Top 10 Twilight Zone Episodes

This New Year’s Eve and Day, as in years past, the Sy Fy Channel (formerly known as the Sci-Fi Channel before they got all hip and edgy) ran their Twilight Zone Marathon, a gazillion hours of episodes from the landmark Rod Serling television anthology that celebrated its 50-year anniversary last year.

Of course, I am fully aware that a Twilight Zone cult has arisen over the past decade or so, and its members worship the show based on a small number of episodes it considers the best sci-fi stories ever. You know the ones I’m talking about – Burgess Meredith survives an atomic blast only to lose his reading glasses; Agnes Moorehead destroys a tiny alien space craft, which turns out to be from the United States; William Shatner sees a hairy monster stumbling around on the wing of a flying airplane.

There are others, but you get the idea. The point of this list is to take the stand that there are a lot of other-better Twilight Zone episodes-than the ones we usually see on top ten lists. And so, what follows is what I consider to be the Top 10 Twilight Zone episodes of all time.

The Hitchhiker

Watching this episode as a child has single-handedly kept me from picking up a hitchhiker. Ever.

Nan Adams (played by the lovely Inger Stevens) has been in a car accident on a cross-country road trip. After getting her car repaired, she notices a scary looking man hitchhiking. Wisely, she drives away quickly.

Unfortunately, wherever she goes, she keeps seeing the same man, always asking for a ride.

Near the close of the show, Nan at last realizes the truth: She actually died in that first accident, and the man is Death, simply waiting to take her to the other side.

Yikes, what a spooky show and concept.

The After Hours

Marsha White is a department store shopper looking for a special gift that she is told can only be bought on the 9th floor. Oddly, the store elevator only goes as high as the 8^th floor. Nevertheless, she arrives at a 9th floor and buys a gold thimble for her mother. (The thimble, by the way, is the only item for sale on the entire deserted floor.)
As Marsha prepares to leave the store, she sees a scratch on the thimble and goes to the Complaint Department. When she says that she bought the item on the 9th floor, she is told that there is no 9th floor! Marsha finally sees the sales clerk who sold her the thimble, but is shocked to discover that the woman isn’t really a salesclerk at all; she’s a mannequin.

While resting in an office after her shock, she becomes locked inside in the closed store. Trying to get out of the store, she begins hearing voices calling to her. Then she starts seeing the store mannequins moving about.

Frightened, she returns to the elevator, which takes her up to the 9th floor. Suddenly surrounded by mannequins, she now remembers that she too is a mannequin and has been allowed one month to be out among the humans. What a wonderful surprise in the plot!

The notion of being locked inside a closed department store at night has always been a terrifying idea for me after having seen “After Hours” as a child.

The Howling Man

While walking through Europe in the 1920s, a stranger becomes exhausted and lost. He seeks shelter in a nearby castle. Inside, he collapses, and falls asleep.

On waking, the stranger hears a howl and discovers an old man in a cell. The man says he has been imprisoned by members of an insane religious order.The stranger is taken away from the imprisoned man and meets with the leader of the order, Brother Jerome. He explains that the prisoner is the devil and has been locked up using the “Staff of Truth” to bar the door since shortly after World War I.

The stranger thinks Jerome is insane, although he pretends to believe the story. Jerome assigns another brother to watch him, but after the brother falls asleep, the stranger creeps down to the cell and removes the staff barring the cell door. As the prisoner exits the cell, he suddenly takes on the appearance of the devil before escaping the castle in a plume of smoke.

Jerome finds the stranger and says that the inability to recognize the devil remains Man’s greatest weakness. At a future date, the stranger explains to a hotel maid that since that day he has been hunting for the devil and finally succeeded in locking him in a room. He plans to return with Brother Jerome, but after the stranger leaves, the curious maid goes to the room and removes the Staff of Truth barring the door…

This episode is spookier than hell!

