The second episode, "One For The Angels", had Lou Bookman negotiate with Death that he would live until he'd given a pitch for the angels - by the end, he'd made such a pitch to the Angel of Death himself.
I have always had an interpretation of "He's Alive" that few people (as far as I know) have contemplated. As the spoilerized know, the ghost of Adolf Hitler directs the protagonist to become his ideological heir and start a new Nazi movement. But I never thought it was Hitler talking to the protagonist, especially after his famous line of "I invented darkness." Who could literally claim the mantle of inventor of darkness, who could appear in a form that the protagonist would be drawn to and offer limitless power? Satan.
Another moment of fridge brilliance from the episode. By the end, Peter is convinced he's "All steel; no softness, no weakness." Only when the police finally come down on him he breaks. As much as he claims to be without softness, one of steel's important points is that it is relatively able to flex and move in order to carry heavy loads. Peter has no idea what steel's true strength is, just like how he has no idea just how vital sentiment and kindness are to a man.
Why is the military covering up the crash in "The Parallel"? Because if they released the truth, that the ship crash landed completely intact after losing all contact, nobody would believe them and assume an even bigger coverup.
In "Five Characters in Search of an Exit", there's one scene where the Army major tries to get out of the cylindrical room by stabbing the wall with his saber, and the saber breaks like a twig. Now, the first time you see that episode, it gives you the impression that the wall is made out of some super-durable metal (lending credence to the Ballerina's theory that the characters are trapped in an alien spaceship). Then you find out the Twist Ending... Of course the sword snapped with one blow—the major was a doll, so his sword was made of cheap plastic.
At first it seemed weird to me that despite having no memory and only the most archetypical of personalities the characters in "Five Characters In Search of an Exit" still retain some skills; the bagpipe player can still play bagpipes and the Ballerina can still dance. Put when it is revealed that the characters are all children's dolls it makes perfect sense. They have the skills because those skills are the defining characteristics of their roles, their backstories and personalities have to come from the children who play with them.
There is a subtle scene where Bronson looks at a girlie calendar and then at the female soldier, which implies that the idea of raping her briefly entered his mind, but he just isn't the type to do that for real.
Dave from "The New Exhibit" seemed to play a very minor role, as all he did was give Emma the idea to turn off the air conditioner that led to her death. Why was he in the episode then? If you go with the theory that Martin killed Emma, Dave, and Ferguson and just imagined that the wax figures killed them, that means he would've killed 3 people total classifying him as a Serial Killer which would rightly give him a place at the ending as a figure in the museum with other serial killers. If he had only killed 2 people, he wouldn't have been classified as a serial killer and the ending might not have worked so well.
Whenever Douglas Winter is approached by Mr. Smith in "Printer's Devil", there are two common elements at play: Desperation and alcohol. One leading to the other, both into terrible decisions.
Especially given how long she'd been waiting on him and why, "Uncle Simon" must have been fully and completely aware of his niece's habits and motivations for his will to be detailed as it was read to her. It's a textbook example of the Batman Gambit; he's made completely sure that the state university will inherit his money and property in full, without having to do anything, while Barbara is doing all the dirty work for nothing but more misery and headaches.
At the end of "Will the real Martian please stand up?", Ross doesn't know what the word "wet" means. It's reasonable why: either he hasn't heard the term yet during his time on Earth, or Martians, hailing from a dry planet, don't have an equivalent to it in their language.
"One More Pallbearer:" Radin has an obvious fear of humiliation... so much so that he summons three of his lifelong grudges to apologize through fear. When they refuse and belittle his pettiness, his sanity starts to shatter... because he's now been humiliated in a far more epic scale... by his own childish actions.
His shock at their refusal to grovel is apparent: how can this be? This makes no sense! Because to him, honor is such a foreign concept that he cannot conceive it, even when it is standing right in front of him.
