100 Favorite Shows: #40 — The Twilight Zone
“You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.”
I don’t pretend to understand the full weight of The Twilight Zone’s legacy and influence. Debuting in 1959 and running for five seasons and 156 episodes in its initial run (it later experienced three revivals, in 1985, 2002 and 2019, as well as a film adaptation and a theme park attraction), The Twilight Zone soared in popularity and controversy in its time. Created, hosted, produced, and written by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone pushed the television medium forward with its anthology format, rooted in the genres and styles of science-fiction, horror, fantasy, political thriller, moral fable, and radio teleplay-esque short fiction. It has consistently ranked among the greatest series in television history even if its fifth dimension is beyond the comprehension of man.
(There are spoilers for certain episodes of The Twilight Zone in this essay. Not all episodes, but I’d still be wary of ruining some of the best for myself.)
The genre of science-fiction has always been a Trojan horse for metaphors and allegories. If the best stories are the ones that enlighten us a little bit more about our ways of life and our natures, then sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have proven time and again that it’s possible for these themes to come across even in the most unbelievable of scenarios (living puppets, surgeons with pig snouts, problem-solving alien cultures). The best sci-fi does not limit itself to holding a mirror up to the world, even as it stretches beyond the planetary limitations, though. No, the best sci-fi can foretell plagues of the human condition and, in so doing, becomes timeless.
Every New Year’s Eve and Labor Day and Independence Day (and so on), The Twilight Zone proves its timelessness again with all-day marathons that help to define the holidays as much as Dick Clark, school anxiety, and special edition baseball caps do. When The Twilight Zone first aired, the United States was in a negative space between World War II (Rod Serling served in it) and the tumultuous 1960s. Many times throughout the series’ initial run, it seemed like Serling gazed into the future with reckless precision.
Arguably the series’ most timeless installment, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” was a perfect marriage of Twilight’s overwhelming feelings of dread and societal intuition. The episode begins, as they all did, with Serling’s narration.
“Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 P.M. on Maple Street. This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment — before the monsters came.”
Following this, a meteor passes near to Maple Street and the residents think nothing of it until all the functionality and electricity they’d grown accustomed to is stripped from them as a result. Quickly, the occupants of Maple Street begin to suspect alien interference (as one does) in their ways of life with the electricity compared to “going back into the Dark Ages” and the potential for aliens compared to pulp stories read by resident Tommy (Jan Handzlik). Anyone who’s seen The Twilight Zone has seen this episode surely (and even if you haven’t, the resulting action is practically telegraphed from the premise alone), so it’s no surprise that the anxieties of Maple Street’s manor-owners quickly result in the collapse of their miniature society.
When they try to determine who is responsible for the electricity (read: who is hobnobbing with the foreigners), the blame is scattershot in rapid fire with each character desperate to shrug suspicion off of themselves and onto someone else, no matter if it’s a trusted friend or even a child. This tendency to blame is timeless. We’ve seen the concepts of prejudice toward “the other” in eras with prevalent immigration and nationalism. The Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare in the Cold War (the most direct parallel), Trump’s Muslim ban. It exists in literature (Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson are just two writers of many to pen it). It exists in television. It exists in everyday life.
Nearing the episode’s climax, the most panicky resident, Charlie (Jack Weston), shoots his neighbor, Pete (Ben Erway), who was returning to Maple Street in shadows that were suspicious enough for Charlie to pull the trigger. Upon realizing that Pete was the one perceived to be a monster, Charlie wails, “How was I supposed to know who he was?” It’s a bit of dialogue that could easily be construed as too on-the-nose, emblematic of Serling’s writing style, which had a tendency to be overly preachy. I’m not opposed to it, though. Serling could be preachy, yes, but can you really be preachy when it comes to prejudice? Sometimes, it’s just important to position your progressive writing as directly to the point as possible. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is timeless because it’s acute, not because it’s subtle.
