the episode itself is fine as it is. We get to see Warren Stevens play out the double identity of Nate the bum and Dane the mobster with a compelling humanity and charisma respectively, even if the backstory isn't enough for us to care about either person. The fact that the tale played out in the end didn't really take away from the eeriness of a dead mobster coming back to haunt his killer over and over again, so I kinda appreciate it.
The Twilight Zone
The Hunt
Season: 3
Episode: 19
Air date: 1962-01-26

Guest stars: Arthur Hunnicutt,Jeanette Nolan,Robert Foulk,Charles Seel
On a hunting trip, Hyder Simpson and his dog Rip dive into a lake after a raccoon. When he gets home he finds that no one can see or hear him.

I find value in longform reviews, especially those that get more personal and delve into the reasons why you'd give a certain rating or what that episode means to you. It helps to build a connection between the reader and the author. Those recap reviews summarizing the plot of the episode AGAIN like we have the memory span of a Blue Tang are kinda annoying too, like they are just there to fill up space.

I say this because this episode shows us what value there is in longform storytelling, even in a half hour episode of an anthology sci-fi series where spooky gimmicks happen every week. We could easily have the hillbilly Hyder Simpson (Arthur Hunnicutt) get to the crux of the episode instead of spending half the episode hunting racoons and whining to his wife, but that wouldn't build up the important relationship between Hyder and the other important player, Rip the Coon hound, who gets to aid his master from supernatural trickery down the episode.

It's an endearing little tale that manages to focus enough on Hyder's relationship with his partner to avoid being boring or goofy, even if it leaves viewers questioning some of the plot conveniences by the end regarding Rip's swimming capabilities. As a Chinese Singaporean, I was never one to be interested in westerns or Southern tales of the rural countryside, but I could appreciate a tale of a man and his dog who could neither be separated by heaven or hell.

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