Well it’s been something like eight months since I talked about season one of this show, and while I frankly prefer writing other articles, I promised we’d go through this whole show eventually. I have nothing special to add for an intro this time. Just enjoy my musings on season 2.

                And yes, I will compile the season-by-season tier lists into a grand ranking of every episode whenever I finally get around to the fifth of these. I am keeping the running list privately.

S2E1 – King Nine Will Not Return

Here we have the first instance of the show’s iconic theme tune. About time.

An odd one, to be sure. This sees a pilot wake up next to his crashed plane, with no sign of where the rest of his crew went. He slowly goes crazy for most of the episode, hallucinating his crew as he slowly pieces more information together, and then growing extremely confused when jet planes fly overhead in spite of it being 1943. It’s largely a one man show, and feels like a weird redux of the first season’s premiere, Where is Everybody. Just like in that episode, the ending is rather unsatisfying, with a rather blase explanation for what happened. Unlike in that episode, the final shot of his shoes adds a last second twist that suggests something far more supernatural was occurring. As that is the final shot of the episode, it doesn’t even bother to explore what this idea could be, nor am I sure what the possibility that everything in the episode actually happened was meant to suggest. 

Other oddities include the decision to dub over the protagonist’s thoughts rather than having him speak aloud for several portions, both contrasting his general overacting and leaving us with several minute long shots where he just stares into the camera while thinking. In a very strange move for this show, we also get some heavy implications about who the character is from the swastikas painted onto his plane, but that never really gets developed at all. For a show that occasionally delights in a nazi torture episode, it’s odd to frame those near the center of some shots and never comment on the implications. I didn’t love this one overall, but it’s far from the worst episode.

S2E2 – Man in the Bottle

An antique store owner gets ridiculed by his wife for giving out too many handouts when he buys junk from a poor old lady purely to put some money in the woman’s pocket. Which is a fair criticism, given that they can barely pay their own bills. But then it turns out he has purchased a genie’s lamp and now has four wishes to make (I assume the fourth wish was tacked on so the characters could be incredulous and have a test wish). You mostly know how this story goes, with the inevitable wish for money, then power, then oh no what have we done. But also this couple is just so darned likable. They wish for a million dollars, and the first thing they do is give tens of thousands of it away to take care of their entire neighborhood! And then they get left with a mere five dollars when they get hit by the NINETY PERCENT INCOME TAX that is almost certainly the cause of their financial woes. Anyway, they decide that if money can be taken away, they should wish for power, and decide to be the leaders of a contemporary foreign nation where they can’t be voted out of power. Naturally, the genie has a field day with that wording, and the couple is eventually left with their five dollars and the repaired window they used the test wish on. It teaches them to be a bit more content and to figure out new ways to enjoy life within their existing means. And then they break the window again and laugh the episode out when they realize they ended the entire experience exactly five dollars richer than they started it. 

That said, while I like the message, I also appreciate that the episode never undoes their early charity, meaning that the rest of the community is now much wealthier and will probably be able to help them out of their own little bills as a result. It pays to take care of those around you first, I suppose.

S2E3 – Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room

Okay before I even talk about the episode, I just want to say I love the opening monologue here and how it’s a shot of Serling talking superimposed over a bird’s eye view of the protagonist going about his routine. It’s a really cool and disorienting shot.

So this is probably the most impressive of the one-man show episodes thus far. Jackie is a mobster hired to kill an old man, but he’s also a nervous wreck who never gets away with anything, so he panics in his cheap hotel room. Then he looks in a mirror and his reflection starts talking to him. A reflection that is noticeably more put-together, macho, and conscientious than he has ever been. While I’m not wholly sure the tech was quite there for this concept yet, given the odd look the mirrors always have, I’m still quite impressed by the ambition of this one. It’s the tale of one man arguing with a reflection of the life he could have had, one which insists they still have one last chance to get out of this life and make something of themself, if Jackie would just listen to the reflection for one night. 

You can watch this and accept the supernatural, or view it as a very literal metaphor for self-reflection as this guy realizes this is his last chance to be a man. I won’t spoil what ends up happening, but I really enjoyed this and its conclusion. Personal growth is hard, and some part of you will always be what you once were, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole of you will be. And Jackie learns these lessons in a very literal fashion.

S2E4 – A Thing About Machines

Finchley is a pompous twat that hates machines and greatly annoys everyone who interacts with him. The local mechanic is sick of coming in to fix things when it is readily apparent that Finchley is ripping wires out of his radio and kicking through his TV screen, and Finchley’s secretary is desperately pursuing lower paying jobs just to not have to deal with him. He’s terrified to let these two leave his house because he believes all his machines are conspiring against him when he’s alone. And I don’t mean sci-fi machines; I mean basic things like a typewriter. 