After all, every strand of prejudice exists outside of the Twilight Zone, too. That’s what most damning about the episode. Its worst elements are not limited to a quasi-dimensional realm that we can ignore and feel better about ourselves. The worst of the behavior on Maple Street impacts the lives of everyone daily. It impacts our “children and the children yet unborn.” It’s to be reckoned with on a consistent basis. Our own prejudices cannot be the same as our fears, or else our greater civilizations will go the same way as Maple Street did with Pete.
Overall, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is not just a treatise against being biased. A person has got to do more than trust in the best of her, or his, fellow human. They have to advocate for others to share in this trust to create a world that is better for the lives of all. If someone needs defending against baseless accusations, defend them. If one is anxious about prejudice in the future generations, speak to children about the ills of the past and the ways forward toward ridding them. We can’t all be Serling, but we don’t have to dismiss his writing as over-the-top; we can embrace the best parts of it — even today.
In “Maple Street,” Steve (Claude Akins) is essentially an avatar for Serling. As his friends and neighbors destroy themselves, believing every accusation levied, he finds it increasingly hard to defend himself against the power of mob think. Steve never resorts to the violence that the rest of the street does. Instead, he brandishes his linguistic abilities the best he can. “You’re gonna talk us right into our grave,” Charlie protests against Steve’s pleas to calm down. To the mob, words hardly matter and they’re not interested in platitudes meant to soothe and relax; they crave only justice and defense. I trust the world has more Steves than Charlies or, at least, more Rods. We need words for the most obvious, well-established reasons in the animal kingdom. They’re why we’re on top of the food chain, even though lions and alligators could wreck us like a knife through ice cream or Patrick Mahomes through the Chargers defense: without an ounce of exertion.
Words underscore every episode of The Twilight Zone. On the surface, sci-fi is a genre with grandiose spectacles and dizzying, otherworldly artistry. When the genre is well-written, too, it’s transcendent. “Maple Street” wasn’t the only example of sci-fi subdued on The Twilight Zone. The series was a flurry of iconic stories (in a scale system to assign point values for various categories of a television show, Twilight would absolutely get full marks for stories) like “The Hitch-Hiker,” “A Game of Pool,” and “Time Enough at Last.” Hell, The Twilight Zone has to be one of the only TV shows to ever have a theme park attraction based on it. (Not even Game of Thrones does. Though, I’d be as interested in spending time in the dungeons of King’s Landing as I would be to spend time in Seinfeld’s Tom’s Restaurant. But yes, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is a fun journey when you have an affinity for Walt Disney World and Rod Serling.)
Despite the marriage of properties, Rod Serling was no Walt Disney. (The only quality they had in common was that they were some of the earliest, most influential champions of the television medium, able to harness its power by positioning themselves squarely in front of the camera.) Disney was an innovator who was always keen to embrace the latest technologies. Serling was more wary of this sort of progress, fearing artificial intelligence, flying, and superficial medical science, seemingly in equal measure. He just didn’t feel that these innovations were meant for humans to grasp anymore than the Twilight Zone was meant to contain and sustain human life.
Throughout the series, it’s assuredly unclear what exactly the Twilight Zone is. Not that the understanding of what the Zone was meant to be was ever the point of the series, it’s just that its status as a plane of reality was marked by myriad intangible qualities that shifted on an episode-by-episode need. Each installment felt like a visual representation of old radio teleplays in the vein of Orson Welles. The screenplays for them needed to be as airtight as possible to pull off a tale in twenty-four minutes when the rules would reset the next week. Efficiency in exposition was achieved through Serling’s narration, of course, but also in screenplays marked by economy of language, giving audiences exactly what was needed to be understood and nothing more.
A prime example of this comes in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” when we’re informed that Bob (William Shatner) has just resolved his time in a sanitarium and we receive no further details about the nature of his initial breakdown, save for its avian connection. Screenplays were as clear as the gremlin (Nick Cravat) on the wing in “Nightmare” was unclear.
