THE TWILIGHT ZONE: SEASON 3
See Videography 7 for an explanation of the rating system for Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes.
“The Arrival”
**
Air Date: September 22, 1961
Directed by Boris Sagal
Cast: Harold J. Stone: Grant Sheckly; Fredd Wayne: Paul Malloy; Robert Karnes: Robbins; Noah Keen: Airline Executive Bengston; Jim Boles: Dispatcher; Bing Russell: George Cousins
The One Where: Grant Sheckly, an investigator with the Federal Aviation Administration, tries to solve the mystery of a plane that has somehow landed without a pilot or passengers aboard.
It Turns Out: The plane is an illusion subconsciously created by the one unsolved case on Sheckly’s record—a plane out of Buffalo that disappeared in a fog seventeen years earlier.
“The Shelter”
***
Air Date: September 29, 1961
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Rod Serling’s short story adaptation in Rod Serling, New Stories
Directed by Lamont Johnson
Cast: Larry Gates: Dr. Bill Stockton; Jack Albertson: Jerry Harlowe; Joseph Bernard: Marty Weiss; Michael Burns: Paul Stockton; Mary Gregory: Mrs. Henderson; Jo Helton: Martha Harlowe; Sandy Kenyon: Frank Henderson; Peggy Stewart: Grace Stockton; Moria Turner: Mrs. Weiss
The One Where: After being warned of an impending nuclear attack, a quiet community descends into chaos, fighting over access to a neighbor’s bomb shelter.
It Turns Out: The warning is a false alarm, but this provides little comfort. Having revealed to each other the darkest aspects of their nature, the relationship between these once-friendly neighbors has been irreparably damaged.
Notes: Serling’s scripts are sometimes criticized as being overwritten. A concise example of what is meant by this criticism can be found in the climax of “The Shelter.” The story ends with a group of people standing in Dr. Bill Stockton’s basement, where they have battered through the door of his family’s bomb shelter. Minutes earlier, while in the throes of fear, they devolved into an unthinking, violent mob, and one of them revealed racist attitudes. And now that the threat has turned out to be a false alarm, they want to forget what they have done and return to normal. One of them suggests that they will make amends by paying for the damages to Stockton’s home. Stockton responds,
STOCKTON
Damages? I wonder. I wonder if any one of us has any idea what those damages really are. Maybe one of them is finding out what we’re really like when we’re normal. The kind of people we are just underneath the skin. I mean all of us. A lot of naked, wild animals who put such a premium on staying alive—that they’d claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege.
(he shakes his head, turns and looks up toward the steps)
We were spared a bomb tonight. But I wonder. I wonder if we weren’t destroyed even without it.
“The Shelter” is a provocatively told story. The actions of its characters are believable and disturbing. The image of these people, out of breath from the exertion of having turned into “naked, wild animals,” has already said all that need be said. The story’s climax would have been at least as effective had Serling limited the monologue to “Damages? I wonder. I wonder if any one of us has any idea what those damages really are” and then allowed Stockton to walk up the steps and leave the audience to consider the nature of those damages for itself.
MOB MENTALITY:
“If you stick good men into a mob, take away their names, faces, identity, take away their responsibility, they’re no longer good men.”
—“Widow on the Evening Stage,” The Loner
Rod Serling stories exploring mob mentality:
“Noon on Doomsday,” United States Steel Hour
“A Town Has Turned to Dust,” Playhouse 90
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” The Twilight Zone
“The Shelter,” The Twilight Zone
“I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” The Twilight Zone
“Widow on the Evening Stage,” The Loner
“The Trial in Paradise,” The Loner
“A Killing at Sundial,” The Chrysler Theatre
“Pilot,” The New People
“The Passersby”
**
Air Date: October 6, 1961
Directed by Elliot Silverstein
Cast: James Gregory: Sergeant; Joanne Linville: Lavinia; David Garcia: Lieutenant; Austin Green: Abraham Lincoln; Rex Holman: Charlie; Warren Kimberling: Jud Goodwin
The One Where: At the end of the Civil War, a wounded soldier stops to rest at a house by the side of a road. The house is owned by a woman who watches the near-constant procession of wounded soldiers returning from battle via this road and waits for her husband to return.
