16
But Who Are the Monsters Really?

Criminals, Con Men and Man’s Inhumanity to Man

Of all the themes to which Rod Serling most frequently returned, mankind’s capacity for cruelty and evil was among the most pronounced. Perhaps as a consequence of his wartime service, but also through the simple process of reading the newspapers and watching the news, Serling was constantly aware, and painfully so, of the sheer evil that human beings are capable of displaying; of the ease with which self-interest can so frequently outweigh all other considerations.

Indeed, by the time The Twilight Zone had completed its run, and certainly across any attempt to binge-watch the entire DVD box set, many viewers confess to a certain fatigue every time another tale resolved itself with another plea for forbearance and consideration.

At the same time, however, some of Serling’s most potent stories were wrapped up within this most simple of resolutions, beginning with another of those episodes that clings, limpet-like, to the popular imagination, season one’s barnstorming “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

“The Fever” (First broadcast: January 29, 1960)

A Serling original, “The Fever” was the story of a most reluctant gambler . . . Franklin Gibbs, who despite his disdain for the Las Vegas slots, finds himself a winner. But his conscience will not allow him to keep the money, so he pumps it all back into the machine. And then keeps on pumping, draining his savings as he feeds the machine, and unable to stop because the damned thing keeps calling him, mocking him, even pursuing him, chasing him around his hotel room, until he falls to his death from the window. It then coughs up a single dollar coin, the one that Gibbs deposited in the first place.

Gambling doesn’t pay, then, is the simple moral to this story—unless, of course, you are one of the men who profits from the weakness of gamblers. But there would be a postscript to the story that reminds us it’s not only the gamblers who suffer.

In this episode conjured by Serling for the 1960 collection Stories from the Twilight Zone, we now find Flora Gibbs returning home “to pick up the broken crockery of her life. She lived a silent, patient life from then on and gave no one any trouble. Only once did anything unusual happen and that was a year later. The church had a bazaar and someone brought in an old used one-armed bandit. It had taken three of her friends from the Women’s Alliance to stop her screaming and get her back home to bed. It had cast rather a pall over the evening.”

All in all, it’s a less than subtle commentary on the perils of gambling, remedied by the sheer power of actor Everett Sloane’s performance—one of the strongest and most convincing seen throughout the first season, at least. Fittingly, too, Serling later revealed that he got the idea for the story while he and his wife were visiting Las Vegas, as he sat in a casino contemplating the life of a gambling addict.

The still-prevalent belief that this particular episode was not actually screened in the Las Vegas area is understandable, then, although it was wholly erroneous; likewise the very real impression that Vegas itself was employed for the filming. Stock footage and suitably decorated lots at the MGM lot were all that was required, although the mood was certainly enhanced, and offered further verisimilitude, by the use of jazzman Russ Garcia’s “Deserted Street” through the episode.

Arranger and musical director at Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s deathless Porgy and Bess sessions, Garcia also contributed a number of jazzy pieces for the CBS library, and his work can also be heard, to similar fine effect, in the episode “A Nice Place to Visit.”

“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (First broadcast: March 4, 1960)

Serling’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” takes us, indeed, to Maple Street, “a tree-lined . . . world of front porch gliders, barbeques, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice-cream vendor.” A typical street, in a typical town, somewhere in the U.S.A.

Suddenly a roar and a flash of light shatter the idyll, and while there was no immediate explanation for the flash of light, it brought with it a total loss of power. Nothing mechanical, electrical or battery operated worked any longer, but when little Tommy suggests that aliens might be responsible, nobody believes him. The fact that almost every alien encounter of the last few years included moments when earthly engines seized up, when cars lost power or street lights went out, does not seem to impact anyone else’s thinking. That, after all, was simply the stuff of science fiction . . . the premise behind movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), or author Raymond F. Jones’s novel The Year When Stardust Fell. Hogwash, balderdash, comic book corniness.

That’s what they think at first, anyway. But as the night wears on, paranoia grows. Suddenly nobody trusts anybody any longer, an increasingly fractious mob mentality that explodes after one of the townspeople shoots another, convinced that he is a space invader.

But then the mood shifts again. It wasn’t the shooter’s fault. It was Tommy’s for scaring everyone with his far-out stories of aliens and spacemen.

The mob goes crazy. Stones fly, gunshots ring out, murder becomes a massacre. And, watching from a nearby hill, a pair of aliens are very pleased with the result of their experiment. All you have to do is turn the lights out, and the monsters come out on any street in the land.

Today, it seems a clumsy analogy, no matter how fervently Serling’s conclusion couches it in more intellectual terms. Yet it is also an extraordinarily effective tale, one that we do in fact see played out on an increasingly regular basis today, not only in and around the traditional hotspots where riot and violence are more or less endemic, but in suburbia too. All it requires is one misjudged action—a stray police bullet, an unpopular verdict of innocence, a misaligned comment from those who should know better, and the monsters come out on every street. And it’s not always the perpetrator who is held accountable. The ancient art of shooting the messenger, first recorded by the Roman author Plutarch, remains alive and well today.

In 1960, such scenarios were less common, and certainly less violent. Not for the first or the last time in the show’s run, Serling told a tale whose despotic futurism turned out to be chillingly prophetic. Or, as he put it at the time, “a strange oblique commentary on prejudice. The minorities always need a scapegoat to explain their own weaknesses.”

