With this week’s Top 5 podcast discussion of ‘The Twilight Zone‘, Stephen, Rodrigo and I spent a little time talking about the nature of twist endings, one of the hallmarks of Rod Serling’s work. Rod and his staff crafted strong, meaningful twists, and later writers have emulated their work to variable amounts of success (*coughM.Nightcough*), but it’s hard to top the revelations at the end of ‘To Serve Man’, ‘Eye Of The Beholder’, or even ‘The Obsolete Man,’ which leads to today’s shockingly unexpected query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) always leans towards the climactic reveal of ‘Planet Of The Apes’, itself retained from Rod Serling’s mostly scrapped script for the film, asking: What’s the best twist ending of all time?
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I have to go with “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, both because of the perfection of that story’s structure, and because it was probably my first introduction to the concept, back in middle school.
Fight Club, that always comes my mind first when thinking about twist endings.
Does the episode “Normal Again” from Buffy count? It was left ambiguous as to whether she was really The Slayer hallucinating that she was in a mental hospital or that she was really in a mental hospital hallucinating the whole setting.
The Usual Suspects.
idk how twisty it’s considered but I just watched Gone Girl and the way that played out was pretty crazy.