Twenty Two

In a hospital for stress, Liz Powell has a strange nightmare. Every night, she awakens at midnight, breaks a drinking glass full of water, then follows a nurse who leads her through the hospital to room 22.

The strange nurse then opens the door to the room and always says, “Room for one more.” After having the dream for several days, Liz investigates and discovers that room 22 in the hospital morgue.

When she is at last discharged from the hospital, Liz prepares to fly home. Unfortunately, when she hers her flight announced, it is flight 22, and she begins to panic. Things get worse when she bumps a woman who drops a glass vase, which breaks like the glass in her dream. As Liz prepares to board the airplane, a stewardess who looks like the nurse in her dream, says “Room for one more, honey”.

Screaming, Liz does not board the plane, running away instead. The plane takes off and moments later it explodes.

Months after seeing this, I was afraid of hospitals and never wanted anything to do with the number 22.

A Hundred Yards over the Ridge

In the year 1847, Chris Horn (Cliff Robertson) is part of a wagon train heading for California. When his son becomes ill, he sets off across the desert looking for a town where there might be a doctor or medicine for his son. Crossing a high sandy ridge, he sees power lines, a blacktop highway and fast-moving semi-truck, all of which are alien to him.

He falls when the truck whizzes by, setting off his rifle and wounding himself. Finally finding an old gas station, he is helped with his wound, but the people are concerned that the strange man talks of covered wagons and is carrying an antique gun. As he rests, Horn gets medicine for his wound, and also reads about his son-a future doctor-in an encyclopedia he looks at.

When the people at the gas station send for the sheriff to help the man, Horn escapes, retracing his steps and heading back over the ridge to his family and his own place in time.

Using the medicine he got in the future, Horn helps his son and knows he will be healed and become a doctor in the future.

I used to do a lot of hiking in the Mojave Desert and each time I climbed over a sandy ridge, I would wonder if I hadn’t crossed over a time warp and into the past.

The Rip Van Winkle Caper

This is one of the better “twist at the end” episodes I can remember.

Running from the law after stealing $1 million in gold, four thieves hide in a desert cave in which one of the men named Farwell has designed chambers that will allow the men to sleep for 100 years, then emerge to spend their gold when nobody is chasing them anymore.

When they wake up in the future, they find that one man died when a rock fell from the cave’s ceiling and broke the sleeping chamber he was in. Next, all of them but Farwell perish as they try to walk through the desert when they crash the getaway truck.

Farwell continues down the highway, carrying the gold he would not leave behind. Shortly after he collapses from heat exhaustion, a hovercraft approaches (it is 2061 now) and Farwell offers his gold to the couple inside in exchange for water and a ride to town, but it’s too late, he dies seconds later.

As the man from the future gets back into his car, he tells his wife, “That man just offered this gold to me as if it was really worth something.” The wife asks her husband if gold was ever worth anything, and the husband replies, “Sure, about a…. hundred years or so ago, gold was worth something-before they found a way to manufacture it.” He tosses the gold bar away.

The Obsolete Man

In a future totalitarian state, Romney Wordsworth (Burgess Meredith) is on trial for being “obsolete.” He is a librarian (punishable by death when the government made literacy illegal). He also believes in God, also punishable by death.

The Chancellor announces in court that Wordsworth shall be liquidated. Wordsworth is given a choice as to how he will die. Wordsworth requests he be allowed a personal assassin to whom he will tell his preferred method of death. He also requests a television audience for his execution.

A camera is installed in Wordsworth’s study so TV viewers will watch him in his final hours. He summons the chancellor, who shows up at 11:15 p.m. After some time, Wordsworth reveals that the door has been locked and he, the Chancellor, will be killed along with Wordsworth, by a bomb set to go off at midnight. To show the nation how a spiritual man faces death, Wordsworth starts reading verses from the Bible.

As time passes, Wordsworth-and the TV audience-watch the chancellor growing more and more afraid.

