Here’s a general TV/movie/short story question:
What stories have sudden, unexpected twist endings that you really like?
The ending could be from a movie, TV show, story, whatever. Here are a few I really like:
The Twilight Zone episode “The Invaders.”
Done almost entirely without dialogue, “The Invaders”: concerns an old woman
who lives by herself in the middle of nowhere. One day, she hears a thump on the roof and
goes up to investigate. She quickly finds that a tiny UFO has landed on the roof. From the
UFO emerges a little spaceman. The woman panics and swats the spaceman away, but the
spaceman’s partner appears and fires a gun at the woman, burning her arm. The woman retreats into her cabin, but the spacemen follow her.
Thus begins a cat and mouse game within the cabin, the spacemen ambushing the woman and blasting her with their guns, and the woman trying to fight back. The woman
finally manages to catch one of the spacemen in a blanket and beat it against a wall before dropping it in a box, and tossing the box into the fireplace. Spaceman #2 sees its partner’s fate and tries to run, but the woman pursues it with an ax. The spaceman makes it to his spaceship, and reports back to homebase to not send anymore troops-the planet is filled with giants. The woman appears and attacks the spaceship with her ax, destroying it and killing the occupant. As the woman retreats back into the cabin, the camera begins a slow pan of the spaceship’s exterior, finally focusing in on some writing on the spaceship’s side-Property of the US Air Force.
“The Outer Limits”(90’s version)
An episode called The Quality of Mercy. The episode takes place in the future, where
Earth is involved in a running war with the Evil Aliens(TM.) As the episode begins, a Earth spacefighter pilot has been shot down and captured by the aliens, and placed in a prison cell. With him in the prison cell is a young woman who introduces herself as a cadet
from Earth, who met a similar fate to the pilot. She has been there quit a bit longer.
Later on, the aliens enter the cell and remove the young woman. When they return her, she is changed-she now is beginning to resemble her alien captors. She explains to the pilot that the aliens are experimenting on her, trying to turn her into one of them.
The rest of the episode is taken up with attempted escapes by both the pilot and the cadet. At one point, the pilot is climbing through the ventilation shafts and sees the a liens performing experiments on the cadet.
By the episode’s end, both the pilot and the cadet are disheartened and hopeless.
The pilot offers to kill the cadet, and end her pain. Before he does however, he tells her to
take heart. There is an Earth fleet just outside the galaxy, hiding in preparation for a
surprise attack.
Before anyone can do anything else, the aliens return to take the cadet again. The
pilot protests, telling the aliens he wouldn’t let them turn her into one of them. The cadet
looks at the pilot and smiles. “Oh, they were never changing me into one of them.” She says. “They were just changing me back.”
Anyone else have ideas of this sort to contribute?
I love twist endings, but I would never post them. I’ll just name the places:
The Last of Sheila – I’ve mentioned it before. The classic mystery that gives you all the clues and plays fair. But you’ll still never guess the ending.
Sleuth --Related to TLOS in a weird way I won’t go into here. Several twists.
Body Heat – Sultry sex scenes between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, but it still has a killer twist at the end.
** The Sting** – Wonderful twist. Everyone’s probably familiar with it by now, but if you haven’t seen this, do so.
** Around the World in Eighty Days** --Jules Verne loved a good twist. This classic story has a realy unxpected one.
** Michael Strogoff** Less familiar Verne novel, with an nteresting twist.
The Sixth Sense I had to bring it up, of course.
** Charade** This film (with screenlay by Peter Stone) is practically a textbook on the art of revelation. More twists than “Sleuth”, and wittily done.
Mirage Also by Stone, also directed by Stanley Donen, and with some of the same ast as Charade, but a much more sombre film. Gregory Peck plays a man who chass a woman down nonexistent stairs, and hires private detective Walter Matthau to help him figure it out.
A coupl of recent films tha a lot of people like, but I don’t: The Usual Suspects and Fight Club. Eve the twists didn’t help me like these.
The Quantum Leap episode “The Leap Back, Part II” (set in Vietnam) has three great twists at the end, one after another.
And if you mention “Sleuth,” you also have to consider Ira Levin’s “Deathtrap.”
James Tiptree, Jr.'s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” has a great twist, too, set by a line of dialog that in any other context would be completely innocuous. As a matter of fact, Tiptree’s own life has a bunch of really strange twists to it, too.