Anyway, after spending half an episode telling us that Finchley is an unsympathetic, paranoid twat, it turns out he was very right and every mechanical object from his razor to his car is indeed both sentient and out to get him. We’re told it’s because he mistreats his things, but he says he mistreats them because they’re out to get him, so the why of this situation is lost entirely. Anyway, it ends when his car comes to life and runs him over, at which point Serling assures us that Finchley wasn’t crazy and things really did play out exactly as you just saw. I uh, kind of have no idea what the point was, given that one half of the episode is about evil machines while the other half insists there’s nothing wrong with having these devices in our lives. I guess we’re supposed to view Finchley as obsolete because he can’t get with the times enough to hold an electric razor properly, but the whole thing is very… inadequate? I don’t think this episode knew what its goal was.

S2E5 – The Howling Man

David goes on a walking trip through Europe, gets lost in a storm, and winds up banging on the door of a monastery that’s hesitant to let him in. When he’s finally inside, he keeps hearing a horrible howling sound, and learns the monks have a man locked up in a cell. The prisoner begs David for help, insisting this isn’t a real religious order and that it is run by crazy people, only for the monks to pull David away and insist that they haven’t locked a man up. This one is weirdly movie-like, with its framing story, effects, and cinematography heavily resembling the old Universal monster movies. The strange camera angles and the gothic setup give it a lot of personality, though like many of the old films it emulates, it moves kind of slowly, with the meat of the episode being a conversation between David and the head monk. While I expected werewolves the second I heard the howling, I won’t spoil where this one goes. The ending, interestingly, isn’t the typical Twilight Zone twist, but an epilogue that almost feels like it’s setting up more plot. I like what it establishes, because while this is largely a story about what you’re willing to believe, I probably would have ended up making similar choices as David and the epilogue character… if I hadn’t heard the howling. That really feels like the kind of thing that should scare somebody away all on its own.

S2E6* – Eye of the Beholder

Another one of the “everybody knows it” classics. I’m comfortable spoiling this one just because the twist is so famous that you probably already know. And if you don’t, knowing that this is The Twilight Zone, and that there is therefore a twist, will clue you in on the truth pretty early. Miss Tyler is in the hospital following an experimental treatment that will hopefully fix her hideous facial deformity. We can’t see this deformity, as her head is wrapped in bandages, but we’re told people see her on the streets and scream, and that she’s okay with being ugly as long as children don’t run at the sight of her like they do now. The episode, through a mix of clever framing, positioning props, blocking, weird birds-eye views, and shadows, maintains Miss Tyler’s “private world of darkness” by also preventing us from seeing the faces of any of the hospital staff. 

More worryingly, this episode takes place in some sort of totalitarian society that legally enforces very strict beauty standards in the name of public conformity. As Miss Tyler is a very difficult case, she is in for her eleventh treatment, which is the last one the government allows before she has to choose between execution and exile. While she tries to argue the point and that the state is not God, the hospital staff have no power to change this. Part of what makes this episode feel so human is how altruistic the staff is. It would be so easy to have them be mean to her, but instead she’s met with constant sympathy, and when privately talking away from her, the nurses think she’s brave for pushing on in spite of her deformity, and everyone emphatically wants to help this woman. In a show filled with purposefully awful people, having everyone try so hard to help her that they’ve accepted the case eleven times really makes them all feel that much more human, letting you root for everyone for once.

Here comes the spoilers. The fact that it makes them feel more human is made ironic when, after the dramatic reveal in which Miss Tyler’s bandages are removed, we see a beautiful woman underneath, and the doctor laments the complete failure of the operation. We then finally see everyone else’s face, and learn that this is a world where people have hideous pig faces, and our protagonist’s normal appearance makes her the monster. She desperately flees in an attempt to not be sent away, and then screams in horror when she encounters the biggest stud they could pull in off the streets in the sixties. The doctor informs her that this is a representative from a colony of the deformed, and that the hospital has arranged for him to take her to where she can live a decent life with her own people. While that will always be funny, this is just an episode that does so much in not a lot of time.

You have the obvious “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” discussion, combined with the easily made metaphors for people with visual differences being segregated. Then there’s the discussion of the state as God and the push for conformity hurting people, on top of a still impressive acting performance by Miss Tyler. Seriously, I like The Mandalorian as much as the next guy, but this woman proved you could give a heart wrenching performance without your face decades ago, making you feel for her and her points with just body language and her voice. With an excellent twist, great acting, a wide variety of talking points, and one of the rare happy endings in the series, Eye of the Beholder still deserves its place in history as one of the classics. It might be the best episode of television produced that year.

As a final aside, this is the first (and possibly only) time that Serling’s opening monologue doesn’t end in the show’s title, though it is still mentioned in the monologue.

S2E7* – Nick of Time

After their car breaks down, a newlywed couple passes some time in a small town diner, where the napkin holder is a fun little penny fortune telling machine that gives magic 8 ball styled responses. After asking a few harmless questions for fun, the husband becomes convinced that the device really can tell the future. This episode starts a little all over the place, but eventually ties itself together as a discussion on whether we can make our own futures or if superstitious beliefs like fortune telling have any ground to stand on. It’s largely made by the dynamic between the two leads, the superstitious husband and the skeptical wife (not a combination you see super often), and how well they push the “I care about you deeply but also you’re being a moron, my moron” vibe. The little napkin holder machine looks a bit too ridiculous to be as ominous as the cameraman would like it to be, which drags things down a little bit. The introduction of a second couple at the end, who have fully bought into the belief that this particular napkin holder really can tell the future, puts a nice bow on things to contrast the wife who decides that it doesn’t matter if it is magic or not. I like the conclusion the main couple reaches in that regard: that it could be magical but that they should move on because knowledge of the future may prove too restrictive to living their lives. It’s a good message, but even by this show’s standards, the delivery is just a little too ridiculous for my liking.

