The top ten episodes of Rod Serling’s seminal The Twilight Zone on IMDb are essentially the usual suspects. Some of them have to do with humanity’s tendency to turn on itself, e.g. in “The Shelter,” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” and, to an extent, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” Then there are the more straightforward scarers, like “Living Doll,” and “It’s a Good Life,” and those that throw a particularly ingenious and devastating twist at the audience, such as “Time Enough at Last” and “To Serve Man.” Then, of course, there’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” starring William Shatner.
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But none of those are the number one episode, at least as far as IMDb raters are concerned. Instead, that would be Season 2’s “Eye of the Beholder,” which was released on this day, November 11th, 65 years ago. And, throughout those six and a half decades, it hasn’t lost an ounce of its power.
What Is “Eye of the Beholder” About & What Makes It So Special?
“Eye of the Beholder” follows Janet Tyler, a woman living in a futuristic dystopian society where physical appearance is valued above all else. If one’s face doesn’t conform to the beauty standard set by their peers, they are forced to undergo a surgery, paid for by the government.
Individuals who require such a surgery are allotted a total of 11. Should that eleventh surgery fail, the individual is discarded from society to live in an area with others who look just as, well, hideous, as they do.
Tyler is currently recovering from her eleventh surgery and, as one might expect, she couldn’t be more nervous. Should this fail, she’ll no longer be a part of the community she’s been raised in. She’ll basically be thought of as less than human and thrown aside.
All we see of her is her head, which is wrapped entirely in a bandage. And, as we learn from her doctors and nurses, it’s for the best that way, because what rests beneath that bandage is a sight that would keep the viewer up at night. But the thing is, thanks to some clever lighting and camera angles, we never see the medical staff’s faces, either.
Tyler wants the bandages off now, because the wait to learn of her impending fate is just too much. The medical staff oblige and for the first time we see her face, which is beautiful. All but one of the doctors and nurses, however, are horrified, and it’s then that we see their faces, which are horrible, scrunched faces with pushed-up pig noses. Tyler is then escorted off by a man who is similarly attractive by modern standards, and we are told by Serling that, no matter when or where this story takes place, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If we put too much stock in what’s on the outside, we’re bound to miss the more complex beauty that exists within.
Unlike the high quality of a beautiful person’s physical appearance, judgment and narrowmindedness will never go away; they are quite unfortunately eternal. Therefore, this episode remains as impactful and thought-provoking now as it ever was. It’s classic The Twilight Zone both in terms of flipping the script on the audience at the very end and making them think in the process.
The episode is so creatively constructed that, even if you know the ending going in, it’s fantastically effective. The imagery of a woman with her head fully encased in bandages works, as does the medical staff’s foreboding commentary on just how grotesque she was going into the procedure.
But the best part of the episode is the moment when, in response to one of the nurse’s trepidatious musings about seeing the woman without her bandages on, one of the doctors begins to question why their society is so dead focused on physical appearance. Instead of agreeing with him or mulling over his words, the nurse replies that, were he to continue speaking in such a way, it would be considered treason.
Without delving too much into the current political landscape, it’s hard not to view the episode as prescient when the United States has a president who himself consistently refers to women’s beauty. Here’s just hoping the U.S., or anywhere else for that matter, doesn’t fall so low it excises anyone from society who doesn’t conform to a rigid physical standard.
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