It Turns Out: The soldiers traveling this road are not wounded but dead. And so is she.
“The Mirror”
**
Air Date: October 20, 1961
Directed by Don Medford
Cast: Peter Falk: Ramos Clemente; Arthur Batanides: Tabal; Antony Carbone: Cristo; Rodolfo Hoyos: Garcia; Richard Karlan: D’Allesandro; Will Kuluva: General DeCruz; Vladimir Sokoloff: Priest
The One Where: A revolutionary general, Ramos Clemente, becomes a paranoid, tyrannical dictator thanks to a mirror that magically reveals the reflections of his would-be assassins.
It Turns Out: After Clemente kills or orders the deaths of his four lieutenants, the mirror reveals Clemente’s final enemy: himself. Heeding the mirror’s message, Clemente commits suicide.
Notes: Produced a little over two years after Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, “The Mirror” reveals its model too blatantly for some tastes but is nonetheless a sharply written script. Its primary weakness is its length—Serling needed a much bigger canvas to do this story justice.
Anthony Fremont (Billy Mumy) sends a “very bad man” to the cornfield in “It’s a Good Life.”
***
Based on Jerome Bixby’s short story, “It’s a Good Life”
Air Date: November 3, 1961
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Jerome Bixby’s short story in Greenberg, Matheson, and Waugh, Twilight Zone
2. Remake produced as segment 3 of Twilight Zone: The Movie
3. Feature-length screenplay by Rod Serling, unproduced
Directed by James Sheldon
Cast: Billy Mumy: Anthony Fremont; John Larch: Mr. Fremont; Cloris Leachman: Mrs. Fremont; Casey Adams: Pat Riley; Jeanne Bates: Ethel Hollis; Alice Frost: Aunt Amy; Tom Hatcher: Bill Soames; Don Keefer: Dan Hollis; Lenore Kingston: Thelma Dunn
The One Where: A six-year-old boy with godlike powers, Anthony Fremont, holds his family and neighbors in a state of continuous terror, knowing that anything they do or think might invoke Anthony’s wrath.
It Turns Out: Anthony’s parents and neighbors are too afraid to directly confront Anthony, and so their nightmare will never end.
It’s a Good Life: The Movie (No, Not That Movie)
In 1974, in cooperation with producer Alan Landsburg, who had produced Serling’s “A Storm in Summer” for Hallmark Hall of Fame, Serling expanded Jerome Bixby’s short story, “It’s a Good Life,” into a terrifically creepy, feature-length screenplay that went unproduced.
Serling’s screenplay begins with Anthony’s frightening birth as a premature yet fully developed baby who already has six teeth. He begins to speak within a day. All the clocks in Peaksville have stopped at 11:03 A.M., the moment of Anthony’s birth and the moment when the town was somehow torn away from the rest of the world. At Peaksville’s edge, telephone wires end in midair and roads abruptly terminate into nothingness.
The first act of Serling’s screenplay is a frenetic and gruesome sequence of scenes in which Anthony terrorizes the town’s residents. When he’s only one day old, he sets fire to his Uncle Harvey as punishment for his bad thoughts about Anthony. Ablaze, Harvey crashes through Anthony’s second-floor bedroom window, screaming as he plunges to the ground and dies. Before long, Anthony has plucked the arms and legs off a sheriff (and cruelly keeps the sheriff alive), removed a man’s eyes as punishment for staring at him, and tormented a church organist with her worst fear, a gigantic rat that looks up at her from the organ’s keys as Anthony taunts her, “Keep playing or I’ll make it eat you up.” >>
The story proceeds into a retelling of Dan Hollis’s birthday party as presented in the television version, though this time Hollis (renamed Wally Wiggins) doesn’t wind up with his head on a jack-in-the-box, he ends up inside a fishbowl, transformed into a horrific human-tadpole creature.
Throughout the story, a group of men occasionally and cautiously discuss ways to dispose of Anthony, always concluding that doing so would be impossible. Eventually, one proposes the idea of rendering Anthony helpless—and potentially powerless—by getting him intoxicated. They know, however, that this would be impossible to accomplish because Anthony could read their thoughts and uncover their motives before taking a single sip of alcohol. One of them suggests a potential solution to this obstacle….