For my own money, while I generally accept the supernatural answer at face value in The Twilight Zone, I think the thing was just a piece of junk. Plenty of fortune telling revolves around giving answers just vague enough to be interpreted as correct after events occur in the future. I may enjoy the concept and think you can tell a neat story with something like tarot cards, but it’s all just for fun. Those magic 8 ball responses reeked of this concept.

S2E8 – The Lateness of the Hour

A family of three lives in a wonderful house, their every need perfectly cared for by the robotic servants their patriarch has built. Their adult daughter Jaina fears that their lives are wasting away in this tiny house of perfection away from the world, surrounded by their unaging servants. Jaina’s concerns are very Wall-E, as she fears her parents are becoming dependent on the machines, while feeling she has been eternally isolated from the world by them. Her parents have no such concerns, and would prefer to continue on as they are. Much of the episode consists of the family debating this point, while the robotic servants are cleverly positioned to make the scenes more claustrophobic, as if there’s no way for Jaina to leave the house. 

The episode, through various little things like where the servants stand and the subtle restriction of never showing more than two rooms of the house, really hammers in Jaina’s feeling of being trapped, and makes the audience sympathize with her. To be honest, I think this one handles Wall-E’s points much more effectively than that movie does. It’s much more on the nose, since Jaina makes her impassioned speeches on the point, but it communicates the entire thing in the most claustrophobic way possible instead of playing the situation for laughs. When Jaina finally gives her father the ultimatum of destroying the robots or watching her leave, things get decidedly interesting, with the robots arguing for their own survival in a way that makes you question if you’re about to see a rebellion. 

Something very very clever comes after that, and while I won’t spoil this one for you, I fully recommend this episode even today. Hat’s off to all three of the central actors for their handling of the third act. This one is quintessential Twilight Zone, with its fascinating discussion on a number of topics of what it means to be human and the things we use tools to avoid. That final shot is excellent, and it earns that scare chord.

S2E9 – The Trouble With Templeton

Templeton is an aging broadway actor who used to be a big star but isn’t getting special treatment from the new director. And then he maybe goes back in time to speak with his dead wife or maybe there was a conspiracy to hire 300 actors to convince him he had stumbled into the 1920s. I don’t know and I don’t think the episode does either. It’s kind of all over the place and confusing in a way that leaves me wondering what I just watched. I want to say more, but outside of one really cool shot when Templeton leaves a speakeasy, there really isn’t much for me to work with here. It’s a weak episode.

S2E10* – A Most Unusual Camera

A thieving couple robs an antique store and winds up with a pile of junk, and a camera that takes pictures five minutes into the future. They quickly realize that they could use this to make a killing on horse racing bets by taking photos of the scoreboard before the race. It’s a mostly light-hearted episode, until they and their accomplice realize the camera has limited film, and start arguing over how to use the last two pictures. Inevitably, their argument uses one of those pictures up, and then violence ensues as everyone comes to their own conclusions about what is going on in the picture.

A classic tale of greed, that ends in an exceedingly funny manner. I appreciate this one for having the audacity to kill off literally every speaking character just because it can and because they’re all terrible people. The sheer idiocy of the couple in how they handle their ill-gotten winnings makes this episode much funnier than the more direct attempts at comedy we’ve seen so far. I don’t think that was the goal, but I enjoyed it as such nonetheless. Seriously, these people leave thousands of dollars scattered about their hotel room while calling room service, have a camera that shows them the future, and are still surprised when they get robbed. A+ nonsense right there.

S2E11 – The Night of the Meek

Oh hey, the Christmas special. Well it’s June as I am watching and writing this, but we’re gonna roll with it. A mall santa gets drunk on the job, complains a bit about his lot in life, then finds Santa’s sack of toys that lets him pull out whatever the person he’s giving a gift to wants. It’s a nice little heartwarming tale without a lot of meat to it. It also ends in massively bizarre and disturbing implications when an elf shows up to inform this guy that he’s Santa now and takes him to the North Pole. Is Santa just a title held by whoever finds the bag every few decades? Is he really a conglomerate of people covering different areas? It raises so many questions that are never going to be answered. 

While it’s supposed to be the standard heartwarming holiday special, I also just found the first half to be unnecessarily sad. The mall santa is just so pathetic that I half believe he really is just going to be arrested for giving out stolen goods when the cops bring him in after a gift giving spree. And it’s not like with other actors who were “I feel bad for you” pathetic, but more of a “I’m kind of embarrassed to be looking at you” pathetic. Kind of like Mr. Denton on Doomsday in that regard. Couple that with the strange quality inherent to most of this episode’s footage (I think they tried a different kind of camera for this one?) and I don’t think it’s one I’ll ever revisit. 