Mr. Foster's revenge in "The Masks" is even nastier than it initially appears: with their faces so drastically altered, it's likely that his heirs won't even be able to claim the inheritance with which he'd tempted them, because nobody's going to believe they're who they say they are. Heck, even the property they'd already owned may be out of reach.
In "Long Distance Call", the grandmother's explicit Freudian Excuse is that her first two children died in infancy, which made her very possessive of her one surviving son Chris, who ultimately broke her heart by leaving home to get married and then by treating her like she was "good for nothing" after she came to live with him in her old age. This is why she so adores her grandson Billy: he's a Replacement Goldfish for her children and she feels as if only he still cares about her. But there's another, unspoken factor too. The grandmother is clearly a European immigrant, with a strong foreign accent. (Her actress, Lili Darvas, was Hungarian.) This explains even more why she feels out-of-place and rejected in the house of her Americanized son and his American wife. (The Pixar short Bao shows similar tension between a foreign-born mother and her Westernized son and his fiancée, although unlike the Twilight Zone characters, they manage to reconcile.)
"A Nice Place to Visit" adds a substantial Oh, Crap! to the ending of "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine".
The episode "And When the Sky Was Opened" involves three men slowly disappearing from existence. It's never explained exactly why, but it's implied that someone or something that controls the universe accidentally let the men survive a space ship crash when they were supposed to die. To compensate for this mistake, this unknown force corrects destiny by erasing the three men and everyone's memory of them completely from reality. The thought of being erased from existence was already a terrifying idea to This troper. I just realized though that if something like this story happened in real life, there would be no way for any of us to know about it. You or I could have had a best friend for our entire lives who was wiped from existence the same way as the men in the episode, and nobody would realize it or be able to prove it.
In the episode "A Nice Place To Visit", Rocky Valentine, after spending the first few days in his personal paradise in the afterlife which is really an Ironic Hell, asks his spirit guide, Pip, how a thug like him managed to get into such a nice place, figuring that 'this place' would be more for schoolteachers or something. To which Pip says, "Oh, we have a few schoolteachers here." Let that sink in for a minute; at the time the episode aired (1960), schoolteachers were considered altruistic and number 3 on the list of adults that children could automatically trust, behind police and their own parents. The idea that there could be corrupt, evil schoolteachers would be Nightmare Fuel to some viewers.
The implications of being trapped in a frozen moment of timefor all eternity is where the real horror of "A Kind of Stopwatch" lies. Not even McNulty deserved that!
Not to mention…what about everyone and everything else? Depending on how you interpret the “stop time” mechanism (it could be that it somehow removes McNulty from the flow of time so everything appears frozen from his perspective, but it could also be that it really does stop time), the universe has just come to an end.
The ending of "Caesar and Me," where Caesar convinces Susan to run off with him. In addition to the fact that the little girl implicitly agreed to kill her grandma, there's just something off about how Caesar, a dummy with the personality of a grown man, is offering to take a little girl to see the city, as well as the likelihood that the two would resort to crime as a way to make money. Susan may have been a brat, but that whole set-up can be easily seen as the beginning of a Break the Cutie scenario...
In the episode "Living Doll", Talky Tina says "you better be nice to me!" after she murders Erich, which implies her motives are selfish and she didn't do it to protect Christie. It's impossible to get rid of or destroy Tina, so Christie's stuck with a vindictive, homicidal magic doll, possibly forever. So...what happens to Christie if she gets a new favorite toy, or when she starts outgrowing dolls? What if Annabelle thinks Tina is too dangerous to be around her daughter and tries to get rid of her? Furthermore, given that Tina appears indestructible, the cycle will probably repeat itself with multiple owners.
Speaking of "Living Doll", pay close attention to Erich and Annabelle's behavior throughout the whole episode in addition to his behavior to Christie. Erich is passive-aggressive while Annabelle is pleading and begging him to stop. Looks quite a bit like emotional abuse, doesn't it?