Anthony sits on a porch with his lobotomized Aunt Ada (Aunt Amy in the television episode), drinking a concoction that he likes very much, though it is beginning to make him feel strange. Aunt Ada is the only person whom Anthony remotely trusts, and her compromised mental state means that she can get Anthony drunk without subconsciously betraying a motive. In blissful ignorance, she takes Anthony for walk, leading him bleary-eyed and stumbling into the town square, where one of the men (a former military sharpshooter) guns him down from a safe distance away.
His death immediately reunites Peaksville with the world, as if the town had never left. But the residents have barely begun to celebrate their liberation before disturbing news arrives: Anthony’s mother is again pregnant. The people of Peaksville can only hope that Anthony was one of a kind.
Through its first two acts, Serling’s screenplay is riveting, frightening, and visually exciting. Its resolution is largely unsatisfactory, and another pregnancy is a far-too-predictable climax. However, the screenplay would have likely undergone further drafts before being ready for filming, and the effort had tremendous potential. It is unclear how close it came to being produced.
“Deaths-Head Revisited”
***
Air Date: November 10, 1961
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Illustrated version by Mark Kneece (2009)
Directed by Don Medford
Cast: Oscar Beregi: Gunther Lutze; Joseph Schildkraut: Alfred Becker; Robert Boon: Taxi Driver; Karen Verne: Hotel Clerk; Ben Wright: Doctor
The One Where: A former Nazi SS officer, Gunther Lutze, returns to the scene of his atrocities, Dachau.
It Turns Out: The ghosts of his victims put Lutze on trial, convict him of crimes against humanity, and, after subjecting him to a small measure of the pain he inflicted on his victims, sentence him to spend the rest of his life hopelessly insane.
“The Midnight Sun”
***
Air Date: November 17, 1961
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Rod Serling’s short story adaptation in Rod Serling, New Stories
2. Illustrated version by Mark Kneece (2009)
Directed by Anton M. Leader
Cast: Lois Nettleton: Norma Smith; Betty Garde: Mrs. Bronson; Tom Reese: Intruder; William Keene: Doctor; Jason Wingreen: Neighbor; June Ellis: Neighbor’s Wife
The One Where: Earth has shifted orbit and is moving ever closer to the sun. With increasing temperatures, water shortages, and power outages, the human race has little time left.
It Turns Out: The situation is actually part of the protagonist’s fever dream, and she wakes to discover that reality is the opposite of what she’d dreamed: the world has shifted off its axis and is moving farther from the sun. Before long, all of humanity will freeze to death.
Notes: “The Midnight Sun” offers another example of Charles Beaumont’s suggestion that the success of The Twilight Zone often resulted more from the execution of an idea than from the quality of the idea itself. In “The Midnight Sun,” Serling gets away with using the ultimate cliché, It was all a dream, by first presenting the dream itself suspensefully and then adding a second twist, which gives a reason for the protagonist’s dream and avoids the inherent fault in most such endings. In most cases, the revelation that a character’s experiences were only part of a dream negates the preceding story. Here, Serling has his heroine awaken from her nightmare only to drop her into a second nightmare as frightening as the first. This second nightmare validates rather than undermines the preceding story. Beaumont accomplishes something similar in his excellent “Shadow Play,” in which the main character is explicitly living in a dream but the dream maintains its emotional weight because he will never awaken from it.
**
Based on Manley Wade Wellman’s short story “The Valley Was Still”
Air Date: November 24, 1961
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Manley Wade Wellman, “The Valley Was Still,” short story in Greenberg, Matheson, and Waugh, Twilight Zone
Directed by James Sheldon
Cast: Gary Merrill: Joseph Paradine; Ben Cooper: Dauger; Jack Mann: Mallory
The One Where: With the South on the verge of losing the Civil War, a Confederate soldier discovers a book of black magic and a spell that can immobilize the entire Union army and win the war.
It Turns Out: The soldier and his comrades decide that it would be wiser to lose a war than to lose their eternal souls by calling on the devil for help. They burn the book and resign themselves to defeat.
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit”
***
Based on Marvin H. Petal’s story
Air Date: December 22, 1961
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Working title: “The Depository”
Directed by Lamont Johnson
Cast: William Windom: Major; Murray Matheson: Clown; Susan Harrison: Ballerina; Clark Allen: Bagpipe Player; Kelton Garwood: Hobo
The One Where: A clown, a ballerina, a hobo, a bagpipe player, and an army major find themselves trapped in a metal cylinder from which there seems to be no escape.
