Top ten, would we?
Behold, a loose list of the regions of the Twilight Zone I most often revisit…
• Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? - spoiler alert: the real martian sits down (and orders a coffee)
• The After Hours - as Bobby Peru said in David Lynch's Wild at Heart, “those are dummies, dummy”
• The Fear - 10 out of 10 Type III civilizations agree: size fuggin' matters
• Mirror Image - "Excuse me, is that [my] bag?" This episode is a most solid counterpoint to that old if you see something, say something adage
• Nick of Time - a warning to the superstitious, featuring a Shatner so young he's just Shitner
• Black Leather Jackets - no cool points were killed in the making of this episode—the only one in which you will hear "raygun" and "daddio" muttered in the same sentence
• The Four of Us are Dying — high strangeness, a spaz jazz score, angular neons, shadows of shadows, bloodthirsty karma, maybe the single most Twilight Zoney episode of the Twilight Zone in captivity
• A Nice Place to Visit - utopian ennui 101. Here's a hint: Heaven is a few clicks directly south of where Belinda Carlisle claimed it to be
• The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street — proto-Facebook circa bleeding-belly-button-of-2020 vibes
• Stopover in a Quiet Town — cautionary tale for some of the more outré perils of drunk driving or guerrilla marketing for Barbie & company, you decide
• The Midnight Sun — the twist at the end of this agonizing-in-a-good-way episode shall warm the creepy little hearts of those weirdos who prefer sleeping with one leg in/one leg out
• Once Upon a Time — imagine some kooky universe where there is an episode of the Twilight Zone that features . . . Buster Keaton? That is the universe in which we all currently reside
Of course, my favorite episode is the one about the guy who sort of "auto-walks" (and auto-metros) to a liminal space—a desolate, off-white basement floor in an abandoned hotel/office building/mall thingy in Friendship Heights—and discovers an arcade/pinball room that features the brawny machine, well, featured in this post. (Note: against all appearances, I am not a pinball guy, so I instead fed half my bank account to the Joust/Burgertime machine.)
