Brief Synopsis: A lonely man hits it off with a woman when he accidentally dials her number, but she is hiding an interesting secret...
Spoilery Version:: William Sanderson portrays Norman, a lonely bachelor whose typical night involves eating frozen dinners and impulse shopping while watching informercials. While engaged in the latter, he misdials and contacts Mary Ann, a woman with whom he seems to hit it off. Despite baring their souls over the phone lines, Mary Ann refuses to meet him. A desperate Norman has the call traced and follows it to an art museum phone that sits near a life-size sculpture of a woman. And not just any woman; it's the self-portrait of an artist named Mary Ann who committed suicide. Norman is justifiably freaked out when Mary Ann calls him later to say she saw him in the museum, and how dark and lonely it is there at night. But then she says they can't talk anymore and hangs up. Despite this, Norman heads back to the museum to talk to the silent, immobile sculpture, and tells her how much he loves and wants to be with her. He actually goes in for a kiss before a security guard catches him and meekly asks Norman to please not touch the statues. So, it's basically "My Romance with a Weeping Angel." Mary Ann calls him back later and asks him to return if he really wants to be with her forever, and Norman breaks into the museum. The security guard hears him and enters the room where Mary Ann's sculpture is displayed... only to find her hand-in-hand with a new, male statue...
4) The Cold Equations
Brief Synopsis: A young woman makes a horrible mistake when she stows away on a supply ship delivering vaccinations to a plague-ridden planet.
Spoilery Version: One of the reasons people love The Twilight Zone is its twist endings, and one of the reasons people love fiction in general is that it can compress life into a sensible story where the heroes often find a way to beat the odds and save the day at the end. This story offers neither. Marilyn stows away on a spaceship delivering medical supplies in the hope of seeing her brother, who is stationed on the destination world. Not only is she unaware of the plague, but she also doesn't realize that supply ship flights are plotted out to the last ounce, provided with just enough fuel to safely reach their destination. Any extra weight dangerously throws off the whole flight plan. The ship's lone pilot, Thomas, is ordered to make the only logical choice if the ship is to reach the plague victims on time - jettison Marilyn into the cold depths of space. Alas, ignorance is not always bliss. Thomas tries everything he can to help her, such as desperately removing and ejecting every excess part of the ship's interior he can find. You keep expecting he'll find some way, some ingenious solution, to save this girl. But nothing they do compensates enough for her weight, and both Marilyn and the audience slowly realize the true horror of the situation. She gets a chance to contact her brother and say goodbye, and then grimly accepts her fate and steps into the ship's airlock. Left with no other choice, Thomas opens the outer door and ejects her to an almost instant death, her life cut short by one thoughtless, well-meaning mistake. Struck by the brutal, cold tragedy of it all, Thomas breaks down into tears. It's a horrible incident to watch unfold over 20-plus minutes on screen and will leave you with a feeling of dread, but that's what makes it one of the best. Good TV should occasionally make you want to hang yourself.
3) Her Pilgrim Soul
Brief Synopsis: Two scientists are shocked when a woman is reincarnated inside their holographic projector.
Spoilery Version: It's funny. The least renowned episodes of the original Twilight Zone are the hour-long episodes that made up its fourth season. They're rarely shown in repeats, even during holiday marathons, and generally seem to be dismissed for not adhering to the tighter, major twist-based half-hour episodes of the rest of the series. But in the '80s Twilight Zone revival, the longer episodes are among the best, giving stories a chance to breathe and characters an opportunity to shine. Such is the case in "Her Pilgrim Soul," in which scientist Kevin Dayton and assistant Daniel (played by a young Gary Cole, who looks more Jeff Spicoli than Lumbergh here) suddenly find a young girl, Nola, has come to life in their experimental holographic generator and is playing with a toy ball. The girl ages at a rate of years per day (at one point played by Danica "Winnie" McKellar of The Wonder Years) and Kevin gets to know and fall in love with her as she becomes a woman. We're not still talking about The Wonder Years, by the way. The pair bond over authors like Yeats, and Nola remembers parts of her life in the early 20th century, burdened with a father who discouraged her education and suffering a painful miscarriage. Meanwhile, Kevin's already deteriorating relationship with his wife becomes worse as he spends more time at the lab with another woman. Daniel does some digging and finds out that Nola actually existed, and died during the miscarriage. Although she continues to age as a hologram, her early death in real life resulted in her husband dying from a broken heart. It turns out that Nola's husband was reincarnated as Kevin, and Nola came back in another way to help him get over the loss he was still feeling a lifetime later. Nola calls Kevin's wife to come to lab, and the couple have an emotional reunion as a now elderly Nola fades away. But the holographic ball goes bouncing across the lab and lands in the hands of Kevin's wife, suggesting - possibly - that the couple might have a little girl in their future with an innate love of Yeats. I challenge even the crustiest-souled readers among you not to watch this episode and feel a tug at you shriveled, dark hearts.
