The Twilight Zone 1985 / Tropes A to H

This page covers tropes found in The Twilight Zone (1985). Tropes beginning with letters I-P can be found at Tropes I to P and tropes beginning with letters Q-Z can be found at Tropes Q to Z.

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The Twilight Zone (1985) provides examples of:

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• 555:
  • In "Shatterday", Peter Jay Novins' phone number is Klondike 5-6189.
  • In "Her Pilgrim Soul", the Draytons' phone number is 555-1689.
  • In "Gramma", Dr. Arlinder's number is 555-3502.
  • In "Aqua Vita", the titular bottled drink company's number is 555-AQUA.
  • In "The Call", Norman Blane sees a commercial for a classical music CD that he can order by phoning 555-4421. However, he dials 555-4412 by mistake and is connected with Mary Ann Lindeby.

A

• Abusive Parents:
  • In "Children's Zoo", the four-year-old Debbie Cunningham's parents Sheila and Martin are frequently verbally and emotionally abusive towards her. Her mother yells at her without the slightest provocation, her father ignores her and the two of them spend most of their time arguing with each other with no regard for the effect that it is having on Debbie. This leads Debbie to trade her parents in for a new pair at the Children's Zoo.
  • In "The Toys of Caliban", Miss Kemp investigates Ernest and Mary Ross because she believes that they are abusing their intellectually impaired son Toby. From interviewing relatives and neighbors, she learns that Toby is not allowed to go outside, play with other children or even watch television. She accuses Ernest of keeping him as a virtual prisoner. She learns the truth when Ernest shows her Toby's ability to manifest anything after seeing its picture: Toby is kept isolated in order to protect others from his powers. Miss Kemp apologizes, having realized that Toby's parents were the prisoners.
  • In "Song of the Younger World", Amy Hawkline's father Mordecai slaps her after finding her in a passionate embrace with Tanner Smith, one of the inmates of the House of Refuge Reformatory for Wayward Boys. He is also emotional abusive towards her as he is a religious zealot who is determined to turn her into a proper young woman, using Scripture as a guide, no matter what the cost.
  • In "Our Selena is Dying", Martha Brockman drains her daughter Diane's Life Energy in order to restore her own youth. Diane ages rapidly as a result and Martha assumes her identity.
• Accidental Discovery: In "The Hunters", a young boy named Steve is walking through a field when he steps on an area of soft ground and falls through the earth. In the process, he discovers a prehistoric cave which has been undisturbed for 12,000 years. Dr. Klein later describes it as one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century.
• Act of True Love: In "Aqua Vita", Christie Copperfield begins to age rapidly in appearance after she runs out of Aqua Vita, which she can no longer afford due to the exorbitant price of $5,000 per bottle. Although she is only 40, she appears to be in her 70s. Her boyfriend Marc assures her that he loves her no matter what but Christie is concerned that this may change when people start to give them strange looks because of their apparent age gap. In order to set Christie's mind at rest, Marc drinks some Aqua Vita and soon appears to be the same age as her.
• Actor Allusion:
  • In "Personal Demons", Rockne O'Bannon wrote for Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. O'Bannon is played by Martin Balsam, who played Dr. Gillespie in the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse episode "The Time Element". That episode served as the unofficial pilot of The Twilight Zone (1959).
  • In "A Day in Beaumont", there are three:
    • Dr. Kevin Carlson pointedly describes the Flying Saucer that he and his girlfriend Faith saw crashing as "a thing" to Sheriff Haskin. Haskin is played by Kenneth Tobey, who is best known for playing Captain Patrick Hendry in The Thing from Another World.
    • H.G. Orson sarcastically refers to "tarantulas as big as houses." Pops is played by John Agar, who played Dr. Matt Hastings in Tarantula!.
    • Orson also refers to the planet Altair IV. Major Whitmore is played by Warren Stevens, who starred as Doc Ostrow, a member of the Bellerophon crew who visited Altair IV, in Forbidden Planet.
• Adaptational Alternate Ending:
  • In "Button, Button", Arthur and Norma Lewis are sent a button unit by Mr. Steward who tells them that if they press the button, they will receive $200,000 but someone whom they don't know will die. Norma presses the button over Arthur's objections. Mr. Steward returns the next day and tells them that the unit will be reprogrammed and given to someone whom they don't know, with the implication being that one of them will die. In the short story by Richard Matheson, it was Arthur who died when Norma pressed the button. When she challenged Mr. Steward on the matter, he said "Do you really think you knew your husband?" The change was made at the insistence of CBS executives, leading Matheson to take his name off the episode.
  • In "A Game of Pool", Jesse Cardiff challenges the ghost of Fats Brown to a pool game to determine which of them is the best and loses. Fats tells him that he will die forgotten as all second raters do. After Fats disappears, Jesse begins to practice furiously. In the original episode, Jesse wins the game. After his death, he has to spend his entire afterlife defending his title as the best pool player ever and winds up miserable. Although The Remake used the originally intended ending of the 1961 version, the production team did not tell the writer George Clayton Johnson, which angered him.
• Adaptational Backstory Change:
  • In "Healer", Harry Faulk is Jackie Thompson's neighbor and they seemingly did not have much of a relationship until they began using the healing stone to make money. In the short story adaptation by Alan Brennert, Harry is the closest thing that Jackie has to a father. They met when they were both serving sentences in Vacaville Prison ten years earlier. Since their release, they had worked together on numerous scams and swindles and the occasional burglary but only made enough money to pay their bills until Jackie stole the stone.
  • In "Nightcrawlers", nothing is revealed of the backstory of the waitress at Big Bob's diner. In the short story by Robert R. McCammon, she is a former hippie named Cheryl Lovesong who lived in San Francisco in The '60s and experimented with drugs while she was there.
  • In "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium", David Wong decides to assume management of the Lost and Found Emporium after he finds his compassion. In the short story by William F. Wu, he had already been running the emporium for several months before he regained his compassion.
  • In "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", Gus Rosenthal had a difficult relationship with his father Lou growing up and regretted never telling him that he loved him before he died when Gus was in his teens. In the short story by Harlan Ellison, Gus' relationship with both of his parents was even more difficult. He was sent to a military school at seven years old because of his poor behavior and ran away from home when he was thirteen.
  • In "Gramma", there are no details given about Georgie's relationship with his elder brother Buddy. In the short story by Stephen King, it is mentioned that Buddy regularly bullies Georgie, both physically and verbally. At the end of the story, Georgie is possessed by their grandmother's spirit and plans his revenge against Buddy for the years of torment.
  • In "Dead Run", Johnny Davis decides to help the wrongfully condemned people whom he had been transporting to Hell only one day after taking the job. In the short story by Greg Bear, he is on the job for two years before his conscience gets the best of him and he begins to help the damned escape to Heaven.
• Adaptational Jerkass: In "The Night of the Meek", Mr. Dundee is considerably more unpleasant than his officious counterpart from the original episode. In The Remake, he berates an employee because a junior salesman accidentally sold the custom-made fur coat that he intended to give his wife for Christmas and demands that both of them be in his office at 9 o'clock on Christmas Day. This version of Dundee clearly hates Christmas and sees it merely as an opportunity to make money. When another employee wishes him Merry Christmas, he pointedly says "Good night." As he leaves his store on Christmas Eve, he even kicks a tree. Most significantly, this Dundee is a racist. He comments that it would not surprise him in the least if Henderson, an African-American security guard, helped Henry Corwin to sneak the allegedly stolen merchandise out of his store. His expression and Henderson's reaction make it clear that it was intended as a racist remark.
• Adaptational Job Change:
  • In "The Misfortune Cookie", Harry Folger is a Caustic Critic who loves writing scathing reviews of restaurants, whether they deserve it or not. In the short story by Charles E. Fritch, his occupation is not given.
  • In "A Matter of Minutes", Michael Wright works in an office. In the short story "Yesterday Was Monday" by Theodore Sturgeon, the equivalent character Harry Wright is a car mechanic.
  • In "Shadow Play", Adam Grant's defense attorney Erin Jacobs is the first person who begins to suspect that he is telling the truth about their reality being his recurring nightmare. In the original episode, the equivalent character Paul Carson is a newspaper editor.
  • In "Lost and Found", Jenny Templeton will become the first President of Earth, who will be known as the Great Peacemaker, in the future. In the short story by Phyllis Eisenstein, she is destined to become a famous and celebrated anthropologist.
  • In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", the medium Cassandra Fishbein is a hairdresser. In the Comic-Book Adaptation, she owns a T-shirt shop.
• Adaptation Deviation:
  • "Dead Woman's Shoes" is only loosely adapted from the original episode "Dead Man's Shoes". In the original, the spirit of the murdered gangster Dane takes over the body of the homeless man Nate Bledsoe when he puts on his shoes in order to exact revenge on his treacherous partner Bernie Dagget. In The Remake, the spirit of the murdered socialite Susan Montgomery takes over the body of the shy, withdrawn woman Maddie Duncan when she puts on her shoes in order to exact revenge on her husband Kyle.
  • "A Matter of Minutes" differs somewhat from the short story "Yesterday Was Monday" by Theodore Sturgeon in its presentation of time. In the episode, every minute exists as a separate world that must be constructed and subsequently torn down once that minute has elapsed. In the short story, the workers construct days rather than individual minutes. Each day is referred to as an act which forms part of a larger play. People are considered actors who play their roles on a stage, a reference to the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It. The entire project is overseen by a producer.
  • "A Saucer of Loneliness" differs from the short story by Theodore Sturgeon in that it omits any reference to the protagonist (who is given the name Margaret in the episode) being placed on trial and receiving a prison sentence for her refusal to reveal the contents of the message that she received from the Flying Saucer.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • "Healer" tells the story of Jackie Thompson's discovery and use of the healing stone to set himself up as a Fake Faith Healer. Alan Brennert's short story adaptation of the episode features the alternating narrative of Ta'li'n, one of the priest-rulers of the City later known as Teotihuacan, who is haunted by premonitions of the City's destruction. He also receives a vision of Jackie using the stone in what is to him the distant future. Ta'li'n belongs to the ancient and never conclusively identified civilization that built Teotihuacan, which the Aztecs settled centuries later. One of Ta'li'n's contemporaries, Ch'at'l, is an elderly healer who has been entrusted with the stone for sixty years. Furthermore, the present day sections of the short story go into further detail about the stone's limitations. For instance, it cannot cure cancer permanently but it can cause it to go into remission and it is unable to heal diseases such as multiple sclerosis and AIDS.
  • "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" places greater emphasis on Gus Rosenthal's poor relationship with his father Lou than the short story by Harlan Ellison. In the episode, the present day Gus meets Lou twice after he is sent back in time. On the second occasion, he reveals that he has always regretted never telling his father how much he loved him. For his part, Lou confesses that he has never been able to get through to Gus, though he loves him very much. In the short story, the older Gus and his father never come face to face and nothing is revealed of their relationship other than it being difficult.
  • "The Misfortune Cookie" goes into more detail about the kind of person that Harry Folger is than the short story by Charles E. Fritch. In the episode, Harry is a Caustic Critic and Immoral Journalist who loves to write terrible reviews of restaurants so that they will be closed down. Whenever this happens, he adds another matchbook to a model graveyard on his desk. In the short story, Harry is cheating on his wife with his old flame Cynthia Peters but nothing else is revealed about his personality and his profession is not given.
  • Alan Brennert's short story adaptation of "Voices in the Earth" provides further details about Professor Donald Knowles' backstory. He is struggling to come to terms with the deaths of his beloved wife Cara and ten of his closest friends within the last twelve months. Knowles becomes concerned that Jacinda Carlyle may be correct and that the ghosts of the dead Earth are merely figments of his imagination, an extension of his grief at the deaths of his loved ones.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • In "Shatterday", Peter Jay Novins' alter ego does not have any other name to distinguish him from the original Novins. In the short story by Harlan Ellison, the original Novins decides to call him "Jay."
  • In "A Matter of Minutes", the protagonist's name is Michael Wright. In the short story "Yesterday Was Monday" by Theodore Sturgeon, his name is Harry Wright.
  • In "Dead Run", the former member of the Celestial Bureaucracy who has himself been condemned to Hell is named Gary Frick. In the short story by Greg Bear, his name is Charlie Frick.
  • In "Devil's Alphabet", the seven members of the Devil's Alphabet Society are Andrew, Brian, Cornelius, Deaver, Eli, Frederick and Grant. In the short story "The Everlasting Club" by Arthur Gray, Alan Dermot, Charles Bellasis, Henry Davenport, Francis Witherington, James Harvey, William Catherston and one unnamed man are the seven members of the titular society. Dermot and Bellasis correspond to Grant and Frederick respectively but it is not made clear with respect to the other five.
  • In "Shadow Play", the district attorney is Mark Ritchie, Adam Grant's fellow prisoners are Flash, Jimmy and Munoz and the priest who visits him before his execution is Father Grant (as he is his father in the real world). In the original episode, their names are Henry Ritchie, Jiggs, Coley, Phillips and Father Beaman respectively.
  • In "The After Hours", the protagonist's name is Marsha Cole. In the original episode, it is Marsha White.
• Adaptation Personality Change:
  • Harry Faulk is almost as mercenary when it comes to money in the short story adaptation of "Healer" as he is in the original episode but he still has a conscience. In the episode, Harry refuses to use the stone to heal Jackie Thompson's gunshot wound since he wants all of the money that they have made for himself. In the short story, Harry makes a genuine effort to heal Jackie but he becomes scared and runs away, promising to call an ambulance as he does so.
  • In "The After Hours", Marsha Cole is a sweet, naive young woman who is frightened when the saleswoman asks her strange questions about her background. After discovering that she is a mannequin, she resists the others' attempt to force her to return and resume her "life" as a display in the department store Satler's. In the original episode, Marsha White appears to be somewhat older and is much more self-assured. She reacts with annoyance when the saleswoman makes personal remarks about her. After she recalls that she is a mannequin, she accepts her status without any further objection and decides to return to the store of her own volition.
• Adapted Out:
  • Alan Brennert's short story adaptation of "Healer" omits Duende, the Mexican man who warns Jackie Thompson that he is misusing the healing stone.
  • In "Nightcrawlers", Price mentions that he has met four other Vietnam vets with the same ability to manifest their thoughts but none of them appear. In the short story by Robert R. McCammon, one of them, calling himself Tompkins and claiming to be from a veterans' association, visits Big Bob at his farm about two months after his diner is destroyed.
  • In "A Message from Charity", the parson of Annes Town in 1700 is only mentioned briefly and is not named. In the short story by William M. Lee, Parson John Hix is a minor supporting character.
  • "The Misfortune Cookie", an adaptation of the short story by Charles E. Fritch, omits Harry Folger's lover Cynthia Peters, his wife and Cynthia's husband.
  • "A Matter of Minutes" omits Gurrah, the supervisor of Limbo, a major supporting character in the short story "Yesterday Was Monday" by Theodore Sturgeon.
  • "Dead Run" omits two supporting characters from the short story by Greg Bear: a young hitchhiker named Bill and his recently deceased girlfriend Sherill, whom Bill manages to rescue from Hell.
  • "The After Hours" omits two supporting characters from the original episode: the department store sales supervisor Mr. Armbruster and the store manager Mr. Sloan.
  • "Time and Teresa Golowitz" omits two minor characters from the short story "Influencing the Hell Out of Time and Teresa Golowitz" by Parke Godwin: Bill Tait and Frankie Maguerra.
• Affably Evil: In "A Small Talent for War", the alien ambassador calmly tells the United Nations Security Council that his people intend to destroy all life on Earth in 24 hours as they are disappointed with the small talent for war that humanity displays. The next day, he returns to find that the United Nations has negotiating a lasting global peace and unilateral disarmament and promptly begins laughing hysterically. The ambassador explains that his people breed warriors and that humans have proven to be insufficient for their requirements since they desire peace above all else. He thanks the Security Council for "a most amusing day" and their "delightful sense of the absurd." Before Earth is destroyed by his people's armada, his parting comment refers to the last words of Edmund Gwenn: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • In "Paladin of the Lost Hour", Billy Kinetta refers to Gaspar as "Dad" before he learns his name. He continues to call him that as a sign of affection after they get to know each other.
  • In "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium", Melinda calls David Wong "Brown Eyes" after she regains her sense of humor. He never tells her his name on screen.
  • In "The Shadow Man", Danny Hayes' friend Peter frequently refers to him as "Sherlock."
  • In "Monsters!", Toby Michaels' father regularly calls him "Ace."
  • In "Nightsong", Ace Campbell refers to his fellow DJ Andrea Fields as "the Midnight Queen" because she hosts a show from 12 to 4 am.
  • In "The Road Less Traveled", Jeff McDowell called his future wife Denise "Denny" when they were in high school together. The Alternate Universe Jeff still does as his Denise died in a motorcycle accident. This version of Jeff was called "Spaceman" by his fellow soldiers during The Vietnam War.
  • In "Time and Teresa Golowitz", Bluestone (then Blaustein) and Mary Ellen Cosgrave were called "Binky" and "Melly" by their high school classmates.
  • In "The Hellgramite Method", Miley and Frannie Judson call their son Chad "Chadder."
• Affectionate Parody:
  • "Cold Reading" is an affectionate parody of Old-time Radio, which was popular in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s.
  • "A Day in Beaumont" is an affectionate parody of Alien Invasion films of The '50s.
