When it comes to the classic The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling and company never shied away from telling moral stories that address unsavory topics and individuals. Sometimes the twists seem unfair or a bit twisted, out to punish innocent people, chill audiences, and maybe avoid similar fates. But there are a few episodes where the twist is a welcome retribution, righting the wrongs that are happening and doling out punishment people won’t always experience in real life. For every “Eye of the Beholder,” “To Serve Man,” and “Time Enough at Last,” there are episodes like “The Mirror” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” which highlight our own darker sides.
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We went through some of the great episodes of the original series to pinpoint a few where the characters deserved their twist ending. We’re talking the episodes where the selfish, murderous, and criminal get their comeuppance. The episodes that don’t shy away from the topics we don’t like to discuss on network television.
Scroll down and see the ten episodes where the Twilight Zone‘s twists were welcome and warranted.
1) “I Shot an Arrow into the Air”
After a group of astronauts fear they’ve crash landed on an alien planet, with their survival in question, things quickly take a turn for the selfish. After burying one crew member and arguing over the care of another injured crew member, the three survivors head out into the desert to raise their chances of survival. Before too long, Corey shows his selfish view on survival, killing his fellow crew members for their water and supplies.
The twist comes when Corey discovers the crew and ship never left Earth. The astronauts crashed and were stranded outside of Reno, Nevada. Mr. Corey breaks down, realizing he murdered his crewmates for nothing while begging to the sky for their forgiveness.
2) “The Silence”
In this tale of a bet gone too far between two aristocrats, Colonel Archie Taylor bets fellow club member Jamie Tennyson $500k to remain silent for a year. Both men are unlikable, though Tennyson puts up with a lot of attacks in the year that follows that make him sympathetic.
By the twist, both men are at their ends and the colonel has lost his fortune, revealing he can no longer cover the bet. This doesn’t sit well with Tennyson, who reveals his vocal cords were surgically severed to ensure he didn’t speak for one year, or ever again. If anything, the two men get what they were asking for to start, never thinking once to just go get some ice cream together.
3) “The Masks”
“The Masks” has one of the more satisfying twists and conclusions for any Twilight Zone episode. A wealthy man named Jason Foster is on his deathbed, ready to execute his plan to confront his greedy family during a special Mardi Gras party before his passing. Each must wear masks that reveal the opposite of their personality until midnight, learning their prize will be their inheritance of his estate if they manage to keep the masks on, but failure of just one person earns them train fare back to Boston.
The family succeeds in keeping the masks on, but it turns out this was the real punishment. As they remove the ghastly masks, they discover their real faces have been morphed to look just like their mask of choice. Foster’s mask doesn’t change him at all, but he does pass away by the time the reveal happens.
4) “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”
This is quite the odd episode, given it plays out like a silly otherworldly tale where police are investigating a UFO that crashed and questioning patrons in a diner. The passengers of a bus stopped at the diner are already inside, while the occupant of the UFO allegedly ran to the diner themselves and seems to be blending in when the episode starts. It all takes a turn by the end when the bus leaves and crashes due to a bridge collapse, leaving one survivor. A man named Ross, who turns out to be a Martian scout, reveals he has been sent to ensure the planet is ready for Mars invasion and colonization.
But the real twist is that the diner’s counter man, Haley, is also an alien who has been hiding himself. He reveals he’s originally from Venus and his people have already intercepted Ross’ Martian fleet. Ross looks defeated as Haley laughs at him, revealing a Venusian invasion and bringing the episode to a close. It seems like a small inconvenience, but it is the least a guy who clearly murdered everybody on the bus can expect.
5) “The Little People”
Another story revolving around a team of astronauts on a foreign world, this time for real. We get another crazed member, Craig, who happens upon a society of little people that end up worshipping him as a God. This quickly goes to his head and alienates him from his surviving crewmates. Captain William Fletcher decides to leave the planet, and Craig, behind to be with his supposed followers.
