Catholic Themes in "The Twilight Zone"

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I am a big fan of Rod Serling’s television show. Is there anyone else out there who likes it?

Here are some episodes with themes that are rather specifically Catholic:
Dust(A great meditation on divine providence)
A Passage for Trumpet(pretty much a shorter version of “It’s a wonderful life”)
Escape Clause
The Howling Man(Boy this one’s very scary)
A Nice Place to Visit…
The Chaser

Theres probally a few more I’m missing out on here, but these are the ones that stick out.
 
A lot of the episodes had a moral teaching in them. I always enjoyed the show.
 
We all love, love, love the show in our house. So many of the episodes have sparked great discussion and debate.

Alas, it’s been over a year since I last watched the show, and I can’t remember which ones we particularly liked/found intriguing.

It’s a wonderful show, though. 👍
 
I LOVE the Twilight Zone! I own every season of that show. It’s great. My favorite Twilight Zone episode is To Serve Men.
 
Eucharisted said:
The Quality of Mercy is a classic 👍
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What do you mean? They’re almost ALL classics (some of the last season were real turkeys, but I think that was from trying to go 1hr instead of the half hour).

Anyone remember the title of the one that had the SS captain spending night after night reliving the last night of a passenger ship he’d ordered his crew to fire on? Queen Anne, I think was the ship.

“Purple Testament” (the soldier who saw some sort of glow on the face of people who were going to die).

“Masks”

I dearly love that series. My favorite of all is “Time Enough at Last” but overall that show was seriously good TV and the attempted remakes really miss the boat and try to go for the spooky/supernatural without getting into the morals that were what the TZ twist was all about.
 
I absolutely love the Twilight Zone. It’s one of my favorite shows, and frequently had moral outcomes.

To the OP, I don’t really consider “Escape Clause” to have a Catholic underpinning, especially with the faulty theology, since one can’t really sell one’s soul.

“The Howling Man” is one of my favorite episodes ever. I always think the main character is an idiot when I watch it though.
 
I thought of a couple of religiously orieinted episodes. One was with the backwoods man who dies when trying to rescue his coondog who went in the water after a raccoon. He walks down a road not realizing he is dead when he encounters a guy who claims it is heaven and he should enter in, but he can’t take the dog. The man says he won’t go in if he can’t take the dog but will just wander on down the road. There he finds the real heaven where they let the dog in and have a square dance planed for the evening.

The second one involves a man who crashes his spaceship on a strange planet where the only other person is a young woman who apparently is from another world who also crashed there. They don’t get along at first but they finally begin to communicate with each other. The area has all the food they need and all the other neccessities. He convinces her they have to make the best of it and explore their new world together. He tells her his name is Adam and she says her name is Eve.
 
They usually have marathons of the Twilight Zone a couple times a year on the sci-fi channel. The last one was on New Year’s Eve/Day. I try to record all the good ones I like when they are on.
 
My favorite episode was the one where a man steps into the dimension where reality was being made moment by moment. I especially liked its explanation of why sometimes we lose things and find them, even though we swear that we looked in that place before - it is because the makers of reality forget to put it there, and one of the makers realize the mistake and put it in place. I’m not sure if it was in the old series or the new one.

The “To Serve Man” episode is my next favorite.
 
Mythos said:
I absolutely love the Twilight Zone. It’s one of my favorite shows, and frequently had moral outcomes.

To the OP, I don’t really consider “Escape Clause” to have a Catholic underpinning, especially with the faulty theology, since one can’t really sell one’s soul.

“The Howling Man” is one of my favorite episodes ever. I always think the main character is an idiot when I watch it though.
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Well that’s reasonable yes.

He may be an idiot, but it’s spot on. It’s something we can all do from time to time when we give in to temptation. Which is what makes it a scary episode.
 
Doorbell said:
I LOVE the Twilight Zone! I own every season of that show. It’s great. My favorite Twilight Zone episode is To Serve Men.
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“To Serve Man” is unwatchable - not bad; just too painful at the end. It’s a superb episode; as is “The Little People” (not the colour episode; the black-&-white one):​

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I don’t think that it’s humanly possible to not like The Twilight Zone.
 
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