• Afterlife Express: In "Dead Run", truckers such as Johnny Davis and Pete drive the condemned to Hell in semi-trailer trucks, though seemingly only condemned Americans. According to Pete, trains are used in India and China, tramlines in Russia and old buses in Mexico.
• After the End: In "Quarantine", Matthew Foreman is awakened from suspended animation in 2347, 304 years after a devastating nuclear war wiped out 80% of the world's population.
• Age-Appropriate Angst: In "There Was an Old Woman", Hallie Parker is an author of children's books in her 60s who believes that she has grown obsolete because her books don't appeal to the "video generation." She intends to retire and live a quiet life in Arizona with her sister Ellen as she feels that she has nothing left to contribute. However, Hallie learns just how important she and her books are when she is visited by the ghosts of Brian Harris and about a dozen other children who want her to stay and read to them.
• The Ageless: In "Welcome to Winfield", the people of Winfield stopped aging in the late 19th Century after The Grim Reaper Chin Du Long grew to like them and arranged to spare them from death.
• Age Lift:
  • In the 1967 short story "A Message from Charity" by William M. Lee, Charity Payne is 11 years old in 1700 when she begins communicating with the 16-year-old Peter Wood in the present. In the adaptation, she is several years older. Although her age is not stated, she is seemingly closer to Peter's age. This change was made because the episode places more emphasis on Charity and Peter being each other's first love than the original story. There is also the scene in which Squire Jonas Hacker attempts to rape Charity after claiming that she needed to disrobe so that he could check her for the mark of a witch, which is toned down in the episode compared to the short story. She manages to fight him off in both versions.
  • In "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", the younger Gus Rosenthal is ten or eleven when he meets his future self. In the short story by Harlan Ellison, he is seven years old.
  • In "A Saucer of Loneliness", Margaret is middle-aged when she receives the message from the Flying Saucer. In the short story by Theodore Sturgeon, she was "perhaps seventeen" at the time.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Unlike the original series, sometimes the Asshole Victim of the episode's comeuppance would have an element of tragedy.
  • Bob Spindler in "Kentucky Rye". He's more of an obnoxious Jerkass than a villain, but he's a thoroughly unlikeable character. Still, his horrific fate makes him quite pitiable in the end.
  • Billy Diamond in "Take My Life... Please!". He's a violent scumbag who exploited his fame to get away with countless crimes, but after being forced to confess to all his sins in his Ironic Hell, Billy has a Heel Realization and sincerely wants to change. But since he's Dead to Begin With, he's too late and forced into a Fate Worse than Death.
• Alchemy Is Magic: In "The Little People of Killany Woods", it is Magic by Any Other Name. The Little Green Men give Liam O'Shaughnessy triangular gold pieces to buy supplies with which they can repair their damaged ship. He tells O'Dell that the gold will not last in the hands of a sinner, which he passes along to Mike Mulvaney. The gold piece that Mulvaney later forces Liam to give him turns to lead soon afterwards.
• The Alcoholic:
  • In "The Night of the Meek", the department store Santa Henry Corwin is a chronic alcoholic. After the store owner Mr. Dundee fires him for showing up late and falling over drunk in front of the customers, he blames him for ruining Christmas for the children who wanted to see Santa Claus. Henry angrily tells Dundee that the children in his store will get everything that they want for Christmas but there are other children who can't enjoy Christmas as their families are struggling to put food on the table. He drinks so that he can forget about how miserable the world is for a while.
  • In "Cold Reading", Milo Trent replaces Earl Sedgewick, who usually plays the title character's younger brother Timmy in Dick Noble, African Explorer, as he has reportedly taken ill. The writer Nelson Westbrook's assistant Carla makes a drinking gesture at Milo, indicating that Sedgewick is too drunk to record his part.
  • In "Time and Teresa Golowitz", the Prince of Darkness tells Bluestone that Mary Ellen Cosgrave spends most of her time in 1987 drinking vodka in a vague malaise about what she imperfectly remembers as her golden years.
  • In "The Hellgramite Method", Miley Judson is a severe alcoholic whose drinking is ruining his life. Over the years, he has tried to quit many times through psychiatric treatment, aversion therapy and other methods but he always starts drinking again after two or three months at most. Miley's drinking has cost him many friends and is on the verge of costing him his marriage as his wife Frannie can't cope with much more. He admits that he both loves and hates alcohol. One night at a bar, Miley is approached by Dr. Eugene Murrich, who gives him a matchbox advertising the Hellgramite Method for treating alcoholism. When he goes to Dr. Murrich's house, he is given a pill to swallow. Murrich tells him that this is all there is to it. The next day, Miley discovers that he can't feel the effects of alcohol no matter how much he drinks. He confronts Dr. Murrich, who explains to him that the pill contained the larva of a Hellgramite worm. The larva has already grown and is absorbing all of the alcohol that Miley drinks. Murrich tells Miley that he can starve the worm into dormancy but he will have to go cold turkey in order to do so. He also warns Miley that even if he is successful, the worm will come back stronger if he ever takes another drink.
• Alcoholic Parent:
  • In "Her Pilgrim Soul", Dr. Kevin Drayton tells Nola Granville that his wife Carol's mother was an alcoholic and that she wants to have children so that she can be the kind of mother that she never had herself. Hearing about Nola's difficult childhood with her Fantasy-Forbidding Father allows Kevin to understand how Carol feels for the first time.
  • In "A Saucer of Loneliness", the middle-aged Margaret lives with her alcoholic, emotionally abusive mother who constantly belittles her because she doesn't have a man in her life. She tells Margaret that she should be respectable but her own behavior is anything but. She eventually throws Margaret out of her apartment because of all the negative publicity generated by her refusal to reveal the contents of the message from the Flying Saucer.
• Alien Invasion: In "A Day in Beaumont", Dr. Kevin Carlson and Faith see a Flying Saucer crash in the desert and immediately assume that its insectoid crew are planning to invade Earth. It turns out that they are correct but not in the way that they think. It is all part of a commando training simulation on Altair IV to prepare troops for a future invasion. Kevin and Faith are themselves aliens who suffered memory loss and came to believe that they were humans.
• Aliens Are Bastards: In "A Small Talent for War", all life on Earth is destroyed by the alien race that seeded life on the planet two million years ago as humanity's talent for war is too small for their needs.
• All Take and No Give: In "Cat and Mouse", Andrea Moffat showers Guillaume de Marchaux with affection and gifts as she believes that she has finally found True Love after years of loneliness. However, Guillaume belittles her by calling her a "fool of a woman" and threatens to leave if she does not get him a decent blend of coffee as opposed to the "sewage water" that she has serving him. As soon as she leaves, he has sex with her supposed friend Elaine. He later tells Andrea to spare him the clichés when she says that she thought that he loved her.
• Alliterative Name:
  • In "Tooth and Consequences", the protagonist's name is Dr. Myron Mandel.
  • In "Aqua Vita", the protagonist's name is Christie Copperfield.
  • In "Time and Teresa Golowitz", Mary Ellen Cosgrove married her high school boyfriend, a jock named Bob Bolling, after graduation.
  • In "Something in the Walls", the Crest Ridge Sanitarium head nurse's name is Rebecca Robb.
• Alliterative Title: "A Matter of Minutes", "Welcome to Winfield", "Street of Shadows", "Many, Many Monkeys" and "Special Service".
• All Myths Are True:
  • In "Ye Gods", Todd Ettinger discovers that Cupid, Megaera, Bacchus, Jupiter and all of the other gods and demigods of Classical Mythology really exist.
  • In "Tooth and Consequences", Dr. Myron Mandel learns that the Tooth Fairy really exists when he appears in his office and grants his wish to be respected and loved by his patients.
  • In "The Leprechaun-Artist", three teenage boys named Buddy, Richie and J.P. discover that Leprechauns are real when they capture one named Shawn McGool and he is forced to grant them Three Wishes.
  • In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Tom learns that Merlin and the rest of the figures from Arthurian legend really existed when he is hired by Morgan le Fay to bring Lancelot to her.
• All There in the Manual: In "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium", Melinda and Mrs. Whitford's names are never mentioned. They come from the script and, in the latter case, the short story by William F. Wu.
• Alternate History:
  • In "I of Newton", the demon tells Sam that he can show him Berlin if Nazi Germany had won World War II or a 21st Century Rome if Alexander the Great had lived to a ripe old age.
  • In "Extra Innings", an up-and-coming baseball player named Monte Hanks entered a coma in 1910, two years into his career, after getting hit in the face with a pitch. However, thanks to a magic baseball card, Ed Hamner (who also played baseball, until he got injured) actually winds up preventing his death. What's more, after the card is torn up at the end, keeping Ed in Monte's body, he went on to have a long and successful career.
• Alternate Timeline: In "Profile in Silver", a time traveling historian from 2172 named Professor Joseph Fitzgerald prevents the assassination of his Famous Ancestor John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The resulting change to the timeline leads to the creation of significant time distortions and a temporal rift of unprecedented proportions. Tornadoes appear without warning in Texas as part of the initial attempt to counterbalance the temporal damage. The assassination of Nikita Khrushchev results in the new Soviet premier sending in troops to capture West Berlin in an attempt to force the Western powers out of the rest of West Germany. Fitzgerald's wrist computer determines that there is a 77% probability that a nuclear war will break out between the United States and the Soviet Union, resulting in the total annihilation of the biosphere. At 12%, the best case scenario is that Western Europe will surrender within six years. Military costs will cause the Soviet economy to collapse, leading the USSR to blackmail the West for food. The subsequent agro-bacterial war will completely destroy the biosphere within a century. The remaining 11% accounts for all other probabilities in which the biosphere is destroyed. From this, Fitzgerald learns that Kennedy's death is a Necessary Fail and that history must be restored to its proper course if humanity is to survive.
• Alternate Universe:
  • In "But Can She Type?", a beleaguered and overworked secretary named Karen Billings, who is verbally abused by her boss Burt Nelson at every opportunity, is accidentally sent to a parallel universe by a malfunctioning photocopier. She soon discovers that being a secretary is the most glamorous and exciting job in existence in this universe. At a party, other guests are enthralled by her stories about her job and a highly paid fashion model tells her that her dream job is to be a secretary. Karen eventually decides to move to this universe permanently after Burt once again berates her. She accepts Edward Rehnquist's offer to organize his company's Paris office and is driven to the airport in a limousine.
  • In "The World Next Door", Barney Schlessinger discovers a parallel universe where his Alternate Self is a famous inventor after going through a doorway in his basement.
  • In "The Road Less Traveled", a version of Jeff McDowell from an alternate universe who lost his legs in The Vietnam War crosses over to ours after spending years wondering how his life would have turned out had he not gone to Vietnam. The Jeff of our universe dodged the draft in 1971 and went to Canada with his girlfriend Denise in 1971. They eventually married and had a daughter named Megan. In the alternate universe, Denise was killed in a motorcycle accident. The alternate Jeff is not angry or resentful as our Jeff fears but glad to have gotten the chance to see the life that he could have had.
  • In "Song of the Younger World", Amy Hawkline and Tanner Smith are able to transfer their souls into the bodies of wolves in a parallel universe using magic.
  • In "Memories", Mary McNeal is transported to a parallel universe in which everyone can remember their past lives.
  • Discussed in "Something in the Walls". Sharon Miles speculates that the creatures that live in the walls are from a parallel universe which has intersected with ours and are only able to enter our universe through these intersections.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: In "Shelter Skelter", Sally Dobbs smiled at the thought of her abusive husband Harry having been buried alive when their home town of Dunston, Kansas was destroyed by the accidental detonation of a nuclear cruise missile.
• Animated Armor: In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Merlin animated a suit of armor to protect him during the 1,000 years that he slept in the cave in Cornwall. After he awakens, Merlin has the Hollow Knight fight Lancelot so that he can sacrifice Tom. Lancelot handily defeats it.
• Animate Inanimate Object: In "The After Hours", the department store mannequins have the ability to come alive. Every month, one of them leaves the store and goes to live as a human.
• Animorphism:
  • In "Ye Gods", Megaera turned Cupid's lover Drusilla into a tree frog as she was angry that Cupid had cheated on her. She later threatens to turn Todd Ettinger into a snail darter.
  • In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Merlin threatens to turn Tom into a goose as he finds him disrespectful but Lancelot stays his hand.
  • In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", Volkerps considers turning Arky Lochner into a bug and feeding him to his serpent mate Diptha.
• Antagonistic Offspring: In "Father & Son Game", Darius Stephens becomes embroiled in a major legal battle with his son Michael after his consciousness is transferred into a Cyborg body. Michael's lawyer Larry argues that Darius is dead and that ownership of his company should therefore fall to Michael. Darius' lawyer Dave tells him that they are in uncharted legal territory as there has never before been the case of this nature since Darius is the first person to undergo the procedure. Darius' new body begins to malfunction and he dies, meaning that Michael has won without going to court. However, it turns out that Darius copied his memories onto a micro disc and now exists as a computer program. With the help of his wife Anita, he intends to restart the legal battle with Michael.
• Apathetic Citizens: In "Many, Many Monkeys", almost 100,000 people across the United States suddenly go blind as a result of a growth forming over their eyes. Jean Reed's theory is that it is a punishment for humanity's indifference towards each other's pain and suffering. She tells Nurse Claire Hendricks that her husband lost his sight after he received news of his mother's death and talked about it as if he was discussing the weather. Jean admits that she left him alone in spite of his condition in order to save herself and thinks that she was struck blind as a result. Claire eventually becomes convinced that Jean was right when she said that people have become monkeys.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Nelson Westbrook in "Cold Reading" doesn't believe a plane crash will happen as mentioned in the script since plane crashes happen outside, as his colleague points out it just rained inside the studio. For some reason it never occurs to him a plane could crash into the studio from the outside.
• Apathetic Teacher: In "Teacher's Aide", Miss Peters is the only teacher at her tough Inner City School who cares about the students and treats them with respect. Other teachers consider them to be animals and degenerates.
• The Ark: In "Quarantine", after nuclear war broke out in 2043, the United States launched a spacecraft containing 1,000 politicans and military figures into space. It returns to Earth in 2347. Due to the effects of Time Dilation, only five to ten years have passed for the crew. Sarah and the other members of the Commune used their psychic powers to fool Matthew Foreman into thinking that the ship was a meteor that was going to destroy Earth's entire ecosystem. They tried to get him to destroy it using the remaining particle beam satellites that he created prior to being frozen in 2023 as they did not want the cycle of war to start all over again. When Matthew discovers the truth, he attempts to stop the satellite from firing but Sarah stops him by sabotaging the computer and the ship is destroyed.
• An Arm and a Leg: In "The Road Less Traveled", the Alternate Universe Jeff McDowell lost both of his legs when he stepped on a landmine during The Vietnam War.
• Artistic License – History:
  • In "A Message from Charity", Squire Jonas Hacker tells Charity Payne that he will have her burned at the stake for witchcraft. In reality, the most common method of execution for convicted witches in The Thirteen American Colonies was hanging.
  • In "The Once and Future King", the front page of The Commercial Appeal gives the date as Monday July 3, 1954. In reality, July 3, 1954 was a Saturday.
• Artistic License – Law: Lampshaded in "Shadow Play". In trying to prove that it is all part of his dream, Adam Grant points out to the district attorney Mark Ritchie that he was convicted and sentenced to death on the same day, which doesn't happen in reality. He is also executed very shortly after his conviction, which is highly unusual in the United States.
• Astral Projection:
  • Discussed in "Shatterday". Peter Jay Novins' alter ego claims that he is the real Novins and that the other one is a piece of him that wandered off while he was sleeping because of astral projection.
  • In "Quarantine", Sarah and the other members of the Commune have the ability to astrally project themselves to anywhere in the universe that they choose, including inhospitable planets which ships could have never visited. Irene uses her psychic powers on Matthew Foreman and takes his mind on a trip around The Solar System.
  • In "Song of the Younger World", Amy Hawkline and Tanner Smith use the I Ching to transfer their souls into the bodies of a pair of wolves in a younger world so that they can be free of her abusive father Mordecai forever.
• The Atoner: In "The Crossing", Mark Cassidy's girlfriend Kelly was killed in a car accident caused by his reckless driving more than 20 years earlier. She was trapped inside the car after it went over a cliff but Mark was thrown clear. He could have possibly saved her but he was too afraid to try because of the flames. Mark was so guilt ridden that he became a priest in order to atone. Although he has spent two decades working on behalf of St. Timothy's Church and the wider community, he still feels as if he hasn't atoned for his sins.
• Attack on the Heart: In "The Toys of Caliban", Toby Ross accidentally kills his mother Mary when he removes her heart from her chest using his ability to manifest anything from a picture. He had seen a diagram of a heart in a magazine and wanted to know how it worked.
• Attempted Rape: In "A Message from Charity", Squire Jonas Hacker attempts to rape Charity Payne, claiming that he needs to look for the Devil's mark, after she is accused of witchcraft. After attacking Hacker, she manages to escape unharmed.
• Author Avatar:
  • Gus Rosenthal, the lead character of "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", was directly based on Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original story - to such an extent that (according to his audio commentary on the DVD) he actually wept while watching the filming of one scene.
  • "Personal Demons" tells the story of a writer named Rockne S. O'Bannon, dealing with a severe case of writer's block. It was written by... Rockne S. O'Bannon. While the fictional O'Bannon was in his 60s and had been writing for 30 years, the real O'Bannon was only 31 when the episode was made.

