Top 10 Twilight Zone Episodes
The Twilight Zone is probably one of the best TV series ever created. I am talking about the 1959 series of course, the only one which is worth mentioning in my opinion. In what follows I am going to present you what I consider to be the best episodes of the series. The TV series has a science fiction exterior, but I have to tell you that despite of that, it has some really powerful moral messages. This is the reason why it was praised by so many people. You will see characters which have real life problems, presented in a science fiction or paranormal situation.
Warning, this article contains spoilers.
In this episode we are presented with a character who is fascinated by reading. He is a banker, and unfortunately he does not have enough time to read. He does each and every time he has the possibility, especially during his lunch break. That annoys his boss, and not to mention his wife, who has forbid him to read while he is at home. To make the matters worse, she has gone so far that she has destroyed all of his books in order to prevent him from reading. If only he would have the time to read. During one of his lunch breaks, he goes into the vault of the bank, and he hears a blast. It seems that a nuclear bomb was detonated, and that he is the only one left surviving. Everything around him is destroyed, and when he goes outside he realizes that there is lots of food for him to consume, for many years. There are no more people left, but there are books, and lots of them.
He wears glasses, and just when he thought that the world could not be better, he drops them on the ground and they break. What a turn around: now he has all the time in the world to read the books, but he can not do it, as he can no longer see to read.
This episode is about a newspaper editor, who is in the verge of committing suicide. He is a failure, and because of it, he wants to end it all. However one day he is greeted by a mysterious man and soon afterward he starts to become very successful. As you might have guessed from the title of the episode, the stranger is in fact the devil, and the little success the main character had was just “demo”. In order to continue having the same success, the character has to sell his soul to the devil, who tries to convince him that the process is not very complicated, and that he will not regret the choice. Mr. Smith, A.K.A the devil, does not admit who he is, and he even manages to convince the character to sign the contract by assuring him that the devil is not real.
The devil tries to take advantage with the aid of the contract, and he wants to convince the character to commit suicide in order to gain his soul. In the end things turn out all right, as the main character manages to outsmart him.
In this episode we get to see a large number of people who have come to house of a dying man. They are all related to him, and all of them are waiting for him to die in order to inherit his fortune. He knows this, and he asks them to wear grotesque masks until midnight. The masks are supposed to represent their true emotions, and their true nature, which is very ugly. They do not care about him, they only care about his money. During the entire episode he verbally assaults his family, telling them that they are nothing but caricatures, who are only interested in money. He was right, and he wanted to make them know that as well. Well, the old man dies, and everyone is happy.
They can now remove their masks, but to their horror, they have realized that the ugliness of the masks has been transferred into their faces. They are now ugly just like the masks were; they are now showing their true identity. It is a real moral lesson, and the episode is excellent at presenting the human values.
This episode presents the life of a couple: Joe and Phyllis Britt who are not getting along. It seems that they can not stand each other, and they fight all day long. They argue for the smallest reasons, and life is a living hell for both of them. Joe wants to get along with his wife, but she rejects him, abusing him in a verbal manner. The twist to this story is the fact that Joe is able to see the situation between him and his wife on the TV. He is able to see the past, the present, and even the future, and I have to tell you that the future looks really grim. He sees at the TV that he will kill his wife, in one of their fights. They will start arguing, and he will punch her, throwing her through the window. Joe is convinced that what he sees is real, and he tells this to his wife, who starts to make fun of him, and who tells him that she will put him in a mental institution. The fight which he saw on the TV begins, and just like in the scenes which he saw, he kills her with a punch.
The police come and takes him away, and he knows that he will be placed on death row. The story does not have a real moral, but it is interesting because of the grim ending; the feeling that he has, knowing that his life will be over and that he can not do anything about it. At the end we realize that the TV repairman who came in order to repair the TV during one of their fights, was the one responsible for the situation. Or for a part of it anyway.
As the title suggests, this episode presents the life on the Maple Street. The people from the street see a strange thing on the sky, accompanied by a crashing sound. They have no idea what that was, but they realize that none of the electrical devices work, and that they are stuck in the street. They can not use their cars to get away because they do not work, they can not phone for help, and so on. A little boy suggests the fact that this is the way in which the aliens operate, and strangely the people listen to him. He adds that in his comic books, the aliens take the shape of humans, so the hunt for the aliens begins. Everybody blames everybody, the situation getting tenser by the minute. They assault each other, they threaten each other, and they blame each other for the situation.
Things seem to be out of hope when all of a sudden the devices start to work again. In the end we see that the situation was actually controlled by the aliens, as they wanted to see if the same thing would happen. They did it before, and they will do it again. Even if the story does not sound very impressive, it can be compared with the situation in which we are nowadays, when it seems that we are more and more addicted to the technology.
