Best episode of Season Five?
Mine is "Number 12 Looks Just Like You."
shareI'd have to choose either "The Fear" or "The Encounter"
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MovieChat Forums > The Twilight Zone (1959) Discussion > Best episode of Season Five?
That was good. A few I enjoy are:
Nightmare at 20,000 feet
The living doll
Ninety years without slumbering
Ring a ding girl
Queen of the Nile
Mr Garitty and the graves
Come wander with me
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share1. Ring-a-ding Girl
2. Number 12 Looks Just Like You
3. The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms
"Nightmare at 20,000 feet."
shareThat's a good one. I like Ring-A-Ding Girl; the overly familiar but still watchable Stopover In A Quiet Town; The Old Man In The Cave,--very well done, flawed script--with its post-apocalypse theme, yet again on the Zone; Come Wander With Me, a haunting one off that seems to divide even die-hard Zoners; The Fear, a sort of ugly duckling favorite of mine that was on MeTV last week, it's the second to last, or maybe third, of the series, and I like the slow build-up, the characterizations, the creeping surrealism near the end.
The fifth was by no means a bad season. It was more eclectic than the earlier ones, with one good point in its favor that Serling & Friends were losing interest in suburbia, offered up some strange ones, such as the outright horror, Night Call.
I'm surprised "The Masks" hasn't been mentioned yet.
Anyone out there who shares my affinity for the unfairly maligned "I am the Night Color Me Black"?
Oh sure. I'm actually a huge fan of both those episodes myself.
shareCount me in as a fan of I Am The Night,--Color Me Black. Pedantic, moralistic, the symbolism of the encroaching darkness was neither new nor in my opinion used particularly well. Actually, on the surface, as a TV show, it sucks on ice, plays like a road show riff on To Kill A Mockingbird. So why is it a favorite?...
It captures the spirit of its time to a tee, was written in the dark, seemingly sunless days after the JFK assassination, and for those of us who remember that time, and/or saw the episode first run, it's darkly nostalgic. The symbolism actually revolves around the issue that the episode never raises, that of mourning.
Yes, there are other political issues in there,too, whether civil rights, war or just plain hatred, but I see it as a cry of the heart more than anything else; a primal scream in the wake of the awful death of a man who brought so much hope to so many, and for so many Americans it felt like the world was falling apart.
The Masks is one I used to like but it's grown repulsive to me. I don't care for anyone in it but the doctor and the "colored help". Jason Foster is a nasty piece of work, and I despise the way he plays God as if he was coming from a "higher place". Higher place my arse. His adult and often not so adult acting children are unlikable and yet in a way they're pathetic; unloved and unlovable, I can't help but feel sorry for them. Their punishment strikes me as beyond harsh. It's downright sadistic. Maybe if the story was better written or offered some hope for redemption I'd like it better. Films and TV shows set in New Orleans at Mardi Gras time often have a magical quality. This is one does, too, yet the magic makes its ending an extreme downer.
shareYou have to concede, though, that Jason Foster, along with Uncle Simon, has some of the best put-downs of the entire series (and possibly of TV in general). Serling couldn't write comedy but his gift for generating unique and amusing insults to this day has few competitors.
shareTrue, and I like Robert Bray's regular army CO questioning of the Custer chasing soldier in The 7th Is Made Up Of Phantoms.
Maybe the best Rod Serling intro put-downs (his entire intro was one big put-down basically) was his first season chip on his shoulder the size of the national debt introduction of Fred Renard in What You Need.
I don't know if 'the best' since it's been a couple of years since I've watched Twilight Zone, but Nightmare at 20,000 ft is very good and one of the most popular episodes of the entire series.
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