The episode created something of a stir when it was aired, with Serling even receiving requests from various educators to use the script in their classes, to illustrate points that the standard text books eschewed.

Serling was happy to oblige, but when the script was adapted for Stories from the Twilight Zone, the focus of blame shifted slightly. Previously, the aliens had merely been observers—more proactive, perhaps, than they ought to have been, in that it was they who ignited the flashes in the first place, but there was still a sense that they were simply watching what then happened. In the short story, a new ending ensured their actions were given a reason—the bodies on the streets were still warm, but already new families were moving into the town. New inhabitants, each of whom has two heads.

“Nightmare as a Child” (First broadcast: April 29, 1960)

Rod Serling dreamed up this tale, the story of schoolteacher Helen Foley (a name he borrowed from his schooldays drama teacher) who has spent the past almost-twenty years utterly unable to recollect the events of the most terrible night of her life, when an unknown stranger murdered her mother.

A succession of doctors have told her that the memory will return at some point, though, and that the slightest incident might trigger it—a trigger that arrives in the form of Markie, a little girl she has befriended, and who bears the same nickname Helen herself had at that age.

One night, after the child has gone home, Helen awakens to hear Markie singing on the steps outside her apartment—at the same time as her mind recalls a dream in which she finally remembers all the details she had blocked away. Which is when she realizes something else—that Markie was a creation of her own subconscious, come to help her take that final step.

But her nightmare is just beginning, for now the murderer, too, reappears in her life—Peter Selden, who has spent the past twenty years watching Helen from the shadows, knowing that one day she would remember him. He enters her apartment and they struggle desperately, violently . . . and Selden falls, tumbling down the stairs to break his neck.

After so many years of fearfully not knowing, Helen is free once again to live.

“Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” (First broadcast: October 14, 1960)

Jackie Rhoades was one of those guys with whom fifties film noir positively overflows; a shabby, sordid little runt, a borderline con man who lived just sufficiently outside of regular law and order to have a rap sheet loaded with petty offenses, but who never had the balls to actually move into the big time. Until the day he received a visit from George, a gangster with a twisted line of protection rackets and extortion schemes, and an offer that Jackie might not want to refuse.

An old man that George had been trying to put the squeeze on was proving reluctant to be squeezed. Worse than that. He was proving positively stubborn. It was time, George decided, to put an end to his nonsense, but George could not do the job himself. He knew that the old man had already spoken to the police—if anything happened to him, the cops would be all over George’s operation, searching for the slightest clue.

But if the crime was committed by a complete outsider, then the investigation would simply run into a brick wall.

Jackie wasn’t sure. In fact, he was horrified. But he also knew that, if he didn’t do the job, then George would find someone else who would, and who’d then come gunning for Jackie as well. (Thirty-three years later, Mark E. Smith of the British rock band The Fall would compose his own paean to Rhoades at this moment, the proudly anthemic “Paranoia Man in Cheap Shit Room,” from the album The Infotainment Scam.)

Still, Jackie’s conscience won’t give up without a fight. Staring into the mirror of the sordid hotel room where he’s staying, Jackie argues deep into the night—at first with himself, and then with a stranger who isn’t a stranger, not really. He’s John, Jackie’s alter ego, and it’s John who’s taking over. Jackie vanishes, and John sits and waits . . . for George to turn up to find out why the old man is still alive and well.

John sends him packing, with even darker threats ringing in the cowed gangster’s ears. They won’t be hearing from him anymore. And though the old, ragged Jackie is still cowering in the mirror, chewing his nails beyond the quick, it’s John who’s running the show now. Jackie Rhoades is a new man. Literally.

“Eye of the Beholder” (aka “The Private World of Darkness”) (First broadcast: November 11, 1960)

Two titles adhere to this episode, the result of a legal wrangle that came to light just days before the story was broadcast for the first time, under its original name “Eye of the Beholder.”

Years before, in 1953, the same title had been employed in an episode of General Electric Theatre, penned by Hannah Grad Goodman. Now, the production company that handled that show was making aggrieved noises over the title clash, on the grounds that their earlier show was still in syndication within a series titled Your Star Showcase.

Had Serling and CBS chosen to fight, they would probably have won—abbreviated from the phrase “Beauty is in the . . . ,” “eye of the beholder” is a more-than-common idiom, traced back to Greek literature of the third-century BC; toyed with by Shakespeare (“Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye”) and Benjamin Franklin (“Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion”), before being finally codified by author Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in her 1878 novel Molly Bawn.

Beauty may be skin deep, but in season 2’s “Eye of the Beholder,” ugliness is lovely. Left to right: Edson Stroll, William D. Gordon and Donna Douglas.

CBS/Photofest

Were anybody to lay prior claim to the phrase, any of the many authors who had deployed it in the years since Hungerford had far more justification than General Electric Theatre.

But they did not fight, and not only because it would probably prove more expensive to do so than it was to simply change the name. Besides, Serling himself was a fan of the old General Electric Theatre, as he had made clear in an interview with the New York Times just three months before, in August 1960.

“The half-hour film has always been an imitative, doggy, telegraphed, insipid, assembly-line product since its inception eleven years ago. In the past few years, good anthology shows like [General Electric] Theatre have proven that the half-hour film can make a point tellingly and dramatically. The Twilight Zone is attempting this, too. It will often fall on its duff and on occasion will mistake pretension for maturity (a common fault of many of the ninety-minute specs), but the attempt at quality is always there.”