B

• Badass Teacher: In "Teacher's Aide", Miss Peters is possessed by the spirit of the gargoyle that sits on the roof of the tough Inner City School where she teaches English. She goes from being a dedicated teacher whom the students don't respect to one who responds to any act of insubordination with violence. Miss Peters begins to worry that there is something seriously wrong with her because she can't control this behavior. When a gang member named Wizard plans to attack her, she senses the approaching assault and is able to defeat him. Miss Peter is about to kill him when she sees her reflection and realizes that she has now become a gargoyle herself. She is disgusted by her use of violence as she is not that kind of person. Lightning strikes the gargoyle and she returns to normal. Grateful to Miss Peters for not finishing him off when she had the chance, Wizard thanks her from the bottom of his heart and helps her up.
• Bad "Bad Acting": In "Cold Reading", Jack Holland, who plays the title character in Dick Noble, African Explorer, constantly struggles with his lines and the other actors have to cover for him as the series is broadcast live. He mispronounces words such as "azure" and "tut" on air. When his co-star Marilyn Cavendish, who plays Dick's Girl Friday Millicent, helps him with the pronunciation of the former, he breaks character and thanks her. Unlike both Marilyn and the novice actor Milo Trent, he is completely unable to improvise when the things mentioned in the script begin appearing in the studio.
• Balancing Death's Books: In "Welcome to Winfield", Matt Winnaker wakes up after being near-death from a coma. His new wife Lori Bodell takes him to the titular town of Winfield, where the occupants struck a deal with Chin Du Long, an agent of death, to not die about 100 years earlier. But when St. George, the current agent of death, finds Matt, the situation becomes this: either Matt is spared in exchange for Winfield, or Winfield is spared in exchange for Matt. After calling Chin, St. George decides to spare both parties.
• The Bard on Board: "Song of the Younger World" is based on Romeo and Juliet. It involves a pair of teenage Star-Crossed Lovers, Amy Hawkline and Tanner Smith, who fall madly in love over the objections of her abusive father Mordecai. Amy uses the I Ching to make her soul leave her body and take possession of a wolf in an Alternate Universe. As she appears to be dead, Tanner is devastated and assumes that she has committed suicide because of her father. Unlike Friar Laurence's messenger in the play, however, Hoakie manages to get the news to Tanner that Amy is still alive. Tanner then uses the same spell to transfer his soul to the younger world before Mordecai can kill him.
• Baseball Episode: In "Extra Innings", Ed Hamner is an ex-baseball player whose career ended because of an injury. Thanks to a magic baseball card that he got from his baseball-loving friend Paula, he can possess a baseball player named Monte Hanks who never woke up after being hit by a ball in 1910 as to continue playing baseball. Beause of the card being torn up, he gets to have a long, fruitful baseball career.
• Battleaxe Nurse: In "Many, Many Monkeys", Claire Hendricks is a mild example. She is professional and diligent in her job but she is cold and offhand with patients, never paying them more attention than is strictly necessary. After the plague of blindness spreads, Claire comes to realize that she gradually lost her compassion and came to view patients as numbers with charts as opposed to individuals with life stories.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: In "Dream Me a Life", Roger Simpson Leeds is repeatedly forced to enter Laurel Kincaid's dream. It follows the same pattern each time: they are in a room filled with candles and Laurel begs Roger to help her in keeping something, seemingly a monster, out. On the first few occasions, Roger refuses to help. When he enters her dream again, however, he realizes that he is not supposed to keep it outside but to let it inside the room. It turns out to be the spirit of her husband, who died ten years earlier. He wants Laurel to accept his death and live her life again instead of remaining catatonic. The next morning, Roger cheerily approaches Laurel and invites her to breakfast. She then speaks her first words in ten years.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • "The Leprechaun-Artist": Three young boys get a wish apiece from the leprechaun they capture. It goes badly, and the boys end up under arrest by the police before the leprechaun takes pity on them and re-sets everything to normal.
  • "The Library": A woman gets a job in a magical library, the books of which can re-write people's lives. She can't resist the temptation to meddle, again things go badly before again (hopefully) being re-set to normal.
  • "Cold Reading": An egotistical old-time radio director named Nelson Westbrook rhetorically wishes that all the sound effects from his current jungle-adventure program Dick Noble, African Explorer came from something real. Unfortunately, he is indeed holding a real voodoo relic as he does so. Hilarity Ensues as a vulture, monkeys and African tribesmen appear in the studio as the actors perform the script. A thunderstorm even breaks out indoors. Through some very quick rewrites, Westbrook manages to avoid a plane crash, an elephant stampede and an earthquake but a Flying Saucer crashes in the studio when the promo for the following week's episode is read by the announcer.
  • "Act Break": An unsuccessful playwright wishes for a better writing partner than the one he currently has. He finds himself sent back in time, where he meets William Shakespeare. He ends up with every line that Shakespeare ever wrote stuck in his memory, and is forced to become Shakespeare's ghost writer, without getting any of the credit or accolades.
  • "Examination Day": Dickie Jordan wishes on his birthday to do well on the government exam. He does and it turns out people who do too well are killed.
  • In "Tooth and Consequences", Dr. Myron Mandel is a severely depressed dentist who hates his job. He wishes that an attractive patient named Lydia Bixby will fall madly in love with him and that his other patients will respect him and look forward to their appointments. The Tooth Fairy grants his wish but Myron is soon just as miserable as he was before, if not more so. He doesn't have a moment's peace as his patients hound him at every turn and Lydia's love for him is suffocating. Myron eventually runs away and hops a freight train.
  • In "Memories", Mary McNeal believes that if everyone had memories of their past lives, people would be kinder to each other as they would be able to remember being less fortunate than they are now. The next morning, she wakes up in an Alternate Universe in which everyone remembers all of their past lives. Many of them are miserable because they are weighed down by their memories of the grudges and traumatic experiences that happened decades or centuries earlier. Others are miserable because their past lives were happy and full, in contrast to their current ones.
  • In "The Trunk", the desperately lonely Willy Gardner uses the titular object to wish for all kinds of material possessions in the hope that they will make him popular and well-liked. After only a few hours, however, it becomes clear to him that people such as Candy are merely pretending to be his friends so that they can take advantage of his kind nature and get him to do things for them. Willy is more depressed than before at this revelation and tells his party guests that they can take whatever they want. None of them hesitate to do so. Worse still, the situation leads to him being attacked by the hoodlums Danny, Rocco and Cap, who want the money that they believe he must have stolen.
  • In "Cat and Mouse", Andrea Moffatt is an extremely lonely woman who longs for True Love and a man who is "strong, handsome and exotic" like the heroes of the romance novels that she reads. It appears that all of her dreams have come true when she meets a suave, charismatic Frenchman named Guillaume de Marchaux, who is trapped in the form of a cat by day, and they become lovers. However, after several days, it becomes clear that Guillaume is petty, cruel, self-obsessed and has no real feelings or even respect for Andrea.
• Become a Real Boy: A variation in "The After Hours". After finding out that she is a mannequin and spending a month living in the outside world, Marsha Cole doesn't want to give up her new life as a human. However, she is ultimately forced to do so by the other mannequins so that one of them can have a turn.
• Becoming the Costume: In "The Night of the Meek", the Mall Santa Henry Corwin becomes the real thing, leaving for the North Pole on his sleigh to get a start on next year's Christmas.
• Becoming the Genie: A non-genie example in "Rendezvous in a Dark Place". After she dies, Barbara LeMay becomes an agent of death. She is very happy that she can share the beauty and peace of death with others.
• Big Brother Is Watching: In "Room 2426", Dr. Martin Decker was taken into custody by the State for allegedly displaying anti-social behavior and wrong thinking towards the State and has been diagnosed as schizophrenic. In reality, the State had Martin under observation as they believed that the bacteria that he has developed can be modified for use as a bioweapon.
• Big Entrance: In "Cold Reading", the Large Ham radio writer and director Nelson Westbrook arrives at the UBS Radio Center in an ambulance with the sirens blaring. As soon as the ambulance stops, he jumps out of the back of it without a moment's hesitation.
• Bigger on the Inside: In "The Library", as soon as she sees all of the books in the titular building, Ellie Pendleton suspects that it must be some kind of trick as the building that she saw from the outside was nowhere near big enough. It soon becomes clear to her that the library is bigger on the inside and that it needs to be in order to house a book corresponding to every living person on Earth.
• Big "NO!": In "Private Channel", Mr. Williams gets one when he realizes that blowing up the plane would ruin other people's lives in the same way that his life was ruined after his wife and daughter were killed.
• Binary Suns: In "The Uncle Devil Show", Joey creates a fantasy world with two suns by following Uncle Devil's instructions on the Tim Ferret and Friends video. When his mother tells him to come inside before the sun goes down, he asks her which one.
• Bio-Augmentation: In "Quarantine", the survivors of the nuclear war of 2043 began using genetic engineering to give themselves psychic powers as they no longer trusted technology. By 2347, all life on Earth exists in harmony as part of a biological gestalt. Their computers are a form of Organic Technology created by genetically engineering chimpanzees and orangutans through increasing their intelligence by a factor of 20. Each augmented ape performs a specific function. All available knowledge is stored in their brains and accessible to anyone who requires it. Telepathic humans make contact with the apes at an early age and give them the choice of either living a normal life or becoming part of the collective computer brain.
• Birthday Hater: In "Aqua Vita", Christie Copperfield is depressed at the thought of turning 40 because she believes that she will soon be replaced by a younger woman as television anchor. She laments to her boyfriend Marc that birthdays are fun when you are 10 but not when you are worried about crow's feet and keeping your job. However, Christie is not angry at him for throwing her a surprise party as she appreciates the sentiment.
• A Birthday, Not a Break:
  • In "If She Dies", Paul Marano gets into a car accident on his birthday. He is uninjured but his young daughter Cathy ends up in a coma.
  • In "Grace Note", Rosemarie Miletti's beloved younger sister Mary dies of leukemia several days before Rosemarie's birthday. The last thing that she does before she dies is give Rosemarie her birthday present: a locket with Mary's picture.
• Bit-by-Bit Transformation: In "The After Hours", Marsha Cole begins to become plastic again after learning that she is a mannequin. Her right leg is the first part of her to transform and she has to drag it in her fruitless attempt to escape from her fellow mannequins. It is followed by her right arm and then her left leg. Refusing to accept her fate, she still tries to escape but soon her head is the only part of her that is still human. In the final scene, she has become fully plastic and is on display in the department store Satler's with all of the other mannequins.
• Bittersweet Ending: In "Healer", Jackie's partner has gotten away with stealing the money they were going to split and leaving Jackie for dead. But not only has Jackie used the stone one more time to heal a boy's deafness, the boy used the stone to heal Jackie's bullet wound, and the stone has been returned to its rightful owner. Best of all, Jackie has changed for the better.
• Black Magic: In "Cold Reading", Sol acquired a real voodoo artifact for the radio writer and director Nelson Westbrook, who always insists on his dramas being as realistic as possible. Westbrook dismisses it as nothing but a dime store novelty. He then says that if he had one wish, it would be that every sound effect in his latest script for Dick Noble, African Explorer would come from something real. His wish comes true and proves to be more than he bargained for.
• Black Market: In "The Mind of Simon Foster", the black market is the only way that people can get real meat as opposed to meat substitutes in 1999. The pawnbroker Mr. Quint also illegally sells memories removed from desperate people to wealthy collectors.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • In "Cold Reading", Dick Noble, African Explorer is sponsored by the cereal Krisp-O-Meal, which is based on Corn Flakes.
  • In "The After Hours", Marsha Cole buys a Cornfield Kids doll for her landlord's daughter Jennifer, a reference to the Cabbage Patch Kids. The doll itself is a repurposed Cabbage Patch Kid in a corn ear.
• The Blank: In "A Matter of Minutes", every minute is built by faceless blue construction workers who are seemingly incapable of speech.
• Blank White Void: In "A Matter of Minutes", Michael and Maureen Wright attempt to use their neighbor Cliff Turner's phone but when they enter his home, they find nothing but a featureless white void. The same thing happens later when they run down an alley. The supervisor explains to them that he and his workers did not bother to construct the home or the alley when building the minute 11:37am on April 27, 1986 as no one is supposed to see either during that time.
• Blind and the Beast: In "To See the Invisible Man", the only person to be kind to Mitchell Chaplin during his punishment is a blind man named Bennett Gershe who cannot see the implant telling others to ignore him. Subverted when Gershe is then told of Mitchell's status, after which he angrily curses Mitchell and leaves him.
• Blind Musician: In "Love is Blind", the folk musician at the Mustang bar is blind.
• Blind Seer: In "Love is Blind", the blind musician has the ability to see the future. He is able to tell that Jack Haines has come to the Mustang bar to kill the man with whom his wife Elaine is seemingly having an affair. After confronting Jack, the musician explains that he is drawn to a place by a strange feeling and that a prophetic song appears fully formed in his head once he is close to its subject. He can also share his vision of the future with someone if he chooses. In order to dissuade Jack from committing murder, the musician shows him exactly what would happen if he were to go through with it: Elaine would be killed in the crossfire and it would turn out that she was meeting with his best friend Taylor in order to get him a surprise anniversary gift.
• Boarding School of Horrors: In "Song of the Younger World", Tanner Smith is an inmate at the House of Refuge Reformatory for Wayward Boys. Its superintendent Mordecai Hawkline beats him severely when he finds him with his daughter Amy. He later tells Amy that Tanner and the other boys are scum, animals, beasts who must be caged away from decent society. After Tanner tries to kill him as he thinks that Amy is dead, Mordecai has his men put him in a cell called the Hole and bind him in a full body straitjacket.
• Body Horror: In "The Hellgramite Method", Dr. Eugene Murrich infects Miley Judson with a Hellgramite worm in order to help him overcome his alcoholism. The worm takes up residence in Miley's stomach and absorbs all the alcohol that he drinks. Dr. Murrich offers Miley a choice: he can either continue drinking and allow the worm to remain active or he can stop drinking and suffer extremely painful withdrawals in order to render the worm dormant. Miley goes cold turkey and almost succumbs to the terrible pain caused by the starving worm moving around in his stomach but he sticks it out and finally achieves sobriety.
• Book Ends:
  • In the first scene of "Memories", Mary McNeal is using hypnosis to regress Lorraine Gustin to one of her past lives where she was a dressmaker whose shop was raided and burned by British soldiers during The American Revolution. In the final scene, Mary uses hypnosis to help Ruth Gordon forget all of her memories of her past lives so that she can lead a happier life.
  • At the start of "20/20 Vision", Warren Cribbens gains the temporary ability to see into the future when he bumps into Sandy and she breaks the right lens of his glasses. At the end of the episode, he catches her from falling off a ladder and the left lens is broken, which causes him to lose this ability.
  • In the first scene of "There Was an Old Woman", the children's author Hallie Parker is saddened because no one has turned up to her last storytime session in the local library. She feels that she has outlived her usefulness and her books have lost their appeal. In the final scene, she discovers that her books meant a great deal to Brian Harris and other deceased children, whose ghosts ask her to read to them.
• Both Sides Have a Point: In "Little Boy Lost", Carol Shelton and her boyfriend Greg both bring up valid points about Carol's career prospects and having kids. Carol points out if she takes the job and has kids they'll hardly see her and she won't get to see them grow. Greg points out that given his age, if they waited to have kids he'll be too old to do parent/child activities with his child.
• Bottle Episode:
  • "Dealer's Choice" takes place entirely in Pete's living room and kitchen.
  • "The Uncle Devil Show" takes place entirely in Joey's living room and kitchen.
  • "I of Newton" takes place entirely in Sam's classroom.
  • "A Small Talent for War" takes place entirely in a meeting room in the United Nations Headquarters.
  • "The Elevator" takes place in and around Roger and Will's father's factory.
  • All of "Gramma" takes place in Georgie's house.
  • Except for the first scene, "Button, Button" takes place entirely in Arthur and Norma Lewis' apartment.
  • All of "Lost and Found" takes place in Jenny Templeton and Kathy's dorm room.
  • Almost all of "Acts of Terror" takes place in and around the Simonsons' house and garage.
  • All but one scene of "20/20 Vision" takes place in the farmer's bank.
  • "The Cold Equations" takes place entirely on Captain Thomas Barton's Emergency Dispatch Ship.
  • All of "A Game of Pool" takes place in the pool hall.
  • Except for the first and last scenes, all of "Rendezvous in a Dark Place" takes place in Barbara LeMay's house.
  • All of "Many, Many Monkeys" takes place in the hospital.
  • "Love is Blind" takes place in and around the Mustang bar.
• Brain Uploading: In "Father & Son Game", Darius Stephens' consciousness is placed on a series of micro discs. The information is digitized and then transferred to an artificial brain inside of a Cyborg body. Darius is the first human test subject but the procedure has previously been performed successfully on monkeys. His son Michael, who wants control of his company, considers him dead and starts proceedings to have him so declared. Although the cyborg body shuts down after several weeks, Darius' wife Anita discovers that he placed a copy of his consciousness in his computer and intends to continue the fight.
• Breather Episode:
  • "Wish Bank" is a light-hearted, comedic episode which immediately preceded the violent, horror-themed "Nightcrawlers".
  • "The Leprechaun-Artist" is a comedic episode about three teenage boys who find a Leprechaun. It immediately preceded "Dead Run", a very dark episode about souls who have been wrongfully sent to Hell.
• Broadcast Live: In-Universe in "Cold Reading". The UBS radio series Dick Noble, African Explorer is broadcast live. Milo Trent is horrified that Nelson Westbrook has completely rewritten the script and that he and the other actors won't have any time to rehearse it before it goes to air.
• Brown Note: "Need to Know" features an Awful Truth that causes insanity in anyone who hears it.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Discussed in "Something in the Walls". Sharon Miles assures Dr. Mallory Craig that she never wanted to sleep with her brother.
• Bullying the Disabled: In "Our Selena is Dying", Martha Brockman (while pretending to her daughter Diane) describes the deaf Orville as "our sort of combination handyman and village idiot." She does so in his presence but with her face turned away from him so he can't read her lips. Her niece Debra is shocked and disgusted.
• Burn the Witch!: In "A Message from Charity", Squire Jonas Hacker tells Charity Payne that he will have her burned as a witch after she manages to fight off his attempt to rape her.
• Bystander Syndrome: Several stories warn of the dangers of not taking a more active role or interest in world affairs. In "A Little Peace and Quiet", a harried housewife named Penny also refuses to take note of the fact that the Soviet Union and United States are on the brink of war, and that she – thanks to an amulet that can get people to "Shut up!" and "Start talking!" – might just be wearing the thing that can bring world peace. Instead, she uses the amulet selfishly (when her family gets to her or wants to deal with annoying visitors) ... and the United States pays a dear price in the end, thanks to her disinterest in world affairs and her not realizing that she held a gift of world peace – leaving her to finally stop time just an instant before a nuclear bomb detonates and wipes out much of central and southern California.