Just before the bomb explodes, the chancellor begs Wordsworth to let him go: “In the name of God!” Wordsworth obliges, first reminding the TV audience that the chancellor pled to God-which the State believes does not exist.

The chancellor escapes but has now been declared obsolete, just as Wordsworth was. The mob in the courtroom surrounds him, and to drags him forcibly from the room.

Nice to see nasty people get what’s coming to them in the end!

The Midnight Sun

I love stories where what we believe to be true is proven to be just the opposite of the real truth. This episode also makes me think of the growing panic over global warming and the fact that nobody really knows what the earth will be like in a hundred years.

In this episode, the earth is experiencing severe heat from the sun and an artist named Norma, and her landlady are the last two people in their apartment. The others either moved north or have already died.

The two watch in terror as their water supply and food grow scarce. Time passes and the temperature grows hotter and hotter. People in the city have been warned about looters and when they hear footsteps outside, a man with a gun breaks in and drinks their supply of water.

Unable to handle the heat, the landlady collapses and dies. The thermometer reaches 140, and shatters. Norma’s oil paintings melt from the heat, as Norma screams and also collapses.

At the end of the episode, we find Norma in bed with a high fever. The landlady and a doctor watch over her as snow flies outside. It turns out that Norma dreamt the whole episode about a hot earth and, in reality, the earth is going into an ice age and getting colder and colder.

In the last minute of the show, Norma tells the landlady about her nightmare, adding, “Isn’t it wonderful to have darkness, and coolness?”

The landlady, with sadness in her voice, says “Yes, my dear, it’s….wonderful.”

The Hunt

Talk about a tear-jerker. Between the simple message about a man and his dog, and the wonderful harmonica music as a backdrop, this tale really pulls on your heartstrings.

70-year old Hyder Simpson lives in the backwoods with his wife and his hound-dog Rip. Mrs. Simpson has seen some bad omens, and warns her husband not to go raccoon hunting that night. When Rip plunges into a pond after a racoon, Hyder jumps in to save him. In the morning, man and dog wake up beside the pond.

Hiking back home, Hyder finds that his wife, the preacher, and his neighbors can neither see or hear him-apparently, they are both dead. Returning to the woods, Hyder meets a man at a gate he doesn’t remember seeing before. The man tells Hyder that this is the gate to heaven, and invites him in.

When Hyder and Rip start to enter, the man says that dogs aren’t allowed in heaven. The old man says that anyplace that won’t allow a dog, isn’t any place he wants to go. So he keeps on walking down the road, where he meets a young man who tells him that the gate a ways back was the entrance to hell, and heaven is just down the road a piece.

What about my dog? Asks Hyder, and the young man (who also tells Hyder that he is an angel) says that Rip is more than welcome in heaven.The angel also tells Hyder that his wife will be coming shortly, and won’t have any trouble with the Devil at the gate.

Night Call

Phone calls in the middle of the night have always scared me. Watching this as a child only made the fear worse!

An elderly, wheelchair-bound woman named Elva receives strange phone calls at night. At first the caller says nothing, and all she hears is static. Later, she hears moaning sounds. After saying, “Hello? Hello?” several times, Elva hears the voice reply, “Hello?” At last, the anonymous caller mutters, “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”

Elva screams loudly that she wants to be left alone. The next morning, the phone company traces the source to a telephone line that fell during a storm. Later, Elva and her housekeeper visit the location of the line given by the telephone operator. To their amazement, they discover that the fallen line rests on the grave of Elva’s long-dead fiancé.

(What a Stephen Kingish sort of concept!)

A week before they were to be married, Elva had lost control of the car and her fiancé died. At home, she tries to talk to her dead fiance on the phone. He replies that she has told him to leave her alone, and that he always does what she says. Then the line goes dead, leaving Elva alone and crying in her bed.

Sheesh, if that doesn’t induce both shivers and tears, I don’t know what will!