A new title was conceived, a fresh trailer was shot; and while CBS still blundered forward to air the uncorrected version at the time, repeat screenings beginning the following year would all bear the new title, “The Private World of Darkness.”

Both were appropriate. “This is one of those wild ones that I came up with while lying in bed and staring into the darkness,” Serling explained in an interview with TV Guide.

Nothing precipitated it beyond . . . instinct. . . . I [wanted] to make a thematic point. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” was a parable having to do with prejudice. “Eye of the Beholder” on the other hand made a comment on conformity. No audience likes a writer’s opinion thrust down their gullet as simply a tract. It has to be dramatized and made acceptably palatable within a dramatic form.

Two cosplayers celebrating “Eye of the Beholder” at Dragon Con 2006.

kenward/CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons

Shadows of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids float over the story of Janet Tyler—a horribly disfigured woman who lies in a hospital bed after yet another operation to try and remedy her terrible plight. In Wyndham’s world of absolute perfection, a growing race of human mutants are exiled from society. In Serling’s, too, banishment awaits, but only if the doctors are unable to reverse her condition.

Time, however, is running out. The state mandates no more than eleven operations before a case is deemed irreversible, and Janet has undergone ten already. If this final, desperate attempt does not succeed, she will be cast out.

Terrified, she awaits the moment when her bandages will be removed, painfully aware that she will know the outcome even before the doctors open their mouths to speak. She will be able to tell from the expressions on their faces, and as the last of the bandages is unwrapped . . . she knows. The operation was a failure. There has been no improvement at all.

And then we, the viewers, get our first look at Janet, and to our eyes, she is beautiful. It is the doctors, whose faces, we realize with a start, we have not seen once throughout the episode . . . it is they who are the monsters.

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, although few people would have denied that Janet, as played by Donna Douglas, did indeed fit the bill. Douglas was, at that time, best known for appearances on such shows as Ed Sullivan, Perry Como and Steve Allen’s (she would soon become a household name thanks to The Beverly Hillbillies), and was just “a newcomer from New York” when she was offered the role.

She recalled Rod Serling for the website popcultureaddict.com.

He was a remarkable man. Very talented. A friend of mine, George Faber, was one of the vice presidents at CBS. He was a great family man and a lovely person. Anytime I had to go to a big event in Hollywood, George would usually take me. He worked for CBS, but was my representative. . . . Well, George was friends with Rod Serling . . . and he would invite me. I would just go and sit, and I would chit chat. . . . I never asked a lot of questions. I was very appreciative of being there. But Rod was such a nice man. . . . I just wish that I had more of an opportunity to talk to him.

Interestingly, Douglas appeared only in the closing moments. The actress who spent the rest of the show under wraps was Maxine Stuart.

As plastic surgeons go, Dr. Bernardi is scarcely an oil painting. But as plastic surgeons go, his action figure is sharp.

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“A Most Unusual Camera” (First broadcast: December 16, 1960)

Almost from the moment that photography was invented, equally inventive minds have toyed with all the possible uses that the device could conceivably have. Spirit photography was one of the earliest, the notion that the cameras could capture the image of the dead—and very swiftly, tricksters arrived who insisted that they could.

Photographs of fairies, and the rest of the supernatural crew quickly followed. Cameras could assist in crime fighting, espionage, all manner of escapades, and occasionally, the prophets were correct. They could.

So the idea of camera that could take photographs not of events as they were happening, or capture the distant past (another idea that was floated during the instrument’s infancy), was always a notion waiting to be born. Rod Serling visualized one that made snapshots of the near future—and what happens when it falls into the hands of a trio of incorrigible ne’er-do-wells Woodward, Paula and Chester.

Crime flickers constantly throughout The Twilight Zone. So many of its antagonists are perched on the wrong side of the law; some through personal determination, others through bad luck and circumstance. What many of them have in common, however, is their overwhelming incompetence—even when confronted with what ought to have been a seriously advantageous situation.

Greed, of course, motivates the trio’s experiments with this remarkable device, taking it down to the racecourse where they snap pictures of the winners of all the scheduled races, before the races have run or been won. But the instrument comes with a cost. A French inscription on the camera gives the warning that there are just ten photographs per customer, and they have already taken eight.

Inevitably, a fight breaks out between Chester and Woodward, over how best to use the final two pictures. They never settle the argument. Instead, they fall out of their hotel room window and are killed. And so does Paula, as the camera predicted with its tenth and final photograph.

Their tenth and final one, anyway. But somebody else is sure to find the camera, and they are sure to use it as well. Or so Serling’s closing narration fears. Yes, it’s just a camera. “But for the greedy . . . the avaricious . . . the fleet of foot who can run a four-minute mile so long as they’re chasing a fast buck, it makes believe that it’s an ally, but it isn’t at all. It’s a beckoning come-on for a quick walk-around-the-block . . . in the Twilight Zone.”

“The Whole Truth” (First broadcast: January 20, 1961)

Effectively cobbled together from a couple of scripts prepared for the abortive Mr. Bevis series proposal, transformed into another of Serling’s dips into the minds of the criminal underclass, “The Whole Truth” is the aptly titled story of a used car salesman, Harvey Hunnicut, with a profitable line in selling off barely roadworthy junk. Until he picks up an old Model A Ford that apparently has a bizarre effect on everyone who owns it. For as long as it’s in their possession, they find it impossible to tell a lie.