C

• Canis Major: In "The Elevator", Roger and Will find a dead dog that ate their father's super food and became a giant. It was killed by something larger which they later discover was a Giant Spider.
• Canon Foreigner:
  • In "A Message from Charity", Peter Wood has a younger brother named Bobby. In the short story by William M. Lee, he is an only child.
  • In "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", Gus Rosenthal sleeps with a fan of his whom he met after he delivered a lecture on writing. She does not appear in the short story by Harlan Ellison.
  • In "The Night of the Meek", the Dundee's security guard Henderson is Henry Corwin's Only Friend and helps him to distribute the presents from his magic Santa sack. He does not appear in the original episode.
  • In "The Star", the commanding officer of the survey ship Magellan is Captain Durant. She does not appear in the short story by Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "The Misfortune Cookie" features the supporting characters of Harry Folger's editor Max, the eponymous owner of Mr. Lee's Chinese Cuisine and April Hamilton, whom Harry briefly dates. None of them appear in the short story by Charles E. Fritch.
  • In "A Matter of Minutes", both Michael Wright and his wife Maureen become trapped in a minute that is still under construction. In the short story "Yesterday Was Monday" by Theodore Sturgeon, it is only Harry Wright.
  • In "Dead Run", Johnny Davis learns of the job transporting condemned souls to Hell from his fellow trucker Pete, who shows him the ropes. Pete does not appear in the short story by Greg Bear as Johnny has already been doing the job for two years.
  • In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Tom is one of three punks hired by Morgan le Fay to bring Lancelot to her. Lancelot later takes Tom as his squire and brings him to the cave in Cornwall to meet the newly awakened Merlin. Tom does not appear in the short story by Roger Zelazny. He was added at the insistence of CBS executives who thought that Twilight Zone stories should always feature ordinary people in extraordinary situations.
• Captivity Harmonica: In "Shadow Play", Adam Grant's fellow prisoner Munoz plays the harmonica while Adam is waiting to be hanged.
• Career-Ending Injury: In "Extra Innings", Ed Hamner was a pitcher for the Detriot Tigers until he severely injured his left knee during a game, giving him a permanent limp.
• Cargo Cult: In "The Beacon", the people of Mellweather have worshiped a lighthouse called the Beacon for 200 years. They believe that it is controlled by the spirit of their collective ancestor Seth Janes.
• The Casanova: In "Cat and Mouse", Guillaume de Marchaux describes himself as having a great talent for making love. He has spent centuries going from woman to woman, never spending more than a few days with one before getting bored.
• The Case of...: "The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon".
• Cassandra Truth:
  • In "The Burning Man", Doug and Aunt Neva pick up a dirty, disheveled man while driving through Kansas. He immediately begins ranting and raving about people who are born evil, telling Doug and Aunt Neva that they should be wary of genetic evil. He compares such people to seventeen year locusts and warns that they eat people "fried, cooked, boiled and parboiled." Aunt Neva has finally had enough of his wild stories and throws him out of her car. That night, the two of them pick up a strange boy in a white suit who claims to have been left behind after a town picnic. After making the car stop, the boy asks Doug and Aunt Neva, "Have you ever wondered if there was such a thing as genetic evil in the world?" The headlights of the car then go out, implying that he is going to kill Doug and Aunt Neva.
  • In "The Little People of Killany Woods", no one in Kelly's pub believes Liam O'Shaughnessy when he says that he has seen Leprechauns under a giant toadstool in Killany Woods. When he follows Liam to the woods in the hope of getting more gold, Mike Mulvaney discovers that the little people are actually aliens and that the toadstool is their spaceship. He returns to Kelly's to tell the townspeople what he saw but none of them believe him.
  • In "The Once and Future King", Gary Pitkin is an Elvis Impersonator from 1986 who assumed the identity of Elvis Presley after accidentally killing him on July 4, 1954. In the 1970s, he tries to convince Sandra, who will be his manager by 1986, that he is simply pretending to be the real King. However, Sandra doesn't believe him. She later comes to think that it was merely another example of Elvis' often strange and eccentric behavior towards the end of his life.
  • In "The Convict's Piano", Ricky Frost tells the prison doctor Puckett that he was transported back in time to 1899 and 1917 after playing songs from those years on the old piano in the reception hall. Puckett clearly does not believe a word that he is saying. The next day, Ricky tells Eddie O'Hara that he can come with him to 1928 and get his revenge on his old nemesis Mickey Shaughnessy if he touches the piano while he is playing "Someone to Watch Over Me". Eddie retorts that he has been in prison too long to believe in magic. However, he realizes that Ricky is telling the truth when he disappears in front of his eyes. He receives further proof when Shaughnessy is sent forward in time after playing the piano himself.
  • In "The Card", Linda Wolfe is unable to convince her husband Brian that the family had a cat named Boris and a dog named Scooby who have disappeared and whom only she can remember. Brian thinks that she should see a psychiatrist because of these delusions about non-existent pets. The situation becomes even more serious when their children Matt, Evan and B.J. disappear, having been acquired by the card company. Brian explains to Linda that they never had any children and tries in vain to calm her down. He is even more convinced than before that she is having a breakdown.
  • In "Private Channel", an obnoxious teenage boy named Keith Barnes gains the ability to read minds using his Walkman after his flight is struck by lightning. He soon discovers that one of the passengers intends to blow up the plane. Keith tries to warn the stewardess Gloria but she thinks that he is making a sick joke and tells him that he could be arrested for doing so. She is also not inclined to believe him because they had an earlier run-in when he rudely refused to turn off his Walkman.
  • In "Voices in the Earth", Professor Donald Knowles attempts to convince his friend, commanding officer and former student Jacinda Carlyle that the ghosts of the dead Earth appeared to him while he was exploring the ruins of a library. However, they refuse his requests to make an appearance in Jacinda's presence. Jacinda is concerned that he may be going insane.
  • In "The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon", the psychiatrist Dr. Jeremy Sinclair does not believe the title character's claims that his contraption made from discarded odds and ends is vital to keeping the world in balance and preventing major catastrophes. He comes to the conclusion that Edgar is suffering from delusions of grandeur. However, Dr. Sinclair realizes that Edgar was telling the truth when he learns that the tiny South Pacific island of Tatoa was destroyed by a tidal wave at 3:17 pm local time, which is exactly what Edgar said would happen when his contraption was disturbed. Sinclair then rushes to Edgar's apartment to stop his landlady Mrs. Milligan from destroying it.
  • In "Something in the Walls", Sharon Miles, who voluntarily committed herself to Crest Ridge Sanitarium, tells her new psychologist Dr. Mallory Craig that there are creatures living in the walls and elsewhere that can only be seen if you look for long enough. She believes that the creatures are attempting to kill her and refuses to have anything with patterns in her presence as they can travel through these patterns. Dr. Craig believes that they are merely hallucinations and attempts to treat Sharon on that basis. Sharon is later absorbed into the wall and replaced by one of the creatures that has taken her form. However, Dr. Craig notices a crack in Sharon's room and becomes concerned that her fears may have been justified.
• Catapult Nightmare: In "Dream Me a Life", Roger Simpson Leeds bolts upright in a distressed state after having a dream in which an elderly woman, later revealed to Laurel Kincaid, begs him to help her prevent something from entering her room.
• Caustic Critic: In "The Misfortune Cookie", Harry Folger is a cruel and obnoxious food critic who takes delight in writing bad reviews about restaurants. When his editor Max accuses him of trashing these restaurants, he claims that he is exposing them. He collects matchbooks from restaurants which have been closed because of his reviews, of which he has about 20, and places them in a model graveyard.
• Celebrity Paradox: In "The Road Less Traveled", Jeff and Denise McDowell watch The Thing from Another World on television. Its star Kenneth Tobey, who previously played Sheriff Haskin in "A Day in Beaumont", is seen in the featured clip.
• Celebrity Resemblance: In "The Once and Future King", Gary Pitkin is an Elvis Impersonator who bears an uncanny resemblance to the King of Rock & Roll. After he is sent back in time to July 3, 1954, the real Elvis Presley mistakes him for his identical twin brother Jesse, who died at birth and has seemingly been brought back to life. After Elvis is impaled on the neck of his guitar, Gary assumes his identity and manages to fool everyone except Elvis' mother Gladys.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: In "Dead Run", Johnny Davis begins working as a truck driver transporting condemned souls to Hell. Within hours, he discovers that many of the damned don't deserve to be there. For instance, one woman was too self-centered in life, one man only saw the dirt in life and not the beauty and another was an atheist. After the souls riot, Johnny is brought to meet the Dispatcher, who has the final say on who is sent to Hell because the Boss abdicated responsibility long ago. The Dispatcher explains to Johnny and he is instituting "time honored Biblical standards" in holding the departed souls to a high standard. He sees it as his duty to combat the "secular, intellectual propaganda" of the modern age and ensure that pornographers, heathens, atheists, humanists and others receive the punishment that they deserve. Johnny is disgusted and helps a draft dodger, a junkie, a librarian who fought against banned books being removed from the shelves and a young gay man escape to Heaven.
• Chekhov's Gun: In "Need to Know", everybody in Loma Valley listens to the same local radio station all the time. Professor Jeffrey Potts later goes on the radio to share the meaning of life with his fellow townspeople, causing everyone who hears the broadcast to go insane.
• Chess with Death: In "Dealer's Choice", Pete, Jake and Tony correctly deduce that Nick, who has taken Norman's place at their regular poker game, is the Devil and that he is here for one of them. Nick suggests that they make a game of it: whoever picks the highest card "wins" and gets to go with him. Tony picks an eight, Jake picks a seven and the unfortunate Pete picks a jack. Tony suggests that Pete and Nick play a game of one-on-one, all or nothing. Nick agrees and tries to put up $18 (three sixes) but instead puts up $19 at Pete's insistence. As it is dealer's choice, Pete chooses a game of lowball, where the lower hand wins and players don't want matching cards. Being the Devil, Nick has been getting three sixes in every hand. Pete gets four fives and Nick gets three sixes, meaning that Pete loses. However, Marty, who is too innocent for the Devil to trick, reveals that Nick's Tarot death card is in fact a fourth six. After been caught out, Nick leaves empty handed, though not before filling Pete's empty kitchen with food and beer.
• Childhood Friend Romance: In "Appointment on Route 17", Mary Jo and Jamie Adler were neighbors and best friends from the time that they were five years old. They dated for years and always knew that they were going to get married but Jamie was killed in a car accident before they could do so.
• Christmas Episode:
  • In "The Night of the Meek", an alcoholic Mall Santa named Henry Corwin finds a magic sack that can produce any gift that a person asks for on Christmas Eve.
  • In "But Can She Type?", an underappreciated secretary named Karen Billings is transported to an Alternate Universe in which being a secretary is considered highly glamorous shortly before Christmas.
  • In "The Star", the survey ship Magellan discovers the records of a long dead civilization on Christmas Day. Father Matthew Costigan points out that, because of relativity, the ship is the only place in the universe where it is Christmas.
• Chromosome Casting:
  • "Paladin of the Lost Hour", "Act Break", "Take My Life...Please!" and "Room 2426" do not feature any speaking roles for women.
  • No women appear in "Dealer's Choice", "I of Newton", "The Elevator", "Devil's Alphabet" and "A Game of Pool".
• Cigarette of Anxiety: In "The Crossing", Father Mark Cassidy smokes heavily in order to calm his nerves as he desperately tries to raise money for the new children's wing of the hospital.
• Circles of Hell: In "Dead Run", newly condemned souls arrive in the Outer Circles of Hell and are eventually brought to its center where they are to spend all eternity. The Celestial Bureaucracy doesn't particularly care whether the damned suffer as long as they are kept somewhere they can't hurt others.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: In "Room 2426", Dr. Martin Decker is extremely skeptical of his cellmate Joseph's claim to be able to teletransport. Joseph assures him that he has been specifically trained and has done so many times. He explains that a person must believe that they are capable of teletransportation in order to do it. Subverted in that Joseph is a mole who tricks Martin into believing that they have teletransported to a safehouse. Double Subverted in that, after realizing the truth, Martin uses the power of his mind to transport himself to safety.
• Close-Enough Timeline: In "Profile in Silver", Professor Joseph Fitzgerald creates an Alternate Timeline when he prevents John F. Kennedy's assassination. When it becomes clear that the new timeline isn't viable as the world will be destroyed within a century at most, he sends JFK forward to 2172 and allows himself to be killed in the President's place. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, JFK was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
• Clothes Make the Maniac: In "Dead Woman's Shoes", a shy woman named Maddie Duncan tries on a pair of haunted high heels at a thrift store that make her assertive, self-confident—and send her on a murderous mission to kill Kyle Montgomery.
• Clothing-Concealed Injury: In "Acts of Terror", Louise Simonson tries and fails to hide the latest bruise inflicted by her abusive husband Jack using the top of her dress. When the mailman asks about it, she tells him that she walked into a door.
• Cold Equation: In "The Cold Equations", which is based on the Trope Namer, a teenage girl named Marilyn Lee Cross stows away on an Emergency Dispatch Ship (EDS) traveling to Woden in order to reunite with her elder brother Gerry. The ship is carrying a serum for kala fever which is needed to save the lives of 35 men on Woden. However, EDSes are only provided with enough fuel to reach their destination, discounting a small surplus in case of adverse atmospheric conditions. Marilyn's added weight of 45.359 kilograms means that the ship will run out of fuel before it can land and will crash on the surface of Woden, killing Marilyn and its captain Thomas Barton and dooming 35 others to certain death. As such, there is a regulation stating that all stowaways must be jettisoned into space. Barton contacts his superior Commander Delhart for assistance but is told that there isn't a cruiser within 40 lightyears. He and Marilyn attempt to strip the EDS of all non-essential equipment but when they do so, they are still 24.407 kilograms over. Barton assures Marilyn that he would jettison himself if he could but the EDS lacks a sophisticated landing computer, meaning he is indispensable. As such, he has no choice but to jettison Marilyn. After he does so, Barton breaks down in tears. He had previously told Marilyn that he would be haunted by his actions for the rest of his life.
• The Collector: In "Stranger in Possum Meadows", Scout was sent to Earth to collect specimens of numerous life forms, including a deer and a dog, for his people to study. Danny Wilkins is chosen as the human specimen and is briefly placed in cryostasis aboard Scout's ship. However, he is soon freed as Scout's thoughts turn to his own family and how he would feel if something happened to one of them.
• Collector of the Strange: In "The Mind of Simon Foster", the pawnbroker Mr. Quint sells removed memories to wealthy people who collect different experiences such as high school graduations and a person's first time making love.
• Colorblind Casting: A variation in "Paladin of the Lost Hour". Gaspar is played by the white Danny Kaye while Billy Kinetta is played by the black Glynn Turman. In the short story by Harlan Ellison, it is mentioned that one of the two men is white and the other is black but does not specify which one so it could have been Gaspar who was black and Billy who was white.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • In "Dealer's Choice", the extremely innocent and not very bright Marty describes A Streetcar Named Desire (which he incorrectly calls Streetcar Called Desire) as a great movie all about poker.
  • In "The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon", the title character tells Dr. Jeremy Sinclair that he hears voices. When Dr. Sinclair says "Oh, you also hear voices?", Edgar assumes that Sinclair means that he hears them too.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich" was adapted for the first issue of NOW Comics' short-lived Twilight Zone series in 1991.
• Commune:
  • In "Quarantine", after being revived from cryo-stasis, Matthew Foreman finds himself in what appears to be a small, primitive farming community in 2347. He later learns that although they have abandoned all forms of machinery, they are far from primitive as they use Bio-Augmentation to improve both themselves and the world around them.
  • In "The Wall", the Gate leads to a small, agrarian community on a Paradise Planet where the people work together for their mutual advantage.
• Composite Character:
  • In "Nightcrawlers", the Big Bob's diner patrons Ray and Lindy have a son named Ricky. In the short story by Robert McCammon, they have two unnamed children, a boy and a girl.
  • In "A Matter of Minutes", the unnamed supervisor is a composite of the supervisor Iridel and the producer from the short story "Yesterday Was Monday" by Theodore Sturgeon.
• The Constant: In "A Message from Charity", there is a rock near Harmon Brook in Annes Town (later Anniston) called Bear Rock, which is so named because it resembles a bear bending down to drink from the stream. In 1700, Charity Payne carves a message of love for Peter Wood, their initials in a heart, under the bear's jaw on the left side. He finds it in 1985.
• Continuity Nod: In "The Night of the Meek", a news report states that the Tim Ferret and Friends line of educational videos is selling extremely well at Christmas. In "The Uncle Devil Show", Joey learned how to perform real magic from one of these videos.
• Conveniently Coherent Thoughts: In "Private Channel", Keith Barnes is able to read Mr. Williams' mind using his Walkman and learns that he intends to blow up the plane because the company negligently caused a crash in which his wife and daughter were killed.
• Cool Big Sis: In "Grace Note", Rosemarie Miletti is the eldest of five children and enjoys strong relationships with all of her siblings, especially Mary who is dying of leukemia.
• Cool Gate: In "The Wall", a group of scientists were researching wormhole physics when a freak accident resulted in the creation of a portal, which is dubbed "the Gate" for lack of a better name. Four volunteers (2nd Lt. Emilio Perez, Sergeants Evelyn Marx and Glenn Sinclair and Captain Henry Kincaid) were sent through the Gate to determine what was on the other side but they failed to return. When the fifth volunteer, Major Alex McAndrews, goes through, he discovers that it leads to a Paradise Planet where the people live a simple, agrarian existence free of the social problems that plague Earth. The US government hopes to use the Gate in order to launch preemptive strikes on its enemies. Although the Gate is constantly visible on Earth, the refraction of light on the other planet means that it can only be seen at night.
• Cop Killer: In "Joy Ride", Charlie Taylor killed a cop after robbing Chadway's Five & Dime in 1957. After his death 30 years later, his spirit possesses his car and his guilt forces Alonzo to relive the experience.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • In "Shatterday", Peter Jay Novins took the Cumberland account at his PR firm in full knowledge of the company's intention to strip mine a county.
  • In "Appointment on Route 17", Tom Bennett is a ruthless businessman whose sole ambition in life is to make money at any cost until he receives Jamie Adler's heart in a transplant and becomes a better man.
  • In "Street of Shadows", Frederick Perry is aggressively pursuing a new construction project with no concern regarding the impact that tearing down the existing buildings will have on the people of the area. Although he is worth over $40 million, he wants to cut costs down by firing personnel where possible.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", the mob boss Nino Lancaster uses Nino's Toys & Imports at the docks as a cover for his smuggling operation.
• Cowboy Episode: In "Welcome to Winfield", two people fleeing an agent of Death end up in an old west town.
• Cranky Landlord:
  • In "Act Break", Maury Winkler and Harry's obnoxious landlord demands the two months rent that they owe him on their office and threatens to evict them if he doesn't get it soon. He also enjoys mocking them because almost all of their 17 plays closed after one performance.
  • In "The Mind of Simon Foster", the title character's landlord threatens to throw him out of his apartment if he does not pay his overdue rent by the next day. This forces Simon to accept the pawnbroker Mr. Quint's offer to buy his memory of his high school graduation. When Simon pays the $625 that he owes, the landlord proves himself to be corrupt as he illegally demands the next month's rent in advance. He tells Simon that if he goes to the Housing Commission to complain, he could find that his apartment has been given to someone else due to a "clerical error" when he returns.
• Crapsack World:
  • In "Memories", society in the Alternate Universe has grown stagnant and is breaking down because it has become increasingly difficult for people to cope with memories of their past lives. Jim Sinclair explains to Mary McNeal that many people are traumatized by past tragedies or consumed by a need for revenge for something that happened in another lifetime. Sinclair belongs to a group that believes that the only way for their society to survive is for everyone to forget their past life experiences and focus on building better lives in the present. As she is a regression therapist, Mary is able to facilitate this through hypnosis.
  • In "The Mind of Simon Foster", there is a major economic depression in the United States in 1999. The unemployment rate is 32%, bread costs $5 per loaf and meat can only be obtained on the Black Market. As a result, the title character is living a shattered life and is trying to piece together enough money to survive even in the short term.
• Crazy Survivalist: In "Shelter Skelter", Harry Dobbs is convinced that a nuclear war is imminent. As his home in Dunston, Kansas is only a few miles away from Wakefield Air Force Base, a likely prime target, he has a fallout shelter built in his basement. It has a lead lined door, four foot thick concrete walls and outside temperature and radiation gauges. Harry has kept it a secret from his neighbors and warns his wife Sally not to reveal its existence to her sister Wendy. However, he later tells his friend and employee Nick Gatlin about it as he considers him to be practically part of the family. When the base is destroyed by a nuclear blast, the two of them take refuge in the shelter and wait to see whether the radiation will die down so that they can go outside again. In the final scene, it is revealed that the base was not destroyed by an enemy bomb during World War III but by an American cruise missile which accidentally detonated aboard a B-1 bomber. Dunston was destroyed but the horror at the loss of life pulled the world back from the brink of nuclear war. A radiation proof dome, which has come to be known as the Peace Dome, was constructed to contain the fallout.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Robert Downey, Sr., who directed "Children's Zoo", "Teacher's Aide" and "Tooth and Consequences", played Mr. Miller in "Wordplay".
  • Wes Craven, who directed seven episodes, played Edgar, one of the imprisoned parents, in "Children's Zoo".
  • In "Opening Day", the director John Milius plays a party guest who tries to sexually harass Sally Wilkerson.
• Credit Card Plot: In "The Card", a compulsive spender named Linda Wolfe is given a strangely accessible credit card only to find out the consequences of not covering her purchases when the company first repossesses her pets Boris and Scooby and then her children Matt, Evan and B.J., who don't even remember who she is. She desperately tries to buy them back using her joint checking account, but her husband Briana cancels the payment thinking she's lost her mind because he doesn't remember their kids. With the checks bounced, the episode ends with Linda unable to do anything but watch helplessly as Brian, her home, her entire life and eventually she herself are repossessed from the face of the Earth, leaving not a trace save for the credit card.
• Creepy Changing Painting: In "The Hunters", Dr. Klein studies the paintings found on the walls of the recently discovered prehistoric cave. After a week, she notices that one of them has changed. According to a photograph, a figure who was previously on the right of a depiction of a ceremonial altar is now on the left. She assures the sheriff that she can tell that the paintings are genuine because of her extensive experience in the area. That night, Dr. Klein realizes that all of the figures have disappeared from the walls, having entered the real world. One of them kills her with a spear. When the sheriff enters and discovers her body, he sees that the figures moving on the walls before his eyes. Dr. Klein's body then disappears from the cave and a figure representing it appears on one of the walls. In order to defeat the threat posed by the ghosts of the prehistoric hunters, the sheriff washes the figures away.
• Creepy Child: In "The Burning Man", Doug and Aunt Neva pick up a strange boy in a white suit while driving through Kansas. They soon discover that he is the genetic evil whom their earlier passenger, a seemingly crazed, disheveled man, warned them about. It is implied that the boy kills them.
• Cross-Cast Role: In "Gramma", Georgie's grandmother is played by Frederick Long.
• Cruel to Be Kind: In "What Are Friends For?", Jeff Mattingly's Not-So-Imaginary Friend Mike tells him that he was only pretending to be his friend and that he hates him after realizing that his presence is preventing Jeff from becoming friends with real children. Mike did this as he knew that it was the only way to convince Jeff to stop playing with him. The closing narration describes Mike, who previously appeared to Jeff's father Alex in his youth, as "one special friend, one who loved them both enough to vanish when the time was right."
• Crusading Widow: In "Private Channel", Mr. Williams plans to blow up the plane because his wife and daughter were killed in a plane crash caused by the company's negligence.
• Cultured Badass: In "The Convict's Piano", the infamous gangster Mickey Shaughnessy is an extremely talented piano player.
• Cunning Linguist: In "The Cold Equations", Marilyn Lee Cross was studying linguistics on Mimir before she stowed away aboard an Emergency Dispatch Ship bound for Woden.
• Cupid's Arrow: In "Ye Gods", Cupid sprinkles Todd Ettinger and a woman whom he has just bumped into with magic dust so that they fall instantly in love with each other. He later strikes Todd with his arrow three times so that his feelings for the woman will intensify.
• Curse: In "Cat and Mouse", after being found in bed with the wife of a warlock, a curse was placed on Guillaume de Marchaux. During the day, he is trapped in the form of a cat. However, he can freely transform between a man and a cat at night. The warlock also cursed him with immortality to prolong the spell.
• Curse of Babel: In "Wordplay", Bill Lowery develops aphasia and gradually loses the ability to communicate with other people. The first indication of his condition is his wife Kathy telling him about a doctor named Bumper. He comments on his unusual name but thinks nothing more about it. When his neighbor Mr. Miller refers to his dog as an encyclopedia, Bill thinks that it is a practical joke. However, he becomes agitated when the mailroom attendant Robbie asks his advice on where to take Barbie for "dinosaur." Bill assumes that it is some sort of New Wave slang until he goes home and Kathy uses the same word. By the time that he goes to work the next morning, he cannot understand anyone and he is equally incomprehensible to everyone else. This presents problems when his young son Donnie has to be rushed to the emergency room. After Donnie is successfully treated, Bill has to learn the new language. He picks up one of his son's ABC books and sees that the new word for dog is "Wednesday." Other new words include "mayonnaise" for "experience," "trumpets" for "tricks," "throwrug" for "anniversary," "stepdad" for "seatbelt" and "elephant" for "emergency." Bill's own name is Hinge Thunder.
• Cute Ghost Girl: In "If She Dies", Paul Marano sees a young girl on the roof of St. Amelia's Orphanage but she disappears as soon as he turns his head. When he tells a nun named St. Agnes, he learns that the orphanage is having a rummage sale as it is closing down and buys an antique wooden bed. As he leaves, Paul sees the strange girl again. That night, the girl visits him in his bedroom, telling him that she is looking for Toby. The next morning, he pays a visit to the convent and St. Agnes tells him that there was a girl named Sarah who died of tuberculosis in the bed many years earlier. Her teddy bear Toby was her prize possession. Paul realizes that Sarah was trying to tell him to place his comatose daughter Cathy in the bed with Toby so that she could restored to health. He does so and Cathy recovers almost instantly.
• Cyborg: In "Father & Son Game", over 50% of Darius Stephens' new body consists of machinery. Almost all of his major organs, including his brain, are artificial. This creates problems for Darius as there is no legal precedent for a person with an artificial brain to be considered alive.

