Twilight Zone episode review — 5.21 — Spur of the Moment

Episode 5.21 “Spur of the Moment”
Original air date: February 21, 1964
Writer: Richard Matheson
Director: Elliot Silverstein

Rating: 7/10

An 18-year-old woman, Anne Marie Henderson (Diana Hyland), goes out for a horseback ride when she’s confronted by a scary woman dressed in black riding a black horse. She’s chased, but makes it back home, terrified.

Here, she is comforted by her fiancee, Robert Blake (Robert J. Hogan), and her parents, whom she tells she knows that woman in black wanted to kill her. Her ex-fiancee, David Mitchell (Roger Davis), then shows up and tries to get her to come with him. It’s clear that Anne still has feelings of some sort for him, but her parents hate him, and her dad threatens to shoot him.

It’s sort of a soap opera plot, and it’s definitely quite different from most of the series.

After David gets kicked out of the home, we then see the woman in black arrive home, and we see that it’s an older version of Anne. In financial troubles and depressed, she laments her decision to marry David. She claims she saw a ghost earlier that day of her younger self.

It’s an interesting episode, even though I’m not sure it’s a great one. It tells a genuinely dramatic, unique, and ambitious story.