But at the end, another ship lands, piloted by two spacemen who are larger than the mountains. Craig tries to tell them to leave, calling himself a God, before one of the giant men picks him to give him a closer look, crushing him in the process. It’s a satisfying end, highlighted by Craig being tossed to the ground like a sack of trash. Then the little people celebrate his death and topple the statue they built of him on top his body.
6) “A Nice Place to Visit”
A thief is gunned down by police after robbing a pawn shop, but wakes up unharmed and greeted by a man named Pip. That’s where this one kicks off, showing Rocky Valentine apparently winning a jackpot and receiving whatever his heart desires in his new environment. He’s a clearly lousy guy, but never realizes he’s not as lucky as he seems until the end of the episode.
After learning he can’t lose, he somehow determines he’s in Heaven. Pip even shows him the Hall of Records, which only showcases his numerous crimes, but he still can’t grasp that he’s in “the other place.” So when the big reveal comes in the end, it is more satisfying than your typical Twilight Zone twist. It also should be noted that this is Donald Trump’s favorite episode and he credits it with his life philosophy.
7) “A Kind of Stopwatch”
At the start of this episode, you might feel some pity for Patrick McNulty. He’s a bother who drives people away, even at his favorite local bar, and he just lost his job for similar reasons. But a small act of kindness gives McNulty a break, as a bar patron named Potts gives him a stopwatch in exchange for McNulty buying him a drink.
While the watch seemed to be a gift in response to his kindness, McNulty quickly pinpoints that he could do whatever he wants as the watch freezes the world around him, allowing him to move freely with no one noticing. Instead of just keeping this for a rainy day or using the watch to do good, he almost immediately decides to rob a bank. This seals his fate after the watch is broken and he is trapped in the frozen world.
8) “Deaths-Head Revisited”
An important episode of the original series, and written by Serling himself, “Deaths-Head Revisited” follows a former SS officer who is returning to Dachau for a trip down memory lane. Gunther Lutze almost seems giddy to be back in his old stomping grounds, which he expects to be empty before running into a former inmate named Alfred Becker. He is then confronted by other past inmates as part of a show trial, revealing Lutz murdered 14 people with his own hands, ordered the death of nearly 2,000 without a trial, and signed orders related to the gas chambers, condemning millions. Becker was one of those personally murdered by Lutze before the camp was liberated by American troops. They torture him and leave him to be taken to a mental institution. Serling closed the episode with an important message that still needs to resonate today.
“There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing,” Serling says in his closing narration. “They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard…And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”
9) “The Night of the Meek”
A nice change of pace from the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazism, “The Night of the Meek” is a tale about Christmas and the magic of the season. That said, it is one of the episodes from The Twilight Zone that never stuck its landing with me, mostly due to its differences from other Twilight Zone episodes. It is also one of the episodes shot on videotape, a cost-cutting experiment that mainly succeeded in lowering the quality of the episodes.
But Henry Corwin’s journey from seasonal department-store Santa to the real deal with a flying sled is still well deserved. He makes a wish to “see the meek inherit the Earth,” ending up with the ability to produce any gift from his bag and a desire to continue doing it each year. It’s a sweet ending and not one you’d expect from the series, even if it looks kinda crappy.
10) “He’s Alive”
Finally, we have to return to the realm of hate for this concluding entry. “He’s Alive” comes from the super-sized fourth season of the series, is written by Serling, and once again deals with Nazism. Dennis Hopper stars as a hate-monger named Peter Vollmer who spends time preaching Neo-Nazi hate on the street corners. While he seems torn personally, especially when talking to his “father figure,” and elderly Holocaust survivor Ernst Ganz.
Sadly, Vollmer is tempted and manipulated by a shadowy figure, who pushes him to spread his hate and pays his rent at the hall where his rallies are held. After Ganz interrupts one of his rallies and confronts him, the shadow figure demands that Vollmer kill his father-figure. He obliges, but soon learns his shadowy benefactor is Adolf Hitler, who has returned to spread his hatred again. Police gun down Vollmer for the murder of Ernst, and he is abandoned by Hitler after he is killed.
Do you agree with our choices? Think another Twilight Zone character was asking for trouble beyond the above? Let us know in the comments.
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