D

• Darker and Edgier: While somewhat tame compared to other 80s anthologies like Tales from the Darkside or Freddy's Nightmares, the show still had several segments which were purely horror in nature, unlike the original series.
• Dark Is Not Evil: "Rendezvous in a Dark Place" is essentially the original series' "Nothing in the Dark" flipped around: instead of being fearful of Death and needing to be convinced it isn't scary, Barbara LeMay actually finds beauty in Death... and wants to join him. In fact, Death himself is flipped around: instead of being compassionate from the get go, he basically needs to learn how.
• Daywalking Vampire: In "Monsters!", the vampire Emile Francis Benedictson can spend as much time in the sunlight as any human. He tells Toby Michaels that, contrary to how they are depicted in monster movies, vampires are immune to the effects of The Sun.
• Dead All Along:
  • In an extremely disturbing way, "Kentucky Rye" ends on this note. After managing to walk away from a car crash, Bob Spindler (drunk at the time) wanders into a bar and, after befriending the patrons and the owner, winds up buying it (after getting a little help from a somber looking man). The next morning, Bob wakes up in the bar... which is dusty and abandoned. The somber man is with him. And as they look outside, they see police and ambulance workers clean up a car crash outside the "Kentucky Rye". The victims? The somber man... and Bob (who hit him, then crashed).
  • In "Nightsong", Andrea Fields is visited by her ex-boyfriend Simon Locke, whom she has not seen for five years. She later discovers that he is a ghost when he shows her his skeletal remains and crashed motorcycle at the bottom of a cliff. Simon tells her that he has returned in order to convince her to let go of her feelings for him and get on with her life.
  • Implied in "Love is Blind". Jack Haines wonders how the Blind Musician could have survived getting shot in the head, which should have been fatal. However, the musician refuses to answer.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: In "The Road Less Traveled", the Alternate Universe version of Denise was killed in a motorcycle accident in the 1970s while her boyfriend Jeff McDowell was fighting in The Vietnam War. The alternate Jeff is delighted to see her alive and married to his counterpart in our universe in 1986.
• Dead Animal Warning: In "The Hunters", Dr. Klein believes that the mutilated sheep carcass found outside the prehistoric cave was placed there by Jim Hilsen, whose housing development was delayed by the discovery of the cave, in order to intimidate her and the rest of the archaelogical team. However, it turns out that it was killed by the ghosts of the prehistoric hunters depicted on the cave walls.
• Deadly Closing Credits:
  • Implied in "The Burning Man". In the final scene, the lights of Doug and Aunt Neva's car go out after the strange boy in the white suit asks them if they had ever wondered if there was such a thing as genetic evil.
  • At the end of "The Beacon", Dr. Dennis Barrows is swarmed by the people of Mellweather so that he can be the Human Sacrifice that the Beacon demands.
  • In "A Small Talent for War", this is seen on a large scale. In the final scene, the alien ambassador summons his people's armada to destroy all life on Earth as it is apparent that humanity's small talent for war will be of no use to them in their wars across the galaxy.
  • In the final scene of "The Elevator", a Giant Spider grabs Roger and Will with its pedipalps as the elevator rises to the top. After several seconds, the brothers' screams stop. A flashlight drops to the floor and its lens breaks as blood drips down.
• Deadly Euphemism: In "Welcome to Winfield", The Grim Reaper Griffin St. George tells the people of Winfield that he is in the reclamation business. After a while, they realize that he means the reclamation of souls. He later says that he has come for Matt Winnaker because his number is up and it is his time.
• Dead Person Impersonation: In "The Once and Future King", Gary Pitkin, an Elvis Impersonator from 1986, gets into a fight with the real Elvis Presley on July 4, 1954 as Elvis believes that he is a demon who has been sent to tempt him with evil music. In the struggle, Elvis is killed when he is accidentally impaled on the neck of his broken guitar. After burying his body, Gary assumes Elvis' identity and becomes the King of Rock & Roll.
• Dead to Begin With: "Take My Life...Please!" depicts a callous stand-up comedian's unpleasant experiences in the afterlife.
• Deal with the Devil: "Dealer's Choice", "I of Newton", "Time and Teresa Golowitz", and "Crazy As a Soup Sandwich" all feature humans making deals with literal devils, though in the case of "I of Newton", it happens involuntarily. Surprisingly, they all end fairly happily for the wish-makers.
• Death by Adaptation: In "Healer", the mob boss Joseph Rubello has a bad heart which Jackie Thompson is unable to heal as he has begun using the healing stone for selfish purposes. In spite of this, Rubello is still alive when he is last seen. In the short story adaptation by Alan Brennert, Jackie is able to heal Rubello in the short term but his heart problems return and he dies two weeks later.
• Death by Childbirth:
  • In "A Message from Charity", Charity Payne's mother died while giving birth to her.
  • In "Her Pilgrim Soul", Nola Granville died in childbirth in March 1943 after she had a miscarriage caused by the malformation in her uterus.
• Death from Above:
  • In "The Cold Equations", Group One's base on Woden was damaged by a meteor storm and its supply of the serum for kala fever was destroyed. Captain Thomas Barton's Emergency Dispatch Ship is on a mission to replenish their supply when Marilyn Lee Cross stows away.
  • In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", the demon Volkerps kills the medium Cassandra Fishbein with a bolt of lightning after she contacts him for Nino Lancaster.
• Death of a Child: In "Examination Day", the totalitarian government gives tests that identify child prodigies—who are then killed before they can grow up to question or threaten the power structure.
• Death of the Old Gods: In "Ye Gods", Cupid tells Todd Ettinger that the gods and demigods of Classical Mythology did not go away after the fall of Ancient Greece and The Roman Empire. They continue to exist but take little interest in the affairs of mortals, considering that they no longer believe in them. However, some such as Bacchus live on Earth. Under the name Ed Bacchus, he owns a wine label called Olympus Wines.
• Death Seeker: In "Rendezvous in a Dark Place", Barbara LeMay became obsessed with death after her husband and all of her old friends died. She explains to Death that she was jealous because he had taken almost everyone that she cared about. As a result, Barbara decided that she would do everything that she could to be close to death, even attending the funerals of people whom she didn't know. She wants Death to take her as she doesn't fear him but sees the beauty, freedom and tranquility that he represents. Death initially refuses because her obsession with him means that there is no life in her but he reconsiders and takes her the following night. Barbara then becomes an agent of death herself.
• December–December Romance: Implied in "Dream Me a Life". After the elderly retirement home resident Roger Simpson Leeds helps Laurel Kincaid overcome her grief at her husband's death in her dream, he asks the spirit of her husband why he called him into the dream. Her husband replies, "I think you know." The next morning in the real world, Roger dons a nice suit and takes Laurel to breakfast.
• Deliberately Monochrome: In "Dream Me a Life", all of the dream sequences are in black and white.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • In "The Once and Future King", Mr. Harris, Elvis Presley's boss at the Crown Electric Company in Memphis, Tennessee, is disgusted that the Elvis Impersonator Gary Pitkin has a picture of a "nigger" on his undershirt. Gary, a time traveler from 1986, is wearing a Chuck Berry T-shirt.
  • In "The Junction", Ray Dobson, a miner trapped in a cave-in in 1912, is initially reluctant to let John Parker, a similarly trapped African-American miner from 1986, touch him. He later notes that he didn't know that there were any "colored" working on his shift. When John suggests that Ray talk to his union rep as he only makes $50 per month, Ray angrily tells him that the only union men in the mine are dead ones.
• Demonic Possession:
  • In "Time and Teresa Golowitz", the Prince of Darkness possesses Laura Schuppe so that he can talk to Bluestone at Mary Ellen Cosgrove's party in October 1948. He later takes possession of Nelson Baxley.
  • In "Voices in the Earth", the ghosts of the dead Earth possess Professor Donald Knowles and make him attack his ship's sensor web. Their hope is that he will be sent back to Central and that they will be able to accompany him. They are unable to travel through warp space themselves without being destroyed or driven insane.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: In the final scene of "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", it is revealed that Nino Lancaster is the master of demons.
• Depopulation Bomb: In "Quarantine", a nuclear holocaust occurred in 2043 when each side fired six missiles at the other. 80% of the world's population were wiped out and all of the major cities were destroyed. By 2347, Earth has a population of only 200,000.
• Desk Jockey: In "The Wall", Major Alex McAndrews agrees to risk his life and go through the Gate because he was recently told that he was too old to be a test pilot and hated the idea of being a desk jockey.
• Destination Defenestration: Discussed in "Act Break". Maury Winkler and Harry are writing a play in which an English aristocrat named Roger kills a woman named Ethel but they can't decide how he should do it. Harry suggests throwing her out the window. When Maury says that people don't die from being thrown out of first story windows, Harry thinks that she should fall into a swimming pool that is being renovated. They eventually agree that Roger should strangle Ethel.
• Determinator: In "Dead Woman's Shoes", Susan Montgomery is determined to seek revenge on her husband Kyle for murdering her. Her spirit survives in her shoes, which allows her to take over the body of whoever puts them on. Although Susan fails to kill Kyle while in control of Maddie Duncan, she later succeeds in doing so after a maid finds them in the trash and puts them on.
• Died on Their Birthday: In "Examination Day", on his twelfth birthday, Dickie Jordan wishes that he will do well on the government's mandatory intelligence test. After the test is conducted, he is found to be too intelligent and he is killed by the government.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In "Shadow Play", Adam Grant's recurring nightmare always ends with him being hanged. In both the short story "Traumerei" by Charles Beaumont and the original episode, he was killed in the electric chair.
• Dirty Communists: In "Red Snow", the vampires in the Siberian gulag hate the Soviet Union and everything that it stands for. They believe that Communism has brought nothing but pain, suffering and death to the Russian people and seek to destroy the USSR for the sake of humans and vampires alike.
• Dirty Cop: In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", Cassandra Fishbein threatens to the call the cops if the mob boss Nino Lancaster and his henchmen Gus and Bork don't leave her hairdressing salon. Nino advises against it as most of them work for him.
• Disability Superpower:
  • In "The Toys of Caliban", Toby Ross was born with a severe intellectual impairment which also allows him to manifest objects that he sees in pictures.
  • In "Love is Blind", the musician gained the ability to see the future after he was shot in the head by his lover's jealous husband and lost his sight and possibly his life.
• Disappeared Dad: In "Stranger in Possum Meadows", Danny Wilkins never knew his real father, who took off either while his mother was pregnant with him or shortly after he was born. His mother had a boyfriend who served as a surrogate father to him for several years but he eventually left too.
• Distinguishing Mark:
  • In "The Storyteller", Micah Frost falls from a tree and cuts his right cheek on a rock in 1933, leaving him with a prominent scar. In 1986, his former teacher Dorothy Livingston is able to recognize him as an adult because of this scar.
  • In "The Convict's Piano", the gangster Mickey Shaughnessy has a large scar on the right side of his face which makes his mouth look bigger when he smiles. He seemingly obtained it in a knife fight.
• Domestic Abuse:
  • In "Dead Woman's Shoes", Kyle Montgomery physically abused his wife Susan on a regular basis and eventually pushed her off the balcony to her death. He later claimed that it was an accident. When Susan's spirit takes over Maddie Duncan's body and returns to confront Kyle, he hits her once again.
  • In "Shelter Skelter", Harry Dobbs verbally abuses his wife Sally on a regular basis. He belittles her, orders her around and bullies her into going along with his wishes. Before she goes to Kansas City, the abuse turns physical as he grabs Sally roughly by the arm and warns her not to tell her sister Wendy about their fallout shelter.
  • In "Acts of Terror", Jack Simonson takes every opportunity that he can to physically abuse his wife Louise and has seemingly been doing so for a long time. He is also emotionally abusive and controlling as he refuses to let her open a package from her sister Susan until she has made his lunch, which is five minutes late. The package contains a porcelain Doberman and Louise soon discovers that her anger and hatred towards Jack causes a real Doberman to manifest and attack him.
• Dominatrix: Implied in "Ye Gods". Todd Ettinger's friend Peter offers to set him up with a woman that he knows who is into some strange things. Todd turns down the offer as he wants a more substantial relationship with a woman.
• Don't Fear the Reaper:
  • In "Welcome to Winfield", The Grim Reaper Chin Du Long decided to spare the people of Winfield from death as he took a liking to them. His successor Griffin St. George is an impatient, officious and often rude bureaucrat but far from evil. He eventually decides to let Matt Winnaker go but tells the townspeople that no one lives forever and that he will be back for them...in a century or so.
  • "Rendezvous in a Dark Place" plays with this in that Barbara LeMay doesn't fear Death, she actually finds beauty in it. But Death isn't interested in her...
• Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: In "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", Gus Rosenthal's father Lou hits him with his belt to punish him for shoplifting a comic book, which he has done several times before. However, Lou hates himself for doing it and breaks down in tears as soon as Gus leaves the room. His wife Sarita tries to console him by saying that it is the only way that Gus will learn.
• Doppelgänger: In "Shatterday", Peter Jay Novins accidentally dials his own number and ends up talking to his alter ego, who gradually takes over his life.
• "Double, Double" Title: "Button, Button".
• Downer Ending: Happens fairly regularly. Examples mentioned elsewhere on this page:
  • "The Beacon": The lighthouse gets its sacrifice.
  • "Burning Man": Doug and his aunt are trapped in a car with a genetically evil child.
  • "The Elevator": The two boys are killed by a giant spider.
  • "Examination Day": Do too well on the government test, get killed.
  • "Gramma": She takes over her own grandson's body.
  • "Need to Know": The insanity spreads throughout the entire town, and will probably end up going world-wide.
  • "Shadow Man": Take your pick: either there's more than one Shadow Man going around killing people, or Danny's turned on him.
  • "A Small Talent For War": Humanity's alien creators wanted warriors, we're a bunch of useless second-raters and all get exterminated.
  • "Something In The Walls": The main character is replaced with a doppleganger, who leaves her trapped inside the wall.
• Down the Rabbit Hole: In "The World Next Door", Barney Schlessinger finds a doorway to an Alternate Universe with an early 20th Century level of technology. In this universe, he is an extremely wealthy and world famous inventor whose creations can be found in every home. The alternate Barney uses the same doorway to travel to our universe, which he likes because of the peace and quiet that it affords him. The two Barneys switch places as each is envious of the other's life.
• Draft Dodging:
  • In "Dead Run", a man who dodged the draft and crossed the border to Canada during The Vietnam War is sent to Hell by the fundamentalist Dispatcher who has recently taken over the Celestial Bureaucracy.
  • In "The Road Less Traveled", Jeff McDowell was drafted in 1971 but went to college in Canada instead of going to Vietnam. His high school girlfriend and future wife Denise went with him. In an Alternate Universe, however, Jeff went to Vietnam and lost both of his legs.
• Dream Apocalypse: In "Shadow Play", the district attorney Mark Ritchie and the defense attorney Erin Jacobs become concerned that Adam Grant is telling the truth and they will cease to exist when he is executed as their reality is nothing more than his dream. It's actually worse in The Remake, since it's implied that unlike the original episode, where Grant was simply having the same nightmare every night, this is a nightmare Grant has yet to wake up from.
• Dream People: In "Shadow Play", several of the people in Adam Grant's Death Row nightmare are drawn from his real life. For instance, the priest Father Grant who visits him before his execution is his father, who has been dead for years in the real world. In the previous iteration of the dream, he was the judge. In the next, he is the foreman of the jury. The district attorney Mark Ritchie's wife Carol, who is eager to see Adam dead, is his sister, who has always hated him. Carol is the only character in the dream whose role never changes. Outside of his own life, he got his fellow prisoner Flash from a bad movie that he once saw.
• Dream Walker: In "Dream Me a Life", Roger Simpson Leeds is unwillingly drawn into Laurel Kincaid's dream by her late husband so that he can help her to come to terms with her overwhelming grief which caused her to enter a catatonic state.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In "Devil's Alphabet", Deaver commits suicide by shooting himself after losing everything that he owns in a card game in October 1896. On November 2, his ghost attends the meeting of the Devil's Alphabet Society with the six surviving members because of a bargain that they made at their last meeting before graduation in 1876. One year later, Andrew hangs himself from a high ceiling but it is unclear how he did so as no chair was found near his body. That night, Andrew's ghost appears to Grant at the meeting and Grant likewise hangs himself. On November 2, 1898, Cornelius and Frederick are the last two surviving members of the society as Brian and Eli were killed the previous year. Unable to face what awaits him at that night's meeting, Cornelius shoots himself.
  • In "Time and Teresa Golowitz", the Prince of Darkness tells Bluestone that the title character committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a bus after leaving Mary Ellen Cosgrove's party in October 1948. She was depressed because no one at the party even talked to her, a regular occurrence because of her unpopularity. At the Prince's urging, Bluestone manages to convince Teresa that she can get people to notice her through her excellent singing voice and promises to work with her in order to perfect it. This changes history so that Teresa becoming a famous singer with six $1,000,000 albums by 1987. She collaborated with Bluestone on at least one of them.
  • In "Memories", the law in the Alternate Universe allows people to commit suicide if they are not happy in their current lives. Some kill themselves because they can't handle the memories of the terrible pain and grief that they suffered in their past lives. Others do so in the hope that their next life will be better.
  • In "The Call", the struggling artist Mary Ann Lindeby committed suicide because of her overwhelming depression and loneliness. After her death, her spirit inhabits her last piece, a bronze sculpture of herself, in the Civic Art Gallery. She becomes concerned that Norman Blane may be planning to kill himself too as he feels just as hopeless as she did towards the end of her life.
  • In "Rendezvous in a Dark Place", Barbara LeMay tells Death that she considered overdosing on pills so that he would take her with him but that it seemed too forward.
  • In "Love is Blind", the man who killed his wife and blinded the musician by shooting them hanged himself in jail one week later.
• Drives Like Crazy:
  • In "Dead Run", the trucker Johnny Davis is a reckless driver who has gotten into four accidents in two years and can no longer get any insurance company to take a risk on him. His fellow trucker Pete gets him a job as one of the truckers who drive the condemned to Hell.
  • In "Nightsong", Simon Locke's tendency to drive recklessly resulted in him being killed in 1981 when he drove his motorcycle over a cliff. He had been going much too fast because he needed to clear his head as he was afraid of success and his relationship with Andrea Fields becoming serious.
  • In "The Crossing", Mark Cassidy's girlfriend Kelly was killed because of his careless driving. He is still haunted by the experience more than 20 years later.
• Drunk Driver:
  • In "Kentucky Rye", an alcoholic named Bob Spindler and his co-workers celebrate closing a big deal. As ever, Bob has too much to drink and becomes angry when several of his co-workers suggest driving him home or calling him a cab. Instead, he drives drunk, seemingly not for the first time, and runs another car off the road. Bob is injured in the process and seeks refuge in a tavern called the Kentucky Rye. The owner sells him the tavern for $1,600, the last $100 of which is contributed by a strange man. The next morning, Bob wakes up to find the tavern covered in cobwebs and dust. There is no one there except for the strange man. It turns out that the man is the driver of the other car, who was killed when Bob ran him off the road. Bob himself was killed in the accident and is trapped in the Ironic Hell of a deserted bar for all eternity.
  • In "The Once and Future King", Gary Pitkin is driven off the road by a drunk driver and crashes his own car as a result. When he wakes up, he finds that he has been transported back in time to Memphis, Tennessee on July 3, 1954.
  • In "The Hellgramite Method", Dr. Eugene Murrich's wife and two children were killed by a drunk driver while they were crossing the street. The pain that he suffered after their deaths led Dr. Murrich to create the Hellgramite Method, which involves secretly placing a Hellgramite worm in the stomach of alcoholics so that it can absorb their liquor.
• Dumb Blonde: In "Tooth and Consequences", Dr. Myron Mandel tells the blonde and beautiful Lydia Bixby that he is going to kill himself and to have a nice day. Her only reaction is to wish him a nice day too.
• Dutch Angle:
  • In "The Shadow Man", several are used when Eric confronts Danny Hayes in MacGyver Park and when the Shadow Man attacks Danny shortly afterwards.
  • In "A Day in Beaumont", one is used whenever Dr. Kevin Carlson and Faith discover that someone is an Insectoid Alien wearing a Human Disguise.
• Duty That Transcends Death: In "Devil's Alphabet", Grant suggests that he and the other six members of the Devil's Alphabet Society meet every year on November 2 whether they are alive or dead. Although he is entirely serious, the others agree to it without much thought as they don't take it seriously. In 1896, the society discovers that they are being held to the occult bargain that they made 20 years earlier. Shortly after committing suicide, the unseen ghost of Deaver makes his presence at the meeting known by signing his name on the register and drinking the wine poured for him. Over the next two years, five of the other members die from various causes until Frederick is the Sole Survivor. Frederick proposes to dissolve the society so that the dead may rest. Although Grant initially objects, the motion is passed unanimously.
• Dwindling Party: In "Devil's Alphabet", Deaver is the first member of the Devil's Alphabet Society to die when he shoots himself in October 1896. On November 2, 1897, Andrew hangs himself but may have been compelled to do so. That night, his ghost attends the meeting of the society and frightens Grant so much that he also hangs himself. After the meeting, the horse pulling Brian and Eli's carriage goes out of control. The carriage then spontaneously catches fire and crashes, killing them both. The next year, Cornelius commits suicide by shooting himself. This leaves Frederick as the last surviving member of the Devil's Alphabet Society. Seeking to bring an end to his deceased friends' torment and spare himself the same fate, Frederick proposes that the society be dissolved and their agreement to meet every year irrespective of death be rescinded. The others agree, though reluctantly in Grant's case.
• Dystopia:
  • In "Examination Day", child prodigies such as Dickie Jordan are killed for scoring too well on government tests.
  • "To See the Invisible Man", possibly; Mitchell Chaplin undergoes a lengthy government-mandated Cool and Unusual Punishment aimed at correcting his morality rather than due to a specific crime, and there are enforcement drones buzzing around everywhere, but the society as a whole seems peaceful and prosperous.
  • In "Room 2426", Dr. Martin Decker lives in an oppressive society where people are routinely arrested for committing intellectual crimes against the State such as wrong thinking or being an outsider and are taken to the titular room to be tortured.

