This week, I was pleasantly surprised to find one of my comics to be littered with references to several episodes of the classic Twilight Zone, including ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’, ‘Twenty-Two’ and ‘The Odyssey of Flight 33.’ As a long-time fan of the Zone (I can often quote episode, season and production number, though not with the alacrity that I could at age 17), I was happy to see a reminder that Rod Serling’s masterwork is still remembered in this age of irony and jump-scares. Indeed, the amount of suspense and terror in even a not-so-iconic episode (take, for example, the Lee Marvin showcase “The Grave”) is equal to many of the lesser fright-fests seen in some of today’s television and movies. Also, get off my lawn, rotten kids! In any case, the hundred-fifty-six episodes contain some scary $#!+, which leads us to today’s fifth-dimensional query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) thinks it may be a toss-up between poor Henry Bemis and Bob Wilson’s midair breakdown and hallucination, but there are candidates aplenty, asking: What’s the most frightening moment in Twilight Zone history in your mind?
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It’s a tossup between Billy Mumy’s “It’s a Good Life” story from the original run and the sequel to it with Billy and his actual daughter named “It’s Still a Good Life” from the 2002 season.
Both are just utterly terrifying to consider.
“The Martians on Main St.” i believe the episode is called? the one where there’s a massive blackout and all the people on one block of houses start turning on each other because one house still has power. the ending, revealing just two aliens standing up on the hill controlling all the power from their console, creating all that fear and hatred between neighbors, is incredibly chilling and prescient given the past few weeks of news.
sorry, “The Monsters Are Due On Maple St.” is the name of the episode.
We had to read that as a play in third grade and I was beyond excited until I found out not a single person in my class (teacher included) had ever seen the episode.
With Claude Akins, no less!
“To Serve Man” comes to mind first. It’s a cookbook!!!!
The episode with the Penguin…err…Burgess Meredith, where he only wants to be left alone and read his books. He gets his wish, but breaks his glasses. Now that I need glasses…SCARY!!!
@hiphophead
Scary indeed. I read a lot and have glasses.
That said, I think I would fumble my way down to the local eye doctor and try to find glasses that work… after all, I have all the time in the world.
Maple Street was the most sobering to me. I can’t say any of them actually scared me. I was a very stoic teenager.