The Twilight Zone (now with a top 25 list!)

[Lord Dalek]

Yeah this is my all time favorite tv show (sorry Insomniac), Rod Serling when on his A-Game is near equivalent to the god of writing. Also Syfy's having a marathon for the next 48 hours but I'm ignoring it because their prints are ass and I have blu-ray for everything but season 5.

[Avaitor]

Well I still don't have the Blus, so I might try to catch some of that marathon.

[Foggle]

Love this show! The original series, anyway.

[Lord Dalek]

Yeah the 80's and 2001 versions aren't too hot. For some reason, the writers thought they were doing Outer Limits instead and completely missed the point.

[Avaitor]

Ooh nice, "To Serve Man" is on.

mmm... cook books.

[Lord Dalek]

The place is here...

The time is now...

And the journey into the shadows we are about to watch... could be our journey.

Lousy pilot, but its still got the best opening narration in the series.

[Spark Of Spirit]

A marathon, eh? 

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yep, this is quite easily the best show ever made in the history of television. FACT!

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yep, this is quite easily the best show ever made in the history of television. FACT!

Oh, really?

[Lord Dalek]

Yes.

[Lord Dalek]

No more needing to have to rely on Syfy(lus). I can has uncut Season 5 in HD now.

[Lord Dalek]

So basically Avaitor asked me to do a top ten list of TZ episodes since... well... ITS THE GREATEST SHOW EVER (TM) but I really couldn't narrow it down to just ten episodes. So instead... here's a top 25 list complete with title cards in glorious High def where available....

PART ONE!

25.

"Long Distance Call" is the sole TZ contribution of writer William Idelson who cowrote the script (to exactly what degree changes with the account) with series stalwart Charles Beaumont. Its a simple tale of a young child (Billy Mumy in his first of three Zones) and his personal attachment to his late grandmother through a toy telephone... which may be truly connected to beyond the grave. This episode was part of a brief experiment in season 2 to shoot episodes on quad videotape to save costs, and its easily the best of them, being mostly based in interior sets so nothing is lost. This one is frequently overlooked but its a real creepy classic that holds up. 

24.

This could be either be viewed as a story of divine justice or a psychotic fore-runner to Child's Play. Either way, "Living Doll" is a masterpiece of psychological tension. Telly Savalas plays a nasty unlikable stepfather who finds himself pushed to the edge by his daughter's Talky Tina doll. You kinda want to see this guy get his just desserts from the doll because he's such a louse and Talky Tina is just a harmless piece of plastic, but the very end of the episode forces to reevaluate your opinion of both characters.

23.

This hour-long Zone by Reginald Rose features Pat Hingle in what could be considered the anti-"Walking Distance". Its the story of a man who makes nostalgia a profession (he's a toy maker) and finds himself delving deeper and deeper into his past while undergoing something of a mid-life crisis. But unlike Martin Sloan of "Walking Distance", Horace Ford's childhood appears to have been something much more hellish and unnostalgic than we could possibly imagine.

22.

Richard Matheson's debut script is on the surface a simple time travel story of an English WWI flying ace (played to perfection by Kenneth Haig) who finds himself warped to 1959. But beneath that is another story about honor and doing the right thing. Time travel in the Twilight Zone frequently occurs through technological and/or accidental methods. In this case its a higher power behind it, one who wants our hero to finally overcome his personal demons and do the right thing.

21.

A clear example of Serling's "fear of the unknown working against you" format, "Mirror Image" sticks Vera Miles in a nightmarish battle between her own sanity, parallel universes, and a series of increasingly bizarre coincedences. Of course we in the audience know whats going on since we're  witnesses to her perspective, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. The atmosphere is kept deliberately hostile through the proceedings only adding to the sense of tension and fear experienced by its protagonist, which manages to completely boil over by act three.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Man, I need to see more of this show. That stuff sounds too cool.

[Avaitor]

I've seen so little of the show myself, but I love all that I have seen.

Here, I've watched "Long Distance Call" and "Living Doll", both of which I think are brilliant. The others are added to my list of episodes to watch.

And thanks for reminding me about my own list for what I consider the greatest show ever. I've got a theory that I might be working on that soon.

[Lord Dalek]

20.

While William Shatner's second appearance on the Zone (as nervous wreck Bob Wilson facing a "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet") is the more famous of the two, this season 2 offering is by far the superior work. Here he plays a honeymooner stuck in a small Ohio town by a combination of car trouble, and the suggestive power of a strange fortune telling napkin holder with a bobbing devils head. There's actually very little supernatural content to this, since its all based off perspectives and coincedences. The ultimate message is not one thing can predict the future, you have to face it for yourself.

19.

Kinda obligatory but whatever... Burgess Meredith's first and most famous role on The Twilight Zone has him play a henpecked bookworm who survives a nuclear war quite by accident to have him finally be able to dedicate his life to...yeah you know how this goes... This is arguably the most famous episode of the Twilight Zone for a reason. That payoff, even though its been spoiled to death is still one that packs a hell of a wallop.

18.

Until it received its long belated second US broadcast on Syfy in January of 2016, "The Encounter" was the only episode of the Twilight Zone to be outright banned from reairing on television for content reasons, making it TZ's equivalent of Song of the South more or less. Two men: a WWII vet who's kind of a bigot (Neville Brand), and a young Japanese man (George Takei, pre-Star Trek) the former has hired to clean out his attic, find themselves in a battle of words and weaponry when an apparent supernatural force locks them in an attic. Claustrophobic and tense, this is an overlooked gem that has been ill-served by the controversy it has caused.

17.

It begins and ends at the same moment, in a trial for first degree murder. But between that is the execution by electric chair of the accused (Dennis Weaver)... how does that work? "Shadow Play" is one part of a near endless loop for a man who cannot escape the nightmare he is having, one where fantasy and reality seem to merge and take a life of their own (remember this was almost 50 years before "Inception") and the battle for the mind is the equivalent of being caught in an Escher-esque labyrinth.

16.

In its first season, The Twilight Zone found itself frequently dealing with 30-40ish businessmen who find themselves outside of reality as they know it. In the case of "World of Difference", its Howard Duff as Arthur Curtis, who comes into work one day...only to discover (in one of the best reveals ever) that he's actually an actor named Jerry Ryden who's playing "Curtis" in a movie! Richard Matheson's script is pretty menacing, making it vague as whether or not Curtis/Ryden has been ripped of out of his own reality or simply a man who has had a major nervous breakdown caused by his horrible marriage.