Another theory on the doll. One of the theories about poltergeists and similar paranormal activity is that of a child or adolescent suppressing their emotions and their subconscious lashing out in rage with telekinesis. Take a child with an emotionally abusive stepfather (who is a jerk to both her and her mom), and a focus for channeling all that suppressed anger (bonus is that the doll and the girl have the same name), and Christie may have been the one who controlled the doll all along...but not even known it.
The angel in "The Hunt" says that the gatekeeper of Hell is always trying to get innocent people to go into hell. How many have?
This is made even worse by how Hyder only avoided Hell because Rip died at the exact same time as him and was able to travel to the afterlife with him. To this troper, that seems like a very unlikely coincidence, especially when considering the average lifespans of humans and dogs.
Hyder was established as not much of a church-goer or excessively kindly man, meaning that The Powers That Be were still deciding on where he ought to go. The dog was his best buddy and cherished companion. Leaving his dog behind to go to Paradise or trying to sneak the dog through the back door would have established him as not worthy of eternal reward. Putting his foot down and saying "not without my dog" established him as willing to sacrifice his own comfort to keep his dog company. The whole thing was likely a Secret Test of Character.
For all we know, the "dog" in the episode is a construct of Hyder's worthiness-for-Heaven test. The actual Rip may have outlived his master by a good margin, only to join him in paradise at a later time.
A chilling alternate take on the ending: Hyder has shown that there's something he'd rather have than God. That IS the essence of damnation!
The episode "I am the Night- Color me Black" is full of this. The sun doesn't rise over a town on the day of an innocent man's execution. It remains pitch black well into the afternoon. Still, the whole town turns out to watch. He says he'll gladly give them a show, but not the satisfaction of his apology. After his hanging, the town's reverend realizes what the darkness is: hate. The hate they felt toward him, the hate he felt toward them, all of it coming up and choking them all. The same thing happens in many other places filled with hate around the world, including Alabama, the Berlin Wall, Shanghai, a political prison in Budapest and all of North Vietnam. These areas will more than likely freeze over without any sunlight. Worse, since the cause is human emotion, it doesn't matter where refugees might go; as along as someone hates someone else, the darkness will follow. In a time like the 1960s, when the Cold War was at its height, it could grow to cover the whole world.
Which, given Serling's beliefs, was entirely the point.
Not so much horrific as depressing in "The Fever": Franklin was at the dollar slot machine for over five hours. Given a pull every five seconds and a mean 133% payout (not counting losses) over an hour, it's safe to say he lost around $3,600. That's around $28,000 in 2016 money. Also, figuring an average household income of $7,000 per year, that's over six months of pay. As the Gibbs were implied to be retirees, that would have probably ruined them.
A bit of Fridge Brilliance as well, showing how for every lucky guy who hits the machine's $10,000 jackpot, there's probably six or more guys who provided the money (giving the casino 10k in profit as well).
This episode shows exactly how casinos make their money. A man who plays, and loses, will move on. However, if a man wins, he begins to believe it will happen again, just as long as he keeps at it. This deceptive trick has made the casinos billions over the years... and has ruined countless lives.
The manager also tells him, "Remember, you have unlimited credit," implying that any betting he does is part of the prize his wife won. In reality, it just means that the casino would cash his checks (or other markers) and he's out the money instead.
Also, there's a good chance Mrs. Gibbs is going to be suffering from survivor's guilt, as she was so gung-ho about the Las Vegas vacation in the first place.
What happens to Flora afterwards? Not only is her husband dead, but because of how much money he lost, unless he had a good life insurance policy (and given how miserly he was, that doesn’t seem likely)…she might not have a house to go back to.
"Perchance to Dream" becomes a lot scarier and sadder when you realize there are people out there with heart conditions that can easily kill them due to sudden shocks.
"To Serve Man": the Kanamits say that they have brought their "gift" to many civilizations — now think about all those episodes where people think they are the last people on Earth, or some other planet...