S2E12 – Dust

We’re going back to the wild west to see Louis hanged for his crimes. His father is so desperate to save him that he spends his life savings on “magic dust” from a peddler that will make everybody compassionate for his son. This same peddler sold the rope for the hanging and is actively scamming him. We get a lot of melancholy drama about this before the hanging comes and the rope snaps, sparing Louis. Then the people he hurt decide that this is an act of God so they should just call it even. This seems like a setup involving the peddler, but he’s extremely confused by the entire thing so that’s shot. 

Anyway, it’s probably supposed to be a treatise against the death penalty, but the whole thing falls flat for one simple reason. Louis’s crime is drunkenly beating somebody else’s child to death. There’s also no “he’s really innocent,” just a “he did it, but he didn’t mean to.” I uh, kind of have no sympathy for that, and find it hard to believe the mother of the murdered child is willing to let this go, no matter how many ropes God cuts. Entirely skippable.

S2E13 – Back There

After arguing about the theoretical elements of time travel at a gentleman’s club, a man is inexplicably sent back to the night of Lincoln’s assassination. At the start, he argued nothing could be changed because of the obvious time paradox of how you wouldn’t go back if it was changed. Despite this, he gets swept up in trying to stop the assassination, only for nobody to believe him. It’s a fun little thriller that ends the only way it can, only with the realization that some things will inevitably be changed by an extra person’s presence. Not the highlight of a season by any means, but a decent episode.

S2E14 – The Whole Truth

The character trope of the sleazy used car salesman has probably been around… for longer than cars have existed, if we’re being quite honest. He’s a liar who’s trying to smooth talk you into buying something you probably shouldn’t have, often for a higher price than it’s worth. In this story, our protagonist is one such salesman, except he buys a haunted car that forces its owner to always tell the truth. And when I say always, I don’t mean it is limited to the job, I mean he literally can’t lie ever in any situation. And it doesn’t appear to be just a “can’t tell lies” situation, but a “literally can’t stop talking if he tries” situation. It’s another comedy episode, this time taking the form of schadenfreude as a detestable character keeps talking himself into worse situations because he can’t keep from digging himself deeper. Some of the laughs are lost by values drifting over time, since he’s not as bad as the episode wants him to be. We kind of just expect that he’s going to be a liar because of his profession, so we overlook that. And while he shouldn’t lie to his wife about it, wanting one night a month to play cards with his friends is a pretty minor sin. The worst thing he does is run a shitty business that probably wouldn’t survive if he wasn’t constantly lying, which, again, is almost his expected job with how alive the stereotype is.

Anyway, this eventually leads into him trying to sell the car to a politician just so he can get rid of the truth curse. Anyway, that doesn’t work because he can’t manage to not tell the guy about the haunted car. But it’s fine because the two of them arrange to sell it to a visiting Russian government official because this was filmed during the Cold War. I got some chuckles out of this one, but the conclusion is very rushed relative to the rest of the story, and the moral seems to be less “tell the truth” and more “life is easier when you can lie.” It’s imperfect, but marginally stronger than the previous three episodes.

S2E15* – The Invaders

The famous silent episode. An older woman lives alone in her outdated seaside home. And by outdated, I mean that it’s very Little House on the Prairie, with no gas or electricity. One night, she hears strange noises, only to discover that a tiny flying saucer has landed in her attic, and that a pair of hand-sized, robot-like aliens are invading her home. What follows is a thrilling, action-packed episode where this woman, unable to call for help, combats these aliens and their strange weapons with nothing but a hatchet and her superior height. It’s a fun and tense episode with no dialogue other than Serling’s narration, as you hope the poor woman can outwit her mysterious assailants and their strange weapons that leave weird pockmarks on her skin from a distance. 

The highlight though, and this is a big spoiler, so please watch the episode first, is the ending. After one of the aliens is killed, our protagonist goes on the offensive and chases the second one back into her attic, where it runs into its ship and tries to communicate with home. This is when we learn the aliens are American astronauts who have landed on a planet of giants. It’s a great perspective flip as we realize that, while these weren’t really the most competent of men, they are the ones we would have been rooting for in any other episode of this show. This game of perspectives, complete with the excellent framing and soundtrack, ensure we root for “the monster” for the entire thing. Obviously an integral part of this episode is that we are being tricked, but the point still stands that we make assumptions about the situation just because the protagonist looks like us while her assailants look strange.

I should also bring up the fact that there’s also the inverse moral of “never start with aggression.” The “aliens” are kind of morons who purposefully land in what is clearly a domicile and attack the first living creature they encounter. She technically starts it when she gets scared and kicks one of them away, but they still shouldn’t have menacingly approached her the way they did, nor should they have opened their interactions by breaking into her home. It’s entirely possible they wouldn’t have been able to communicate and that violence would have ensued anyway, but maybe things could have turned out differently if they had knocked first. Even knowing the twist and that these were some of our own, I still feel more for the giantess and her plight, since she ultimately feels more like the victim and really only reacts in self-defense. And well, it really does seem like the weapons were built directly into their suits… they broke in armed.