Fredric Brown wrote some nicely twisted short short stories; my favorite is “Nightmare in Yellow.”
The Twilight Zone often used plot twists in a particularly nasty manner. Some seem labored and obvious now, though (e.g., “Eye of the Beholder”).
The twist at the end of “Sunset Boulevard” is a good one, and still has the power to surprise.
A lot of the twists mentioned seemed like they were coming, it was fun trying to figure out “How” they were coming. “The Usual Suspects” for example–anyone with a brain knew [deleted] was going to be Kaiser Sose (sp?), but we didn’t know “How” interestingly it was going to be revealed. Same with the “Outer Limits” episode with the cadet–the line of clever dialogue sorta saved what was a sledgehammer-subtle episode.
“Now Way Out” is a good one as well (I think that the title of the Kevin Costner flick).
I recall a DS9 (let’s rip of P. K. Dick for the umpteenth time) ep. in which O’Brien notices that all the crew are acting strangely and begins to suspect that they may be imposters. Good ending on that one.
There are several books out, anthologies of short Shaggy Dog stories. These are the best from masters of the form, not second-hand on television.
Sir Rhosis – I remember that DS9 episode! Good one, too…
I just assistant-stage-managed H.M.S. Pinafore for the U of Mich Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and we certainly shocked G&S purists by changing the ending…but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind! (I hear we got thrashed on Savoynet for it.)
Classic “Twilight Zone”'s were good at this. I don’t remember show titles, but:
Of course: “‘To Serve Man’…It’s a COOKBOOK!!!”
And another episode, astronauts have crashlanded. They spend the entire show staggering around, and one of them snaps entirely, kills his companions in order to take their canteens…and stumbles over the next rise to see a busy highway cutting through the desert.
The 90’s “Outer Limits” had a very amusing episode, featuring Wesley Crusher (whatever the actor’s name was) accidentally sending a planet-destroying bomb at Earth–he’d thought he was being a hero and nuking the Alien Menace.
The episode is called, of course, To Serve Man. And give credit where it’s due – that episode, like a lot of the most striking ones, started life as one of those wonderful science fiction short stories from the 1950s. Damon Knight, I believe, wrote “To Serve Man”.
As noted above, Fredric Brown is another of those writers of science fiction short stories with twisted endings. He was also good at horror, fantasy, and mysteries. I also recommend the sf/fantasy short stories of Robert Sheckley, William Tenn (Philip Klass – but not the skeptic one), Theodore Coggswell, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont.
And how can I write about twist endings without mentioning Frederick Forsyth? The Day of the Jackal is my all-time favorite thriller, and was made into a wonderful film by Fred Zinneman in 1972 (totally ignore the more recent remake). There are two “twists” in the book, one of which is how the assassin is actually going to get close enough to commit the crime. The Odessa File has a beautiful twist in it. The Devil’s Alternative has several twists in it, with the best one saved for the very last page. There are also several good twists in the stories contained in his short story collection No Comebacks.
Finally, I recommend The Poisoned Chocolates Mystery, mentioned in Sleuth – it is a real mystery, and, as Anthony Schaffer has Andrew Wyke say of it: “It’s a virtual textbook of the genre. A tour-de-force with no less than six separate solutions!”
The Twilight Zone episode and short story, People Are Alike All Over. A guy goes off into space, but before he does his friend warns him about meeting aliens, “People are alike all over.” The main guy lands on a planet and meets these aliens. He’s scared at first, but they make him comfortable in a house. After being in the house for awhile, he starts to get worried. He tries to leave, but can’t and then notices the bars on the windows and the aliens outside of the house looking in at him. He realizes he’s in a zoo and he screams (as if to his friend), “You’re right! People are alike all over!”
In an episode of Space: 1999, aliens land at Moonbase Alpha. They’re on their way to Earth, and they have an extra suspended-animation chamber. Commander Koenig decides to let the station’s computer choose the person best qualified/least necessary to the station, to go back home with the aliens.
Simmons, the station’s liaison from Earth, is desperate to go back home and won’t trust his fate to the computer. He waits for his opportunity, then brandishes a weapon and forces his way onto the aliens’ spacecraft, then into one of the chambers. The spacecraft leaves the Moon with Simmons and the aliens aboard.
In a separate scene the audience saw but not Simmons, we’d learned the chambers must be calibrated to the individual, and that if they aren’t, that person will wake up only hours into the decades-long voyage and then slowly suffocate/starve/thirst to death in the chamber.