So when Hunnicut tries to sell off another of his wrecks, he winds up confessing every one of the vehicle’s faults. When he calls his wife to say he’s working late, he tells her that he’s playing cards with his friends. Nothing he says comes out as he intended it, unless he happens to be telling the unvarnished truth. And being a congenital liar, that makes life very uncomfortable.

There is one car on the lot, however, that is not a wreck, and does not require a false testimonial. The Model A Ford itself. So when he receives an offer from a well-known foreign dignitary . . . of course he offloads the car without a moment’s hesitation. And off it trundles to its new owner, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

“The Whole Truth” is another of Serling’s more lighthearted efforts, then, with the usual moralizing tone . . . in a “perfect” world, Hunnicut would have been cured of lying altogether; here, his habit is just curtailed for a while . . . replaced by a jab at the man widely regarded as Public Enemy #1, and a bang on the drum for patriots everywhere.

It’s not often you get the opportunity to sell a used car to the leader of the Soviets’ evil empire. So when the chance does come along, make sure you take it. Nikita Khrushchev, the unwitting costar of the episode “The Whole Truth.”

Dutch National Archives/ANEFO/CC BY-SA 3.0 NL/Wikimedia Commons

Leader of the U.S.S.R. since 1953, Khrushchev is historically regarded as something of a liberal, at least compared to the leaders who preceded him. That said, he fiercely opposed the Anglo-Americans division of Germany into two separate nations at the end of World War II, and described the enclave of West Berlin as a “malignant tumor.” He was a leading proponent of the nuclear arms race, even arguing for the U.S.S.R. to virtually abandon all conventional weaponry in favor of a fully nuclear arsenal; he was a driving force behind his country’s early successes in the space race.

But it was the Soviet destruction of the American U2 spy plane, and the capture of its pilot, Gary Powers, that finally tipped the balance. Hitherto, Khrushchev had believed his relations with American president Eisenhower were at least cordial, and was even willing to believe that the spy plane was a covert CIA operation that the president knew nothing about. But that only placed Eisenhower in a pickle—if he tried to keep Khrushchev on his side, it meant admitting that he couldn’t control his own security forces. But if he admitted to having approved the spy flights (for this was not the first that the Soviets had noted), then he risked damaging relations with the U.S.S.R. at a time when they really weren’t too bad.

He took the option that would go down best with the home audience, declaring that he had authorized the espionage, and that was essentially it. Relations remained frosty until the end of Eisenhower’s presidency, and when Khrushchev visited the United States in October 1960, he did so not as leader of the U.S.S.R., but as the head of the Soviet Union’s UN delegation—a role that gave him plenty of opportunity to taunt the Americans in front of the world; to woo third world nations to the Soviet way of thinking; and, of course, to bang his shoe on the table in what remains one of the most remarkable acts of high drama ever perpetrated in the UN headquarters.

Three months later, with that image seared into the American consciousness by a local media that was now painting Khrushchev as a cross between the Antichrist and Fifty Shades of Stalin, Rod Serling delivered his solution to the problem. If only Khrushchev could be sold a haunted Model A Ford, he would never be able to tell lies again.

The problem was, you just knew that within a week or two, the U.S. president would be made a gift of a vintage Soviet-built NAMI 1, and who knew what miraculous powers that might embody?

“The Rip Van Winkle Caper” (First broadcast: April 21, 1961)

Shot back to back with “A Hundred Yards over the Rim” in the desert near Lone Pine, California, the caper first introduces us to what Serling warns are “four experts in the questionable art of crime.”

Mr. Farwell is an expert in noxious gases, a former professor with a doctorate in both chemistry and physics. Mr. Erbe’s specialty is mechanical engineering. Mr. Brooks knows everything there is to know about firearms and other weaponry; and Mr. DeCruz has dedicated his life to the study of demolition and destruction. And from their base in a cave in Death Valley, they are plotting the heist of the century.

The stunt is a massive train robbery, one of the most ingeniously and meticulously planned of all time. It would appear to be foolproof, too. So many criminal masterminds are brought down by the law catching up with them after one mistake too many, and Farwell, the gang’s ringleader, knows that a fortune in gold will be difficult to hide.

But what if the bandits didn’t break cover until a full century after the crime? Who would care to hunt them, or even remember them, after all that time?

Mr. Farwell’s ingenuity has provided them each with a hibernation chamber, a gas that will preserve their bodies and bodily functions for the next one hundred years, and with the robbery complete, they return to their hideout and prepare for sleep.

For three of the men, at least, everything works perfectly. They awaken in 2061.

True, a fault in Mr. Erbe’s airtight case allowed the gas to escape and eventually he died—a fate that Serling clearly enjoyed so much that he replayed it in his screenplay for the original Planet of the Apes movie in 1968. But the others are as full of vim and vigor as they ever were in the distant past. Too full, in fact. Arguments once the three men awaken see DeCruz murder Brooks—but that’s okay, because now two men have half the gold apiece, instead of merely one-third.

And then there is one. Deep into the desert, walking in a direction that they hope will lead to civilization, Farwell realizes he’s running out of water, while DeCruz has wisely preserved his. So the bargaining begins, Farwell offering ever greater quantities of his share of the gold in exchange for one more precious sip.