It Turns Out: When the army major manages to climb out, it is revealed that the five of them are dolls that have been dropped into a donation barrel as Christmas gifts for needy children.
“A Quality of Mercy”
**
Based on Sam Rolfe’s idea
Air Date: December 29, 1961
Directed by Buzz Kulick
Cast: Dean Stockwell: Lieutenant Katell/Lieutenant Yamuri; Albert Salmi: Sergeant Causarano; Jerry Fujikawa: Captain Nakagawa; Rayford Barnes: Watkins; Leonard Nimoy: Hansen; Ralph Votrian: Hanachek; Michael Pataki: Jeep Driver
The One Where: An army sergeant protests his lieutenant’s order to wipe out a group of Japanese soldiers trapped in a cave on what may be the last day of World War II.
It Turns Out: The lieutenant is transformed into a Japanese soldier who has been ordered to slaughter a platoon of American soldiers under the same circumstances and finds that he must question the wisdom of this order just as his own order was questioned.
“One More Pallbearer”
Air Date: January 12, 1962
Directed by Lamont Johnson
Cast: Joseph Wiseman: Paul Radin; Trevor Bardette: Colonel Hawthorne; Gage Clarke: Reverend Hughes; Josip Elic: Electrician; Katherine Squire: Mrs. Langford
The One Where: A wealthy and powerful man, Paul Radin, invites a former schoolteacher, an army colonel, and a preacher to a meeting in his state-of-the-art bomb shelter. Radin believes that all of them mistreated him in the past, and he confronts them with his long-held grudges. He then reveals that he has learned of an impending nuclear attack and offers them shelter if they apologize for their treatment of him and beg his forgiveness.
All of them believe that their actions were justified and refuse to apologize. The schoolteacher embarrassed Radin after catching him cheating on an exam. The army colonel had Radin court-martialed for disobeying direct orders. And the preacher caused a scandal by revealing that Radin had driven a woman to suicide. All would rather spend their last moments on Earth with loved ones than owe their survival to such a vile man.
It Turns Out: Once released, Radin’s guests discover that his nuclear threat was a hoax. Their rejection and the failure of his plan cause Radin to suffer a complete mental breakdown. When he exits the shelter, he believes that the world truly has been destroyed. He is left stranded in and surrounded by the ruins of his own mind’s invention.
“Showdown with Rance McGrew”
*
Based on Frederic Louis Fox’s idea
Air Date: February 2, 1962
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Rod Serling’s short story adaptation in Rod Serling, New Stories
Directed by Christian Nyby
Cast: Larry Blyden: Rance McGrew; Arch Johnson: Jesse James; Robert Cornthwaite: Blattsburg; Robert Kline: Actor Portraying Jesse James; Troy Melton: Movie Cowboy #1; Jay Overholts: Movie Cowboy #2; Robert J. Stevenson: TV Show Bartender
The One Where: A television cowboy, Rance McGrew, is visited by the ghost of Jesse James, who announces that he and several of his outlaw friends in the afterlife are displeased with the way they have been portrayed on McGrew’s television show.
It Turns Out: After confirming that McGrew is a fraud and a coward, Jesse decides to stick around to ensure that McGrew’s TV series will start portraying the Old West more realistically and its outlaws a little more sympathetically.
Notes: A few months after writing this script, Serling realized that he might have inadvertently used a story idea that another television writer, Frederic Fox, had previously suggested. On October 12, 1961, he sent Fox a copy of the script and assured him that producer Buck Houghton would contact Fox’s agent “to arrange a price for your outline, and a credit of some sort which will satisfy you.” Fox responded, thanking Serling “for being a member of the exclusive minority group (Hollywood Chapter) that opposes the idea that integrity is a trauma.” He claimed that all he gave Serling was “a quickie about a deceased hombre who, in righteous protest, crawled out of his pine box” to confront the actor who portrayed him as a fool on television.1 Fox received an “idea by” credit on-screen. He later earned story credit for another episode, “Hocus Pocus and Frisby.”
