I have been slowly working my way through the original Twilight Zone series. It is a fantastic show and I am not sure an anthology show has ever surpassed it since. I was wondering what people’s favourite episode was, especially episodes that aren’t endlessly cited as the creme de la creme.
It is funny the modern resonances I get from episodes,I lately watched “World Of His Own” which was written as comical but really strikes an up to date satirical chord with regard to male privilege and the recent round of abuse allegations.
One for the Angels. It was the second episode aired. I think it’s one of the best told stories in the series and has an outstanding performance from Ed Wynn.
Nick of Time: it’s a solid Maybe-Magic-Maybe-Mundane story, with William Shatner carrying the episode in low-key fashion – well, low-key for Shatner, but that’s still weirdly memorable – and it’s interesting enough to stick with you.
“Time Enough at Last” Season 1 Episode 8. One of several appearance by Burgess Meredith and a classic episode. A bank teller who likes to read but never has enough time for his reading. He sneaks into the vault at lunch to read and thus he is the only survivor of a nuclear exchange, but at last he has enough time to read. …
No titles, but there was one where a man tossed a coin on a beggars tray. The coin landed on its edge, and the man who tossed the coin had super natural powers until the the coin flipped down.
Another was when a street lost power. And everyone freaked. Only to find out on the next block there was no problem. But no one wanted to venture out to discover that.
A World of His Own - a writer describes his characters so well that he can bring them to life, just by speaking into his dictaphone recorder. A particularly like the coda.
It’s a Good Life is a great one. We’ve all known children who run the show in a family.
Note: it has an amazing sequel on one of the more recent Twilight zone revivals(the Forest Whittaker one). Stars Bill Mumy again, too. Well worth a back-to-back watch sometime.
Yeah that the one when the lights when out , I couldn’t remeber the title of the show . It really got people spooked after seeing it ! We talking about it at school !
“The Shelter”. Family builds a bomb shelter. This resonated with me because our own next door neighbor built a bomb shelter under his driveway. He was a defense worker in one of the nuke bases in Albuquerque. In the TZ episode, everyone ridicules them. We did too, in real time. Then the “attack” begins, and everyone wants to get into the shelter. They bust down the door, and it’s just a rumor gone viral. Human behavior at it’s best. Last time I drove past the place, the air vents were still visible.
A loser, Jackie Rhoades, is in a hotel room, waiting for orders to kill a bartender who refused a protection racket. The hotel room has mirrors. The bulk of the episode is Jackie being berated by the confident version of himself, the version who wants to be real and who needs to whip the nervous, skulking Jackie into shape to make it happen, looking at himself through those mirrors.
It’s timeless, it’s simple, and it hangs on a monologue written and acted as a dialogue, one actor in two simultaneous roles, deftly realized by simple craftsmanship on the part of everyone involved. It’s efficient but not cheap. Cheapness, cutting corners in visible ways, kills suspension of disbelief and can turn a tragedy into a farce, but the only things cheap about this episode are deliberately so: the setting and the character of the nervous version of Jackie Rhoades.
It’s unusual for the series because you can analyze it as being in no way supernatural, just a cinematic trick, a narrative convention used to externalize a purely interior drama. The interior drama drives the whole episode, and the acting makes you care about the character.
It also made good on the promise in the opening monologue: This really does take you to a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.