2) A Little Peace and Quiet
Brief Synopsis: A harried housewife discovers the amazing ability to stop the world around her by telling everyone to SHUT THE HELL UP.
Spoilery Version: The star of this episode is Melinda Dillon, who looks almost exactly like she did when she played the mother in A Christmas Story. Her role here is also kind of similar, and you can certainly see her using the magic stopwatch she finds in this episode to make the Old Man, Ralphie and Randy freeze in place around the Christmas tree for a few hours while she sits back, relaxes and enjoys her eggnog. Having the ability to stop time is one of those special powers most of us have fantasized about at one time or another. The possibilities for convenience and unbridled perversion are just unimaginable. In this episode, the stopwatch give the mother the ability to stop time all over the world by yelling "SHUT UP!," which she discovers during a very frustrating moment with her husband and kids. She can then unfreeze everyone by telling them to start talking. What follows is pure wish fulfillment, as she uses her newfound ability to go shopping in an eerily but peacefully still world without any hassles and totally freak out two nosy door-to-door peace activists by freezing them and moving them elsewhere. The problem is that, in her bliss, the woman has been ignoring news reports of a tension build-up between the USA and Soviet Union. When the TV news anchors begin screaming about impeding war and the sirens start blaring, the woman yells at it all to shut up. Then she wanders out into town to find everyone staring upward... at a nuclear missile just seconds from hitting the ground. If she restarts time, everyone dies; she is otherwise stuck until the end of her days in a frozen world on the brink of hell. HOLY F@CK!N' SH#T is that a gut-punching twist! The threat of nuclear annihilation was an unsettling, underlying fear throughout much of the '80s, and this episode does what The Twilight Zone does so well - capturing the anxieties of its era.
1) A Message from Charity
Brief Synopsis: Future Star Trek: Voyager star (although we won't hold that against him) Robert Duncan McNeill plays Peter, a 1980s teenager who becomes telepathically attached to a teenage Puritan girl named Charity (Kerry Noonan) from Colonial America after the two become afflicted with the same fever.
Spoilery Version: There is a purely interesting fantasy at the heart of this episode, in which a pair of teens separated by nearly two centuries obtain the ability to mentally communicate with each other and see their respective worlds through each other's eyes. The appearance of a jetliner in the sky is a pretty ho-hum event for Peter, but the episode captures the utter disbelief and amazement experienced by Charity as she sees it through Peter's eyes. The premise does bring about some curious questions that the episode doesn't address - like do they see each other when they go to the bathroom or take a shower? - but this is The Twilight Zone, not a late night Skinemax movie, so those types of queries go unaddressed. Instead, we get a hauntingly beautiful tale about two teenagers who find the friendship they both needed, even if they had to reach out across time to do so. The odd connection comes to a head when Charity's knowledge of the future causes her to be branded a witch and Peter has to rush to the library to find historical records with blackmail material on her accuser in order to save Charity's life. Charity decides to end the connection for both of their sakes and Peter goes on to make friends in his own time, but a year later Charity contacts him with one last message - to go to the woods and find a rock on which she carved a timeless proclamation of her love for him. It's a tangible, silent artifact of a relationship tragically restricted by the wide chasm of time.
One of my faves (and it might have been from a different series) was a story where a couple are presented with a box with a button. If they press the button, they'll be rewarded but someone will die. I forget exactly how it goes, but basically they end up pressing the button and then discover that the box will be passed along to another couple, with them as the potential victims this time. I believe it was the basis for the feature film, "The Box" a couple years back. It was a short piece, possibly during the hour-long format, and was quite good.
@jakethy That was one of my faves as well. I think it was that if they press the button somebody they won't know will die, and they will get a lot of money. The wife wants to press it but the husband doesn't want to... she pushes the button, the guy that brought the box shows up with a briefcase of money and takes the box. The movie The Box stank like week old garbage!
I always thought 'The Card', about a woman with a compulsive shopping problem that gets a special credit card which takes away pieces of her life like she never had them (pets, children, etc) when she doesn't pay off her balance on time was pretty good. Plus the guy who played Walter Peck in Ghostbusters was her husband.