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (initially written by Richard Matheson and directed by Richard Donner) is a story that has endured across many iterations of The Twilight Zone. In Twilight Zone: The Movie, John Lithgow slipped into the main role. In Jordan Peele’s 2019 reboot, Adam Scott took on the job. It makes sense why “Nightmare” has endured. It’s a bottle episode at its core and the fear is vague enough (seriously, what kind of gremlin is that?) that it can stretch across any period of time.
Back in the 1960s, the airplane setting brought a much stronger sense of decorum than those who fly Spirit (me) might expect it to in 2020. It’s a group of strangers flying in a confined space in the middle of the night. With the knowledge that everyone has to be on their best behavior to ensure collective safety, even the slightest out-of-the-ordinary moment can wreak chaos on the falsified aura of peace established in the aircraft. For the other passengers, that’s Bob’s growing paranoia. For Bob, it’s the literal monster destroying the airplane’s wing.
The visuals of the episode are easy to take for granted. The fact that a window keeps Bob and the gremlin apart from one another is almost like a portal into another psychiatric breakdown (Donner’s directorial authorship over this divide is a testament to how direction is crucial, even for one episode of an anthology series). Rain falls from outside, blurring the view Bob has of the gremlin, leading him to doubt his own sanity as the people around him do not even spend one moment believing him.
Equipped with the knowledge that Bob has already been deemed crazy, we experience the paranoia in real time with him (as we see the gremlin, too). It’s not just the fear that the aircraft is going to crash as a result of the gremlin’s deviousness. We’re also teetering on the ledge of extreme cringe, knowing that the boy-who-cried-wolf psychology Bob harbors is leading to increasingly forceful reactions from his wife, Julia (Christine White), and the rest of the airline staff. Throughout the episode, Bob is, at best, 99% sure that what he’s seeing outside is real, but he’s also self-aware enough to know that he wouldn’t believe himself if he was an outside viewer either. “He jumps away whenever anyone might see him,” Bob remarks, sinking back into his seat as a signal of surrender that he’s done trying to persuade those around him. Right then, Bob accepts he’s the only one who knows what is on the wing, but he holds onto the trust that it will be revealed to the others in time.
I’m not sure why “Nightmare” has always been my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s obviously thrilling and unbelievably mysterious, but it’s also mired in ambiguity. Ultimately, I think my affinity comes from that exact reaction from Bob. He’s simultaneously embodying the knowing acceptance of his own shortcomings and a desperation to be believed by those who can amend the situation and those he loves so forcefully. The episode can certainly be read as a statement on the helplessness of mental illness. The gremlin taunts Bob to the point where he seems to be omnisciently aware of the plane’s interior goings-on. He’s not just tearing the plane apart; he’s toying with Bob and targeting his sanity directly. The velocity of the plane leads to the premise of the episode being inherently implausible, but that hardly matters when the gremlin hangs on anyway. Only increasing Bob’s fear as to how the gremlin could hang onto a speeding metal cylinder, it’s an impeccable representation of the paranoia that can come from flying (and this was decades before the paranoia was situated in evergreen reminders of terrorism’s influence on the flying process).
That’s exactly why the gremlin is so deserving of these fears from both Bob and the audience. The most palpable fears come when we’re not thinking clearly, even when we know we should. There’s an abundance of security and safety procedures at airports and for airplanes and yet the fear of flying still crawls all the way up from our subconscious for every hour of the journey’s duration. We’ll never see a gremlin when we’re flying Delta Airlines, but this fact will never defeat an irrational fear borne from emotion. This kind of terror was impeccably achieved by The Twilight Zone, but Serling’s writing was able to tackle a different kind of fear in equal measure: the strength of fears that are grounded in reality, like the fear of death in season three’s “The Passersby.”