E

• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • "Acts of Terror" ends with Louise Simonson putting her abusive husband Jack in his place and leaving him.
  • In "The Trunk", Willy Gardner learns the hard way that a trunk that grants his every wish causes more problems than it solves as it leads to him gaining many false friends, three of whom attack him and try to steal the money that they think he is hiding. He hides from them in the trunk but finds that he is trapped inside. Sometime later, a woman who has gained possession of the trunk idly wishes that she could find a decent guy to spend the rest of her life with. The trunk then opens to reveal Willy, whose loneliness is finally over.
• Earth That Was: In "Voices in the Earth", humanity evacuated Earth 1,000 years earlier because its biosphere had been destroyed by centuries of pollution. There is no life on the planet, not even amino acids in the oceans. A ship commanded by Jacinda Carlyle is sent to Earth to strip mine its few remaining resources. Except for historians such as Professor Donald Knowles, few humans have any affection for their ancestral home. Archer notes that its name comes from one of the dead languages.
• Eiffel Tower Effect:
  • "A Small Talent for War" opens with a shot of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.
  • "Grace Note" opens with a shot of the Statue of Liberty, followed by one of the Empire State Building.
  • "The Last Defender of Camelot" opens with a shot of Big Ben chiming. Even so, a subtitle indicates that it is London a few seconds later.
  • "Time and Teresa Golowitz" opens with a shot of the Manhattan skyline.
• Elder Abuse: In "Take My Life...Please!", Billy Diamond, a wealthy stand-up comedian, threw his mother out of his house as he found her annoying. She was forced to move back to her old and poorly maintained house in Philadelphia where she died of hypothermia because of the lack of heating.
• Electro Convulsive Therapy Is Torture: In "Room 2426", Dr. Martin Decker is hooked up to numerous electrodes in the titular torture chamber in an attempt to get him to divulge the location of the notebook containing his bacteria research.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: In "Father & Son Game", the first sign that Darius Stephens' new Cyborg body is failing is when he begins to repeat his words. The problem grows worse over the next two weeks.
• Elixir of Life: In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Merlin has Lancelot give him an elixir of life after he awakens from his 1,000 years of sleep so that he can regain his strength. After Merlin removes the enchantment granting Lancelot immortality, Lancelot drinks the rest of the elixir as he has learned caution in his extremely long life and suspected that Merlin might betray him.
• Elvis Impersonator: In "The Once and Future King", Gary Pitkin is a very talented Elvis impersonator who is trying to make it as a musician in his own right. He mostly performs for disinterested audiences in seedy hotel lounges and is extremely reluctant to take his act to Las Vegas as it killed the real Elvis Presley. He is eventually sent back in time to July 3, 1954 and takes Elvis' place after accidentally killing him.
• Embarrassing Nickname:
  • In "20/20 Vision", the uptight, highly committed loan officer Warren Cribbens is embarrassed when he overhears Sandy refer to him as "the human calculator."
  • In "Cat and Mouse", Elaine refers to Andrea Moffatt as "the Mouse" because of her shy, mousy demeanor. She also compares her to a hamster and a gerbil.
• Emergency Broadcast:
  • In "A Little Peace and Quiet", a live announcer, trembling through an EBS radio alert, fails in his attempts to keep calm as nuclear war breaks out between the Soviet Union and the United States.
  • In "Shelter Skelter", Harry Dobbs and Nick Gatlin watch a television report about an escalating crisis in the Middle East. According to the report, the President and First Lady have left the White House by military helicopter and Russian cities are being evacuated. They later hear a radio report stating that the aircraft carrier Nimitz is in position in the Gulf of Sidra, the armed forces have been placed on red alert and an emergency Cabinet meeting is taking place at an unknown location. It is also reported that the President has issued a statement saying that he would not hesitate to use force to prevent the situation in the Middle East from escalating any further.
• Emotional Powers: In "Acts of Terror", Louise Simonson has been subjected to terrible physical and emotional abuse by her husband Jack for years. After she receives a porcelain Doberman from her sister Susan for her birthday, her long repressed anger manifests in the form of a Doberman that tries to attack Jack. The angrier Louise gets, the more vicious the Doberman becomes. When she tells Jack that she hates him, the Doberman mauls him, injuring his face and arm. Louise is able to call the dog off and it is absorbed back into her. After she does so, she learns to accept her anger and finally musters up the courage to leave Jack. When Jack threatens to follow her wherever she goes, Louise retorts that he won't and the Doberman appears in the seat next to her. She has seemingly learned to control her ability to manifest the dog.
• EMP: In "A Day in Beaumont", Dr. Kevin Carlson's watch stops functioning as soon as the Flying Saucer crashes in the vicinity. He immediately attributes it to magnetic interference.
• Empathic Healer: In "Quarantine", John uses his ability to absorb another person's pain on Matthew Foreman during the surgery to remove his cancerous tissues.
• Empty Shell:
  • In "Dream Me a Life", Laurel Kincaid has been in a catatonic state since the death of her husband ten years earlier. Her husband's spirit contacts Roger Simpson Leeds, who is mourning his wife Rachel, so that he can help Laurel accept his death and get on with her life. After Roger does so in Laurel's dream, she speaks for the first time in a decade.
  • In "Our Selena is Dying", Diane Brockman, whose youth and identity have been stolen by her mother Martha, was traumatized by the experience and spends all of her time staring out the window. Dr. Burrell is able to bring her out of it when he tells her that he is aware of what has happened to her.
• The End of the World as We Know It: In "Paladin of the Lost Hour", the entire universe will be engulfed in darkness if Gaspar's watch strikes 12 o'clock.
• Energy Beings:
  • In "Chameleon", an energy being hitches a ride on the space shuttle Discovery and is unknowingly brought back to Earth. It has the ability to absorb any object or person into itself and transform itself into either them or anything from their memories. For instance, after absorbing Crew Chief Brady Simmons, it imitates both him and his wife Kate. Later, it absorbs the weapons expert Dr. Vaughn Heilman and changes into a nuclear bomb in order to coerce the NASA scientists studying it into releasing it.
  • In "What Are Friends For?", Mike is a being of light who appeared to Alex Mattingly and later his son Jeff as a young boy with whom they could play when they were lonely. Before he leaves, Mike tells Alex that he has "always existed in this place" and will always do so.
• Enslaved Tongue: In "The Trance", a strange voice speaks through Leonard Randall's mouth and ruins his scam about channeling the warrior Delos.
• Episode on a Plane: In "Private Channel", Keith Barnes learns from his telepathic Walkman that Mr. Williams plans to blow up the plane on which they are both passengers.
• Equivalent Exchange:
  • In "The World Next Door", Barney Schlessinger and his counterpart from the Retro Universe switch places as each wants what the other has in life. The Barney of our universe has longed to be a famous and successful inventor for years. He is delighted when he meets the alternate version of his wife Katie, who admires "his" inventions greatly as opposed to his own Katie who belittles him for them. The alternate Barney has grown tired of the pressure that comes with fame and people's expectations for the next great invention so he settles in our universe, where he can live in blissful anonymity and doesn't have to invent anything else if he doesn't want to.
  • In "The Convict's Piano", Ricky Frost is able to escape his unjust prison sentence in 1986 when he plays "Someone to Watch Over Me" on the old piano and is transported back in time to 1928. He realizes that he has picked the right song and the right time because he remains in the past after he stops playing the piano, in contrast to his previous trips to 1899 and 1917. The gangster Mickey Shaughnessy is transported forward in time to 1986 when he plays "S' Wonderful". He is trapped 58 years in his future as the piano is subsequently destroyed.
  • In "Something in the Walls", the creatures that live in walls are able to enter Sharon Miles' room at the Crest Ridge Sanitarium by coming through a crack formed by a leak. They absorb Sharon into the wall and one of them assumes her form and takes over her life.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • In "Dead Woman's Shoes", Maddie Duncan's first scene involves her walking down the street and immediately stepping out of the way of everyone in her path without saying a word, indicating that she is very shy, mousy and withdrawn.
  • In the first scene of "Red Snow", KGB Colonel Ilyanov arrests a young dissident named Ivanovich for possessing banned books and orders the guards to send him to The Gulag. It turns out that Ivanovich is well known for his contact with Western agents and this is not his first offense. As such, his crimes warranted the death penalty. A high-ranking minister overrules Ilyanov's order and has Ivanovich put to death. Ilyanov is upset when he hears this but does not say anything.
  • "The Last Defender of Camelot" opens with Lancelot being approached by Tom and two other punks who intend to take him to Morgan le Fay. As Lancelot appears to be in his early 60s, they don't think that he will put up much of a fight. However, he proves to be extremely agile and, using his cane as a weapon, effortlessly defeats all three of them in less than a minute.
  • In the first scene of "Acts of Terror", Louise Simonson is shown to be a timid, abused woman as she nervously tries to hide the most recent of the many bruises given to her by her husband Jack, telling the mailman that she had an accident. When she goes back inside, Jack verbally abuses her because his lunch is five minutes late.
  • "Cat and Mouse" opens with the shy and timid Andrea Moffatt reading a Romance Novel while avoiding any meaningful human contact.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • In "The Shadow Man", Eric enjoys bullying Danny Hayes and has every intention of beating him to a pulp after Danny challenges him to a fight in MacGyver Park. However, when he sees the Shadow Man, who has already put several people in hospital, he tells Danny to run before he runs away himself.
  • In "Cold Reading", Nelson Westbrook is more focused on how the sound effects coming to life will boost ratings rather than how it's inconveniencing the actors. When he discovers that the events later in the story, such as a gun firing in the studio, could actually endanger the actors, he rushes to change the script.
• Evil-Detecting Dog:
  • In "Teacher's Aide", Miss Peters' dog Muffin barks at her after she is possessed by the spirit of a gargoyle because he can sense that there is something very wrong with her.
  • In "Stranger in Possum Meadows", the Wilkins' dog Biff barks at Scout, who is an alien who intends to take Danny back to his planet for study. Scout uses his power over animals to quieten Biff and later takes the dog as a specimen. Although he eventually releases Danny, Biff is not so lucky.
• Evil Old Folks: In "Gramma", a young boy named Georgie has to spend a night watching over his monstrous bed-ridden witch-grandmother.
• Exact Words:
  • In "I of Newton", a math professor named Sam accidentally summons the (or possibly just a) Devil, and the two play a game for his soul—Sam gets to ask three questions about the Devil's powers, then pose a final question or task that he must perform; if the demon can't answer the question or do the task, Sam retains ownership. The trope first shows up when, after hearing the rules, Sam asks "Really?"; the Devil counts that as one of the three questions, as the conditions had already been placed. After thinking over the next questions carefully and learning that the Devil can quite literally go anywhere (including alternate realities) and always make it back to where he started from, Sam invokes the trope by using what would ordinarily be a metaphor as the task:
    Sam: ...get lost.
  • In "A Small Talent for War", aliens show up before the United Nations and announce that humanity is just one of many races they've seeded across the galaxy. They've come to judge Earth and are extremely disappointed with the level of belligerence they find, remarking that the human race has a small talent for war. If they can't improve in twenty-four hours, the aliens will blow up the whole planet. Every nation in the world immediately drops its conflicts, and representatives work around the clock, coming up with a comprehensive blueprint for total nuclear disarmament and world peace just before the deadline. The alien in charge of the experiment reads the plan and starts laughing. He specifically said that his race was unhappy with humanity's level of belligerence and small talent for war—but he didn't specify why they were unhappy. Turns out that they're a species of incredibly proud warriors, and the human race isn't warlike enough for them. Cue the Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
• Expy: In "Cold Reading", the UBS radio adventure series Dick Noble, African Explorer is based on Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, which ran on CBS and later NBC and ABC from 1933 to 1951. In the final scene, it is mentioned that next week's episode will pit Dick Noble against invaders from Mars, a reference to Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
• Extra Eyes: In "The Uncle Devil Show", Joey uses the magic that he learns from the Tim Ferret and Friends video to give his pet poodle Ben four eyes.

