Nearly sixty years ago, Rod Serling created a television program that broke all the rules: Doing science-fiction seriously, horror without rubber monsters and taking aim at the social issues of the 1950s with subtlety and wit. For 157 pretty excellent episodes and also “Come Wander With Me”, Serling and his crew did their magic, leading to a very culturally significant query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) would make a case for ‘Two”, a season three episode featuring fine acting by a young Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery, asking: What’s the best/your favorite foray into The Twilight Zone?
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As a kid, it was “A Quality of Mercy” (the original series episode, not the adaptation in the movie) because it had Spock (this was when I was like 3 or 4 years old and still had trouble differentiating the same actor playing multiple characters). But after I grew up and saw it again, I began to love the story for a completely different reason.
But I’m equally fond of the story “Mr. Bevis”, which was rather whimsical and lighter compared to many of the series stories.
“Time Enough at Last”
As a life-long bibliophile who never has enough time to read as much as I want, this one hits home.
My favorite is the “Invaders” with Agnes Moorehead (the MIL from Bewitched) as the Woman who is terrorized and then fends off invaders from Earth. The episode is unusual, where for most of the show, not a word is spoken.
It was well written and well acted.
So many that it’s hard to choose. They all had an impact on me. I can’t reach for something under a bed without worrying I’d fall into a gap in space and into the fourth dimension, I always carry a spare set of glasses, and I love picking up random foreign language books and telling whoever will listen “It’s a cookbook! ‘To Serve Man!’ It’s a cookbook!!”
A friend of mine who ran a second-hand bookstore with his wife would always pull that when someone asked what a foreign language book title was. It was a bit depressing to me how few people actually got the reference.
Man, that’s a tough question. I haven’t seen all the episodes, I catch them when I can, but the one that popped in my head first was “A Kind of Stopwatch.” That episode was crazy good and it was hard to decide if you felt bad for the guy for getting stuck or glad that he got his come-up-ins for being so pretentious.
That one gave me nightmares when I was a kid… He totally didn’t deserve that kind of torment.