S2E16 – A Penny for Your Thoughts

After flipping a coin into a donation bucket and having it land perfectly on its side, Hector suddenly develops the ability to hear people’s thoughts. Hector, coincidentally, is also an idiot who doesn’t seem to realize these people are not speaking aloud even when he can see their mouths not moving. Of course, it also doesn’t help that everyone in his life inexplicably think in complete sentences about what they’re doing like weirdos. My own thoughts are usually a disjointed mess of images and concepts that don’t form into words until I’m speaking, so hearing these comically proper, syntax accuracy internal monologues as part of people’s passive conversations is hilarious. Still, this one isn’t about laughs, it’s about what you would do if you suddenly knew what everyone around you was thinking in their day to day lives. 

In Hector’s case, he mostly just has interesting experiences with office politics and people on the street until he overhears a coworker planning to rob a bank. Naturally, none of these respectable, straight-laced 60’s people can be convinced of his mind reading powers, but they are easily convinced that a trusted employee intends to rob them. The fun twist in all this is the realization that sometimes people think about things they aren’t actually going to do, and Hector’s inability to consider this leads directly to mistaking a daydream for true intentions. But hey, that’s how intrusive thoughts work. Sometimes we think about things, or even entertain fantasies, about things we wouldn’t actually be willing to go through with. Hector learns this the hard way, and he also learns that some people are worse on the inside than they let on. 

This isn’t the best episode, nor even the most well-done of them, but I very much enjoyed it. Hector and his secretary scamming the bank manager with his personal information is an amusing finish. Ultimately, this one’s not really trying to impart a moral so much as it is just exploring an idea. Hector seems to lose his abilities once the coin from the start is knocked over, so he’ll be back to a normal life, and his sheer relief at not having to hear everyone’s thoughts, even knowing it helped him throughout the day, feels as real as it does sweet. 

S2E17 – Twenty-two

Do you like Final Destination? Because this is Final Destination. A woman has been hospitalized with hysteria because she keeps having recurring nightmares about the number 22 and a morgue. After a bunch of light creepiness and medical treatment, she’s sent home, only to realize she’s going to be flying home on flight 22. You can probably guess where this goes. It’s a fun little story for its era, but I can’t love it after having seen an entire film series about the same concept. Also the lady’s manager has the worst glasses ever that make his eyes look the size of his head and I am fascinated by this costuming choice.

The only other note about this episode is that, in a first, the episode ends with a teaser for the next one, in which Serling invites everybody to enjoy next week’s episode by name (and with a brief plot synopsis). Now I’m curious to see if it holds up to the hype.

S2E18* – The Odyssey of Flight #33

I’m convinced this episode got the “next time on treatment” because they knew it was too boring and wanted to hype it up. The idea is that an unexplainable phenomenon causes a plane to randomly travel through time, with the crew panicking over how to get home before they run out of fuel. Unfortunately it consists mostly of the pilot crew and a stewardess questioning what’s happening and reading flight instruments with almost no effects to imply what is happening beyond the dull surprise dialogue. It takes them more than half the episode to realize they traveled through time, and when they do, it consists entirely of a bad shot of a dinosaur and the realization that they’re in New York in the wrong year. It tries to be scary by ending on an uncertain note as they take their last chance to return home without knowing if they will succeed in returning home on their last bit of fuel, only for Serling to pop in and suggest that they fail. The whole thing is just kind of aggressively boring and I think they didn’t have the budget for this idea yet.

S2E19 – Mr. Dingle, The Strong

The titular Mr. Dingle is a below average salesman sitting in a bar, who gets dragged into an argument about a questionable call during a baseball game, and gets punched across the room for giving an opinion. First onscreen violence we’ve had in a while. Things get weird when some interesting designed aliens arrive and secretly give Dingle the strength of 300 men as part of a test to see how he’d use it. Most of the episode from here is just semi-humorous attempts to show off this strength, as Dingle gets into the papers for his sudden oddity. This goes on for a bit, and frankly drags, until he pays back the guy that hits him in the bar every week and starts doing an exhibition of strength for the papers. The aliens then decide he’s wasting it and take the strength back. But lo and behold, some aliens from a different planet arrive to test giving intelligence to somebody, and the ones on the way out recommend Dingle.

It’s not as bad as The Mighty Casey when it comes to writing comedy, but the jokes solely consist of Dingle not knowing his own strength, and people reacting to his breaking things. It tires out quickly and there frankly wasn’t enough going on here to be a full episode. This interestingly won’t be the last time we get martians and venusians arriving in the same eatery this season, but the ones from that later episode bear no resemblance to these ones. This one’s quaint, but I can’t help but feel they could have come up with a more interesting direction to take the story in.

S2E20 – Static

First of all, I just want to highlight the changing times by quoting the episode:

After handing 50 cents to a child, “Go buy yourself a switchblade.”