F

• Face Death with Dignity: In "The Cold Equations", Marilyn Lee Cross is devastated when she learns that she must be jettisoned into space because of the Emergency Dispatch Ship's precise fuel requirements. However, she is extremely dignified and even seems resigned to her fate when the time comes.
• Fake Faith Healer: In "The Trance", Don becomes the business manager of a supposed faith healer in Panama after the strange voice in control of Leonard Randall exposes their claims about being able to channel the ancient warrior Delos as a scam.
• Fake Town: In "A Day in Beaumont", the titular town turns out to be a training ground for aliens to prepare them for the invasion of Earth.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: In "Shelter Skelter," a Crazy Survivalist builds a state-of-the-art fallout shelter under his house in preparation for World War III, complete with radiation gauges and a communication antenna; when the end apparently arrives, he and his friend are safe there... but because they didn't retract the antenna before the blast, their communication equipment is useless, and the survivalist's too scared of violent scavengers to call for help when he hears voices upstairs. Also, for some reason, the gauges are still reporting lethal radiation levels weeks after radioactivity should have dropped to safe levels. It turns out that the apocalypse never happened: a nuclear accident at the nearby air force base leveled the town, forcing the US government to erect a concrete dome over the ruins in order to contain the radiation. The "scavengers" he heard were a survey team looking for survivors to evacuate before the dome was built, but because our Crazy Survivalist didn't call out to them, nobody knows he's down there - and without the antenna, no-one ever will. The man has been, for all intents and purposes, Buried Alive.
• False Friend:
  • In "The Shadow Man", Danny Hayes knows that the Shadow Man will never hurt him as the person under whose bed he sleeps. His apparent bravery in going over to Lianna Ames' house at night earns him many false friends, including Lianna and various popular students who used to either ignore him or make fun of him. In the process, Danny ignores Peter, his one true friend, and takes no action to prevent the Shadow Man from hurting anyone else.
  • In "The Trunk", Willy Gardner finds an old abandoned trunk in a room of the Hotel Winchester, of which he has the manager, and soon discovers that it can grant his every wish. He uses it to fill his small room with expensive clothes, pieces of electronic equipment and bottles of wine and invites the hotel guests and the locals Candy, Danny, Rocco and Cap to a party. He comes to think of them as his new friends but it does not take him long to realize that they are merely using him because of his apparent newfound wealth. The only person who truly likes or respects him is an elderly guest named Mrs. Kudaba.
• Family Versus Career: In "Little Boy Lost", the photojournalist Carol Shelton must decide whether to accept her dream assignment abroad or marry her long-time boyfriend Greg and have children. The day after the job offer, she meets a strange boy named Kenny at the zoo and she assumes that he was sent by a modeling agency to work with her. The two of them spend the day together and quickly form a bond. The next day, Carol breaks it to Greg that she has decided to take the assignment. Immediately afterwards, she finds Kenny at her apartment and he pleads with her to remain in the US. Confused, she asks him how he knew about her conversation with Greg and where she lived but Kenny runs away. He mysteriously vanishes before Carol can catch up with him. The following morning, Carol sees Kenny in the park and questions him once again. She discovers that Kenny is the son that she would have had if she had chosen to turn down the assignment and marry Greg. Carol explains that she does want children but there are other things that she wants to do first. Kenny says that she might have a son one day but it won't be him. He then fades away, calling Carol "Mom" just before he disappears forever.
• Famous Ancestor: In "Profile in Silver", Professor Joseph Fitzgerald, a time traveling historian from 2172, is a descendant of John F. Kennedy.
• Famous, Famous, Fictional: In "The Convict's Piano", the notorious 1920s Chicago gangster Mickey Shaughnessy is compared to Dutch Schultz and Al Capone.
• Fantastic Time Management: In "A Little Peace and Quiet", a harried housewife named Penny finds a magic sundial pendant that allows her to stop and restart time. She uses it to literally make time for herself, enjoying a peaceful breakfast or leisurely shopping for groceries while time is stopped for everyone else. Everything is perfect until nuclear war breaks out and she stops time while a missile is 10 feet above her head. She will have to choose between dying with everyone else and living her life forever trapped between two instants of time.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: In "Her Pilgrim Soul", Nola Granville's father actively discouraged her from reading literature and discussing or even thinking about politics. Whenever she tried to discuss these topics with him, he merely looked at her and told her that she was beautiful, implying that she should not bother with such things as she is a woman. He disowned and disinherited her when she decided to pursue poetry as a career and married a Jewish lawyer named Robert Goldstone.
• Fantasy Keepsake:
  • In "A Matter of Minutes", Michael and Maureen Wright find the blue wrench thrown at them in a phone booth. It belongs to one of the faceless laborers who construct every minute as a separate world.
  • In "The Convict's Piano", Ricky Frost becomes concerned that he only imagined being transported back in time to 1899 and 1917 by the old prison piano. However, he realizes that it all really happened when he finds the matchbox that he got in the Shamrock Club in 1917 in his pocket.
  • In "Extra Innings", Ed Hamner is sent back in time to 1910 by the Monte Hanks baseball card given to him by Paula. While there, he is struck in the face by a ball. When he returns to 1988, he knows that the experience was real because his nose is still injured. He also has a large bruise on his left leg from sliding into second base.
• Fate Worse than Death: In "Welcome to Winfield", The Grim Reaper Griffin St. George tells the people of Winfield that his boss is not the easiest guy in the world to work for and that things can still hurt you after you're dead.
• Fauxtastic Voyage: In "Room 2426", Dr. Martin Decker's cellmate Joseph convinces him that he can transport himself using the power of his mind to a safe location. Martin loses consciousness and later wakes up to find himself in a resistance safehouse being tended to by Joseph, who explains that the first time teletransporting is difficult for everyone. Now that he is free, Martin intends to destroy the notebooks containing the information on how to create a bioweapon that the State is seeking. However, Joseph tells him that it is too dangerous for him to go out and gets Martin to reveal the notebooks' location to him. After Joseph leaves, Martin pulls back a curtain and discovers what were seemingly the sounds of the street below are coming from a pair of speakers. He then realizes that it was all an elaborate trick and he is still a prisoner.
• Feet-First Introduction: In "Dead Woman's Shoes", the first that the audience sees of Maddie Duncan is her feet as she walks to the thrift store where she works. She continually steps out of people's way as she does so. The camera pans to reveal her face when she arrives in the store.
• Fictional Counterpart:
  • In "Wish Bank", the Department of Magical Venues, an infuriating Vast Bureaucracy, is a Parody of the Department of Motor Vehicles.
  • In "Cold Reading", Dick Noble, African Explorer is broadcast on the radio network Unified Broadcasting System (UBS), a reference to Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) which broadcast The Twilight Zone.
• Finger-Snap Lighter: In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Morgan le Fay snaps her fingers to light her cigarette after Lancelot refuses to do so, telling her that chivalry is dead.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: In "Nightsong", Andrea Fields has never gotten over her tumultuous relationship with Simon Locke, who cheated on her and often disappeared for weeks at a time when inspiration for his music struck. She still loves Simon after everything that he put her through and these mixed feelings mean that it is impossible for her to pursue a new relationship. Andrea had a very short relationship with her fellow DJ Ace Campbell but she broke it off before it could get too serious. Simon returns after an absence of five years and eventually reveals that he died in a motorcycle accident shortly after the last time that he saw her. He wants Andrea to be happy so he apologizes for mistreating her and tells her that she should let him go.
• First Friend: In "A Message from Charity", Peter Wood skipped two grades when he was younger and therefore found it very difficult to make friends. When Charity breaks off their telepathic contact, he tearfully tells her that she was the first real friend that he ever had. The closing narration makes it clear that they were also each other's First Love.
• Five-Finger Discount:
  • In "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", the young Gus Rosenthal often stole comic books and toy soldiers, leading his father Lou to hit him with his belt to teach him a lesson. Even so, he was going to steal another toy soldier the next day but stopped when he noticed his older self looking at him.
  • In "Song of the Younger World", Tanner Smith was forced to pick people's pockets as he had no money for food. As a result, he was sent to the House of Refuge Reformatory for Wayward Boys.
• The Flapper: In "The Convict's Piano", the gangster Mickey Shaughnessy's girlfriend Ellen is a flapper who is seen on his arm at a party in 1928.
• Flash Sideways:
  • In "The World Next Door", Barney Schlessinger has been having what he thinks are dreams in which he is a famous inventor who lives in a more technologically primitive age. After finding a doorway in his basement, he arrives in a Retro Universe which resembles the early 1900s. While there, he learns that he had in fact been seeing the life of his Alternate Self and vice versa.
  • In "The Road Less Traveled", Jeff McDowell begins experiencing what he thinks are hallucinations about being attacked by the Viet Cong during The Vietnam War. He attributes them to Survivor's Guilt as a result of dodging the draft in 1971 but he later discovers that they are the memories of his counterpart from an Alternate Universe who fought in the war. The two Jeffs hold hands, allowing the alternate Jeff to experience the happy moments from his counterpart's life that he missed out on such as his wedding to Denise, their honeymoon and the birth of their daughter Megan. The Jeff of our universe is willing to receive further memories of Vietnam so that the alternate Jeff can see the life that could have been his.
• Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter: In the episode "Shelter Skelter," Crazy Survivalist Harry Dobbs builds a state-of-the-art fallout shelter in his basement, believing it will allow him and his family to survive the inevitable nuclear war - though his obsession ends up driving his wife away. After seeing a news report suggesting that World War III might be imminent, Harry goes upstairs to call his wife, though she dismisses his call as him Crying Wolf... and in that moment, a nuclear detonation lights up the town. Harry immediately runs back downstairs, frantically counting down his remaining time aloud as furniture bursts into flames around him, and though the blast wave knocks him over, he's able to get himself and his friend Nick into the shelter without sustaining injury. Unfortunately for Harry, it wasn't nuclear war: it was just an accident at the local air force base that levelled the town and spread no further. Doubly unfortunately, the ruins are eventually encased in a concrete dome to prevent radiation from spreading, leaving Harry and Nick effectively buried alive.
• Fling a Light into the Future: In "The Star", the survey ship Magellan discovers a vault on the outermost planet of a solar system which was destroyed by its sun going nova in 3120 BCE. It was created by a civilization that lived on one of the other planets in order to preserve their history, scientific knowledge, art, literature and music. They did this so that their legacy could survive even if they themselves could not.
• Flying Car: At the end of "Welcome to Winfield", The Grim Reaper Griffin St. George's car rises above the ground and he flies back to Heaven Above.
• Flying Saucer:
  • In the final scene of "Cold Reading", Nelson Westbrook and the cast of Dick Noble, African Explorer believe nothing else will materialize in their radio studio as they have reached the end of the script. However, the announcer reads out a promo for the following week's episode in which Dick Noble fights invaders from Mars. A flying saucer immediately crashes into the studio.
  • In "A Day in Beaumont", Dr. Kevin Carlson and Faith witness a flying saucer crash in Willoughby, five miles outside of Beaumont. Upon investigating, they discover that it belongs to a race of Insectoid Aliens.
  • In "A Saucer of Loneliness", a small flying saucer comes to Earth in order to deliver a message to an extremely lonely human. The recipient of the message is a middle-aged woman named Margaret.
• Forced Transformation: In "Cat and Mouse", Guillaume de Marchaux was cursed by an angry husband to live forever in the form of a cat during the day, only being able to turn into a man again at night.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In "A Little Peace and Quiet", while on the phone to her friend Fran, Penny says that it is World War III in her house as her children are bickering and making a lot of noise. She later ignores the radio and television reports of the deteriorating arms talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. A nuclear war breaks out shortly afterwards.
  • In "The Once and Future King", the Elvis Impersonator Gary Pitkin tells his manager Sandra that he may look like Elvis Presley but that doesn't mean that he has to make all of the same mistakes that Elvis did. She says that Elvis once pulled her up on stage and invited her to his dressing room, where he told her that he wasn't the King. Gary is later sent back in time and assumes Elvis' identity after accidentally killing him. He proceeds to live out Elvis' life and does everything the same way as he remembers. Gary reveals that he isn't the real Elvis to a younger Sandra in the 1970s but she does not believe him.
  • In "Nightsong", Andrea Fields reminds her ex-boyfriend Simon Locke that he planned to sell his van for more studio recording time but that he crashed it because of his reckless driving. It turns out that Simon is a ghost and that he died five years earlier when he was driving his motorcycle too fast on a dirt road and drove over the edge of a cliff.
  • In "The After Hours", Marsha Cole is dressed very similarly to the mannequins in the department store Satler's. She later describes her landlord as "a real doll." It turns out that Marsha is an animate mannequin who had forgotten her true nature after spending a month in the real world.
• For Science!: In "Room 2426", the theoretical biochemist Dr. Martin Decker has developed a new strain of bacteria which he had hoped to use to eliminate famine. However, the State intends to use it as a bioweapon to completely destroy its enemies, potentially wiping out millions of lives, but they cannot do so without the notebooks that Martin has hidden. Martin tells his torturer Dr. Ostroff that he believes that new discoveries are innately valuable and it had never occurred to him that his discovery could be used against humans.
• Fountain of Youth: In "Aqua Vita", Christie Copperfield learns of the bottled water company Aqua Vita from her friend and co-worker Shauna Allen. By drinking it on a daily basis, a person can look years younger than their actual age. At first, Christie feels wonderful as she has gotten her confidence back and the ratings for her news show are up. However, she soon discovers that missing even one daily glass of Aqua Vita causes her to age rapidly and the only way to reverse it is to drink some more. This becomes increasingly difficult as time goes on because each bottle costs $5,000. After the Aqua Vita runs out, Christie looks as if she is in her 70s. Shauna, who is seven years older and has been taking Aqua Vita for longer, appears to be over 80 when her own supply runs out.
• Frame-Up: In "The Convict's Piano", Mickey Shaughnessy framed Eddie O'Hara for murder in 1928 because he was his rival for Ellen's love.
• Freudian Excuse: In "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium", the reason the titular David Wong lacks compassion is because it's just that: he's literally lost his compassion. Mostly it had to do with racist incidents, but the one that set off his bitterness was when he read about the murder of Vincent Chin.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: In "Street of Shadows", the desperate homeless man Steve Cranston breaks into the millionaire Frederick Perry's house in order to rob him. When Perry discovers him, Steve tries to reason with him but Perry shoots him. The next morning, Steve wakes up in Perry's bed to find that the two of them have swapped lives and identities but have kept their physical bodies. For instance, Steve looks in the mirror and sees his own reflection and his image has replaced Perry's on photographs and his driving license. When he confronts his wife Elaine and daughter Lisa at Mercy Hospital, they recognize him only as the man who shot their husband and father and put him in a coma. Steve uses the opportunity of being Perry to save the 8th Street homeless shelter where he and his family live by buying out its mortgage and to have the charges against him dropped. After he does so, he and Perry switch back.
• From Bad to Worse: The situation in the radio studio in "Cold Reading" as all the jungle-themed adventure-show perils come to actual life; Nelson Westbrook has to desperately re-write the show while in progress to head off even worse disasters, including an elephant stampede, an earthquake and a plane crash.
• Functional Magic: In "The Uncle Devil Show", the title character teaches Joey how to perform actual magic through the Tim Ferret and Friends video. Joey is able to make cockroaches come out of a vase (though he meant for flowers to appear), give his poodle Ben four eyes, give his oblivious parents the heads of a lizard and a wolf, create a fantasy world and turn his toy dinosaur Binky into a real Tyrannosaurus rex.
• The Fundamentalist: In "Song of the Younger World", Mordecai Hawkline is a fanatical Christian who attempts to force his daughter Amy into becoming his idea of the perfect young woman. He later uses Scripture as a justification to try and murder her lover Tanner Smith.
• Funny Background Event: Not quite the background, but a lot of the humor in "I of Newton" comes from the demon's ever-changing Fun T-Shirt: "Hell is a Summer Festival," "Hell is a City Much Like Newark," "Over 2,000,000,000 Served," "Gehenna: More Than a Place, a Way of Life" and "Let's Do Damnation."
• The Future Is Shocking: In "The Junction", Ray Dobson, a miner from 1912, is amazed by the 1986 miner John Parker's digital watch, the flashlight on his helmet and his lighter. Ray's reaction to these items helps John to realize that he has been sent back in time.
• Future Me Scares Me: In "The Girl I Married", Ira and Valerie Richman are visited by the spirits of their late '60s hippie selves in 1987. These younger versions are very disturbed that their older selves have become boring, corporate sellouts and think that they have betrayed all of their ideals in order to make money. The younger Valerie tells the older Ira that he is a "stone drag" and reminds him that they used to laugh at people like him while the younger Ira thinks that they have wasted their lives.
• The Future Will Be Better: In "Profile in Silver", after admitting that he is a time traveler from 2172, Professor Joseph Fitzgerald tells John F. Kennedy that his greatest dreams have been fulfilled. By the 22nd Century, humanity has eliminated tyranny, war and poverty and has gone to the stars.