“To Serve Man”
***
Based on Damon Knight’s short story
Air Date: March 2, 1962
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Damon Knight’s short story in Greenberg, Matheson, and Waugh, Twilight Zone
Directed by Richard L. Bare
Cast: Lloyd Bochner: Mike Chambers; Richard Kiel: Kanamit; Susan Cummings: Pat “Penny” Brody; Theodore Marcuse: Citizen Gregori; Hardie Albright: Secretary General; Robert Tafur: Valdes, Argentine Delegate; Lomax Study: Leveque, French Delegate; Jerry Fujikawa: Japanese Delegate; Nelson Olmstead: Scientist
The One Where: A group of aliens called Kanamits visit Earth, promising to end hunger, disease, and war. When one of the visitors leaves a book behind at the United Nations, a linguistics expert is eventually able to translate its title, To Serve Man. With this proof of the Kanamits’ altruistic intentions, everyone on Earth is clamoring for a place on one of several ships that will visit the Kanamits’ planet.
It Turns Out: When the rest of the book is translated, it is revealed that To Serve Man is a cookbook.
Notes: Science fiction grand master Theodore Sturgeon recommended Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” to Serling as a potential episode of The Twilight Zone more than a year before the series premiered, particularly noting the shock factor of its ending. His judgment was sound. The story and its ending are among the best remembered of the series. Serling’s adaptation is essentially faithful to Knight’s short story, with a few trivial differences and one relatively significant change. In the short story the aliens are squat, hairy, pig-like creatures, but The Twilight Zone’s aliens are far more imposing thanks to seven-foot-tall Richard Kiel and the makeup work of William Tuttle.
“To Serve Man” underwent significant revisions from the time initial filming wrapped to the time it aired. Serling was so dissatisfied with the initial cut of the film (five months prior to its broadcast) that he wrote to Knight and reported, “TO SERVE MAN turned out piss-poor, a combination of horrible direction and a faithless script bit your back. We’re re-shooting some scenes and it’s my hope that we can at least come within a hundred yards of your great story.”2
A Kanamit (Richard Kiel) reads a few of his favorite recipes at the United Nations in “To Serve Man.”
The most significant subsequent change was the decision to tell the primary story in flashback. This necessitated adding Chambers’s narration and the shooting of what became the story’s final scene: Chambers aboard the Kanamits’ ship on his way to becoming “an ingredient in someone’s soup.” The story initially ended with Pat’s horrific announcement, “It’s a cookbook!” As the meaning of these words sinks in, “a huge hand comes into the frame to touch Chambers’ cheek, pinch it lightly as if feeling for tenderness, then the hand gently but very firmly turns Chambers around and propels [him] up the stairs [as] they very slowly close up.” As Chambers is swallowed up by the Kanamits’ ship, Serling’s original closing narration is heard:
The very explicit and very specific difference in points of view. To the wee ones … the little folk called men … it’s a marvelous adventure, a voyage to another planet. An exciting sojourn into another section of the galaxy. But to the inhabitants known as Kanamits … it’s nothing more than a cattle car, a very comfortable provisions ship bringing food from the other end of the universe. Like I say … it’s all in the point of view.
Knight was pleased with the final result. One week after the broadcast he wrote to Serling, “You have made me a big man around here.… My kids thought there ought to have been more to the story, but I thought it was a dandy. I loved your monster and I treasure your line, ‘dust to desert.’” Serling responded,
I’m not at all sure we did justice to your exceptional story but the effort was there and the try was a manly one. Actually, the reactions to the show have been quite incredible. The mail pull, for our show anyway, has been quite phenomenal—and the word of mouth unusually positive and extensive. Actually, I think I piddled around with the U.N. too much and was unable to sustain this properly with legitimate production values…. Apologize to your kids for me, and explain to them what are the pitfalls of novice science fiction writers who run their ham fists all over the works of the legitimate ones.3
In 1997, TV Guide ranked “To Serve Man” at No. 11 among television’s “100 Greatest Episodes”; in 2013, the magazine picked the ending as the “Most Startling Twist of All Time.”
