Favorite Twilight Zone episodes?

Not exactly an unpopular answer, but...

All episodes.

There was an episode featuring Lois Nettleton, and it had something to do with the world ending because the sun was heating up. It focused on a group of tenants living in a New York City apartment building, and everything kept getting hotter and they were trying to survive.

The episode ends up with it all being Lois Nettleton's dream, but when she wakes up, the opposite is happening. The world is ending because there's a deep freeze going on.

For some reason, that episode really freaked me out as a kid.

It’s...it’s a cookbook!

So many classics: To Serve Man, The Eye of the Beholder, Time Enough At Last, etc. Would that today's TV had half the creativity and writing...

I love the one in which the movie star goes back to her hometown, Ring-a-Ding Girl.

I love TZ, but you can basically watch the first and last five minutes and FF through the rest.

I like the Christmas one, with the dolls in the donation can.

R3, that's The Midnight Sun, S3E10, air date November 17, 1961. It's a classic.

I like the creepy ones that are like mini-psychological horror movies. One of my favorites is the very first episode, Where Is Everybody, and not just because Earl Holliman is sexy af in it, although he is. WIS turns on one of my favorite horror themes - a seemingly normal and ordinary world where something seems a little off ... and then a lot more off.

I'm not crazy about the episodes where Rod Serling's obsessions and politics are front and center. (I'm surprised he never made one about a Nazi alienated by modern society who almost starts a nuclear war but is stopped by a wry and kindly old man.) I dislike the heartwarming ones, like Kick the Can.

^^^WIE, not WIS

R9, WIE is an excellent choice for our present circumstances.

While we're on an aeronautical theme, Death Ship (S4E6), which is based on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, was the one that disturbed me the most as a child, and that I still find haunting all these years later.

The one with Agnes Moorehead as the woman visited by tiny "aliens." No dialogue--tour de force.

A World of His Own with Keenan Wynn. Worth watching for the wonderful Phyllis Kirk as a contemporary Morticia Addams.

To wit....

The one where the girls join an aerobics class.

A World of His Own...isn't that the one where the characters actually see Rod Serling during his closing monologue?

While "Deaths-Head Revisited" isn't my favorite episode per se (way too dark, even by TZ standards), it does contain probably my all time favorite closing narration by Serling:

"There is an answer to the doctor's question (why don't we demolish the Nazi concentration camps?). All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. 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. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

“The After Hours” with Anne Francis and Elizabeth Allen. And James Milhollin as the oh-so-fruity floorwalker. “Marsha....Marsha!”

"One For The Angels". Death comes for small-time salesman Lewis J. "Lew" Bookman (Ed Wynn) and by cheating Death, Bookman believes he is in the clear until Death informs him that he must take someone in his place at midnight. Learning that Death has chosen a young girl who lives in Bookman's apartment block, he waits until Death shows up in the evening and is prepared to give the greatest sales spiel he has ever done in order to hold Death's attention until after the appointed hour.

[quote]Lewis J. Bookman, age sixtyish. Occupation: pitchman. Formerly a fixture of the summer, formerly a rather minor component to a hot July. But, throughout his life, a man beloved by the children, and therefore, a most important man. Couldn't happen, you say? Probably not in most places – but it did happen in the Twilight Zone.

The one with Carol Burnett is one of their silliest.

The one with Peter Falk. Amazing actor. The one with a dark-haired Elizabeth Montgomery, and Charles Bronson. The one with Dean Stockwell.

R17 Words for our time and all times.

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. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

"Was someone helping you, R18?"

Rod Serling iirc, wanted to do a show about how depraved humanity can become, but the network wouldn't pick it up because it's a real downer to think like that about ourselves. So he came up with the idea of calling it The Twilight Zone. In this weird place it was accepted.

Neat psychology.

I can relate to A Little Piece and Quiet right about now.

[Best Sophia Patrillo voice] Hey, look on the bright side! It's not a bomb flying at us. It's a sneeze!

The ones with Bill Shatner.

We've done this topic MANY times, OP.

R27, what’s the point of even saying that? So what, he should have bumped an old thread instead? Nobody likes that. If you only care about fresh, brand new topics, go read those.

The HITCHHIKER!!

"I believe you're...going my way."

Also love the hour long episode with James Whitmore as the leader of a colonists from Earth who have settled onto a barren dusty hot planet. A rescue ship comes to get them, but Whitmore becomes jealous and threatened by losing his leadership over "his" people, so he refuses to get on the rescue ship back to Earth. And then, of course, regrets it as soon as the ship takes off, crying for it to come back....

R22, I've thought about that monologue a lot these past 4 years. My mom thought Rod Serling was a genius, but at the same time slightly twisted for the stories he came up with.

Robert Redford as Death.

"Nick of Time," with William Shatner. Shatner and his wife are in a diner waiting for their car to be repaired, and the table has a little devil "fortune teller" machine on it. You put in 25 cents, and your fortune is spit out on a piece of paper. They start playing it for fun, but then it coincidentally starts predicting things that end up happening. Shanter starts going mad, pumping coins into the machine, because he's become convinced this little devil is really telling him his fate.

This is a not-so-subtle indictment of organized religion that dramatized how gullible we can be when we come under the influence of a "higher power" and what we're willing to do in the name of that power, like throwing money at it in order to be "saved."

Serling was way ahead of his time when it came to exploring subjects like this.

Twnety-five cents? Are you kidding? Try a penny!

R33 Whatever. Coins. Happy now?

My favorites are the episodes where people try to revisit their childhood, or their past and realize that nostalgia is a liar.

R17 and R22, I can’t help but think that audiences must have gotten tired of Serling’s incessant preaching and moralizing.

I love his preaching. Better than REALITY TV.

My favorites:

The Hitchhiker

The Midnight Sun

Walking Distance

Eye of the Beholder

Five Characters in Search of an Exit

Person or Persons Unknown

A Penny For Your Thoughts

Nick of Time

A Stop at Willoughby

Long Distance Call

Third From The Sun

On Thursday We Leave For Home

The Odyssey of Flight 33

Two

The Masks

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

I've always been freaked out by (and felt connected to) William Shatner in NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 feet.

Nobody believes him and nobody listens to him, yet in the end we find out he was correct, sane and telling the truth.

The whole theme seems to be paranoia ala Misters Due on Maple Street.

Willoughby (is that actually the title?)

Another favorite is THE SILENCE, where an old guy in a posh gentleman's club is so annoyed by a younger man's constant talking that he bets him $10,000 that he can't be completely silent for one year. Improbably (but who cares?) they build a glass room inside the club for the younger man to live in. Amazingly the guy keeps total silence as time goes by, and the older man tries to trip him up, even hinting that he's seen his wife out with another man, etc. Finally the year is up and the whole club gathers together as the young guy i declared the winner. Th old man sheepishly has to admit that he doesn't have the $10,000, apologizes and offers to resign from the club, at which point the younger guy grabs a pad and scribbles something on it, then rips off his ascot to reveal he had his vocal cords cut!

Moral: never make a bet with some old geezer!