Something has to crack, and it’s his own mind. Now it is DeCruz’s time to die, and Farwell is left with all the gold. A very heavy load to try and drag along behind him, but then he hears an approaching vehicle. Salvation! With almost his final breath, he flags down the approaching hovercraft (readily recognized from its starring role in Forbidden Planet five years before) and offers its occupants a treasure trove of gold in exchange for just a little water. And then he drops dead, which leaves the craft’s inhabitants even more baffled.

The deployment of hovercraft as a conventional means of transport, we now learn, is just one of the many, many advances that science has made in the century since the crooks went to sleep.

Another is the manufacturing of gold. The metal itself is now worthless. No wonder the Samaritans who stopped to give him a ride were confused!

“The Silence” (First broadcast: April 28, 1961)

“The Silence” reunited Rod Serling with Boris Sagal, a director he first worked with in 1955, when he handled the writer’s one-and-only contribution to the anthology Fireside Theatre, a play suitably entitled “The Director.” It was Sagal who approved Serling’s script for use, and now Rod was returning the favor by personally selecting Sagal for The Twilight Zone.

Jamie Tennyson is one of those men who cannot stop talking. From dawn to dusk, no matter where he is, he is holding forth on anything, everything, he can think of, and frankly, it’s driving other people to distraction. None more so than Colonel Taylor, a man who once regarded his club as a refuge from the noise and annoyances of the outside world, but who now cannot find a moment’s silence even there.

So he suggests a remarkable wager. If Tennyson can last a full year without speaking, a solid 365 days of silence, he will earn himself half a million dollars. All he has to do is sit in a specially constructed glass room, in which he can be observed at all times. And if he utters a single word, the bet is lost.

It’s an astonishing challenge, but Tennyson agrees. Not only that, but he’s determined to win the money. Time passes and the colonel is beginning to worry that he is about to be out $500,000—he never expected the young man to actually succeed at the challenge; he simply wanted a few days, or even weeks, of silence. But months have gone by now, and Taylor is probably even more distracted by worry than he was by Tennyson’s chatter.

Nothing can break Tennyson’s nerve. Insults, innuendos, there is nothing that Taylor will not say in his efforts to shatter his adversary’s resolve. Now he’s talking more than Tennyson ever did, and the other members are just as unhappy as he once was. The man is cruel, he is rude, he’s a bully. And he’s broke! As the fatal day draws ever closer, Taylor is forced to admit that not only can he not pay out on the bet, he barely has sufficient money to live on. His gallant front as a wealthy, powerful man is nothing more than that—a front.

He agrees to resign from the club, but his apologies to Tennyson cannot compensate the young man for all that he has lost. Not only did he spend a year in silence for no reason, but he also had his vocal cords severed to ensure he won the bet.

Which is a somewhat ham-fisted way for Serling to deliver the moral of the story—that there’s no such thing as a sure-fire gamble. “If you don’t believe it, ask the croupier, the very special one who handles roulette . . . in the Twilight Zone.”

“The Obsolete Man” (First broadcast: June 2, 1961)

You probably need to pay attention to this one. Or at least to Rod Serling’s opening address. It was, after all, a topic that he kept dear to his heart, the general public’s habit of polarizing everything, of seeing issues only in black and white and ignoring the vast realms of gray in between.

But there was another moral creeping in, as well. The knowledge that if you live by the sword, you will die by it.

It was time to wrap season two, and Serling chose to end things with what would rank among his most controversial ever offerings; a tale whose suggestion that sometimes the state is not always correct would see his mailbag filled with bitter recriminations from those who saw Reds beneath every bed.

Yes, according to Angry of Arkansas, Irate of Idaho and Commiebasher of Connecticut, “The Obsolete Man” was Rod Serling’s confession that he, too, was a Russki agent. A no-good Communist. A traitor to his nation, a fan of Castro’s beard (as Bob Dylan, singing of Communists in general, once so entertainingly put it).

He wasn’t, and it isn’t. Today, sixty years removed from the anti-Red hysteria that once whipped swathes of this nation toward such shameful extremes, it is difficult to even make the connection. To our eyes, “The Obsolete Man” is simply a salutary warning that no state apparatus should be permitted that much control, at a time when some would argue that we have already done so.

To those of less inflammatory viewers, meanwhile, the only thing this episode truly condemned was the kind of muddle-headed thinking and blinkered, twisted jingoism that could even have distorted the tale in a Red direction in the first place. But that’s the general public for you. Why listen to one man’s point of view when you already know that yours alone counts?

“This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth,” Serling intones doomily, “in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He’s a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he’s built out of flesh and because he has a mind.” And, with that, we are hurled into another of the truly dystopian societies with which Serling liked to pock the universe—not one, as with the abortive pilot for The Twilight Zone, “The Happy Place”—in which it is the old who must be eliminated, but one that operates according to even more subjective guidelines than that. Courts are convened and juries sworn in to determine who in society is useless. Valueless. Purposeless. “Obsolete.” And when that has been determined, the person is eliminated.

Romney Wordsworth, a librarian, is deemed obsolete, with his liquidation scheduled to take place within forty-eight hours. There is no appeal, no second chance. But he is allowed a final request—one that sees the Chancellor pay a visit to his rooms the following evening, to discover that he is to share Romney’s fate. The room is wired with a bomb, primed to explode at midnight, and Romney has locked the door.