“The Little People”
*
Air Date: March 30, 1962
Directed by William Claxton
Cast: Joe Maross: Peter Craig; Claude Akins: William Fletcher; Michael Ford: Spaceman #1; Robert Eaton: Spaceman #2
The One Where: Two astronauts land on a planet, where they discover a race of beings smaller than ants. One of the astronauts develops delusions of grandeur and presents himself as the race’s malevolent and vengeful god.
It Turns Out: A pair of true giants arrives on the planet and gives the megalomaniacal astronaut a taste of his own medicine, picking him up and accidentally crushing him to death.
“Four o’Clock”
*
Based on Price Day’s short story
Air Date: April 6, 1962
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Price Day’s short story in Greenberg, Matheson, and Waugh, Twilight Zone
Directed by Lamont Johnson
Cast: Theodore Bikel: Oliver Crangle; Moyna MacGill: Mrs. Williams; Phyllis Love: Mrs. Lucas; Linden Chiles: FBI Agent Hall
The One Where: A paranoid and demented man, Oliver Crangle, keeps a list of “subversive” people on whom he plans to place a curse: through unspecified means, at four o’clock, every evil person in the world will be reduced in size to two feet tall.
It Turns Out: When four o’clock arrives, it is Crangle who finds himself shrunken.
“Hocus-Pocus and Frisby”
**
Based on Frederic Louis Fox’s unpublished story
Air Date: April 13, 1962
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Frederic Fox’s synopsis, “Mister Tibbs and the Flying Saucer”
Directed by Lamont Johnson
Cast: Andy Devine: Somerset Frisby; Howard McNear: Mitchell; Dabbs Greer: Scanlan; Clem Bevans: Old Man; Milton Selzer: Alien #1; Larry Breitman: Alien #2; Peter Brocco: Alien #3
The One Where: Somerset Frisby entertains his group of country bumpkin friends with tales of his far-ranging (and fictional) accomplishments. His tall tales inspire a visit from aliens who do not understand the concept of lies or exaggerations and intend to take Frisby back to their planet as a specimen of the finest of humanity.
It Turns Out: Frisby escapes by playing his harmonica, a sound that is painful to the aliens. But when he returns home and tells his friends what has happened, they don’t believe him.
“The Trade-Ins”
**
Air Date: April 20, 1962
Directed by Elliot Silverstein
Cast: Joseph Schildkraut: John Holt; Alma Platt: Marie Holt; Noah Keen: Mr. Vance; Theodore Marcuse: Mr. Farraday; Edson Stroll: Young John Holt
The One Where: An elderly man and woman, John and Alma, desperately try to accumulate enough money to pay for a procedure that would enable them to trade in their bodies for younger ones. They raise enough money for only one procedure, and Alma gives her husband her blessing to go through with the transformation without her.
It Turns Out: Once he’s in his new body, John realizes that he would rather grow old and die with his wife’s companionship than live a new life without her.
*
Air Date: April 27, 1962
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Reworked from unproduced teleplay, “I Shot an Arrow into the Air”
Directed by Allen H. Miner
Cast: Geoffrey Horne: Williams; Edmund Vargas: Pedro; Cliff Osmond: Manuelo; Paul Mazursky: Police Officer; Nico Minardos: Doctor; Vladimir Sokoloff: Guitar Player; Vito Scotti: Rudolpho; Henry Corden: Sanchez
The One Where: A Christlike alien crash-lands in Mexico and befriends a young boy, Pedro, giving him a mysterious gift.
It Turns Out: The frightened villagers kill the visitor and burn the gift, only to discover afterward that it was a chemical formula that promised to cure every form of cancer.
Notes: “The Gift” is a vastly rewritten version of one of Serling’s unproduced Twilight Zone pilot scripts, “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.” In condensing that far-superior script from one hour to thirty minutes, Serling ended up with one of the worst episodes of the series. Virtually nothing about this heavy-handed Christian allegory works, though some of its shortcomings can be attributed to its abbreviated length. No time at all is devoted to establishing why or how the alien and the boy become friends, for example; viewers are simply told this information. Pedro is an orphan who is viewed as strange simply because he likes to look at the stars, and the alien is the ultimate outsider, but this foundation for their friendship is established solely via pat dialogue: “I am an odd one,” Pedro tells the alien, “we are both odd ones.” Even the villagers’ fear of the alien is presented with almost no basis. Both the crash landing of the spaceship and the alien’s accidental killing of a policeman happen off camera, yet when the alien, who looks no different from a normal man, approaches two men who did not witness the initial incidents, they both react with exaggerated fear. Why don’t they assume the man is human?