Anyway, this episode felt longer than it was, but in a good way. It’s one where every moment was maximized so that they could fit more into the story. It also had some very questionable video quality, but I’m willing to write that off as just being the recording I watched. This story deals with Ed Lindsey, an aging man who lives in a boarding horse with a bunch of other middle aged/retired people and I really don’t understand the setting here. Maybe these things just don’t exist anymore, but everybody seems to be living in separate rooms of a large house and have been there for years. One of the women jokes about how glad she is that she never married a guy who she lives with even though the two of them have been under the same roof for twenty years. It’s weird.

Back on topic, Ed hates television because of how it distracts everybody else during social time. Naturally, he does something only a boomer could do: he digs out an old radio and listens to it alone in his room instead of watching TV with everyone, because the old technology was so much better and clearly his housemates being distracted by the TV is more antisocial than him sitting alone in his room. I expected this conflict to be the focus of the episode, but instead he starts hearing broadcasts from twenty years ago, broadcasts which suddenly stop working every time he calls anybody into the room with him. This leads into the real conflict, that being that the song he keeps hearing was his song with the woman downstairs he dated but never married twenty years ago, and the nostalgic conflict of how neither of them ever got over each other but apparently were never a thing despite living together all this time. He’s clinging to the past and loving what could have been, and she tries to help by getting rid of the radio. The setting makes this story very, very weird (you’re seriously telling me they didn’t basically just maintain a romantic relationship all this time?), but removed from that, it’s sweet and I really enjoyed it. It’s another of The Twilight Zone’s patented “you can never go back” episodes, but I appreciate how they keep finding new and interesting ways to tell that same moral. It’s not on par with similar stories like Walking Distance and 16 Millimeter Shrine, but it was still an enjoyable take on the concept in its own right. I just feel like it would have benefited from being set in a retirement home and having the ex-lovers just now learning they’d moved into the same home.

S2E21 – The Prime Mover

Ace learns his coworker is secretly telekinetic, and takes him to Vegas so he can cheat. The resulting episode is your basic story about the dangers of greed, but in this case, focusing on how the allure of money is causing Ace to ignore people. He neglects the coworker’s pleas to stop and keeps pushing him. He neglects his girlfriend’s wishes entirely so they can keep making more money than they need. Eventually, he winds up with nothing after gambling everything, only for his buddy’s powers to give out from overuse. Neither a highlight nor stinker, this episode does exactly what you expect it to do and then ends.

S2E22* – Long Distance Call

It’s little Billy’s fifth birthday, and his grandmother is so happy. She plays with him, gives him a toy telephone, makes some frankly very rude remarks about her son and daughter-in-law, and then dies. Billy doesn’t really get it, but he claims he can still talk to her over that toy telephone, and that she’s telling him to kill himself so he can be with her.

Long Distance Call is one of the season’s highlights, featuring some stellar performances and a truly disturbing plot. The thought of loving somebody so much that you want them to die with you is a powerful focus, and to everyone that had a good relationship with their own grandmother, the results are chilling. I’m always torn on how to treat the mom in this episode, as she’s absolutely right to be concerned about much of what’s happening, but she’s also beyond rude to her husband for mourning his mother on the day after her death. The husband, meanwhile, is frankly the best actor here, really selling a climax where he tearfully begs a toy phone not to kill his son. It should be utterly ridiculous, yet he makes it work. Hell, even our antagonistic grandmother is plenty sympathetic, desperately just trying to live one more day so she can be at her grandson’s birthday. 

This episode asks what we would do to hang onto our loved ones, even in death, and takes that question to disturbing lengths. It fits right in with the so-called “elevated horror” of today, as the audience never actually hears the grandmother on the phone, and the narration questions if what we’re told is true or if this is just how the family grieved. Twilight Zone being Twilight Zone, I’m inclined to say the old lady was absolutely on that phone and trying to take her grandson. Great performances and a chilling concept make this one of the best ghost stories in the show, and I will always love how they cut that penultimate scene so that you can’t hear the resolution of whether or not grandma’s ghost will agree to spare Billy.

S2E23 – 100 Yards Over the Rim

Man these western episodes just aren’t doing it for me. A pioneer man stumbles over the top of a hill, and 100 years into the future. He acts confused and asks what’s going on for a while before stealing some medicine and stumbling back into his own time. There’s a nice monologue near the end about what people build for the futures they won’t be present for, but this episode is a lot of nothing leading up to that. We’ve seen our fair share of inexplicable time travel episodes already, and this one’s nothing special.

S2E24 – Rip Van Winkle Caper

A quartet of criminals pull off a heist to steal many bars of gold, then use a sci-fi gas to enter 100 years of sleep so they can wake up as rich men in a new world. Problems arise when backstabbing and misfortunes cause their numbers to dwindle, never mind the fact that they setup in a desert they’ll now have to carry the gold out of.

