Thanks to the new ‘Twilight Zone’ revival by Jordan Peele, I awoke this morning to a wonderful gift: A Zone marathon on the SyFy channel. Putting a cherry on top of that sundae was discovering that halfway through ‘In Praise of Pip’, an episode that uses Jack Klugman’s ability to emote with every pore and molecule of his face combined with a young Billy Mumy’s cuteness to achieve perhaps the best overall episode of Season Five. (Only ‘The Jeopardy Room’ even comes close, if you ask me.) Sadly, one of the unspoken rules of the Zone is “Klugman never survives”, leading to a tragic Twilight Zone ending that’s still somehow uplifting and to today’s Fifth Dimensional query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) isn’t even going to limit it to the original 156 episodes, what with three revivals and a movie to choose from, asking: Which of the myriad worlds makes for the MOST tragic Twilight Zone ending?
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Regarding Jack Klugman, when he is given the right script, he knocks out of the park.
For me, the ‘most tragic’ is “Time enough at last” with Henry Bemis sitting in a pile of books with a pair of broken glasses in his hands.
Yeah, gotta go with this one.
All four of Klugman’s TZ shows are awesome and he is a fave-rave of mine. But he also has a zero percent survival rate, dying in all his episodes…
I agree with ‘Time Enough at Last” but a close second for me is “A Kind of Stopwatch”