The Twilight Zone is regarded by many as one of the greatest television series ever produced, certainly the best anthology series, and made a star of its creator, Rod Serling. The show became deeply entrenched in American culture, and the SyFy Channel’s annual New Year’s Twilight Zone Marathon is watched by millions. As an unabashed Twilight Zone fanatic, for what it’s worth, the following are my top 15 TZ episodes.
#15 – Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? Great episode written by Rod Serling featuring a ‘double-twist’ ending as just after the actual three-armed Martian was finally revealed, another alien from Venus, and with three eyes to boot, shocks the viewers at the very end. Interestingly, in the original story, Serling had a stray dog adopted by the owner of the diner as the hidden alien. And, if you think that wouldn’t have worked, remember that the original form that the alien took in the 1982 movie remake of The Thing (starring Kurt Russell) was a dog.
#14 – Living Doll. Based on an idea by the great Charles Beaumont (who would write many classic TZ episodes) and written by Jerry Sohl, the creepy Talky Tina doll says things like, “I don’t think I like you”, and “I’m going to kill you!” to nasty stepfather, Erich (played by Telly Savalas, later to star in The Dirty Dozen as wacky A.J. Maggott, and after that as famed TV detective, Kojak). The ending is great as after the doll intentionally trips the stepfather on the stairs, causing him to fall and die, the girl’s mother picks up the doll and it eerily says, “My name is Talky Tina, and you’d better be nice to me.” A Fun Fact from The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree – The voice of the doll was done by June Foray, also the voice for Rocky the Flying Squirrel on the epic Bullwinkle cartoon show.
#13 – To Serve Man. The teleplay was written by Rod Serling, but it is based on the short story by the great Damon Knight (if you’ve never read Damon Knight’s short stories, you should go on Amazon and order one of his short story anthologies immediately!) Many TZ fanatics regard the twist-ending of this episode to be the most shocking as the supposedly altruistic aliens are revealed to really only have one purpose for humans – to put them on the menu! A book with the title “To Serve Man” was ultimately decrypted and discovered to be a cookbook on the different ways that humans could be served as a meal!! The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree reveals that Damon Knight would later say that “I thought the adaptation was kind of neat – it made me famous in Milford, Pennsylvania, suddenly everyone knew who I was.”
#12 – Five Characters in Search of an Exit. The teleplay was written by Rod Serling, but it was based on the short story The Depository by Marvin Petal. Great episode that leaves the viewer focusing on, and subsequently trying to guess, exactly where these five characters are, and by doing so, the viewer never focuses on actually what they may be. And what’s with that freaking bell they keep hearing!!?? The classic ending reveals that the five characters are actually toy dolls in a Christmas toy donation barrel. The unimaginative among us, upon watching this episode in 1961, might have said, “Well…that was a dumb premise.” But, who would have guessed that 34 years later a Disney film about toy dolls that come to life, Toy Story, would take the world by storm and become a multimedia franchise with 3 record-setting sequels?!
#11 – Eye of the Beholder. Written by Rod Serling. One of the most iconic of all TZ episodes, this particular one absolutely scared the living sh** out of me when I was a kid! My older brothers set me up and said I could take my hands down from covering my eyes as the supposedly horrific-looking woman under the bandages was finally revealed to be the beautiful Donna Douglas (Ellie May from The Beverly Hillbillies). Unfortunately, my relief was short-lived as the camera quickly cut to the horrible, terrifying, and truly scary faces of the surrounding doctors and nurses. I couldn’t sleep for days. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one for whom this episode left an impact. As recounted in The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree, Producer Buck Houghton wanted to see what the viewers might think of the episode, and he screened it for a guy named Lud Gluskin, head of music at CBS, before it was televised. Houghton said that Lud was “a very imperturbable old German…sixty-five, and pretty hard to move. And at the end of that he said, ‘Jesus Christ!’…”
#10 – Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Written by the great Richard Matheson. “Who’s that?”, you may ask – While Matheson wrote many TZ episodes, he is also one of the great sci-fi/fantasy/horror writers of the 20th century in his own right. He wrote I Am Legend, Duel, The Night Stalker, Stir of Echoes, What Dreams May Come, and Prey (that crazy 1970’s TV episode in which that terrifying Zuni Warrior doll attacks actress Karen Black), just to name a few. Again – grab a book of his short stories if you see one. This was another episode that frightened me as a kid, even though, as I look back on it now, the gremlin-monster on the wing of the plane that terrified William Shatner was pretty lame-looking by today’s standards. It’s still a very scary episode, and it was one of the episodes that was remade for The Twilight Zone Movie in 1983, with a much scarier gremlin thanks to a bigger budget and modern special effects. A funny story regarding the episode from The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree – a few weeks after it aired, Rod Serling had worked with Western Airlines to set-up having a life-size poster of the gremlin secretly placed on the outside window of the plane seat that Matheson was going to sit in. The idea was that Matheson would take his seat, open the window curtains, and shockingly see the gremlin looking in at him. So, they had it all set up, Matheson was in his seat, the plane’s engines start up, but the propellers of the plane blew the poster off the window before Matheson opened the curtain! Oh well…it would have been funny.
