Air date: April 24, 1964
Bob Frazier (Barry Nelson) and his wife Millie (Nancy Malone) wake up in a room they don’t recognize. The night before they attended a party and both drank heavily. He passed out before he could drive home, so she got behind the wheel. While they were on their way home, a large shadow fell on their car.
The couple is mystified and frustrated by the house they’ve awoken to. Trying to call out on the phone, they find that it’s not hooked up. The refrigerator only contains plastic prop food. The oddities continue when they leave the house and walk around the neighborhood. When Millie approaches a squirrel in a tree and pets it, the squirrel falls over and turns out to be stuffed. The trees themselves are made of papier-mâché and have no roots. And while the neighborhood appears to be entirely deserted, they hear the laughter of a little girl they can’t see.
The Fraziers make increasingly desperate attempts to escape. These include entering the church and ringing the bell as a distress signal. Relief seems to appear when they walk away from the residential area and find a train station. Their mood lightens and they are able to make jokes about the town they believe they are leaving, ignoring for the time being the absence of any other passengers or railroad workers on the train. The train brings them full circle to “Centerville”, exactly the place they had just departed.
Returning to the town center, Bob and Millie again hear the little girl’s laughter. Now there is another shadow over them. This turns out to be a hand, the hand of a giant child. The girl's equally enormous mother tells her that it's time to put her "pets" – Bob and Millie – away and come to lunch, though the girl wants to keep playing with them. The mother reminds her that she must be careful with the humans, as her father "brought them all the way from Earth." The child reluctantly puts her "toys" back into their new, permanent home, where they cower in fear and begin to run in a hopeless attempt to escape.
Stopover in a Quiet Trope:
- Alien Abduction: The Fraziers were abducted from Earth by the giant girl's father so that they could be her pets.
- And I Must Scream: The episode ends with the implication that the Fraziers will never escape imprisonment and be forced to live as the playthings of a giant alien for the rest of their lives, fully aware of their predicament but unable to do anything about it.
- Asshole Victim: Between her driving drunk, and him being too drunk to drive, and their being two unlikable people who argue almost constantly, both the Fraziers qualify. Then again, while the drunk driving can't be excused, the Fraziers' bickering and bitterness is mostly attributed due to having hangovers and are tense due to the strange predicament that they are in. They begin to calm down and cooperate more once they sober up, so it's possible that they might be Downplayed Asshole Victims.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Despite spending most of the episode bickering and blaming each other, after Millie breaksdown, Bob comforts her and they have a tender moment together. It shows that despite their rocky marriage, they do care about each other.
- Being Watched: At one point while she and her husband are walking around the empty town, Millie Frazier says that she has the feeling of being watched. The revelation of who's watching them is the Twilight Zone Twist. It's a giant alien girl, who is watching over her new pets.
- Blatant Lies: "The moral of what you’ve just seen is clear." Another example of the series being self-aware of its more ridiculous moments.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Millie almost has a breakdown when she and Bob discover that one of the trees outside of the Centerville church is fake. Bob lights up a cigarette for her in order to calm her nerves.
- Creepy Child: A subverted version—the little girl the Fraziers repeatedly hear giggling (and see at the end of the episode) isn't inherently creepy. She actually seems rather polite and sweet, like any child playing with dolls would be. The problem isn't that she's spooky or evil—it's that she's one hundred feet tall, which makes her seem scary to humans. The fact that the Fraziers are now her new pets only adds to her In-Universe creepiness.
- Downer Ending: Bob and Millie are trapped in the toy set forever, unable to ever escape. The best case scenario is they eventually die of hunger or dehydration. The worst case scenario? Facing a long life stuck with a giant alien child for a caretaker who has no concept of how to properly take care of her new exotic "pets".
- The Dreaded Pretend Tea-Party: The plot is a disturbing variation on the trope. A couple, after a night out, wake up to discover themselves alone in a town they can't seem to escape from. The plot twist is that they're in an alien child's dollhouse and surrounding toy town, and the child is just playing. After they ran off the road, the child's parents took them home to the child as playthings. Whether the child and parents are giant or there was a Shrink Ray involved is never explored. But the fear of the couple is genuine in this case given the owner of the dollhouse is at least 100 times their size.
- Drunk Driver: While criticising Bob for being so drunk that he couldn't drive them home, Millie had evidently had enough to drink herself (as the introduction refers to them both "drinking too much" and she admits to having had a couple of drinks), which is how they got here.
- Fake Town: The "deserted town" turns out to be the toy of a gigantic alien girl who is keeping the protagonists as her new playthings.
- Foreshadowing: The last thing that Millie remembers before she and Bob woke up in the strange house is a shadow enveloping their car. This was the shadow of the giant girl's father as he abducted them from Earth.
- Hope Spot: The couple gets on a train and are relieved to be leaving the strange town. . . until it pulls right back into "Centerville".
- Human Aliens: Aside from their size, the little girl and her largely unseen mother appear to be completely humanoid in both appearance and behavior.
- Human Pet: How the Fraziers wind up.
- Minimalist Cast: Barry Nelson and Nancy Malone were the only credited actors to appear in this episode.
- No Accounting for Taste: Bob and Millie snipe at each other constantly. While some of this is undoubtedly stress caused by their bizarre situation, theirs doesn't seem to be a happy marriage in general.
- Our Giants Are Bigger: The girl and her mother are at least 100 times the size of humans.
- Space Whale Aesop: Don't drink and drive, because you could be kidnapped by aliens and turned into a child's toy. Presumably, Bob and Millie could have evaded the giant extraterrestrial hand from the sky if only they were sober.
- Square-Cube Law: Entirely ignored, as the aliens are hundreds of times larger than ordinary humans but otherwise look just the same. (That is, assuming the Fraziers weren't shrunk; the episode doesn't specify.)
- Tuckerization: A sign outside the church in the apparent deserted town of Centerville states that the reverend is Kogh Gleason. This is a reference to F. Keogh Gleason, a regular MGM set decorator who worked on the series during its first three seasons.
- Waking Up Elsewhere: The episode begins In Medias Res, after the Fraziers have encountered the shadow and lost consciousness. They wake up in an unfamiliar house which later turns out to be an alien girl's dollhouse.