Also, the Kanamits' technology is clearly all designed to make humans (or whatever race they're attempting to eat) wholly complacent and helpless. Those anti-nuclear force fields that they offered every nation to end the Cold War? They'll block any concentrated attack on their own ships. The ability to grow massive amounts of food? They're fattening their prey. In other words, there's no defending the Earth from the Kanamits, and now that the word has gotten out about their true intentions, they'll probably drop the polite act and move into full-on conquest.
What's going to happen to the couple in "Stopover in a Quiet Town"? The same thing that happened to the squirrel?
There's one in "A Piano in the House": While Fitzgerald is having fun embarrassing his guests, he decides to play a song "to bring out the devil" but Esther quickly changes it to Brahms' "Lullaby". What would've happened if Esther hadn't thought quickly or even worse, if Fitzgerald stopped her from doing so?
"Death's Head Revisited" provides several examples through its Villain Protagonist Gunter Lütze, a sadistic maniac who tortured and killed countless people at a Nazi death camp.
Lütze is shown to be an unrepentant war criminal who got off on the evil things he did. What kind of horrors was he up to in South America?
Lütze remembers that he did kill Becker and tries to lunge at his ghost. What kind of things could Lutze have done if he did have someone there to grab.
Lütze's fate is already horrifying, but do remember one thing: we only saw the tip of the iceberg. There's thousands more things he experienced we didn't see. For all intents and purposes, Lütze experienced a painful, agonizing death thousands of times. No wonder it drove him completely insane. Of course, he's an Asshole Victim because every single one of those was a death he himself personally inflicted while enjoying every minute of it, which is Fridge Horror of its own. And then Becker mentions that God has something worse planned for him.
One of the sticking bits in "The Encounter" was that Arthur's father was allegedly a traitor at Pearl Harbor. The reality was that there were no traitors, even though it was a common conspiracy theory at the time. But Arthur was four years old at the time, too young to really comprehend what was happening. And like the fellow who played him, he was probably shipped to an interment camp during the war. His father was likely falsely accused by fellows looking for an easy scapegoat, and was never able to disprove them, meaning Arthur believed the accusation, even though it was baseless.
Another brilliance bit from "The Encounter" - We have a Fenton, a stockier white veteran with PTSD, who has consumed a fair amount of alcohol even before Arthur arrives. Arthur is lighter in build, weighs less, and is more likely than Fenton to have a genetic mutation that makes alcohol hit him harder. So, add liquor, weapons, and a stuck door, and it's a tailor-made setup for alcohol-fueled tragedy.
"The Self Improvement Of Salvadore Ross:" Ross purchased Maitland's compassion to win Leah's heart, but in the process turned the old man bitter enough to shoot Ross dead. As a result, it seems likely all those physical traits he bought all died with him, meaning he's permanently changed Leah's kind old father into the same insensitive, egotistical man he'd been.
While in "The Chaser," the exact nature of the "glove cleaner" might be obvious to some viewers, the dialogue is subtle enough to make it Fridge Horror to others. A first casual viewing might leave a viewer thinking it was only the antidote to the love potion; that Roger only buys it to make Leila stop loving him, and can't go through with it because he doesn't want to break up their marriage with a baby on the way. But of course, a closer listen to the dialogue about the "glove cleaner" – "tasteless," "odorless," "painless," "no way to trace it" – leads to the realization that it's actually Perfect Poison. Roger was going to kill Leila to free himself from her smothering love, and can't go through with it because he can't bring himself to kill his own unborn child.
Further horror: What kind of life awaits Roger and Leila's child, with a mother overwhelmingly and demeaningly obsessed with her husband, and a fatherunhappily stuck with her, who was once willing to brainwash her into loving him and then to murder her to escape from her smothering?
The ending of "The Silence" reveals, to win his bet, Jamie had the nerves to his vocal chords severed. Their agreed time for the bet to start was anytime after 10PM on the day after Colonel Taylor made the wager, so the game room could be converted into a space for him to live in. Who did Jamie turn to for the operation on such short notice? It's unlikely a licensed surgeon would agree to it, so did he turn to a Back-Alley Doctor instead?