#9 – The Howling Man. Written by Charles Beaumont. Again, like Damon Knight and Richard Matheson, Beaumont was a superb writer, although not as prolific. In this episode, a lost European traveler comes upon a seemingly kooky order of monks who have what appears to be a normal, sane man imprisoned because they claim he is actually the devil himself. The only thing weird about the imprisoned man is that he howls like a wounded wolf. The traveler eventually frees the man, only to realize the mistake he has made – for the monks were right!! With the limited resources of an early 1960’s TV show, they did a great job with the special effects in showing the freed man gradually transforming into the hideous devil. A shout-out to Beaumont for recognizing the often-forgotten Korean War in his script. When the traveler realizes the enormity of what he had done just prior to World War 2 and the evil he had released onto the world he says: “The evil that soon took the shape of the Second World War, the Korean War, the hideous new weapons of war. I swore I’d find him again, as Brother Jerome had done.” My Dad was a Korean War veteran, and too often it’s not mentioned in historical context, almost as if it never happened – a disgrace to the men who fought and died there. So, kudos to Beaumont for remembering that war in his script.
#8 – Mirror Image. Another classic episode written by Rod Serling in which a woman causes a stir at a bus depot claiming that she is being stalked by another woman, and that other woman is….herself! Actually…her double from a co-existing reality that wants to take over for her. A sympathetic man at the bus depot, played by Martin Milner – later of Adam-12 fame, pretends to believe her but instead ends up calling the police to have the “crazed woman” taken away to get psychiatric help. The ending is classic Serling as the man chases someone who has stolen his briefcase. As he is running after him down the street, the thief turns his head, and the man horrifyingly sees that he is chasing….himself! As revealed in The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree, Serling got the idea for this story when he was at an airport in London and noticed a man who had his back to him, but was eerily dressed exactly the same as Serling, with the same height, and holding the exact same leather briefcase. When the man turned around, Serling said, “…he was ten years younger….but this did leave its imprint sufficiently to write a story about it.”
#7 – The Monsters are Due on Maple Street. Written by Rod Serling. After a meteor is spotted overhead by the residents of Maple Street, inexplicable things start to happen: lights flicker on and off, cars start by themselves, and phones ring for no reason. A young boy says it’s the start of an alien invasion and one of the residents may be an alien. This starts paranoid-driven and senseless suspicions among the neighbors that ultimately leads them to violently turn on each other. The classic ending reveals that the cause of the flickering lights and other malfunctions was, in fact, aliens who then conclude that the conquest of Earth should be easy: “Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then just sit back and watch the pattern…They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and its themselves. And all we need to do is sit back…and watch.” The episode was Serling’s commentary on prejudice in our society and he summed it up eloquently in his closing narration: “For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicions can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own – for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
#6 – Time Enough at Last. The teleplay was written by Rod Serling but it is based on a short story by Lynn Venable. Bookworm Henry Bemis, with extremely thick eyeglasses for his poor eyesight and played by the great Burgess Meredith, sneaks off into the vault of his bank employer during lunchbreak to engage in his favorite activity – reading. While in the vault, there was an all-out nuclear war. When Bemis emerges from the vault and searches the ruins, he realizes that he may be the last man on Earth. As he is about to take his own life he notices the ruins of the public library, and believes that instead of hell, he may have just stepped into paradise as now he has all the time in the world – “time enough at last” – to read for the remainder of his days! In one of the greatest endings of all Twilight Zone episodes, the nearly blind Bemis has his thick glasses fall from his face and break on the rubble. “It isn’t fair”, a weeping Bemis says into the camera as he stands among the ruins of the library. As written in The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree, the episode had such an impact on the American public that Meredith would say many years later that “I don’t suppose a month goes by, even to this day, that people don’t come up and remind me of that episode.”
