“You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of” twist endings that really caught 1960s audiences off guard. Rod Serling was nothing short of a genius, as evidenced by the fact that, just as his twist endings surprised viewers 60 years ago, they’re still capable of doing much the same today. And, while those shocking conclusions weren’t the only thing that made The Twilight Zone a genuine classic of American television, they certainly helped.
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But, of the 156 total episodes, running from 1959 to 1964, which had the most jarring final (or near-final) scenes? For fellow devoted fans of the series, the answers won’t be as surprising as the endings themselves, but they just might come close. Note that some really great episodes, like “It’s a Good Life” and “Living Doll,” don’t have twist endings, so they were excluded. Just missing the cut-off? The conclusions to the iconic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” “The Silence,” and “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.”
10) “Time Enough at Last” — Season 1, Episode 8
“Time Enough at Last” has a memorable gut-punch of an ending that isn’t scary in the traditional sense but is nothing short of devastating. And given the strength of the writing as well as the performance by Rocky‘s Burgess Meredith, the viewer is forced to feel his fear surrounding his predicament. Meredith plays Henry Bemis, who loves nothing about life more than books. When he gets trapped in a bank vault, Bemis manages to avoid an H-Bomb explosion. After he emerges from the vault, he finds himself to be seemingly the last man on Earth. He has an endless supply of books and endless time to read them, until his glasses break.
9) “The Invaders” — Season 2, Episode 15
When looking at the budgets of other network television series of its time, the price tags given to The Twilight Zone episodes were nothing short of paltry. Yet, it made the most of them. Even still, sometimes cheap effects could dampen the impact of truly great twists, like the one seen in Season 2’s “The Invaders.” The episode is a one-woman show, with Bewitched‘s Agnes Moorehead providing a dialogue-free performance as what appears to be a single woman whose home is suddenly infiltrated by little spacegun-wielding aliens. In reality, she’s the alien, and the little fellas are actually astronauts from Earth.
8) “The Hitch-Hiker” — Season 1, Episode 16
One of The Twilight Zone‘s more famous episodes, “The Hitch-Hiker,” helps cement the notion that the series kicked off with what amounted to its best season. Based on a radio play of the same name, the episode follows Nan Adams, who is harassed over and over by a hitchhiker who seems to be following her from state to state as she travels from New York City to Los Angeles. However, the episode also opens with Nan getting a flat tire in Pennsylvania, and it’s revealed that the shown accident was far worse: she never walked away from it, and the hitchhiker is actually the personification of death.
7) “Eye of the Beholder” — Season 2, Episode 6
Featuring a twist ending so iconic it inspired Ariana Grande’s Halloween costume in 2019, “Eye of the Beholder” is one of the series’ strongest episodes. The only reason it doesn’t rank higher is because, while the ending is frightening, it’s also coated with some sweetness. Janet Tyler has undergone eleven surgeries to look “normal.” With her face fully bandaged, the audience is like the medical staff surrounding her in that they don’t know what she looks like or if the procedure has been a success, until the end. Once the bandages are removed, the medical staff recoil in horror and bemoan yet another procedural failure, but the audience doesn’t get it — she’s a beautiful woman. The staff, however, have monstrous appearances.
6) “The After Hours” — Season 1, Episode 34
The Twilight Zone has a few really solid doll-related episodes, and “The After Hours” is right up there. Marsha is a young woman who has entered a department store in search of a gold thimble to get for her mother. She purchases it on the ninth floor but, after realizing it is damaged, seeks to return it. Unfortunately, she learns there is no ninth floor and the cashier who sold the thimble to her is a mannequin. Worse yet, Marsha herself is a mannequin who has ended her one-month allotment to live amongst the flesh-and-blood humans.
5) “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” — Season 1, Episode 22
Like “Time Enough at Last,” the conclusion of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” isn’t the scariest thing in the world in the traditional sense, but sees its impact grow the more you think about it after the credits have rolled. An astute look at Cold War paranoia, this episode (easily one of The Twilight Zone‘s best) shows a neighborhood whose residents swiftly turn on one another when strange occurrences make them believe that one of them is an alien. The twist ending has aliens standing on a hilltop near the neighborhood with a remote that can do simple things such as mess with the street’s lighting. They remark to one another how it’s a simple task to get humanity to turn on itself. “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is as thematically rich and relevant now as it ever was.
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4) “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” — Season 2, Episode 28
“Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up” technically has two twist endings. But, instead of playing like a hat on a hat, it just plays as a straight-up surprise followed by a bigger surprise. The narrative takes place in a single location — a diner — which two state troopers have entered looking for the passenger of a crashed UFO. In the diner is a group of bus passengers, one of whom might not have been on the bus at all. After they have all left the diner to resume their bus trip, it crashes, and cantankerous businessman Ross returns, claiming to be the only survivor. He then reveals a third arm and tells the diner’s cook that he’s a scout from Mars ensuring the Earth is able to be colonized. The cook smiles and takes off his cap, revealing he’s a three-eyed scout from Venus whose people have already intercepted the Martian convoy.
3) “The Masks” — Season 5, Episode 26
Like “The Eye of the Beholder,” “The Masks” is a look at people’s perception of physical beauty. But “The Masks” takes things further by having its characters absolutely obsessed with it, to the point the only thing they value more than physical beauty is cash. The narrative follows a family, all of whom are groveling for their soon-to-die patriarch’s fortune. It’s Mardi Gras and he has a condition to get the inheritance: everyone must wear hideous masks that he claims represent their personalities. The family eagerly agrees but, when the required amount of time has passed, the patriarch is dead, the shallow family members have removed their masks, and their faces have been forever altered. This episode is scarier than “The Eye of the Beholder” because there’s no flowery additive in the ending about the supposedly ugly person finding love and acceptance by those who look like her. Instead, these people are (deservedly) deformed, and there’s no going back.
2) “Stopover in a Quiet Town” — Season 5, Episode 30
“Stopover in a Quiet Town” is one of those episodes that focuses on an especially restrained cast. In this case, the viewer spends most of their time with Bob and Millie Frazier, who have woken up the morning after a raging party in a town they don’t recognize. Worse yet, the house they find themselves in has props for furniture, a television that doesn’t work, and has a refrigerator loaded with plastic food. They learn the reason for this: they’re in a little girl’s model village. And, while one might assume the couple are sentient dolls, they’re not, they’re real people and the little girl is an alien (though that is up for interpretation).
1) “To Serve Man” — Season 3, Episode 24
Naturally, it’s hard to call any TV series that aired 60 years ago truly scary in the 2020s, but “To Serve Man” comes mighty close. Starring Richard Kiel of The Spy Who Loved Me and Happy Gilmore fame, the episode tells the tale of an alien race known as the Kanamit. They’re tall, they’re bulky, and they’re carrying a book called To Serve Man, which they claim is a set of guidelines to help the human race. But, when translators actually work through the book, they come to realize its true intention: to serve man as a delicacy. Too bad hundreds if not thousands of members of the human race have already boarded the Kanamits’ ships anticipating a better new life on a faraway planet.