Bless you for remembering "A Message from Charity". That one has stuck with me for years; for some reason it just had a huge impact on me. The ending was just really sweet and lovely.
In "Her Pilgrim Soul" it was his mother from his current life not his lover from a former life.
Even more heart wrenching because of it I think, she never got to even see her child in life and he never got to see her. so this was a chance for her to "spend a lifetime with him" (hence her rapid aging in the hologram)
Chiller aired a marathon of 80s TZ episodes yesterday (they do that quite often). I caught "To See the Invisible Man". My heart just broke. What a horrible thing it is (not must be, is) to not be acknowledged. Very good that it was on this list.
"Button, Button" with a final twist worthy of the original series and "Profile In Silver", a what-if story invoving JFK and starring the bad guy from "V - The series".
Wow I didn't know the short story "The Cold Equations" was a Twilight Zone episode... maybe I'll use that in class since my students have no attention span.
Great list. I'm a real aficionado of the original series, but only saw a few of these. I remember the Invisible Man one fondly, though. I remember a few real stinkers, too, so this eclectic collection is a wonderful find.
One of the Very Short stories it had dealt with a fleet of alien spacecraft arriving on earth, and one of the aliens teleports into the united nations building during a meeting about the aliens. The aliens tell the assembled world leaders that they are going to destroy humanity because it has a small talent for war, and they have one day to settle affairs before they wipe out the human race. The world leaders hurriedly draft a peace treaty ending all hostilities between all the nations... When the alien returns they give him the treaty, and he looks at it then laughs: THEN he explains that they created lesser races like humanity as their soldiers to fight their wars for them, and humanity has a small talent for war... meaning, he explains, that we are NOT suitable for their use... And they are going to wipe out humanity and seed a more aggressive race on earth. Then the alien ships come in and start destroying earth.
@arthurdentrgv That's the one that I was going to mention - really short, but it made a huge impression on me as a youngster. 'Wonder what the title of that was - was it "A Small Talent for War"?
I miss anthology style TV series. So many possibilities with those. Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, etc. We need good shows like that again. I'd love to his list of top 10 episodes of Amazing Stories. My favorite episode of that is Remote Control Man. Absolutely hilarious.That series was good family fun. Lots of stories were written or directed by big name people or people who went on to be big. You got people like Joe Dante, Brad Bird, and one episode has a 9ish Seth Green. Other fun episodes: Mummy Daddy, Hell Toupe (a killer hair piece), Gather ye Acorns...
But with these shows you get great stories and if you miss a few episodes you are not lost on the story.
"Cold Equation" was also turned into a full lenght movie that aired, I think, on the Sci Fi channel years ago. In this longer version the lone pilot is in front of investigative board explaining what happened... She is still ejected out the airlock... and the absolute horror he felt about it and was still feeling.
I remember one half of an episode that had two stories in one, Sherman Helmsley as a professor whose equations accidentally summon the Devil (Ron Glass) and the two have a nice debate on things. Great twist as to how the professor manages to get this all-powerful being to finally leave him alone.
And had a soft spot for a story of a female doctor who helps with past life regressions suddenly finding herself in a world where everyone remembers their past lives but wants to forget them.
@swerj321 I remember the episode because I had read the original story in a library book. The last line of the book was hilarious, but I am going to be mean and not repeat it here.
@J12345@TaiaShok@swerj321 I bet he's talking about the one with the devil, the last line that gets him to leave the professor alone. I won't give it away either, but that is a terrific story - I love how every time the camera cuts back to Ron Glass as Old Scratch, his tshirt says something different.
There is a fairly decent one-act musical by Alan Menken based on "Her Pilgrim Soul." It's fairly moving. It comprises half of a show called "Weird Romance."
I recall an episode that, when I viewed it again years later on Youtube, I found that people surprisingly thought was "horrible", "stupid" and "the absolute worst one ever", and even less positive things to say about it. One person saying that Rod Serling would even be turning in his grave because of it.
Yet I liked it. A lot, actually.
It was of a sick and twisted "reality tv" game show that grew increasingly bizarre as it would put the contestant's own children in sadisticly violent and horrifying situations, and forcing the parents to prove how much they loved their children. Another one of those situations where I just have to facepalm at people not understanding the concept of satire. To me, I thought it was a horrifying send-up of today's "reality tv" obsessed culture, and even more terrfifying today than it was in the 80's, seeing as we have "television entertainment" today that actually isn't far off, even accurately predicting similar shows like "Cheaters".
In a day and age where human depravity and the degrading level of both exhibitionism and social voyerism brings us "entertainment" like Honey Boo Boo, I found that episode to be one of the most spot on and disturbingly relevant episodes of the revival.