The whole Ironic Hell concept of "Judgment Night" becomes both Fridge Horror and Fridge Brilliance when you realize the Values Resonance of Carl Lanser's eternal damnation. He has to forever get to know his victims in their last hours before experiencing the same death that they suffered. He received this eternal punishment because he saw his victims as mere targets while he was a Kriesgmarine submarine captain. While he was an awful person, Lanser was engaging in naval warfare during World War II. The scary thing is that today, there are people who are just as callous about killing people today, but they usually don't follow the directives of any government. We call them mass shooters and terrorists, and they attack people in much more close-up ways than Lanser did. After watching this episode, it's not hard to imagine this kind of Ironic Hell being inflicted on people like Timothy Mc Veigh (the main Oklahoma City Bombing terrorist) or Adam Lanza (the Sandy Hook Shooter). But if you can imagine that kind of hell for modern terrorists and mass shooters, what kind of person are you? Are you a good, moral person imagining the perfect torment for a Complete Monster, or are you something else?
"The Howling Man": Just after the end of World War One, a traveler stranded in a rainstorm in a small German village stumbles into a monastery run by an order of monks keeping a bearded man in a cell who occasionally lets out a pitiful howl. They reveal that this man is actually Satan himself, that he inspired the recently concluded Great War as well as other wars and misfortunes, and only their holy staffs barring the cell door can keep him imprisoned. The traveling man doesn't believe them, and lets the Devil go free. Realizing what he has just done, the protagonist traveler joins the monks' order and dedicates his life to tracking down and imprisoning the Devil once again, but, as stated in his backstory narration, not before World War II and the Korean War occur. Flash forward to the protagonist ending his story in 1960 (the year the episode was initially broadcast) with the Devil now imprisoned in his closet with a holy staff on the door. Of course his maid is now tempted, and the episode fades out on her removing the staff... While the Vietnam War had actually started before 1960 (perhaps before the protagonist recaptured Satan), it would of course spiral out of control during that decade, leaving sociopolitical scars in the US that arguably never entirely healed, as well as wholesale devastation in Southeast Asia. And then of course The '60s would be marked by high-profile assassinations and violence.
How did Henry Bemis know he was the last person on the planet if he never even left the city? For all he knew, it might have just been his town that was vaporized. And on top of that, Henry Bemis couldn't have been the only person on earth who was inside a bank vault or some kind of shelter at the time...there may have been other survivors too!
He doesn't, but that's not really the point. He's the sole survivor of at least his sector of the city, and given how absolutely cruel everyone else depicted has been to him, once he recognizes he's alone and happier that way, he has absolutely no interest in confirming whether or not he's the last person on Earth. He's got food, books, and easy access to shelter so all of his particular needs are met; as far as he cares, he's "the last man on Earth" and he likes that just fine.
"Five Characters in Search of an Exit": A clown, a soldier, a bagpipe-player, a ballerina and a hobo. Who donates a hobo doll to a little girls' charity, particularly in the 1960s?
It could just be a male doll of a destructive child or pet to ruin the clothes of?
Such characters were modestly popular in entertainment at the time, including children's entertainment.
"It's a Good Life": Ok, so Anthony is a godlike child with the ability to turn people's lives upside down..but why don't they just shoot him? It's not like they weren't capable, they could've just shot him when his back was turned or something. He isn't omnipotent, per se.
He's not omnipotent but he is telepathic and can sense when someone is thinking bad thoughts especially about him. "Let's shoot the kid" would definitely qualify as a bad thought. You'd have to be really quick.
It's not revealed whether he can still read minds while asleep, so offing him then also might have been an option. That is, assuming he does sleep.
