The Twilight Zone: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

A favourite among many TZ aficionados, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is memorable for starring a young William Shatner, and being one of the most thrilling episodes of all 5 series. Bob is a recently discharged sanitorium patient returning to the original scene of his mental breakdown aboard a plane, which happened over a year ago. His sanity supposedly cured, it is immediately jeopardised when he thinks he has seen something on the wing of the plane, but whenever he accosts someone to look, it mysteriously disappears. Set amidst a storm, the episode is a masterclass in suspense from the Twilight Zone's frequent contributor, Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend), and the dichotomy between madness and sanity is played brilliantly by Shatner, whose character is so convinced he has seen something, but fears the possibility of being accused of insanity and having a mental breakdown again, thus fulfilling a recurring nightmare.

The Twilight Zone: The Shelter

'Those people are our neighbours.'

This episode is one of the most terrifying ever written for the Twilight Zone - and there isn't a supernatural element in it. Precisely what makes it so disturbing is that the scenario Serling poses seems to be all too possible, and was possible in the Cold War era of the atomic bomb.

The episode opens with the celebration of the local doctor Bill Stockton, played by Larry Gates; a gathering of nuclear families and the exchange of normality and pleasantries, soon to be broken by a radio broadcast warning of UFOs converging on America. As panic sets in, each of the families leave to retreat to their homes and gather supplies. But the good doctor has something the other families do not - a bomb shelter. The other families plead with the doctor to let them in, but he refuses and events quickly turn nasty as the veneer of normality observed at the opening dinner quickly evaporates.

This 'exercise' as Serling likes to call it is one of his most powerful studies of human nature. The episode examines what happens when humanity is faced with its extinction, and Serling's answer is a troubling, pessimistic one. The families turn on each other with startling, uncivilised ferocity and the imperative becomes not just to survive, but to destroy others to live. Ugly prejudices rise to the surface; pointedly the suppressed xenophobic discourses of post-War America are directed at one of the characters described as a 'semi-American' by one of the men and his wife, who moments before were so amiable. Eventually two of the men decide to destroy the shelter door and they succeed seconds before another announcement is made, declaring the UFOs as harmless satellites.

What happens here is another disturbing idea: the families want to return to normal. The husband who barely minutes before had assaulted the 'foreigner', Marty, defends himself by protesting his fear of death, and Marty himself suggests a party despite the racial and physical abuse he has suffered. They all want a celebration - a performance of normality - apart from the doctor, who is appalled by what he has witnessed, and who suggests that normality, really, is the mob that almost tore itself apart to survive. Normality the episode suggests is a construct, a way of papering over the cracks and prejudices, joining in a false unity which evades the knowledge that you might not know your neighbours as well as you think, and that put in the right (or wrong) situation, they would destroy you to preserve their own lives. It is only the doctor who was prepared for the very possibility of a nuclear or bomb attack - and the disruption of normality -,  and acknowledges that he might well have seen the neighbours in their true colours. The resonance of the episode is produced precisely as Serling forewarns: it is unsettlingly close to home, to the neighbours you may not fully know.

The Twilight Zone: Eye of the Beholder

I promised a follow up to my Twilight Zone run down a while ago, and after a long procrastination I present one of the all time greats, Eye of the Beholder.

The episode opens in a hospital with a lady whose face is entirely bandaged, and we learn is undergoing some sort of treatment for what we assume to be a hideous, ostracising deformity. But it becomes apparent we cannot see the faces of the doctor and the nurses either, theirs in silhouette or their bodies turned away. The cinematography and mise-en-scene used to achieve this is some of the finest in any of the series of the Twilight Zone, the lighting perfectly utilised to obscure faces in darkness, and low angles employed deftly to create an ominous sense of concealment. That we do not see a face until the end of the episode is stylistically and thematically intertwined, and without spoiling anything, it has to the greatest reveal in the show's history. The problem with reviewing this episode is precisely that I refuse to give away the ending, but I shall nonetheless expand on the themes it touches.

As you might have guessed, the episode is built around philosophical principle 101: 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', an ageless principle which is relevant as ever today, but so resonant in contemporary America when both the fear and discursive necessity of conforming or being 'normal' was prevalent in society. Elsewhere in the episode we see television screens with a Stalin or Hitler-esque dictator ranting to the people about the need to conform within a state, and the bandaged woman's doctor frequently refers to her deformity in reference to the state and the measures taken over people with her condition. There are disturbing echoes of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ghettoisation, and the episode becomes an indictment of the way in which discrimination is in many cases state sponsored, and marginalisation sanctioned in pursuit of an oppressive conformist state model. It is Serling at his very best; moral, political, but subtle and clever without being heavy handed. It is the combination of these elements that makes the best Twilight Zone episodes, and compels me to watch them years after they are supposed to have dated.

The Twilight Zone Revisited

Over the next few weeks and months I'll be (re)visiting Rod Serling's classic series to coincide with the remastered release of all 5 seasons of The Twilight Zone on DVD half a century since the seminal show first aired. Its legacy is unmistakeable. A theme tune younger generations recognise decades after the programme ended and associate with horror, science fiction, the mysterious and unexplained. The trademark clipped delivery of Rod Serling's opening caveat at the start of every episode. And some of the most memorable moments, and (oft imitated) twists in television history.

For its time, The Twilight Zone was a groundbreaking series, critically acclaimed, and earned Serling multiple Emmys for his consistently superb writing. But it was much more than a science fiction television programme, weaving contemporary political and social issues, morality and philosophy into the fabric of many of its episodes. As a genre, science fiction is extremely fertile as a vehicle for allegory, and The Twilight Zone exploited the possiblities of the supernatural, super-scientific and hypothetical to invert the way we look at the world. After some episodes we are left even wondering whether the real world is, actually, the Twilight Zone.

The famous opening describes the Twilight Zone as 'the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge'. It is a ground of moral grey areas, double edged situations and paradoxes which forces us to examine whether people are as moral as they believe they are. In the postwar, ideologically conformist America of the 1950s and 60s, the Twilight Zone was a bold programme which used its science fiction form to subtly challenge contemporary politics and social prejudices. It interrogated the human condition and examined its hypocrisies, ironies and superficialities, and didn't shy away from politics in its critique of the state as a vehicle for totalitarianism.

I'll be reviewing my favourite episodes as well as those held in high esteem by fans and critics, so stay tuned while I navigate you all on a trip, through the Twilight Zone ...