Most of this story didn’t need the Rip Van Winkle stuff; it’s basically just four men picking each other off for money while struggling through a desert. It does a great job of keeping the tension up though, since you’re never really sure which man is going to come out on top as the sole survivor at the end. I guessed the twist before it came, but it’s a good one. They worry that a war might have wiped out humanity during their 100 year slumber, but in actuality, people found a way to manufacture gold during that time, rendering it utterly worthless. Four greedy men killing each other over nothing in the desert makes for a solid addition to the show, though to make the comparison, I don’t think this is as strong as the previous season’s “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” which had much the same structure.

S2E25 – The Silence

I liked this one more than I expected to. Returning to a gentleman’s club, an old man makes a bet with an annoyingly talkative younger fellow that he can’t remain silent for one year, with a $500,000 prize attached. The episode follows the passage of time as this fellow sits in a glass cell awaiting the end of it all, while the bet-maker realizes he’s made a horrible mistake and tries to coax him into giving up with lies about what his wife is doing in his absence. After a year finally passes and the bet is won, we get not one, but two twists worthy of closing this one out.

It’s a truly futile story, in a lot of ways. Without spoiling the double twist, both men go to lengths they’re not prepared to go in pursuit of this money, and both of them irreparably damage themselves in pursuit of it. Did either of them really win? Not in my eyes, but maybe you’ll think differently. Credit where credit is due, I honestly didn’t guess the ending until seconds before the reveal, so it did a good job of keeping the big secret from an observant viewer.

Also as a neat little easter egg, the season 1 theme makes an appearance as background music.

S2E26* – Shadow Play

Once upon a time, I would have called this my single favorite episode of The Twilight Zone. I’ve been away from it for a few years, so does it hold up? The short answer is yes; the long answer is that I could do a whole article on just this episode because there’s just so much to it.

Adam Grant is being put to death on murder charges, despite his wild claims that the whole world is his dream and that everyone will die if they execute him. The bulk of the episode consists of either him pulling at threads of reality despite nobody believing him, and the DA’s family slowly growing concerned about the possibility that he is telling the truth, that this is a dream he has every night, and that they all just trade roles and go through the motions again and again. 

How do we know if we’re real? When the dream theory is brought up, the cast deride it with life experiences and things that couldn’t fit into the dream. They’re all wrong in the end though; they couldn’t know that they weren’t real until it was too late. Why does this dream keep repeating? Is Adam actually guilty of something, or is there another reason for his eternal hell? What happens to our ideas and memories when we die? Are they lost forever? Recycled? Is what little time we have best spent desperately putting something real into this world to leave behind proof that we existed? Or is this all just one big lie and our actions don’t matter because we’re following a predetermined script? Am I me, do I deserve the life I have? Or will somebody else be filling my role tomorrow? If the dream works the way it does because it’s how things look in the movies, and people base opinions and replace experiences with the media, then do we turn the world into the dream? It’s a grand philosophical mess, and I don’t have the time to dissect it piece by piece the way I’d like to; not into the empty void of the internet that nobody is responding to anyway. Please, if you watch one episode of this season ever, make it Shadow Play. There’s so much going on here that terrifies and intrigues on an existential level, and nothing would make me happier than to have a group to sit down with and dissect the episode scene by scene.

And god for being such a subtle effect, that fade in at the beginning where the dream comes out of the darkness is so good at establishing that Adam is telling the truth despite us not being certain. And to repeat it at the end is perfect.

I remember several scenes from this one that didn’t actually appear when I watched it, such as Adam looking at someone and saying “Last time you were the judge,” the priest being his father, and things slowly fading out of existence object by object at the end. None of these scenes appeared this time, so I’m going to have to do some digging to see if I’ve conflated this with another work of similar premise.

S2E27 – The Mind and the Matter

One Mr. Archibald hates his daily life and the people that populate it, wishing that everybody would just disappear and leave him alone. Then he picks up a book on mind over matter mambo-jumbo and becomes a god-like reality bender by reading it over his dinner. He then puts his ideals into use by erasing the rest of humanity from existence the next morning, so that he can go about his day in peace.

The episode’s fun. It does a lot with the mirror shots I’ve praised in the past, as Archibald’s reflection becomes his only companion, it runs with the premise of him playing god and the utter hilarity of his deciding to bring everybody back, except just like him. I appreciate their committing to the bit with the scene where the same actor plays every character. In the end, it’s a good little story about him learning that he was the problem all along, because of course only someone who was already terribly unpleasant could find fault in all humanity. You get a nice bit of growth at the end to round things out too. The overall premise has been explored in a few other episodes already, and perhaps better, but this is still a well-done little reminder that while we claim hell is other people, its really being alone with ourselves.

S2E28* – Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up

Two cops investigating reports of an object falling from the sky discover an abandoned UFO. They follow tracks to a local diner, where everyone present is taking a break from a long bus trip. The driver swears he only had six people on board, but there’s seven now, and he doesn’t remember which one wasn’t with him. It’s a different take on Maple Street, and not the last new take on it we’ll see by the show’s end. This one involved hard proof of an alien presence and involves much more rational characters. I used to prefer it for that reason, but while the mystery is laid out well, everyone being so rational not only narrows it down so that you can reasonably solve for the martian (good), but also leads to the loss of the panic and hysteria from Maple Street (bad). This results in a story where the group comes to the most logical conclusion, that the bus driver just miscounted, and then they head off and the martian kills everyone on the bus to hide their identity before stumbling back to the diner for the reveal. It’s an odd case where everybody stays incredibly calm, yet the worst outcome occurs. Is it saying we need a little panic and hysteria? Or is it just a fun little sci-fi mystery? 

