Top 5 Favorites--Rod Serling's Twilight Zone

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I know, this is probably a really hard list to make (narrow down to 5 episodes only!) for those who are also great fans of the original Twilight Zone (the re-make in the 80s really missed the mark badly, IMO).

For those who might have trouble thinking of titles (‘the episode where …’) Twilight Zone episode guide.

My own list of favorite episodes (and I honestly could do a 10, except then I’d be inclined to have 15 … and so on …)
  1. Time Enough at Last (hey, I’m a nearly-blind-due-to-nearsightedness bookworm, too)
  2. Judgment Night
  3. The Masks
  4. The Night of the Meek
  5. The Obsolete Man
[Bites fingers to stop from adding ten or so more episodes …]
 
  1. To Serve Man–great surprise ending!
  2. It’s A Good Life–does anyone know if this is where “Children of the Corn” came from?
  3. Night of the Meek–a classic. Should be shown every Christmas.
  4. Death’s Head Revisited–a great Holocaust story. Should be shown in high school history classes.
  5. The Midnight Sun–another great surprise ending.
also love 6. Eye of the Beholder–pigface!
 
I’ve always liked (not in order of preference)

The Bewitchin’ Pool

Kick the Can

Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?

The Last Flight

And the one starring Buster Keaton as the time-traveling janitor
 
I think it’s called “The Last Man on Earth” or something

When the guy comes back from space and no one is left on earth.
 
Tenebrae said:
And the one starring Buster Keaton as the time-traveling janitor
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That’s “Once Upon a Time”.

Oh, and Death’s Head Revisited is definitely right up there. I’m just a little more partial to Judgment Night (I think because it comes in little bits of clues until the final ‘aha’ moment)–and since I already had one Nazi-gets-comeuppance in my list, I picked a different one out of the twenty-or-so competing for my five.
 
I haven’t seen that many more than five (I need to get on that), so I only have a top 3.
  1. Time Enough At Last - the guy who never has enough time to read…
  2. Printer’s Devil - a failing newspaperman sells his soul to the devil.
  3. Walking Distance - turns out you can go home again.
 
I’ve seen practically all the episodes now… so I can’t do anything less than a top 10:
10. A Stop at Willoghby
  1. Third From the Sun
  2. Death Ship(The best hour long episode)
  3. Walking Distance
  4. Time Enough At Last
  5. Five Characters in search of an Exit
  6. To Serve Man
  7. Eye of the Beholder
  8. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
  9. The Howling Man -
    A terrifying episode about a young man who, sometime before WW2, wandering through Europe stumbles upon an old monastary where the brother’s are keeping a strange “howling” man locked up, claiming that he is the Devil captured in the flesh.
“You can catch the devil, but you can’t keep him”.

One of the best episodes, despite the cheesy makeup.
 
These are my favorites: I can’t pick just one! (But they are in order).

Season 2, Episode 6: Eye of the Beholder
Original Air Date: 11 November 1960
A young woman lying in a hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages, awaits the outcome of a surgical procedure performed by the State in a last-ditch attempt to make her look “normal”.

Season 3, Episode 8: It’s a Good Life
Original Air Date: 3 November 1961
On an isolated family farm, a young boy with vast mental powers, but lacking emotional development, holds his terrified family in thrall to his every juvenile wish.

Season 2, Episode 28: Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
Original Air Date: 26 May 1961
Following a frantic phone call about a crashed spaceship, two policeman try and determine who among the passengers of a bus at a snowed-in roadside diner is from another world.

Season 5, Episode 7: The Old Man in the Cave
Original Air Date: 8 November 1963
In a post-apocalyptic settlement, the inhabitants’ survival is dependent on the advice of an unseen man living in a nearby cave. This dependence is tested when a band of soldiers descends on their town.

Season 5, Episode 4: A Kind of a Stopwatch
Original Air Date: 18 October 1963
A man is given a stopwatch that halts time.

Season 2, Episode 7: Nick of Time
Original Air Date: 18 November 1960
A pair of newlyweds stopping in a small town are trapped by their own superstition when playing a fortune telling machine in a local diner.

Season 1, Episode 22: The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
Original Air Date: 4 March 1960
On a peaceful city street, strange occurrences and mysterious people stokes the residents’ paranoid to disastrous intensity.

Honorable Mention:

Season 1, Episode 30: A Stop at Willoughby
Original Air Date: 6 May 1960
Tired of his miserable job and wife, a businessman starts dreaming on the train each night, about an old, idyllic town called Willoughby. Soon he has to know whether the town is real and fancies the thought of seeking refuge there.

Where I live, the next city west of me IS called Willoughby. I have only seen this episode once, but it IS believed to be filmed here near me.
 
Sheesh, I went through the list, couldn’t find my favorite and wonder if it was even the Twilight Zone :confused:

The episode I’m thinking of is a prisoner makes a pact with a blind caretaker where the caretaker would help him escape. When a bell tolls to announce a death, the prisoner was to climb into the coffin with the body, be buried, and the caretaker would return to dig him up.

A few nights later, the bell tolled, the prisoner climbed in the coffin and was buried. When the caretaker didn’t return soon enough, he struck a match only to discover the caretaker is the one who died. Ahhh!
 
wigglebrick said:
Sheesh, I went through the list, couldn’t find my favorite and wonder if it was even the Twilight Zone :confused:

The episode I’m thinking of is a prisoner makes a pact with a blind caretaker where the caretaker would help him escape. When a bell tolls to announce a death, the prisoner was to climb into the coffin with the body, be buried, and the caretaker would return to dig him up.

