Respectfully Submitted for Your Perusal: Best Twilight Zone Episode…er, Episodes, Ever

Respectfully Submitted for Your Perusal: Best Twilight Zone Episode…er, Episodes, Ever by Roxanne McDonald

Subjective as the suggestion is, we SF and Twilight Zone fans have our favs.

Doppelgangers, duplicity, and dualities. Deliberation. Deception. And deliverance. The Twilight Zone will forever be one of the most pentrating and provocative (and I promise the alliteration stops now) TV series to hit the air waves. In fact, for those of us growing up in the seventies, it was typically the only series with any substance.

And each of us has our favorite episode(s).

Reviewing “Treasures of The Twilight Zone” and “More Treasures Of the Twilight Zone,” reviewer T. Liam MacDonald asserts that “Where is Everybody,” “The Encounter,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Masks,” “Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Howling Man” would all “place in the top ranks of the best episodes in the series….”

At TV.com, the voters ranked the top fifty episodes, putting “To Serve Man” at the number one spot (with a ranking of 9.3 out of 10). I still have yet to figure out who is doing the voting for the ranking system there—and better, who establishes the criteria (and what that criteria are)….

At IMDB, since the site users agree it is impossible to determine best episode, they have gone for other superlative categories:

First, they have written on the best performance in a Twilight Zone episode—sometimes departing but often meeting in agreement on such greats as James Whitmore in “On Thursday,” James Daly in “Willoughby,” Rod Taylor in “And When the Skies Were Opened,” Art Carney in “Night of the Meek,” Gladys Cooper in “Nothing in the Dark,” Jack

Klugman in “In Praise of Pip” or “A Game of Pool,” Burgess Meredith in “The Obsolete Man” or “Mr. Dingle the Strong” or “Time Enough at Last,” John Anderson in “The Odyssey of Flight 33” or “A Passage for Trumpet,” John Williams in “The Bard,” Gig Young in “Walking Distance,” Murray Matheson in “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” Claude Akins in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Agnes Moorehead in “The Invaders,” Fritz Weaver in “The Obsolete Man” or “Third From the Sun,” Everett Sloane in “The Fever,” Sterling Holloway in “What’s In The Box,” Inger Stevens in “The Hitchhiker….”
The lists of course go on, based on one’s disposition toward the absurd, toward horror, and toward classic irony, with creepiest episode category getting top votes for “The Dummy,” “Talky Teena,” and “Long Distance Call,” among others.

I would have to rely on my penchant for good psychological terror—or the kind of episodes that featured a sort of trompe l’oeil of the psyche, with Serling’s classic absurd turns and ironic twists…so my vote is for the creepiest,

either “It’s a Good Life” (which was remade in the last decade or two and still held up quite well) or “The After Hours” (which still appeals to me because of the actress, Anne Francis, who was also the star of “Honey West in the same decade, and because the “Marcia…Marcia…Marcia” calling of the mannequins still haunts me—lol); the most relatable and absurd, “Time Enough at Last;” and the most socially telling, either “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” or “On Thursday We Leave for Home….”

But then there are the identity-themed episodes, the Pirandello take-off, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” “Person or Persons Unknown,” “And When the Sky Was Opened.”

There are the time-warpers and revenge motif episodes, in “A Kind of Stopwatch” and “Walking Distance” and “What You Need” and “Death’s Head Revisited.”

There are also the magical episodes, the tear-jerkers, such as “The Changing of the Guard” and “Night of the Meek.”

Cloning, time travel, superpowers, the deadly sins, the human condition….And etc., and etc., all the possibilities making it hard, obviously to choose the absolute best…never mind trying to name the best performance.

I am going to shut up now and get back to my Twilight Zone marathon on the SCIFI channel.

Happy, creepy, or thoughtful new year to you all.

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