Also, props to whoever did the effects for that third eye. It looks quite good for its time. 

S2E29* – The Obsolete Man

For the season finale, Burgess Meredith, of Time Enough at Last, returns as yet another bibliophile. This time he’s much more likable.

Wordsworth lives in a totalitarian state that executes anyone it deems “obsolete,” which is to say, not directly contributing to the strength of the state. This state has disproven God (or so it claims) and removed all books from the world (once again, so they claim. Wordsworth has shelves of them in his house). As Wordsworth is a librarian, there’s no place for him in a bookless world, so rather than train him in a new skill, the state decides to put him to death within 48 hours. He’s given the choice of how he wants to go, and he chooses a secretive method that will be televised nationally. The figurehead responsible for his trial okays this for no particular reason beyond wanting to make an example out of him.

What follows is a heartfelt confrontation as both the librarian and the chancellor are locked in a room with a bomb, and only one of them can face death with dignity. One of The Twilight Zone’s most badass protagonists, Wordsworth arranges the situation to force the chancellor to decry his own state in order to survive, then accepts his own demise. The chancellor, meanwhile, is now obsolete, as he showed weakness in the state and went back on its doctrine. The episode’s surprisingly feel-good for one about a man’s execution, and is among the season’s strongest offerings. Really, it’s only held back by the absurdity of Wordsworth getting so much power in this situation, and the zombie-like behavior of the people attacking the chancellor at the end. All in all, this was a great choice to close out the season with.

Proper Rankings of These Episodes:

Great Episodes. This is ideal Twilight Zone

• Shadow Play
• Eye of the Beholder
• The Lateness of the Hour
• Long Distance Call
• The Obsolete Man
• Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room
• The Invaders

Good Episodes. Good enough to rewatch

• A Penny for Your Thoughts
• Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up
• Man in the Bottle
• The Mind and the Matter
• The Silence
• Static
• Twenty-two
• The Howling Man

Decent, but I probably won’t revisit them

• A Most Unusual Camera
• The Whole Truth
• King Nine Will Not Return
• Nick of Time
• Back There
• Rip Van Winkle Caper
• The Prime Mover

These were fine, if a bit boring

• The Odyssey of Flight #33
• Mr. Dingle, The Strong
• 100 Yards Over the Rim
• The Trouble With Templeton
• The Night of the Meek

Bad episodes

• Dust
• A Thing About Machines

Season 2 Overall

This season’s a bit shorter than the first, by seven episodes. I kind of felt like it was weaker than the first season as I was going through it, but looking back, I think it’s just that the production order bunches up most of the bad episodes together, resulting in a dry spell while the highlights all come in batches. That last batch of five episodes in particular really salvages this season, with Shadow Play and The Obsolete Man in particular pulling a lot of weight. There’s thankfully no Willoughby equivalent this season, and there were ultimately only two terrible episodes amongst the whole thing. Interestingly, I feel like there were exactly as many episodes in the middle tiers as last season, so it seems those seven less episodes are taken from both extremes. 

Much of what I said in season one still applies here. The stories are still very human, focusing on down to earth elements of our lives even as they tell fantastical tales. A few of our new protagonists are a bit more out there than before, such as the scientists in Rip Van Winkle Caper and Lateness of the Hour, but they remain just as understandable, though perhaps not relatable, as everyone else. The stories are slightly less varied this time around, having found a definitive focus on sci-fi horror plus the occasional western, but the variety pack elements are still here. Night of the Meek and Mr. Dingle are very different from everything else offered, Man in the Bottle remains strictly supernatural, and Howling Man and The Invaders are much more film-esque stories. While The Twilight Zone came out of the gate running, I think it’s safe to say it really found a more solid stride here. The range of quality has flattened some, and while I still think there’s seven totally skippable episodes, what worked before still very much works. Amusingly, this means that I’d recommend about the same percentage of this season as I did the last.

As previously mentioned, the iconic theme tune made its arrival here, as did Sterling’s regular appearances. He only showed up personally in one episode last season, largely being kept back as an unseen narrator; here, he is appearing just as much as the pop cultural perception of him does. These elements definitely help give the show more of an identity, which is necessary to tie together the unrelated anthology stories. Between the two seasons… I think I prefer the first overall. There’s some absolute highlights in here; I’ll never pass up a chance to watch Shadow Play, Long Distance Call, or Eye of the Beholder, but there’s a reason the first season remains iconic despite lacking Sterling and the theme tune. This isn’t to insult the second season though; far from it. This is to acknowledge that some shows just maintain the same overall level of quality, and that having a few extra big titles helps that first season along in my mind. That and I can see a few cases where these plots are loosely recycled from existing episodes (Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up and Twenty-two stick out in that regard).