The climax in which local policemen shoot and kill the alien is staged so clumsily as to be laughable. One twitchy policeman fires the first shot, prompted by hysterical villagers crying, “He’s attacking the boy!” The “attack” that causes this hysteria involves the unarmed alien with his arms spread wide (prepared for crucifixion), shuffling ever so slowly toward Pedro and never getting closer than ten feet. Throw in a couple of painfully bad performances, and “The Gift” ends up being quite the opposite.
“The Dummy”
***
Based on Lee Polk’s story
Air Date: May 4, 1962
Directed by Abner Biberman
Cast: Cliff Robertson: Jerry Etherson; Frank Sutton: Frank Gaines; John Harmon: Georgie; George Murdock: Willie the Ventriloquist; Sandra Warner: Noreen; Rudy Dolan: Emcee; Ralph Manza: Doorman
The One Where: A ventriloquist believes that his dummy has a life of its own.
It Turns Out: The dummy does indeed have a life of its own, and it ultimately switches places with the ventriloquist.
“Cavender Is Coming”
*
Air Date: May 25, 1962
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Working title: “The Side of the Angels”
Directed by Christian Nyby
Cast: Carol Burnett: Agnes Grep; Jesse White: Harmon Cavender; Howard Smith: Polk; William O’Connell: Field Rep #1; Pitt Herbert: Field Rep #2; John Fiedler: Field Rep #3; G. Stanley Jones: Field Rep #4; Frank Behrens: Stout; Roy Sickner: Bus Driver; Jack Younger: Truck Driver
The One Where: Agnes Grep, a good-natured klutz who can’t hold onto a job, is visited by Cavender, an equally inept guardian angel who has been charged with turning Agnes’s life around to earn his wings. When Cavender transforms Agnes into a wealthy woman, she finds that friends from her old neighborhood no longer know who she is. She forsakes the fortune to return to her former life and regain the love of her friends. Having failed again, Cavender seems unlikely to ever earn his wings.
It Turns Out: When Cavender returns to the “3rd Celestial Division, Angel Placement Bureau,” his boss, Mr. Polk, reprimands him for his ineptitude until he sees that Agnes is much happier than she was when Cavender first met her. Given this unexpected success, Polk decides that other humans could use Cavender’s unorthodox brand of help and grants him his wings.
Notes: If one were gathering evidence of The Twilight Zone’s failures with comedic material, “Cavender Is Coming” would be Exhibit A. Essentially a retelling of “Mr. Bevis,” “Cavender” is so unfunny that even Burnett could not mitigate its shortcomings. Like “Mr. Bevis,” “Cavender” was intended to serve as a series pilot. Where “Bevis” would have involved the continuing characters of Bevis and his guardian angel, J. Hardy Hempstead, “Cavender” would have followed the guardian angel’s misadventures as he aids a different person each week before returning to his Celestial Bureau to report his results.
“The Changing of the Guard”
**
Air Date: June 1, 1962
Alternate titles/productions/publications:
1. Anne Serling-Sutton’s short story adaptation in Greenberg, Matheson, and Waugh, Twilight Zone
Directed by Robert Ellis Miller
Cast: Donald Pleasence: Professor Ellis Fowler; Liam Sullivan: Headmaster; Philippa Bevans: Mrs. Landers; Bob Biheller: Graham; Kevin O’Neal: Butler
The One Where: An elderly professor who is being forcibly retired doubts whether he has accomplished anything worthwhile in his life and contemplates suicide.
It Turns Out: The ghosts of several of the professor’s former students appear to him and share the profound effects he has had on their lives, convincing him that his life has had meaning.
It is fitting that “The Changing of the Guard,” with its reference to Horace Mann’s admonition, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” was the final episode of The Twilight Zone’s third season. When the series was not initially renewed for a fourth season, Serling took a job teaching at his alma mater, Antioch College, which Mann helped to found.