@Dufflebag The episode you're referring to, "How Much Do You Love Your Kid?" actually aired as an episode of the forgettable third Twilight Zone series; which aired on UPN from 2002-2003 and was hosted by Forrest Whitaker. In the segment, Wayne Knight(Newman from"Seinfeld, Nedry from "Jurassic Park") played the host of "How Much Do Love Your Kid?"
Isn't there an episode with Bruce Willis where a Doppelgänger steals his identity? (during this time Willis was a TV personality, working on Moonlighting)
"The Cold Equations" is scientifically preposterous (not one ounce of extra fuel?) but damn chilling. It was originally a classic short story that some of read in high school English. It's hilarious that nervous CBS executives tried to alter the ending. I think they wanted the astronaut to cut off his legs.
Honorable mention: "But Can She Type?", a funny tale starring Pam Dauber (Mindy of "Mork and...") as a harried secretary who is magically transported to a parallel world where being a secretary is the most glamorous and prestigious job available. Bonus: a pre-TNG Jonathan Frakes has a small role as a handsome suitor.
I remember watching 'A Little Peace And Quiet' and thinking, if this happened to me, I'd be spending the rest of my life trying to move as many missiles away from cities as possible.
@BatmanJesus@skrag2112 I couldn't get the final scene out of my head--the missile with frozen flame coming from its end, pointed downward, a fraction of a second from turning into hellfire, the red Soviet hammer-and-sickle on the side....
I found a picture of it somewhere ( http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2531975490100752951ovYLIW ), but I can't look at it too long. I remember how silent the last few minutes of that episode was, and that silent THING up there. I thought I would go quite insane if I looked at it for too long...in silence...and I still think I will if I do...
I remember seeing a few of these, but it wouldn't surprise me if I'd seem them all and just don't remember them. (I'm always surprised when I see a TV show 20 years later and realize I've seen it but didn't remember it until seeing it again.) I wish there were more anthology series on the air.
I love invisibility, and remember liking not just that invisible man episode but the story it was based on.
In the # 3 episode on the list, is it safe to say the scientist's wife came down with a Yeats infection?
@OneMinuteGalactica "In the # 3 episode on the list, is it safe to say the scientist's wife came down with a Yeats infection?" The answer is no. It's never safe to say. I'll never make that mistake again.
if nothing else cbs in their attempt to redo the twilight zone at least kept its core given the episodes on this list for remember how after watching the cold equations i was a little freaked out that after every thing he does she still winds up having to go out the air lock. plus also a little bit of peace and quiet shows what happens when one gets used to controling time mostly one could wind up facing trouble without even knowing it. till its too late.
One of my favorite episodes that I always thought about after seeing it was A Little Peace and Quiet. I always tried to imagine how she could disarm the nuke before it exploded when i was a kid.
I've never understood the premise behind "Monsters!" before. Thanks a lot for clearing it all up. It makes sense now. "The Shadow Man" is my favorite TZ episode from the 80's. It's one of the few watchable episodes of the reboot.
I was wondering why "Message from Charity" sounded so familiar, and then it hit me. It appeared in an anthology book from 1989 called "Visions of Fantasy" which included stuff by Asimov, Bradbury, McCaffrey, Zimmer Bradley, L'Engle, and a lot more with some Elmore illustrations. ("...Charity" was written by William Lee in case anyone was curious.) An interesting read if you can find it.
I remember JMS talking about Cold Equations, the network kept pushing for a happy ending where they figure a way to save her at the last moment, and JMS kept arguing that the whole point of the story is she can't make it.
@drszmigiel I remember reading Cold Equations in English class in Junior High and I was like "Really this type of story you will make me read at 8 am?" The ending pretty much blindsided as the inevitable of the situation. Im happy that JMS fought to keep the original ending of the story because like you said the story has no point if there's a happy ending where everyone wins.
I always liked the one where a woman goes to a strange house for help (she ran out of gas or something), and finds what looks like a normal little boy and a bunch of strange and terrifying people. It's only at the end she finds out that everyone else was normal, it was the little boy who made them that way.
THere was also another one where a couple gets caught in between a moment in time, and sees the creatures who build each second...
@DetectiveFork "A Matter of Minutes" I always loved that episode. Plus I figured out how it was possible that I couldn't find stuff where I thought it was then find it somewhere else. Those jerks put it in the wrong place.
I think you're remembering Twillight Zone:The Movie. That sounds like the third story directed by Joe Dante which remade an old episode of the original series.
