favorite Twilight Zone episode?

Post Reply New Topic

What's your favorite Twilight Zone episodes? Post the title (if you know it) and the summary. Don't forget the twist ending!
Here's mine:
"It's a Good Life"
A boy has the power to wish anything he wants and it comes true. The whole small town is under his thumb and must obey his every whim.
The twist: Actually, the whole ep is a twist. But at the end, he "punishes" the town by causing a blizzard. But it's a good thing it happened, really.

That's a good episode. It's been years since I've seen it, but I remember the story. I saw that there was a TZ marathon on during the holiday, but only got to see a few minutes of an unfamiliar episode.

A classic that always sticks in my mind is "Eye Of The Beholder"--

Woman wakes up in a hospital with her entire face bandaged, apparently having undergone surgery for a disfiguration. The bandages are removed by unseen doctors and she is absolutely gorgeous. The doctors react shockingly, still unseen, and state that there was simply nothing they could do and the procedure didn't seem to work.

The twist was that the "normal" people and doctors are hideously disfigured and the beautiful woman was the one they were trying to "fix".

I was going to mention that one. If you remember what the man on the screen said, I think it could relate to aspies in society. There was one other that I think was an aspie one: The one where The guy is dreaming about 'Whilloughby' He seemed very aspieish.

My favorite is the 'Talking Tina' one. Don't remember all of it but it's basicly: Guy's wife gets toy for daughter, a "talking tina" doll. The doll tells him it hates him, etc. Then it tells him it's going to kill him. All the while, the wife thinks it's stress or something, I think marrage problems. In the end, the doll does kill him. (trips dow stairs)
My other favorite is 'Nightmare at 20000 ft." with William Shatner. I don't have time to explain it.

Two I remember off the bat- the one where this guy is in jail, then is pronounced guilty and executed and everytime he dies he just goes back to the beginning again- he tries to explain it but no one believes him... his dying thousands of times over and over again made him quite insane. "Groundhog Day" touched on this.

The other one is the one with the clock that stops time and the woman stops time a second before the nuclear warheads hit- it ends with total silence and an ICBM 100 feet in the air just about to hit.

Also the one with Sherman Helmsley and the Devil- Helmsley is a mathematician and says he'd sell his soul for the answer to his math problem.

I have two favorites. One is "Four O'clock". This nut is under the impression that people all over are evil. He claims that at 4 o'clock every evil person will turn twoo feet tall. He himself turns two feet tall at the end.

I don't know the title of this other one, but these people are trapped in a cylinder with no way out. It turns out they're dolls in a donation bin.

My favorite was the one where the main character hated his life. Then he found a place where people traded their lives and traded it for someone elses. His new life was perfect in every way, but eventualy he realized there must be something wrong if the one who originally lived this life traded it for his own horrible life. Then the wife he got when he traded lives murdered him because the first one who lived this life was cheating on her. The first one traded because he knew she was going to kill him.

It may have been a little different but it's been a long time since I've seen it.

The one where a very young Robert Redford is the angel of death pretending to be a wounded cop outside an old lady's door.

And "In Praise of Pip," the one where the nobody pawnbroker's son has been mortally wounded in a war and a carnival appears and his son is there as a ten year old kid. Includes the classic line, "My only boy is dying in a place called Vietnam."

"Eye of the Beholder"
"Nightmare at 25,000ft"

There's one where this older guy hits and kills a newspaper delivery boy in a hit and run accident, but the car keeps honking in the garage and doing other things to get his attention. After his young rival in the workplace is accused of his crime, the car follows him and after he gets in, he's taken to the police station.

I really liked the one where a woman went back in time to assassinate Hitler when he was a baby. She eventually manages to steal him from his parents and replace him with a homeless woman's baby, and jump off a bridge killing herself and Hitler. The homeless baby grows up to be the Hitler that starts the Holocaust. She killed the wrong one made the Holocaust possible.

I don't quite remember the whole episode, it's been awhile since I have seen it. Some sort of nueclear holocaust happens and a man survives in his shelter with all of his beloved books as companions. Then, he breaks his glasses.

Or, how about the one where the pioneer woman is living by herself and a little spaceship lands on her roof. The little "aliens" terrorize her untill she kills them and smashes their ship. The twist at the end was that she was actualy a giant alien, and the little ship was from NASA.