#5 – Deaths Head Revisited. Written by Rod Serling. A sadistic former Nazi death-camp guard returns to Dachau prison to fondly remember his days there, just 15 years prior, where he tortured and killed thousands of the inmates. However, the former guard has a terrifying surprise awaiting him at the camp – the ghosts of the inmates he killed, who then put him on trial for his crimes. He is found guilty, and his sentence is that he will now experience all of the physical pain he inflicted on the inmates. This renders the former guard permanently insane. The doctor who finds the now incoherent, babbling guard angrily asks the question: “Dachau…why do we keep it standing?” Serling answers the Doctor’s question in what I believe is his greatest ending narration. It should be noted that Dachau was liberated by American soldiers, and Serling, a World War II veteran himself, knew that many of those liberating soldiers, only in their 30’s and 40’s when the episode first aired, would be watching. Quite a few suffered debilitating PTSD from what they found at Dachau, and I interviewed one of them for one of my essays, Don Greenbaum, as well as a survivor of Dachau, Ernie Gross. The ending narration stands the test of time and is now a great way to address the increasing and nonsensical claims that the Holocaust never happened. “There is an answer to the doctor’s question. 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.”
#4 – I Shot An Arrow Into the Air. Written by Rod Serling but based on an idea by Madelon Champion. The Arrow One, the first manned spacecraft, suddenly disappears off the radar screens after launch, and all contact is lost. It turns out that Arrow One crashed on an uncharted asteroid. Three of the eight astronauts have survived the wreck, but their precious remaining water is in short supply. One of the astronauts, Corey, played by Dewey Martin, intends to kill his fellow astronauts for the remaining water. One of the astronauts he attacked and left for dead cannot speak, but still indicates that he saw something over the hill before he died, and he scrawls a symbol of it in the sand before he dies. Corey, now the last astronaut remaining after he kills Commander Donlin, heads to the hill with the strange symbol. In an absolutely killer ending, Corey, to his horror, discovers the meaning of the strange symbol – it was a telephone pole. The Arrow One had not crashed on an asteroid…it simply fell back to the Earth and crashed into the Nevada desert. One of the highlights of the episode is Serling’s sudden mid-episode narration in which he mockingly urges “Corey, yeah, you better keep moving. That’s the order of the moment: keep moving.” I can still remember my older brothers hysterically laughing at Serling’s mocking of Corey, as they clearly wanted to see him get what was coming to him. Per The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling and Champion were in a social setting when Champion pitched the idea to Serling, who then paid Champion “$500 on the spot. But it never happened again.”
#3 – The Purple Testament. Written by Rod Serling. The setting is during World War II on the Philippine Islands in 1945. Lieutenant Fitzgerald, leader of an infantry platoon, realizes that whenever he sees an eerie glow in the face of one of his soldiers, that soldier ends up being killed. Fitzgerald is relieved to hear that he is being sent back to division headquarters so that he will no longer have to look at the faces of the men in his platoon. However, while he is looking into the mirror when shaving before his trip back to headquarters, he sees the eerie glow in his own face. He then sees the same glow in the face of his driver. After the two of them leave in their Jeep, the men of the platoon hear a distant explosion in the direction that the Jeep traveled. Nothing more needed to be said of their fate. Serling clearly drew upon his own experiences when depicting the men of the platoon as he was a World War II paratrooper who fought and was wounded in the Philippines. A crazy story associated with this episode from The Twilight Zone Companion is that on the day that it was first set to air, the actor who played Lieutenant Fitzgerald, William Reynolds, and the director of the episode, William Bare, were on a small plane flying from Jamaica to Miami. The plane’s engines died, and it went down in the ocean, killing one of the five people on board. Bare had two broken legs, but he and Reynolds decided to try and swim, on their backs, the 4 miles back to the Jamaican shore. While they were swimming, Bare said to Reynolds “You know what’s playing tonight?” Reynolds replied, “Yeah, The Purple Testament.” Bare said, “Bill, please don’t look at me.”