“The Passersby” takes place in a faction of The Twilight Zone with undeniable ties to the antebellum south. This version of the region is more of a no man’s land, trod by Union and Confederate soldiers alike (as the Twilight Zone “knows neither North nor South”), completed with dreamy fog as an evocation of the haunting inescapability of death. (This sense of death also compels its victims to it, beckoning and promising eternal rest.)
Civil War soldiers are not the only ones marching down the road to death, though. The curious thrust behind “The Passersby” is that a woman removed from battle, Lavinia (Joanne Linville), is a purveyor of the doomed men. She’s on the road with them, too. Only instead of marching, she’s decided to set up a homestead on the road. By the laws of this subset of the Twilight Zone, Lavinia is dead, too. She wasn’t a soldier (a fever is technically said to be her cause of death), but war was as much a corrupter of her own soul before it was eventually claimed by the unquenchable thirst for revenge. Lavinia is at once bitter over the false grand send-off ceremony’s promise that the Yankees would be defeated in a month’s time and the actual soldiers who killed her husband, Jud (Warren Kemmerling).
Lavinia’s rage manifests in the delusion that she can rebuild her mortal life on this path, only to be readily rebuffed by Jud when he does eventually make his way past her temporary place of living. The only passersby who actually stop to speak with Lavinia for extended periods of time are a sergeant (James Gregory) and a lieutenant (David Garcia). Lavinia treats the sergeant with hospitality for a spell, but she greets the lieutenant with the utmost rebuke. Immediately deadset on murdering the Union leader (framed in ghostly silhouette, as if he’s the Headless Horseman), he greets her with more skepticism by asking softly, “Is this your pleasure, ma’am?” After all, he’s already dead. What does it matter if he’s shot again when he’s been burned and scarred beyond recognition. The only way he’s identified is by the color of his uniform.
The lieutenant has already made the decision to let go of war, which is the place Lavinia needs to arrive at if she is to have any hope at a peaceful afterlife. (Whether or not Confederacy supporters ever actually received that? I’d lean towards “not.”) Lavinia builds a home on the road, content to resign herself to long-term parking, rather than accept the fact that her life is no longer hers (it’s a fact she’s in denial over). Ultimately, emotional closure is a choice. It’s the acceptance that peace and rest is desired instead of blood and vengeance.
The pickle jar of Lavinia’s acceptance was sealed tight and Jud was entirely ineffectual in loosening it. Instead, the sergeant (serving as a sort of Hermes figure for the story) begins to break down her defenses. He’s aware that a twist is inbound for him (as most viewers by the third season of The Twilight Zone would be), but he’s also guiding Lavinia to her supernatural truth. “This place is no good for you,” he tells her. Literally, he means the road of eternal death. Overall, it’s a sentiment that could be spoken to anyone who found themselves relegated to the Twilight Zone.
No acknowledgement that her true love sported black hair brings Lavinia any closer to the afterlife. Instead, she requires the actual prodding of President Abraham Lincoln (Austin Green), said to be the “last casualty of the Civil War.” (Not many presidents die as a result of the wars they send children off to perish in, after all.) Lincoln’s appearance could be an example of Serling’s too-much style taking over again, but I thought it was a profoundly powerful moment of finally convincing Lavinia to let go of the bitterness. After all, no one else was coming down the road after Lincoln. Whether she was letting go of that bitterness or not, death was coming for her.
I think it’s a true flex for Serling to bring Lincoln into the resolution of “The Passersby” because I admire creative risks and ambitious storytelling. How revolutionary must it have been to see Lincoln pop up on the small screen in 1961? I think we need more of that on-your-sleeve creative audacity, especially when you consider that one of the best presidents since the sixteenth would be dead two years later. My personality is naturally drawn to the use of cultural and societal figures as vehicles for inner peace and truths to be drawn out of one’s personality. Lincoln was just one example of many from The Twilight Zone that managed to teach us about ourselves by using ourselves and our perceptions of the world around us. The perceptions of the world are the only ones available to us, after all. The perceptions of the Twilight Zone belong to Rod Serling — and anyone who dares to enter it.