”Odyssey of Flight 33”: A passenger plane enroute to Idlewild airport breaks through a barrier and travels back in time, as the crew and passengers discover when they see a brontosaurus walking around in what should have been NYC. Attempting to return to 1961, they arrive in 1939 in time for the World Fair. It ends with this closing narration, which never fails to give me shivers.
A Global jet airliner, en route from London to New York on an uneventful afternoon in the year 1961, but now reported overdue and missing, and by now searched for on land, sea, and air by anguished human beings fearful of what they'll find. But you and I know where she is, you and I know what's happened. So if some moment, any moment, you hear the sound of jet engines flying atop the overcast, engines that sound searching and lost, engines that sound desperate, shoot up a flare or do something. That would be Global 33 trying to get home...from the Twilight Zone.

Oh there were so many great episodes of the Twilight Zone! I have already mentioned my favourite episode; here are a few other (it’s hard to choose) that I will always remember

”Little girl lost”: A portal to the 4th dimension opens up in the wall in a house and a girl ventures inside. Her father tries desperately to reach her before the portal closes.

”Judgement night”: A man finds himself on a ship in 1942, confused. As the episode plays out, he remembers being the captain of a nazi submarine, sinking a defenseless freighter. Now he is doomed to relive the experience indefinitely.

”The midnight sun”: A woman is living in a nightmarish world where the Earth has moved closer to the sun. The heat is a killer, water is running out and people are going nuts. Then she wakes up and is relieved to find that it was only a nightmare and that the room is chilly. In reality the Earth had moved away from the sun.

”The Rip Van Wynkle Caper”: 4 gold thieves seek refuge in a suspended animation chamber and spend the next century sleeping. Upon waking up one has died in his sleep, and the other 3 soon turn on each other for gold and water. As the last survivor crawls desperately thirsty along the road, a car with a couple stops. He begs them to give him water, and pushes the gold into the hands of the man before dying. The couple is confused. Why would he treat gold as something valuable, the metal has been manufactured for almost a century…

”People are alike all over”: Astronauts land on Mars, and finds there are people there. One of them is a cynic, the other is optimistic and says that people are alike all over (causing a knot in my gut at that comment, at age 8 or 9!) The optimist dies and the other is greeted by the Martians.It seems that they treat him nice. The next day he finds out that he has been sent to a Martian zoo, causing him to bitterly say ’People are alike everywhere’.
I first saw this one at age 8 or 9, and it resonated well with my misantropic mind.

Midnight Sun, Little Girl Lost, The Type Devil,

I liked this one too, but haven't found out what the title is.

BTW, the SyFy (hate that name) is running a marathon of them today!

Two wonderful episodes. The latter is called "I of Newton".

Two other unforgettable ones are:
” The monsters are due on Maple Street”: Something passes whizzing over a neighbourhood, and soon the power is out. A boy says that this is the way alien invasions take place. A light flickers on in one house, a machine starts up in another. People start accusing each other of being aliens and a man is shot. The neighbourhood turns into a riot. In the closing picture we see a space ship and 2 aliens monitoring the people, commenting on how easy it is to creaete paranoia and turn people against each other. This is the easist way to conquer the Earth, one Maple street at a time.
Rod Serling’s unforgettable closing narration:
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices. To be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the frightened, thoughtless search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things can not be confined to the Twilight Zone.

”Button, button”: A couple in economic trouble is visited by a strange man giving them a box. He says that inside is a button. If they push it they will receive a significant amount of money, but a person they do not know will die. He leaves and the couple wonders if it is for real. They start arguing about it and the man puts the box in the trash. The following day his wife pushes the button while he’s at work. The stranger comes to their home, gives them money and takes the box. He leaves after telling them that the box will be reprogrammed and given to someone else. "I can assure you it will be offered to someone whom you don't know."
The short story it was based on, by Richard Matheson, is also great. It ends with the husband dying and the stranger returning saying: “Do you really think that you knew your husband?”

“The star”: A priest on a star ship comes to a dead world. The gentle species that used to live there (they eamine the remnants of their civilisation) expired when their sun went nova. He experiences deep anguish when he realises that the star is the star of Bethlehem.

My personal favorites were 1) the already mentioned, "It's a Good Life," and 2) "Walking Distance," with the late actor Gig Young.

In 'Walking Distance,' a man in his 30's, overwhelmed by his stressful life, just takes off on a long drive. His car breaks down, he walks into town, and, surprise, it is the hometown where he grew up 25 years earlier. Nothing has changed and he even sees his long-dead parents looking as they did then, and, his own 10-year old self. The man is overwhelmed by this wonderful opportunity to 'go home' and make everything right, talk things out with his parents, give advice to his younger self, etc.

The twist is that everything the man does goes horribly wrong and makes things worse, not better. He finally takes his dad's advice and leaves, realizing that he cannot 'go home again' and needs to try harder in his current life.