#2 – One For The Angels. Written by Rod Serling. An old man, Lewis J. Bookman (played by Ed Wynn), is confronted by Mr. Death, brilliantly played by veteran actor, Murray Hamilton (he later played the sleazy mayor in Jaws). Death informs sidewalk-salesman Bookman that his time on this Earth is up, but Bookman does not want to go until he makes his final “Big Pitch – a Pitch for the angels.” He convinces Death to let him live until he does this ‘Pitch’, but he actually has no intention of ever giving it. Unfortunately, Death has to take someone else in Bookman’s place, and after a little girl from the neighborhood is hit by a truck and left fighting for her life, Bookman terrifyingly realizes that she is the one chosen by Death in place of Bookman. He also learns that the time that Death will be taking her is midnight. Bookman realizes that if he can prevent Death from making his “appointment at midnight”, then the little girl will live. He then proceeds to try and distract Death from his appointment by selling him his various street merchandise. Bookman gives the pitch of a lifetime, and the distracted Death then misses his midnight appointment. The little girl lives, but it also means that Bookman must now accompany Death. In what many regard as The Twilight Zone’s most beloved episode, the emotional ending as Bookman and Death walk down the deserted street together always leaves a lump in the throat. Interestingly, per The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling actually wrote One For The Angels many years prior, just after college. In the original story, “an unsuccessful sidewalk pitchman tries to save his two-bit punk brother from a couple of hitmen by giving a pitch so beguiling that they will always be surrounded by a crowd.” Serling specifically wanted a story for the much-admired Wynn and re-wrote his old Angels story just for him. The re-written story proved superior to the original.
#1 – Walking Distance. Written by Rod Serling. An advertising executive, Martin Sloan, weary of his fast paced, busy, and unfulfilling life stops at a gas station outside of his boyhood home and decides to take a nostalgic walk to his old hometown, commenting that it is within “walking distance.” While walking through the town, he gradually realizes that he has somehow miraculously been transported back in time to when he was just a child. He confronts his parents, but they think he is some crazy kook and angrily shut their door in his face. He then tries to talk to himself as a young boy, to simply tell the boy to enjoy this wonderful period of his life. But, the frightened child runs from him, trips off of the merry-go-round and injures his leg, a pain that the elder Sloan immediately feels. In what many regard as one of the greatest scenes in Twilight Zone history, Sloan’s father confronts Sloan after reading through the contents of his dropped wallet. The father knows that this man is actually his son, Martin, who has somehow traveled back in time. Despite the fact that Martin is now the same age as his father, he still seeks his counsel – the same way, and with the same respectful deference that he always had in their father-son dynamic. After Martin reluctantly agrees with his father that he must go back, his father says, “Martin, is it so bad where you’re from?” Martin responds, “I thought so, Pop. I’ve been living on a dead run, and I was tired. And one day I knew I had to come back here. I had to come back and get on the merry-go-round, and eat cotton candy, and listen to a band concert. To stop and breathe and close my eyes and smell and listen. His father wisely advises, “I guess we all want that. Maybe when you go back, Martin, you’ll find that there are merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are. Maybe you haven’t been looking in the right place. You’ve been looking behind you. Try looking ahead.” The episode is deeply personal for Serling, and most regard the character of Martin Sloan as Serling himself who was clearly suffering from the enormous responsibilities associated with maintaining the production and quality of The Twilight Zone. As revealed in The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling got the idea for this episode “while walking on a set at MGM when I was suddenly hit by the similarity of it to my hometown. Feeling an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, it struck me that all of us have a deep longing to go back – not to our home as it is today, but as we remember it. It was from this simple incident that I wove the story Walking Distance…”
