You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone!
The problem with anthology shows is that there’s no real premise behind it. Each episode is different, there is no single story, no uniting setup that is the backdrop of each episode. Every episode is an entirely different entity, and yet, every episode of The Twilight Zone is distinctly, uniquely, belonging to that very show. There’s more to this show’s coherent identity than just its opening narration. (Spoilers below!)
The setup for The Twilight Zone, boiled down to its barest bones, is that each episode takes place in this bizarre universe (The titular Twilight Zone) in which anything can happen. Episodes are opened, narrated, and closed by creator Rod Serling, who pleasantly observes the horrors taking place among the stars of today’s episode, whatever the terrors may be.
In each episode, you could expect something like this:
We meet our main character, who is, at first glance, a very normal person. They move through life, mostly uninterrupted, until An Incident.
Sometimes the incident is nuclear holocaust. Sometimes the incident is noticing someone who looks just like them. Sometimes aliens land. Sometimes it’s as simple as noticing something just a little bit off about the people around them, and all of a sudden, they’re in The Twilight Zone. Any number of horrible things can proceed from here. Sometimes, there’s a happy ending. Often, there’s not. Our main character typically changes over the course of an episode, hopefully for the better, and the audience, whether they like it or not, is changed along with them, and is left with An Aesop.
Simple, yes, but boy, did it work.
These stories weren’t light, and they were rarely uplifting. Most of the time, the villains weren’t aliens, or gremlins, or supernatural entities. In fact, most episodes seemed dedicated to showcase the worst of humanity, what we are in the dark. Episodes like The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street depicts a town, frightened after a blackout and roused into further paranoia after hearing alien-invasion stories, end up killing innocent neighbors in fear. I Shot An Arrow Into the Air tells the story of an eight-man astronaut crew blasting off of Earth, crashing on what appears to be an asteroid. One of three survivors kills the other two for their water supply, only to stumble over a distant ridge and find himself in Arizona. The Shelter shows us a town threatened by a nuclear strike, and the residents immediately turn to the one family in town with a bomb shelter, first in desperation, then with murderous rage, threatening to tear each other apart.
The point? Humans are monsters, worse than any creatures we can come up with.
See, without a uniting set of characters, or ‘premise’, with a new story and starting point every week, The Twilight Zone wasn’t a show that focused on a plot, or characters: it focused on ideas. Specifically, it focused on humanity.
Very rarely was The Twilight Zone genuinely about the Outside. Sometimes the episode was ‘about’ an alien invasion, sometimes the end of the world, gremlins on the wing of a plane, people trapped in a zoo, or as wax figures, or toys, but always, every time, it came back to humanity itself. Our fears, our hopes, our greatest successes and our worst downfalls. It all came back to people, even when it was ‘about’ the invading aliens.
The Twilight Zone was very good at pinning down those hopes and fears, too. Whether we longed for success, wealth, a legacy, or something as simple as being remembered, or having enough time to read, The Twilight Zone could capture it succinctly, representing that hope in a character who strives for it, sometimes to a bitter end. The show understood that humans will always shoot for their goals, and will often pursue them at costs we can’t pay.
But the show’s understanding of humanity’s hopes is nothing compared to the grasp it had on humanity’s fears.
Isolation. Being forgotten. The Unknown. Loss of control, whether it be our minds, our emotions, or our environments. Imprisonment. Loss of humanity. The Twilight Zone had a way of taking what we were most afraid of and using it, often in a metaphorical sense, to tell stories, weaving themes and ideas together with the things that keep us up at night.
But of course, the thing The Twilight Zone is the most famous for is turning stories on its head at the last minute. Let’s talk about the twist endings.
I’ve mentioned a few notorious endings in previous articles: the broken glasses of Time Enough at Last, or the translated alien text revealed as a cookbook from To Serve Man. The Twilight Zone tended to be at its best when it suddenly twisted the events of the story with a surprise reveal. A woman who has received countless reconstructive surgeries in an attempt to cure her disfigurement turns out to look completely normal to the audience, being a beautiful woman in a society of people whom we would consider disfigured. A talkative member of a men’s club, when bet half a million dollars that he can’t stay silent for a year, manages to do so, and when those who made the bet can’t pay up, it is revealed that he severed his vocal cords in order to do it.
There are plenty of episodes that capture the art of the twist ending perfectly: Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?, The Invaders, People Are Alike All Over, Five Characters In Search of An Exit, and The Hitchhiker. Even the very first episode, Where Is Everybody? immediately encapsulates both the nature of the show and its themes, and the twist ending, which would be used very effectively for the remainder of the five seasons.
The Twilight Zone managed to combine both a regular formula and a new story every week. Each twist was different, every character had a different goal, and the oddness of The Twilight Zone was different each episode, whether people were being erased from the fabric of space and time, or whether the planet was hurtling away from the sun. And every time, no matter what, Rod Serling would serenely close the episode, leaving the audience to ponder the events, and the lessons of the episode.
It was predictable in its unpredictability. And it worked. Every week, the familiar formula would bring a new story, a new lesson, a new twist, and even though we expected the twist, it stuck with us, it made us think, which was the goal. The Twilight Zone was designed, not to frighten its audience, but to make them think.
The true mark of its quality is that, usually, it succeeded.
Thank you guys so much for reading! Stay tuned for the next article, where we’ll be discussing the genre and themes of The Twilight Zone. Don’t forget that the ask box is always open, whether for discussion, questions, suggestions, or conversations. I hope to see you in the next article.
Twentieth Century Fun With Film 