The series had already been in danger of cancellation several times. Confronted with each new round of these rumors, Serling reiterated that he was physically and mentally exhausted and would not be disappointed to see The Twilight Zone end. At this juncture, he responded with similar relief. He accepted a position as writer in residence at Antioch with a salary of eighty-one dollars per week for three reasons:
First is extreme fatigue. Secondly, I’m desperate for a change of scene, and third is a chance to exhale with the opportunity for picking up a little knowledge instead of spewing it out. I’ll be teaching three classes a week, and can spend the rest of my time getting reacquainted with my wife and children and doing some writing. Unless of course the TV show goes into another year. Then I’ll have to commute by plane.4
Serling’s hint that the show might continue after its apparent cancellation was based on the fact that negotiations were already well underway to bring the series back in a one-hour format. In fact, as early as March 1961, before the second season had ended, CBS was reportedly interested in expanding the series to an hour. Although the show was not on CBS’s fall 1962 slate, Serling knew there was a good possibility that a revamped version of The Twilight Zone would be unveiled sometime in 1963.
His return to Antioch was not be his first teaching experience. In September 1951, Serling had taught night courses in TV-radio writing at two different Cincinnati schools. But this time was different: not only returning to his alma mater, he was moving into the office of his former mentor, Nolan Miller, who was away on sabbatical. Serling was delighted by the experience: “It was as if I’d never been away” from Yellow Springs, Ohio.
I love the teaching. I have one adult class that’s marvelously exciting, goes on for hours and hours. Usually, that kind of thing, all you get is old ladies in tennis shoes producing probing dramas about bird-watchers. But not these guys. They really write. It’s tremendous. The kids of course are cute. They want to prove to me that they’re something less than impressed by my so-called status. I show them a film and then say, beaming with pride, “What d’you think of that?” And they look at me … and rip it apart.5
Twice a week he taught Mass Media at eight o’clock in the morning. Three afternoons per week he taught Writing in Dramatic Form. Once a week he presided over his adult class, Writing and the Mass Media, which often ran as long as five hours. In his spare time he hosted a local late-night movie program on WBNS-TV, “Ten o’Clock Theatre,” which called for him to introduce and comment on old films. And he wrote. He wrote several hour-long Twilight Zone scripts during this period as well as what is unquestionably the finest screenplay of his career, Seven Days in May, adapted from Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II’s novel about a military conspiracy to overthrow the US government.
The screenplay became a 1964 film directed by Serling’s frequent Playhouse 90 partner, John Frankenheimer, and starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, and Ava Gardner. It received positive reviews. Bob Thomas of Associated Press called it “absorbing throughout its two-hour length, and almost unbearably tense during much of it.”6 Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote, “In a sense, Rod Serling’s excellent screenplay is a hymn to American democracy. It mixes inspiration with excitement, confidence with fear, and concludes that we, the people, should be vigilant but not afraid.”7 Serling’s screenplay was nominated for a Writers Guild award.
Third-Season Twilight Zone Episodes Not Written by Rod Serling
“Two,” written by Montgomery Pittman, September 15, 1961 *
“A Game of Pool,” written by George Clayton Johnson, October 13, 1961 ***
“The Grave,” written by Montgomery Pittman, October 27, 1961 **
“The Jungle,” written by Charles Beaumont based on his short story, December 1, 1961 **
“Once upon a Time,” written by Richard Matheson, December 15, 1961 *
“Nothing in the Dark,” written by George Clayton Johnson, January 5, 1962
“Dead Man’s Shoes,” written by Charles Beaumont, January 19, 1962 ***
“The Hunt,” written by Earl Hamner Jr., January 26, 1962 **
“Kick the Can,” written by George Clayton Johnson, February 9, 1962 **
“A Piano in the House,” written by Earl Hamner Jr., February 16, 1962 **
“The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank,” written by Montgomery Pittman, February 23, 1962 ***
“The Fugitive,” written by Charles Beaumont, March 9, 1962 **
“Little Girl Lost,” written by Richard Matheson based on his short story, March 16, 1962 ***
“Person or Persons Unknown,” written by Charles Beaumont, March 23, 1962 **
“Young Man’s Fancy,” written by Richard Matheson, May 11, 1962 *
“I Sing the Body Electric,” written by Ray Bradbury based on his story, “The Electric Grandmother,” May 18, 1962 *
Third-Season Recap
*** 12
** 16
* 9
