Rod Serling: What you have just witnessed could be the end of a particularly terrifying nightmare. It isn't; it's the beginning. Although Alan Talbot doesn't know it, he's about to enter a strange new world, too incredible to be real, too real to be a dream. It's called the Twilight Zone.
Air date: January 3, 1963
Alan Talbot (George Grizzard), soon to be wed to Jessica Connelly, begins hearing hears strange noises inside his head. These noises appear to trigger homicidal urges, prompting Alan to kill any poor person in his path. Wanting to keep these murderous episodes a secret from Jessica, Alan travels back to his hometown to unravel the mystery on his hands. Once he gets to town, Alan finds that people he claims to remember have never seen or heard of him before. Alan soon comes to realize that the truth lies with a particular man named Walder Ryder Jr., but the truth to Alan's episodes may not be what he wants to hear.
In His Tropes:
- Adaptation Name Change: In the short story by Charles Beaumont, the respective names of the protagonist, his creator, his fiancée, and his supposed neighbor are Peter Nolan (a tribute to Beaumont's friend and fellow writer William F. Nolan), Walter B. Cummings, Jr., Jessica Lang and Agatha Cook. In the television adaptation, their names are Alan Talbot, Walter B. Ryder, Jr., Jessica Connelly and Jenny Cook.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Once he's revealed to be a robot, Walter explains to Alan that his primary design flaw is a series of auditory hallucinations ringing throughout his head that he doesn't know how to fix, which prompt him to gain a psychotic and uncrontrollable urge to kill. Walter doesn't even have any repressed homicidal urges that Alan is acting out in his place, he's just a broken machine.
- Ambiguous Clone Ending: Subverted near the end of the episode, where Alan and Walter get into a fight in the latter's basement laboratory. Shortly afterwards, one of them visits Jessica's apartment and reassures her that everything is okay. The scene then cuts back to the lab, where Alan's broken body is lying on the floor.
- Bookends: In the first scene after the prologue, Alan comes to Jessica's apartment joking that he belongs to the Junior Woodchucks. In the final scene, Walter does the same thing.
- Flawed Prototype: Walter proves to Alan that he's an android he invented by showing the two failed prototypes that led to him: Alan Talbot 1 and Alan Talbot 2. It turns out that Alan is flawed himself, due to his frequent auditory disturbances and homicidal urges.
- Fourth-Date Marriage: Alan and Jessica are revealed to have gotten engaged after knowing each other for only four days. Jessica never learns that he was a murderous android whose identity was assumed by his creator.
- The Fundamentalist: Alan meets an evangelist in the subway station, who tells him that God sees and hears everything, and that Satan plans to have him. He only manages to shut her up by throwing her under a train.
- Kill and Replace: A rare positive use of the trope. Walter destroys Alan and takes over his life, but Alan was a malfunctioning android-turned-homicidal maniac, so no one would mourn his death. This also gives troubled, socially-inept Walter a chance to break free from his shell and actually live his life, including wedding Jessica.
- Meaningful Name: According to The Twilight Zone Companion, Alan ended up with the last name "Talbot" as a reference to Lawrence Talbot, who also discovered he wasn't completely human and had intense homicidal urges.
- Riddle for the Ages: What actually causes the auditory hallucinations that force Alan to kill people? Walter himself has no idea where they came from, so he couldn't even begin to work on a solution.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: Invoked with Alan, a robotic duplicate of miserable genius Walter Ryder Jr. Walter tells Alan that he created him specifically to act as an improved version of himself, with a nervous system that can function just like a human's. The chief flaw in his design is an auditory glitch that induces an uncontrollable urge to kill.
- Tomato in the Mirror: After murdering an evangelist on the subway platform, Alan returns to his hometown with Jessica, but discovers that nothing is as he remembered it. Then he discovers that he is really an android created only 8 days ago, and all his memories were fictional versions of those of his creator, who wanted to build a more perfect version of himself.
- Younger Than They Look: Walter reveals to Alan that he's an eight-day-old android.
Rod Serling: In a way, it can be said that Walter Ryder succeeded in his life's ambition, even though the man he created was, after all, himself. There may be easier ways to self-improvement, but sometimes it happens that the shortest distance between two points is a crooked line – through the Twilight Zone.