While a camera broadcasts the librarian’s last hours to the world, the condemned man sits quietly, reading the Bible. It is the Chancellor who is begging and pleading for his life, offering Romney anything if only he will unlock the door. But Romney is unmoved. Only with just seconds remaining does he hand the key over, and no sooner has the Chancellor slipped through the door than the bomb explodes and Romney is killed.

But the Chancellor has not escaped. His pleading and begging were witnessed by the world. His usefulness has been called into question. His value is doubtful, his worth is in dispute. He will be tried for obsolescence . . . and then torn to shreds by the mob.

“The Mirror” (First broadcast: October 20, 1961)

Peter Falk was the magnificently cast protagonist here, the future Columbo police detective wearing instead “the face of Ramos Clemente”—a peasant in an unnamed Central American nation who rose up against the ruling dictatorship, leading a rebellion that, in the space of just one short year, placed him in the presidential palace.

Serling’s story was certainly sparked by the U.S. government’s now ferocious ideological conflict with Communist Cuba, but also by the sheer unpredictability of so many of the supposed liberators who were sweeping to power throughout what was then termed the third world, and proving just as brutal as the dictators they overthrew. Add to that a glimpse back to the first-season episode “The Purple Testament,” in which a reflection in a mirror informs a man that he is about to die, and “The Mirror” becomes another of season three’s triumphs.

The revolution is over, and a former military dictator, General DeCruz, is about to be executed for his past crimes. As he walks out, however, he warns his idealistic conqueror that they are not such different men. Warns him, too, of the mirror that hangs in the presidential residence, and the magical powers that it possesses. Gaze into it, and you will see the faces of your future assassins.

Clemente is unimpressed by the warning, and his power continues to grow, built on the slaughtered corpses of the men he once considered his allies, but whose faith in him was eroded by their new leader’s descent into tyranny. And every execution is foretold by that mirror.

Only once he has murdered almost every one of his old friends does Clemente pause to consider what he has become. Then he steps to the mirror, and, before smashing it, he gazes one last time into the glass. His face alone is reflected back at him—at which point he takes out his gun and shoots himself.

“Four O’Clock” (First broadcast: April 6, 1962)

This Rod Serling script was based on the short story of the same name by Price Day, originally published in the April 1958 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, a worthy home for a tale that is not, sadly, as esteemed as perhaps it ought to be.

Craig Beam, whose mylifeintheshadowofthetwilightzone blog is certainly a refreshing antidote to the reams of print that extols every last second of The Twilight Zone as being deathlessly brilliant, snarls, “I’ve only seen [this episode] once, probably twenty-five years ago, and I hated it. It’s probably not quite as terrible as ‘Mr. Bevis,’ but my memory tells me it’s damned pretty close.”

Another tale that appears a lot more prescient than we might be comfortable acknowledging (Beam insists he can see Rush Limbaugh in the role “and that jackdaw is nailing it”), “Four O’Clock” looks into the mind of Oliver Crangle, a fanatic who believes that he alone is fit to determine what is evil and immortal in our society, and he alone is capable of purging it.

Crangle’s personal justification is solid. “I don’t threaten people, I compile them. I compile them, and I investigate them. I analyze them, then I categorize them, and I judge them. If they’re impure and evil, then they must be punished. If, on the other hand, they are simply misled or naive (or unsophisticated), then I point out to them the right way.”

His chosen foes are seemingly selected with arbitrary prejudice, but once selected, Crangle spares no effort in cataloging their crimes, balancing their deeds against his own scale of what is and isn’t permissible, and then warning them of his forthcoming judgment via what were then the principal means of such communication, threatening letters and phone calls. One scarcely wants to contemplate the havoc that a maniac like Crangle could have accomplished with the Internet at his disposal!

He is no anonymous troll, however. Openly, Crangle warns the FBI that he intends ridding the world of evil, telling them when and even how he will do so—by willing his victims to diminish in height to a mere two feet. The FBI will then have no difficulty driving around and picking them up.

What he didn’t reckon on was that the Feds would also have no problem identifying him as a fruitcake, and suggesting that he leave law enforcement to them, while he gets on with seeking psychiatric help. But before he can either act on their advice or dismiss it, the clock strikes four—and Oliver Crangle promptly shrinks to two feet.

For he is the greatest threat to humanity of them all.

“He’s Alive” (First broadcast: January 24, 1963)

Rod Serling turns his attention back to one of his favorite themes—the human capacity for evil and the logic that, though conceivably justifying that evil, needs first to be twisted as far from the norm as any story from the twilight zone.

Peter Vollmer is the kind of character that is far too frequently heard (and listened to) in the modern world, an utterly unreconstructed racist, his heart filled with hatred and invective, and his every breath peppered with loudly broadcast “solutions” to problems that most decent people don’t even believe exist.

His was a timely tale in 1963. The battle for civil rights in America was approaching its climax now; the previous September, the Supreme Court ruled that black student James Meredith should be permitted to attend the University of Mississippi, and, with the governor deploying state troopers to prevent him from doing so, the campus erupted into riot.

In November, President Kennedy weighed in on the debate, ordering U.S. Marshals into action to ensure Meredith’s safety, but all around, both in Mississippi and elsewhere, characters exactly like Peter Vollman were on the streets and street corners, firing off their ignorant opinions.

