The Twilight Zone

In My Humble Opinion
1

This is for all my fellow :Twilight Zone" fans out there: What’s your favorite episode[s]?

My favorites:
“One More Pallbearer”[A millionare tires to fake a nuclear war as part of a plot to get revenge on people who have humiliated him]

“Number Twelve Looks Just Like You”[The future society where everyone is beautiful…and the same. LOVE the payoff on this one"]

“Nick of Time” [William Shatner and the fortune-telling machine]

“The Little People”[Astronaut finds colony of tiny men]

“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” [Aliens may have invaded a quiet suburban town-but which neighbor is the REAL alien?]

whew. Hard to limit myself to just five. Post away!

2

I loved the one where the old man in New Orleans made his heirs wear masks until midnite, and when they took them off, their faces were like the masks.

I didn’t see this one. It sounds great, though.

3

“Nick Of Time” is one of my favorites, too. William Shatner is just great – he doesn’t indulge in any the overly-mannered, tic-laden garbage acting that marred his Captain Kirk.

Here are my others:

“The Invaders.” A woman who doesn’t speak suddenly finds herself dealing with tiny aliens. If people loved that episode of “Buffy” where peoples’ voices were stolen, they should check this one out.

“Time Enough At Last.” Burgess Meredith is just wonderful as the misanthropic bookworm.

“Death Ship.” A crew of astronauts land on a planet, only to discover a ship identical to theirs crashed on the surface … with their dead bodies inside. I like how the astronauts go through several theories of the situation before the final revelation.

“Long Distance Call.” A child receives a toy phone from his grandmother, who dies shortly thereafter. The father’s frantic call toward the end is very moving.

4

Willoughby. A guy keeps dreaming about a perfect town named Willoughby while he is on a train. He decides to get off the train at Willoughby the next time he dreames about it. He does. He is hauled off from where he fell in a hurse from Willoughby Funeral Home.

5

Living Doll - “My name’s Talking Tina, and I’m going to kill you.”

6

I’m with Cheezit—I love the “Willoughby” episode. Every night when I commute home from my dreary Manhattan job, I gaze longingly out the window for that little Edwardian town . . . I’d jump, too, even KNOWING the ending!

I also love “I Sing the Body electric,” and the one where poor Inger Stevens is chased cross-country by the creepy hitchhiker.

7

Definitely “Eye of the Beholder,” about the woman who’s had unsuccessful cosmetic surgery to correct her horribly deformed face - and she turns out to be beautiful (by our standards), and everyone else is horribly deformed (by our standards).

8

I love the marathons they play on New Year’s.

I don’t know the episode’s title, but I love the one with Robert Redford. He plays the Angel of Death who has come to take this old woman home, and she won’t let him in. He pretends to be injured and she finally overcomes her fear and takes him into her home. It’s very sweet and comforting.

Other favorites include “Kick the Can” and “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” We read “Monsters” as a screenplay in 6th grade. What a great intro to the genre!

I love this thread!

9

Oh, the Robert Redford as Death one WAS good—the old woman, by the way, was played by Gladys Cooper, one of the greats of the early 20th-century stage in Britain. She was also Bette Davis’ mother in “Now, Voyager.”

10

Some of my favorites are the classics:

Already mentioned:

Eye of the Beholder
Monsters are Due on Maple Street
Nick of Time
Time Enough at Last
The Invaders

Some others:

The Howling Man: A man has the devil locked up, but can he keep him. Excellent photography (camera tilts when the main character goes delirious).

Printer’s Devil (an hourlong episode). Burgess Meredith plays a man who saves a struggling newspaper; for a price.

Five Characters in Search of an Exit: A soldier, a clown, a ballarina, and two other characters (whom I can’t remember offhand) find themselves in a room with no exit and no memory of who they are and how they got there.

Rip Van Winkle Caper: Some crooks decide to pull off a gold heist and have themselves suspended for 100 years, thus leaving the trail cold. The fun starts when they wake up.

A Game of Pool: Jack Klugman and Johnathan Winters have a supernatural billiards game. Be careful what you wish for, you just may get it.

Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?: One of the characters is an alien in disguise, but which?

Nightmare at 20,000 feet: A classic. I’m surprised no one mentioned this one

One for the Angels and Escape Clause: In both episodes, a man makes a deal (one with the angel of death, the other with the devil). In both cases, of course, the deal doesn’t turn out as they planned.

Anyway, those were my favorites:

Of course, my mentioning the episode of 20,000 feet made me think of a recent episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun.

William Shatner (playing the Big Giant Head) gets an airplane. The aliens (John Lithgow and Co.) are waiting for him. Lithgow’s character asks him how the flight was.
“Horrible,” says the Head. "There was this little creature on the wing (a reference to his 20,000 feet episode).
“I know!!” says Lithgow. “The same thing happened to me!” (Lithgow played the same character in the Twilight Zone movie).

Zev Steinhardt

11

Nothing In the Dark

Zev Steinhardt

12

Call me an old softie, but “Night of the Meek,” with Art Carney playing an alcoholic department store Santa who turns out to be the real thing, is probably my top choice. Gets ya all weepy and stuff.

Honorable mention to “Walking Distance,” starring Gig Young; another “harried ad exec finds a Better Place” episode, but for some reason I like it better than “A Stop at Willoughby.”

Also “What You Need,” with Steve Cochran playing a grifter who takes advantage of a sweet old pitchman who can see into the future. It was based on a short story by Henry Kuttner (see the “Favorite Horror Story” thread for Kuttner raves).

13

I also liked The Midnight Sun. That’s the one where the Earth’s orbit has somehow decayed and the planet is hurtling into the Sun.

14

What about the surprise ending?

15

Snooooopy: I loved the ending to that episode. In fact, I had written out the entire plot (as much as I could remember, anyway) as part of my post, but decided to shorten it.

I remember watching that as a kid and thinking, “Oh, so it was all a dream…” until the real ending kicked in, and just saying, “Whoa, I didn’t see that coming.”

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What’s your least favorite episode? (If it’s not too much of a hijack :slight_smile: )

I didn’t like the one where this woman goes to a witch to get this guy to love her, but at a cost of turning into a killer panther at night. It’s set in the hills, and they all talk just too down-home for me.

Another favorite of mine is the one with Dick York who suddenly can hear everyone’s thoughts.

17

Frankly, and I’ve never admitted this in public before because it’s a “classic” and all, but I’ve always thought “Time Enough at Last” was unnecessarily meanspirited.

Burgess Meredith takes NOTHING but shit…nasty shit…from his boss, from his wife, etc., for almost the entire episode. Didn’t he deserve a happy ending?

18

I don’t know the names of the episodes in question, but:

My favorite episode:
It starts after three astronauts have returned to Earth from a spaceflight, in which they passed through some mysterious mist. One of them is hospitalized due to an injury. The other two go out to celebrate. One by one, all of them disappear off the face of the Earth and are completely forgotten about by everyone. Finally, even the spaceship they flew on vanishes, all of them are literally erased from existence.

My least favorite episode:
The one in which the aliens claim they want “to serve mankind” and it turns out the really want “to serve mankind FOR DINNER!” That one was just plain ludicrous, and deservedly lampooned on “The Simpsons.”

19

Amen. Shatner kinda went downhill after that :wink:

20

**

I don’t remember that one. (No, that’s not the title!)

To Serve Man.

Surely not one of the greatest, but this one is far from the worst, IMHO

Zev Steinhardt