I was always under the impression that Anthony, a being who was able to eradicate the existence of an entire planet beyond his own town, as well as the ability to telepathically read anyone's mind any time he wants regardless of where they are, would be considered an omnipotent force. Rod does mention that the people in Peakesville must always think happy thoughts, which would imply that it doesn't matter you are or where Anthony is, he can tell what you're thinking at any given time. If you even begun the makings of a plot to off Anthony, you'd be sent to the cornfield before you could even grab a weapon. Certainly, somebody must've tried before it got to the point we see in the show. Even at the end, it's hard to say whether or not turning on Anthony then would've worked given what he could've done to any of them, tragically enough.
The episode and it's sequel don't back the idea of Anthony constantly reading everyone's mind up, regardless of what Rod says in the intro. The drunk guy was no doubt thinking bad thoughts about Anthony, but Anthony only reacted when he began talking. And while drunk, he suggests killing Anthony with a fire poker, and another character grabs it as if it might work (though to be fair, neither was probably thinking straight at the time.) And in the sequel episode, people explicitly discuss killing Anthony when he's not around, and a man tries to hit Anthony in the back of the head, and Anthony doesn't react until his also-powered daughter banished the man, also suggesting an plotted ambush will work.
There's also the fact that, so far as Peakesville's people can tell, it may only be Anthony's willpower that's keeping their town from disappearing as well. In the short story, it's explicitly stated that nobody in town is sure if Anthony'd destroyed the rest of the Earth or if he'd moved the town to some other dimension or pocket universe. Either way, their only hope is for Anthony to live long enough to become sufficiently mature to develop a sense of responsibility, because if he dies, their town's unnatural preservation will no longer be maintained.
In "Escape Clause," Walter Bedeker sells his soul to the devil and gains immortality. He confesses to murdering his wife in the hopes of trying out the electric chair, for the thrill of it, but his lawyer manages to just get him life in prison. Walter opts to use his escape clause and simply ask the devil to kill him, rather than spend thousands of years in prison. It never occurs to him that, after a few decades, someone's bound to notice that he isn't aging. While that in itself might have a bad outcome (human guinea pig, perhaps?), it wouldn't do him any harm to wait around to see what happened.
For that matter, he could have fired his lawyer.
Or, as it's clear he has no qualms about killing, simply overpowered his jail guards and strode out the exit, shrugging off gunfire and taking a hostage if he needs something open. That would loop right back into Fridge Horror however; a man willing to murder to get a thrill, totally immortal, wandering the countryside as just another hobo—and even something like a sustained artillery barrage or even a nuclear missile might not kill him.
I think that's why the Devil came to him in the first place: the guy had no imagination and thus made for an easy mark
In "A Nice Place to Visit" Henry Valentine comes up with the pretty good idea to get around the dullness of his Ironic Hell by staging his own awesome heist which he could still fail at to make it challenging, which is basically making your own GTA in real life which would have been great, but he immediately decides against it and instead decides he'd rather just go to hell. Cue Twist Ending.
This was long before video games were invented. People back then would probably assume that such an idea would feel about as real as children playing make-believe.
In Grand Theft Auto, you're actually playing — it's a genuine test of your skill that can lead to success or failure depending on how well you do. You don't get to tell the game at the beginning to make sure you win. Even if Rocky literally had a video game to play in this setting, he would win every time, which would get boring just like winning the casino games every time did (and, as he concludes, having Pip make him lose sometimes wouldn't help because it still wouldn't be real). The problem isn't the bank robbery scenario wouldn't be a real robbery — it's that the risk and test and skill involved wouldn't be real. There's no market for any kind of game that guarantees you win every time (or even where you get to determine how often you'll win and lose).
Pip offered to "arrange for [him] to lose" on occasion (presumably at random), and that there could be risk in the heist scenario. Rocky declines because he feels like it wouldn't be the same, and it's true that it wouldn't be "real", but artificially-generated risk (including an element of random chance in some cases) is basically electronic games in a nutshell. The video game analogy is actually rather apt.
The Downer Ending of "The Long Morrow" has a rather obvious solution: now that they know the hibernation system works, put Douglas into hibernation for a few decades while Sandra ages. When she's old enough that he's no longer too old for her, they can revive him and the pair can live out their twilight years together.