This happens to Simmons and he’s still in radio contact with Alpha. Alpha explains to him what happened and we hear him screaming as he realizes his fate.
Dr. Russell asks Koenig who the computer picked. “Simmons,” he answers, and the episode’s over.
A Short Story: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. Read it here.
Discovering exactly what Opal was up to in “Hi Opal!”
The children’s book Holes. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is, but it combines a fairy tale, a western, and a prison camp story. There are ten major characters spread over three settings and timelines. There are three narrative threads, with more jumps back and forth than “Pulp Fiction.” You’ll spend most of the book wondering what the hell the point is, and then the author, Louis Sachar, brings everything together with a single line of narrative. With one line you everything comes into focus, and you realize that all of the clues were there all along. I cannot recommend this book enough.
“Field of Dreams” too many to mention, all of them perfectly timed.
The book The French Luitenant’s Woman. The movie changes the ending, so you still get the full impact of the book even if you’ve seen the movie.
The fabulous French movies Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. Really a single story in two parts, and a wonderful, compelling drama for every minute. The big revelation in the final 10 minutes of the second film is a doozy.
After Life: One of the great unwatched movies of the last decade. The big twist comes at such a quiet moment that you almost miss it.
Perfect Blue: Anime for adults, and the English dub is actually excellent. A young singer on the verge of stardom quits to take a minor part in a soap opera, is stalked by a psycho, and starts to lose her grip on reality.
This isn’t actually a twist ending so much as a complete trick perception episode. We don’t know that the old woman (Agnes Moorehead, who played Endora on Bewitched a few years later) is a giant, and we don’t know that the spacemen are anything but little alien invaders. We spend the entire episode thinking that this poor American hillbilly woman (there is almost no dialogue to determine setting, so most viewers assume from the scenery) is being harassed and tortured by these miniature ETs. This is definitely one of those episodes that’s entirely ineffective after the first viewing, and if it’s been spoiled. The entire effect depends on the assumptions that the audience makes. And having it described in narrative is also absolutely ineffective.
Saki wrote a classic short story called The Open Window. A nervous little gentlemen has been sent out to the country to recover from a breakdown. He has been invited to the house of a friend of a friend. When he gets there the woman of the house makes him at home and tells him she will have dinner ready before her husband and son - who are out hunting - return. But the adult daughter explains apologetically that the two men had died in a hunting accident some years before and her mother has never recoverd from the death. Now this makes our hero even more nervous, especially when the mother opens the big window and says she expects to hear the men come soon, singing their old hunting song.
Just as dusk falls our hero hears two men singing in the distance. The daughter stares out the window in horror.
He runs out the front door and flees.
Of course, the husband and the son are perfectly well. The daughter is a sneaky liar.
Stanley Ellin, John Collier, and Jack Ritchie have all written many great surprise short story endings. (And do I have to mention O. Henry?)
Years ago I was judging the Edgar for best mystery short story. I had to read literally hundreds of stories in a few months. Do you know how hard it is to be surprised
by anything after that? You can hear every creak of the machinery.
I remember one story I read at that time appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and the editor said it had a surprise ending. THis is a terrible thing to do, because I was EXPECTING the surprise ending. And sure enough I saw the surprise pages before it came - but the story went past it to a different surprise. And then ANOTHER. The story was called “Sinkhole” and I THINK the author was Carol Cail. Amazing story, about a man with a wife and a mistress and a sinkhole in his lawn…
Interesting notes about that OL episode:
That ep. [Titled “The Light Brigade” I think] was actually a sequel to the “cadet-captured pilot” episode mentioned earlier. Same universe, same evil aliens, etc. Both episodes are notable not only for their particularly nasty twists, but they both prominently feature past or future “Star Trek” players- The “earth bomb” episode, as you mentioned, featured Wil “Wesley Crusher” Wheaton, while the cadet in the first episode was played by Nicole “Ezri Dax” DeBoer.
This may seem odd but at about 10 my mom got me hooked on Dallas. And when Pam got up and saw Bobby in the shower, WHAM!!! It provided endless hours of discussion for me and her.
I’ve always been sad at the fact that I’ve never really got to watch the Planet of the Apes without knowing that they were back on Earth. Not because somebody spoiled it for me but because I watched it as a kid not really understanding what was going or the significance of the plot. I REALLY wish I could watch it without knowing that.
(I hear we got thrashed on Savoynet for it.)