In Serling’s world, they have no audience—just decent people who pass by and either ignore him or fight fire with superior firepower. So blinkered, however, is Vollmer that he simply cannot understand that there can be any viewpoint but his own, so when a mysterious German-sounding character appears to him, filled with advice on how to make people both listen to and agree with, his convictions, our antihero is convinced that the old fox knows what he is talking about. Even after he realizes that he is in fact taking advice from Adolf Hitler.

Speak to people on terms that deal with their most primal insecurities. Discover the common denominator between your warnings and their fears, no matter how far from the central issue it might be, and then build on it. Faced with alarmist lies that sound like the truth, or reassuring truths that could be misconstrued as lies, people always take the negative option.

Vollmer acts on the fallen Fuhrer’s advice, but his efforts to forge a world in his image are doomed to bloody failure, as he turns first to violence and then to murder. Our horrid little hatemonger ends his days slumped in an alleyway, shot to death by the pursuing cops . . . and watching as Hitler silently departs, in search of another empty vessel to fill with his vileness.

“Where will he go next?” asks Serling in one of his most impassioned monologues.

This phantom from another time. This resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare? Chicago. Los Angeles. Miami, Florida. Vincennes, Indiana. Syracuse, New York. Any place, every place . . . where there’s hate. Where there’s prejudice. Where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it . . . when you hear a name called. A minority attacked. Any blind unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive . . . because through these things . . . we keep him alive.

It was one of the most blatantly political episodes in the history of The Twilight Zone—too much so for some, who found the story line itself so flimsy that the message almost tore it apart.

There was no finesse or grace in Serling’s treatment, after all; no cosmetic camouflage—and, perhaps, there should not have been. Civil rights was not, as so many other people had (and would) discovered, an arena in which artistic license, irony or allegory stood any chance of being recognized—even the then-emergent Bob Dylan, already threatening to become one of the most brilliantly gifted, yet purposefully obtuse songwriters of his generation, stripped his emotions and beliefs bare when it came to tackling civil rights, and when Serling was interviewed by Show Business Illustrated, his words were not that different from any Dylan night have spoken.

Social comment, he explained, was a writer’s duty, and having already taken a lead on the subject back when the question of African American representation on television first raised its head, Serling remained a force to be reckoned with in the field—to the point where he at one time was considering spinning an extended version of this story off as a movie feature.

Serling remained loyal to the beliefs that fueled that episode, and to damning the hypocrisies that permitted them. In 1968, addressing Moorpark College in Moorpark, California, he asked where was the hue and cry when white extremists murdered black children in Alabama, or when white civil rights workers were killed by bigots in Mississippi.

Had America changed in the years since “He’s Alive” was broadcast? Apparently not.

For a quarter of a century . . . we tried to get passed an anti-lynching bill. A simple law to protect the lives of black citizens below the Mason-Dixon line. This was not legislation, as our protesting brethren so often take us to task for—the legislation of brotherly love which they say is impossible. It was a law making it a federal offense to hang a human being from a tree, cover him with kerosene and cremate him. But the loudest cheerleaders of our current law and order rallies . . . were the very gentlemen who fought against that legislation until it was ultimately passed.

Even at the end of his life, in a March 1975 interview with Linda Brevelle for Writer’s Digest magazine, 1976, when Serling was asked what makes him angry, he still cited bias and prejudice.

Serling’s fury echoes through his words, as surely as it did through this episode, and inevitably, the broadcast was to be a controversial one. According to writer Hal Erickson, in the August 1986 issue of The Twilight Zone Magazine, the week following the broadcast saw the show’s offices deluged with over four thousand letters that could be classified as “hate mail.”

Not for nothing was Erickson’s article titled “All the Little Hitlers.”

“The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross” (First broadcast: January 17, 1964)

This was a short story by Henry Slesar, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1961 and adapted for The Twilight Zone by Jerry McNeely—delivering his first full script, having previously been credited for the idea behind “A Kind of a Stopwatch.”

It’s an unusual one, too—Salvadore Ross breaks his hand, and discovers that he has developed the remarkable ability to buy and sell time to whomsoever wishes to acquire some. An aging millionaire mourns the passage of time, so Salvadore sells him forty years of his own life, for a cool million bucks and a luxury penthouse. Then, rather than fret about his own decline, he sets about recouping the years by buying them back from various youths—to whom the chance of adding a year or two to their age seems no big deal at all. It brings them closer to the legal smoking and drinking age, if nothing else.

One thing Salvadore doesn’t have, however, is compassion—a serious deficiency in the eyes of his would-be sweetheart, Leah. So he sets about purchasing that for $100,000 from his potential father-in-law.

It’s an idea that most people watching the show must have realized was not one of Salvadore’s best. And so it turns out. Armed with his new sense of compassion, he returns to her father to ask for Leah’s hand in marriage . . . and is shot dead by the bitter, grumpy old man.

“The Masks” (First broadcast: March 20, 1964)

With Ida Lupino becoming the only woman ever to direct an episode of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling looks into the last hours of Jason Foster, an old man who will celebrate Mardi Gras by breathing his very last. But not before he has delivered some home truths to the greedy relations whose constant carping has done so much to wear down his body. In fact, sometimes it seems as though it is only the prospect of that revenge that keeps him going. But tonight it ends, as he invites the entire family to his New Orleans mansion to celebrate the festival.