A few nights later, the bell tolled, the prisoner climbed in the coffin and was buried. When the caretaker didn’t return soon enough, he struck a match only to discover the caretaker is the one who died. Ahhh!
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Maby it’s a “Night Gallery”(TV series also created and hosted by Rod Serling. you know, the one where he’s introducing the stories through weird paintings, it was sent up in the Simpson’s Halloween special 4.) episode? or perhaps one of the later re-make versions of the show?

It was resurrected in the 1980s after the film version by filmmakers Wes Craven, Joe Dante, and a few others. Plus it was once again resurrected for one season quite recently with Forrest Whittaker as the introducer, i think that one was in 2005.
 
What a fun topic.

When I was little, the original Twilight Zone was on and it was so creepy and unsettling, my folks wouldn’t let my brother and me watch it. So, I waited all those years till SciFi network began re-running the episodes.

I just have two favorites: Time Enough (the guy who broke his glasses and couldn’t read) and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

I still think about that last one whenever I fly. The original with William Shatner still has the power to completely unnerve. The remake with John Lithgow just didn’t quite cut it.
 
I just have two favorites: Time Enough (the guy who broke his glasses and couldn’t read) and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.
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These are my two favorites as well, but I love To Serve Man and Eye of the Beholder almost as much.

Speaking of anthology series, I just bought The Outer Limits and can’t wait to watch it.
 
wigglebrick said:
Sheesh, I went through the list, couldn’t find my favorite and wonder if it was even the Twilight Zone :confused:

The episode I’m thinking of is a prisoner makes a pact with a blind caretaker where the caretaker would help him escape. When a bell tolls to announce a death, the prisoner was to climb into the coffin with the body, be buried, and the caretaker would return to dig him up.

A few nights later, the bell tolled, the prisoner climbed in the coffin and was buried. When the caretaker didn’t return soon enough, he struck a match only to discover the caretaker is the one who died. Ahhh!
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Could it be from Outer Limits? That was also in Black & White.
 
Beachcomber said:
What a fun topic.

When I was little, the original Twilight Zone was on and it was so creepy and unsettling, my folks wouldn’t let my brother and me watch it. So, I waited all those years till SciFi network began re-running the episodes.

I just have two favorites: Time Enough (the guy who broke his glasses and couldn’t read) and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

I still think about that last one whenever I fly. The original with William Shatner still has the power to completely unnerve. The remake with John Lithgow just didn’t quite cut it.
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I was born in 1961 and one of the Twilight Zone episodes was broadcast the day after I was born. However, by the time I saw TZ, it was already in reruns since I was way too small (infant) to see them firstrun…but I bet it was fun to watch them for the first time when they originally aired!👍
 
I had to expand the list slightly. 😃 I think the Twilight Zone had some episodes (certainly more than I’ve listed) that really stood out from the rest for one reason or another. My favorites are mostly typical judging from the review scores they received from the site at the links:

Season 1:

Mirror Image

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

These two great episodes were aired on consecutive weeks!

Season 2:

Long Distance Call

Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up

Season 3:

It’s A Good Life

The Arrival

Season 4:

<…crickets…>

Season 5:

Stopover In A Quiet Town

What’s In The Box
 
Maybe someone knows this one. A boy goes to a walk down shop in a city. Inside are tables with strange items. The boy sees a fish tank with miniature figures inside that suddenly come to life and start fighting. Later, at the end, he convinces his Dad to take him to the shop. When they arrive, the opening in the sidewalk is gone like the stairs leading down were never there.

God bless,
Ed
 
wigglebrick said:
Sheesh, I went through the list, couldn’t find my favorite and wonder if it was even the Twilight Zone :confused:

The episode I’m thinking of is a prisoner makes a pact with a blind caretaker where the caretaker would help him escape. When a bell tolls to announce a death, the prisoner was to climb into the coffin with the body, be buried, and the caretaker would return to dig him up.

A few nights later, the bell tolled, the prisoner climbed in the coffin and was buried. When the caretaker didn’t return soon enough, he struck a match only to discover the caretaker is the one who died. Ahhh!
Click to expand...
I believe it was The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It gave me nightmares, too.
 
MarthaMartha said:
I believe it was The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It gave me nightmares, too.
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yeah, that show was great too…

my fav episode of that(I’ havn’t seen many but this one was great), was the episode with Joseph Cotten when he gets involved in a car wreck and becomes paraplegic, but he can’t move or tell anyone that he is alive, he can only watch helplessly. We the audience know he is alive(because we can hear his thoughts as Voice-Over) and watch helplessly with him.

That would have certainly been exceptionally hard for Cotten as an Actor, he spends the entire episode having to stay absolutly still… a great episode.
 
It amazing how vivid the Twilight Zone remains. I was a huge fan when the series first came on and can still remember clearly my first viewing as a child. They had great writing and powerful themes.By the way, there is a good web site (just googleTwilight Zone) listing all the episodes (the plot summaries below are taken from that site.)

After Hours–A woman who buys a thimble on the ninth floor of a department store later discovers the floor doesn’t exist, and makes a startling discovery after the store closes.

The Silence–A garrulous man, bet half a million dollars that he can’t keep silent for one year, goes to bizarre lengths to win the wager.

The Shelter–A group of neighbors turns into a hostile mob when they try to invade one family’s bomb shelter, believing a nuclear attack is imminent.

Five Charactors In Search of an Exit Five people — a ballet dancer, a major, a clown, tramp and a bagpipe player — trapped in a featureless enclosure with no idea how they got there attempt to escape.

Of Late I think of Cliffordville A ruthless captain of industry strikes a deal with the Devil and goes back in time to the life he remembers as a young man.

It was hard to narrow it down to just five.
 
Great show, but I must say I was extremely disappointed that the DVD sets were not done in chronological order (i.e. Season 1, Season 2) or at least the ones I saw a few years ago were not – they were just like seemingly random episodes thrown together…

Maybe I will do a search and see if they changed this…
 
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