Foster has obtained a set of masks, designed by an old Cajun, he says, and each has a special property of its own. If each member of the gathering would wear one, then he could show them what he means.

They do so, but are horrified at what they see . . . their cruelty and evil etched into the features of each mask. But they dare not take them off, for Jason has sworn that they will inherit his entire estate only if they keep the masks on until midnight.

They do so, and on the stroke of the hour, Jason passes away, peacefully and, strangely, looking happier than they have seen him in a long time. Only when the masks are removed do his grasping, nasty relatives discover what gave him such a final chuckle. The masks may have been removed, but their own faces remain contorted just as hideously.

From left: Virginia Gregg, Milton Selzer, Alan Sues and Brooke Hayward—with and without their “Masks” in season 5.

CBS/Photofest

“I Am the Night—Color Me Black” (First broadcast: March 27, 1964)

Rod Serling again rides deep into the heart of the civil rights movement, on the morning of a public execution, and revisiting a theme he had touched on eight years earlier when The U.S. Steel Hour broadcast his teleplay “Noon on Doomsday,” a dramatization of the previous year’s kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till.

It was, he told Mike Wallace during their 1959 television interview, a hard sell, even to the network. Race was a jumpy issue, after all, and by the time the censors had finished with the story, changing the location, the nationality of the victim and even removing the “Coca-Cola bottles off the set because the sponsor claimed that this had Southern connotations . . . it bore no relationship at all to what we had purported to say initially.”

Hardly surprisingly, reviews were harsh. Though the story’s heart was certainly in the right place, and a growing awareness of the evils of institutionalized racism was slowly infiltrating popular culture, few people felt comfortable acknowledging just how wickedly narrow-minded some folk were. Particularly in the south. Particularly in the smaller towns.

“I Am the Night—Color Me Black” seemed likely to unfold around similar moralities. As Serling said in a contemporary interview with syndicated columnist Dave Jampel, “You try to make the social-point you want to make within the allowable frame of reference. If you want to tell a story of racial prejudice, for example, you don’t set it in Birmingham, but in an unidentifiable place. . . . You tell it somewhat obliquely . . . There is a traditional trick covering what we’ve been doing for years on The Twilight Zone, we tell it completely in parable. If we do a story about the psychology of mob violence, we tell it as a science fiction story, but the psychology remains the same.”

And so it is here, but it quickly becomes apparent that whatever is abroad in the American South has wider-ranging designs. At 7:30 in the morning, the sky over the town remains as dark as night—a darkness that science cannot explain but that instills the editor of the local paper with a nagging feeling of doom. One that he has felt growing ever since the verdict was handed down in the case that will end on the scaffold this morning.

The execution takes place on schedule, of course. No inexplicable darkness was going to keep the good old boys from their God-given recreation, and so a probably innocent black man is hanged for the murder of an altogether deserving white racist.

But if anyone had been listening to the radio at that hour, they would have heard it softly announcing that further reports of the mystifying darkness were coming in from elsewhere around the world. From South Vietnam. From East Berlin. From each and every place where the balance of good and bad has been flung into absolute chaos by the rise of evil.

By “a sickness known as hate,” as Serling puts it in his closing words. “Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ, but a sickness nonetheless; highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone. Look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”

“Caesar and Me” (First broadcast: April 10, 1964)

The only woman ever to have a script produced on The Twilight Zone, Adele T. Strassfield was assistant and secretary to the show’s producer William Froug when she dreamed of transporting viewers back into the mysterious world of ventriloquism, and the double act of Jonathan West (human—Jackie Cooper) and Caesar (dummy).

Except he’s not really a dummy—no less than his alleged operator, Caesar walks and talks and is more or less the brains behind the entire operation. That comprising the legal ventriloquism business, which frankly doesn’t bring in much money; and a growing sideline in burglary, which does.

Of course, their crime spree cannot last. Susan, the niece of the luckless West’s landlady (and the future Morgan Brittany), had long suspected that there was more to Caesar than meets the eye, and after the pair pull off their latest job, she places an anonymous call to the law. The police swoop, West is arrested . . .

. . . and Susan and Caesar prepare to run away together.

“The Jeopardy Room” (First broadcast: April 17, 1964)

Rod Serling conjured this tense tale of Cold War subterfuge, just one more in the long line of televisual experiences that flourished in the shadow of the first James Bond movies—although in this case, the tale predated the first Bond movie; Serling originally wrote it, under the title “Method of Execution,” in 1961.

Major Ivor Kuchenko is an escaped political prisoner of an unnamed (but scarcely camouflaged) foreign regime, pursued to a neutral neighbor by a ruthless executioner known simply as the Commissar. Ruthless and imaginative. Plying his grisly trade with all the finesse of an artist, the Commissar delights in scheming the kind of devices that test both his ingenuity and his victim’s capacity for survival.

A booby trap is placed in the major’s room while he sleeps. If the major can find it, and successfully defuse it, he will be allowed to go free; if he fails, he will die in the explosion; and if he attempts to escape, a watching sniper will shoot him down. He has three hours.

The bomb is well hidden. The clock ticks down, and Kuchenko is no closer to finding the explosives than he was at the outset of his quest. Finally he decides to make a break for it, and somehow he succeeds, bursting through the door while bullets fly around him.

The Commissar, however, is less fortunate. Going back to the room to clean up evidence of the plot, he overstays his welcome, and is blown to smithereens when the device goes off on schedule.