G

• Gangbangers:
  • In "Teacher's Aide", the Inner City School where Miss Peters teaches English has at least two gangs, one of which is the Furies, who frequently get into knife fights with each other at the slightest provocation.
  • In "Paladin of the Lost Hour", two members of a youth gang mug Gaspar while he is visiting his wife Minna's grave but Billy Kinetta manages to fight them off before Gaspar is badly hurt.
• Gang of Bullies:
  • In "The Shadow Man", several boys, led by Eric, ambush Danny Hayes on his way home. They frighten him by wearing monster costumes and carrying plastic chainsaw toys as he has the reputation of being the biggest chicken in Willow Creek.
  • In "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", the young Gus Rosenthal is chased by a gang of bullies led by Jack Wheeldon but he runs into his future self and the bullies immediately leave as they think that the older Gus might be a G-man. Later, the bullies attack the young Gus when he is on the swings and begin to beat him up until the present day Gus intervenes.
• Gender Flip:
  • In "Dead Woman's Shoes", Maddie Duncan is possessed by the spirit of a murdered woman named Susan Montgomery when she puts on her expensive high heels. In the original episode "Dead Man's Shoes", the murdered gangster Dane's personality takes control of a homeless man named Nate Bledsoe when he puts on his two-tone black and white shoes.
  • In "To See the Invisible Man", Mitchell Chaplin meets an invisible woman who refuses to talk to him during his own sentence of invisibility. He later acknowledges her presence once he has completed his sentence. In the short story by Robert Silverberg, the other invisible person was a man.
  • In "Shadow Play", Adam Grant's defense attorney Erin Jacobs goes to the district attorney Mark Ritchie over her concerns that Adam may be telling the truth about all of them being characters in his recurring nightmare about being executed. In the original episode, the matter was first raised by the newspaper editor Paul Carson.
  • In "The Cold Equations", the Ship's Record clerk is a woman. In the short story by Tom Godwin, the clerk is a man.
• Generation Xerox: In "The Wall", Major Alex McAndrews joined the military in order to defend the US and its citizens, as his father and grandfather did before him.
• Giant Spider: In "The Elevator", a spider ate the super food developed by Roger and Will's father in order to solve world hunger. It then killed the smaller but still giant cat and dog and possibly the giant rats. When Roger and Will call the elevator in their father's factory, the giant spider grabs them with its pedipalps and kills them.
• Glamour Failure: In "A Day in Beaumont", Dr. Kevin Carlson determines that Sheriff Haskin and Major Whitmore are Insectoid Aliens when someone takes their photograph with a flash camera and their true appearance is briefly superimposed over their human disguises. He speculates that it has something to do with the light frequency. The aliens are also unable to bend their little fingers when they are in human form.
• A Glitch in the Matrix:
  • In "Dreams for Sale", Jenny is having a lovely picnic in the country with her husband Paul and their twin daughters when she starts to notice unusual things happening. Paul opens the same bottle of champagne twice. After she takes a chicken out of the picnic basket, it suddenly reappears inside of it. Other events begin to repeat themselves such as Paul asking her if she is okay three times in the space of a few seconds. Jenny then wakes up to find herself connected to a Dreamatron, a fully interactive dream machine which had been running the "Country Picnic" simulation for her.
  • In "Shadow Play", Adam Grant has had the same nightmare about being executed many times so he knows that it is a dream but he notes the telltale signs to the district attorney Mark Ritchie. Most notably, he was sentenced and is due to be executed on the same day (a Sunday), which would not happen in reality. Although she is a character in the dream herself, Adam's defense attorney Erin Jacobs begins to notice them too. She points out to Ritchie that there were no press or spectators present in the court room during the sentencing even though it was a big murder trial. Later, she discovers that neither Ritchie nor his wife Carol have any idea how long they have been married and don't even remember getting married.
• Glowing Eyes: In the final scene of "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", Nino Lancaster's eyes glow, revealing that he is the master of demons.
• God Couple: In "Ye Gods", Cupid and Megaera were a couple in the late 19th or early 20th century until he cheated on her with a mortal woman named Drusilla. After Cupid convinced Jupiter to turn Drusilla into a demigod, Megaera turned her into a tree frog. Todd Ettinger realizes that the only way that he can either meet the woman with whom Cupid has made him fall in love or have his intense love for her lifted is to help Cupid and Megaera patch up their differences. When he lures the two of them into his office and traps them there with a smell given to him by Baachus, Cupid apologizes and they resume their relationship. As a reward, Cupid arranges for Todd to run into the woman once again.
• Going Cold Turkey: In "The Hellgramite Method", The Alcoholic Miley Judson decides to go cold turkey in order to force the Hellgramite worm in his stomach into a dormant state. He sends his wife Frannie and their son Chad to her parents' house for several weeks so that he can isolate himself. Miley's attempt is made all the more difficult because starving the worm of alcohol causes him excruciating pain and is potentially life threatening. One day, he frantically searches for any trace of alcohol and eventually finds a small bottle in his gym bag. Although Miley strongly considers drinking it, he is able to resist the temptation and finally manages to go sober after many failed attempts.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: In "Need to Know", whenever someone in Loma Valley, Washington is told the meaning of life by another resident, they instantly go insane.
• Good Shepherd: In "The Crossing", Father Mark Cassidy is extremely dedicated to his parishioners. When he arrived at St. Timothy's Church, it was on the verge of closing down but it managed to survive because of his efforts. Father Mark has spent the last two years fundraising for a new children's wing at the local hospital, getting the necessary $2 million from every available source. When the wing is finally opened, it is named in his honor.
• Grade Skipper: In "A Message from Charity", Peter Wood tells Charity Payne that he skipped two grades when he was younger.
• Grand Theft Me: In "Gramma", a young boy named Georgie has his body stolen by his monstrous bed-ridden witch-grandmother.
• Granola Girl: In "The Girl I Married", Valerie Richman was the archetypal hippie chick in The '60s. When the spirit of the '60s Valerie appears to her husband Ira in 1987, she suggests that the two of them relax by doing a little LSD. Although Ira turns down the idea, she takes him to a double bill of Easy Rider and Woodstock and later a meditation session.
• The Grim Reaper:
  • "Welcome to Winfield" has "agents of death", in particular Griffin St. George (dressed in all white) and Chin Du Long (the previous agent who St. George succeeded).
  • Since "Rendezvous in a Dark Place" is the original series' "Nothing in the Dark" but flipped, Death being one of the characters is a given.
• Griping About Gremlins: In "Personal Demons", Rockne O'Bannon sees strange, hooded creatures all around him but can't convince his agent Brian, his friend Herman Gold or anyone else of their existence because they're Invisible to Normals.
• Groupie Brigade: In "Special Service", John Selig is almost ambushed by dozens of screaming female fans after he learns that his life has been turned into a hugely popular TV show. Since the secret is out, they don't need to hide anymore.
• The Gulag: In "Red Snow", KGB Colonel Ilyanov is sent to a gulag in Siberia to investigate the mysterious deaths of the local Communist Party secretary Vladimir Borisov and the first KGB investigator Major Yuri Andreev. As soon as Ilyanov arrives, he finds the conditions to be even worse than he imagined as it is wintertime and there is no sunlight from October to April. He later discovers that the townspeople have an arrangement with a group of vampires to protect them from danger and that it was the vampires who killed Borisov and Andreev.

H

• Hates Being Alone:
  • In "A Saucer of Loneliness", Margaret is an extremely lonely middle-aged waitress who spent years dreaming about what it would like to be with a man. After so much time, however, she has given up hope that it will ever happen. She lives with her alcoholic mother, who cruelly reminds her at every opportunity that she doesn't have a husband and probably never will. Margaret is so unhappy in her life that she often cries herself to sleep. One day while walking near the beach, a Flying Saucer appears and communicates a message to her telepathically. She is harassed by the media and members of the public to reveal the contents of the message but she refuses to do so as it was private. Margaret eventually places copies of the message in various bottles and throws them into the ocean. A man finds one of these bottles and, after preventing her from committing suicide, reveals that he knows that the message was from an alien being who was even lonelier than Margaret.
  • In "The Call", Norman Blane leads a very lonely, secluded life. The opening narration states that his greatest fear is that if he vanished tomorrow, no one would notice and his greatest sadness is the realization that he is probably right. However, Norman receives a new lease on life when he dials a wrong number and it is answered by a woman named Mary Ann, who is just as lonely as he is. They form an instant bond and talk for hours every night but she declines his offer of a date. After tracing the number to the Civic Art Gallery, Norman discovers that Mary Ann, whose surname is Lindeby, is the ghost of an artist who is inhabiting her last work, a bronze sculpture of herself. Norman is initially shocked and disturbed, cutting off all contact with Mary Ann. He later changes his mind and confesses to Mary Ann that he has fallen in love with her. That night, he breaks into the gallery after closing and turns into a bronze sculpture himself so that he and Mary Ann can be together forever.
  • In "The Trunk", Willy Gardner is an extremely shy and introverted man who manages the rundown Hotel Winchester. He has no friends (other than a cat) and has spent most of his life waiting for human companionship. Willy is a frequent object of fun for the local hoodlums Danny, Rocco and Cap and is disrespected by everyone with the exception of Mrs. Kudaba, an elderly permanent resident of the hotel. When he finds a trunk that grants wishes, Willy thinks that he can finally end his loneliness but it doesn't take him long to realize that his new friends are only interested in him because of what they think he can do for them.
  • In "Cat and Mouse", Andrea Moffatt leads a very lonely life and spends most of her time dreaming about True Love. She turns down her co-worker Carl's offer of a date as he doesn't match her idea of Prince Charming. Andrea is delighted when she meets Guillaume de Marchaux, who seems to be just like the charismatic, virile lovers found in the romance novels that she loves reading. However, it turns out that Guillaume simply uses women for sex and then moves on.
• Haunted Fetter: In "The Call", Mary Ann Lindeby's spirit possessed her self-portrait, a bronze sculpture on display at the Civic Art Gallery, after she committed suicide.
• Haunted Technology:
  • In "Her Pilgrim Soul", Nola Granville's (benevolent) spirit briefly possesses a hologram-projection system.
  • In "Still Life", Daniel Arnold discovers a Kodak 100 camera in an antique trunk that he bought at an auction. After he develops the photos, he finds that they are of a National Geographic expedition to the Amazon River basin in January 1913. Daniel's friend Professor Alex Stottel, the last surviving member of the expedition, tells him that they barely escaped with their lives as the Curacai tribe believed that creating an image of them stole their souls. It turns out that the Curacai were correct and that Daniel developing the photos released them. The Curacai attack Daniel and his wife Becky but he manages to trap their souls again by taking photos of them.
  • In "Joy Ride", Alonzo, his younger brother Greg and their girlfriends Deena and Adrienne steal the classic car owned by the recently deceased Charlie Taylor and go for a joy ride. They are stopped by a cop who is investigating the robbery of Chadway's Five & Dime earlier that evening. Alonzo denies any involvement but shoots the cop out of the blue with a gun that he found under the seat. A car chase ensues and it becomes clear that Alonzo is not in control of his behavior. It turns out that the four teenagers were trapped inside the car the entire time and none of what they experienced was real. The car was possessed by the spirit of Taylor, who killed the cop in 1957 and was confessing to his crime from beyond the grave.
• Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist: In "The Leprechaun Artist", the Leprechaun Shawn McGool wears a Hawaiian shirt while on vacation in the US.
• Healing Hands:
  • In "Healer", this trope overlaps with Healing Factor. A small-time crook named Jackie Thompson steals a rare stone from a museum and is shot in the process. He soon discovers that it can heal any injury when his wound disappears. The next day, his neighbor Harry Faulk has a heart attack and dies but Jackie manages to heal him using the stone. Realizing that they can make a great deal of money, Jackie (calling himself "Brother John") becomes a Fake Faith Healer and televangelist with Harry as his manager. Jackie enjoys the experience of healing people, including a wheelchair bound girl named Amanda, but Harry is simply in it for the money. A Mexican man named Duende visits after a taping and warns Jackie that the stone, which his people loaned to the museum, is in the wrong hands. When a mob boss named Joseph Rubello for whom Jackie used to work asks Jackie to heal his rapidly spreading lung cancer, Jackie charges him $2 million. Rubello agrees but the stone fails to heal him. Jackie's attempt to heal a deaf boy is similarly unsuccessful. Duende then reveals that the stone only works when it is used selflessly. Immediately afterwards, Jackie's gunshot wound reappears. Harry refuses to use the stone to heal him as he wants all of the money for himself. The deaf boy finds Jackie dying in the alley and heals him. Having learned his lesson, Jackie returns the favor and heals the boy.
  • In "Quarantine" Matthew Foreman is shocked when a bunch of Amish-like future people are able to perform psychic surgery to heal him of cancer that forced him to become a Human Popsicle in 2023.
  • In "A Saucer of Loneliness", Margaret is approached by a devoutly religious woman who believes that the Flying Saucer that communicated a telepathic message to Margaret was sent by God. The woman is convinced that Margaret received the power to heal and begs her to heal her paralyzed son. Margaret barely manages to get away from her.
• Hearing Voices:
  • In "The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon", the title character tells Dr. Jeremy Sinclair that he was feeding pigeons in a park one day eleven years earlier when he heard a strange voice that told him that he must keep the world in balance or it would "go puff." He says that he used to think the voice belonged to God but then he figured that God would have a deeper voice. Dr. Sinclair later begins to hear the same voice when he takes over from Edgar.
  • In the final scene of "The Trance", Leonard Randall begins to hear the strange voice that has speaking through him for the last two days for himself. He was previously unaware when it took control over his body. The voice explains to him that it will be his constant companion from now on as it teaches him the wisdom of the universe, which should take 20 or 30 years at most.
• Heat Wave: In "The Burning Man", Kansas is experiencing its hottest July in 16 or 17 years in 1936.
• Hellhole Prison: In "Room 2426", Dr. Martin Decker is locked in a filthy, rat-infested cell and given very little food and water between torture sessions with Dr. Ostroff.
• Henpecked Husband:
  • In "Button, Button", Norma Lewis constantly belittles her downtrodden husband Arthur at the simplest provocation and shows him no affection of any kind.
  • In "The World Next Door", Barney Schlessinger's wife Katie is unsupportive of his love of making Home Made Inventions in their basement. She continually criticizes him for wasting his time at something that is of no use to anyone.
  • In "Extra Innings", Cindy Hamner is unsupportive of her husband Ed, whose promising baseball career ended when he ruined his left knee two years earlier. She tells him that he can't spend the rest of his life wallowing in self-pity and belittles his continued interest in baseball, particularly his extensive card collection.
• Here We Go Again!:
  • In the final scene of "A Day in Beaumont", a young couple approach the local sheriff and tell him that they witnessed the crash of a Flying Saucer, exactly as Dr. Kevin Carlson and Faith did. This time, however, the sheriff has Kevin's face.
  • At the end of "The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon", Dr. Jeremy Sinclair has inherited the title character's duty of protecting the world from major catastrophes by maintaining the contraption in his apartment. He frantically searches for a tambourine which he can add to the device in order to prevent the next disaster.
  • In the final scene of "The Hellgramite Method", Miley Judson, who is finally sober, offers a light to an alcoholic in his old bar. He tells him to keep the matchbox advertising the Hellgramite Method, just as Dr. Eugene Murrich did in the opening scene.
  • At the end of "Our Selena is Dying", Martha Brockman is in a hospital wrapped in bandages after being severely burned in the fire that killed her sister Selena and daughter Diane (whose youth and identity she stole). It is noted that her left arm seems to be healing at an accelerated rate. One nurse then tells another that she does not know how she got the burn on her left arm, indicating that Martha has already begun to drain the first nurse's Life Energy and will soon be restored to health.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In "Profile in Silver", Professor Joseph Fitzgerald, a time traveler from 2172, allows himself to be assassinated on November 22, 1963 in place of his Famous Ancestor John F. Kennedy, whom he sent to his own time to save his life.
  • In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Morgan le Fay engages in a magical battle with Merlin, knowing that he is far more powerful than her and that she has little prospect of victory. She does so in order to save Lancelot and Tom's lives and to prevent Merlin from taking over the world. Merlin manages to defeat her and she dies shortly afterwards.
• Hippie Van: In "The Girl I Married", Ira and Valerie Richman spent most of the late 1960s driving around the US in a van trying to change the world.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • William Shakespeare shows up in "Act Break".
  • John F. Kennedy plays an important role in "Profile in Silver". Lyndon Johnson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jacqueline Kennedy and John Connally appear briefly. Nikita Khrushchev does not appear on screen but he plays a significant off screen role.
  • Elvis Presley is used as a character in "The Once and Future King". The Sun Records producer Sam Phillips, his receptionist Marion Keisker and Elvis' backing musicians Scotty Moore and Bill Black also make brief appearances.
• Hollywood Atheist: Averted in "The Star", based on the story by Arthur C. Clarke, which has an atheist named Chandler who's friendly with a Jesuit priest, Matthew Costigan, and they seem to have frequent polite debates on God's existence. Both are scientists on a space ship which picks up a signal from an ancient civilization whose star had gone supernova thousands of years ago. Chandler questions how God could do this to an entire species. When Costigan discovers that the light of the supernova is what was seen as the Star of Bethlehem, Costigan has a Crisis of Faith at the idea these kind, peaceful aliens were sacrificed to herald Christ's birth. Chandler, however, apologizes for his prior criticism, seeing him distraught. He then shows Costigan a last message that the aliens left, saying not to mourn for them because they had lived full, rich, happy lives, a sentiment they both find uplifting. This is a kinder ending than the original story, in which the priest despairs at what he's learned, with no message from the aliens to save his faith.
• Hollywood Law: In "Special Service", after John Selig discovers that he has been secretly filmed for five years and is the subject of a hit cable TV show, he demands that it be taken off the air as he has rights. The JSTV executive Arthur Spence gives John a copy of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and sarcastically asks him to point out where it says that they can't put his life on TV. John counters that this is a technicality. John's right though-he has rights, and they can't film him secretly nor make use of his name/image without permission. He could get an injunction forcing them to stop. They do stop after he insists, and give him a million dollars for the profit they'd made off him.
• Hollywood Old: In "The Convict's Piano", the 62-year-old Norman Fell plays Eddie O'Hara, an old convict who has been in prison for 58 years because he was framed for murder when he was at least in his 20s.
• Hologram:
  • In "Her Pilgrim Soul", Dr. Kevin Drayton and his assistant Daniel Gaddis have developed a holographic projector for Holotechnics, Inc. It has the ability to create objects such as a ball and a chessboard as well as a projection of The Solar System. Nola Granville's soul enters the projector and creates a holographic image of her from a fetus to old age over the course of five days.
  • In "Profile in Silver", Professor Joseph Fitzgerald intends to record the assassination of John F. Kennedy on his holographic recorder, which is disguised as an ordinary 1963 movie camera. After seeing Lee Harvey Oswald taking aim in the Texas School Book Depository, however, he shouts for JFK and his entourage to take cover and averts the assassination. The Secret Service agent Ray Livingston grows suspicious of Fitzgerald, believing him to be a Soviet sleeper agent, and has the camera analyzed by Department of Defense metallurgists. They discover that it is made from an unknown alloy which is harder than steel and impervious to X-Rays. When confronted, Fitzgerald admits that he is a time traveler from the future and shows JFK and Livingston a holographic recording of the Dallas motorcade to prove his story.
• Homemade Inventions: In "The World Next Door", Barney Schlessinger spends all of his free time in his basement building impractical inventions such as a wind-up mechanical orchid and a missile used to kill mice. The mouse missile worked as it should but it left small mouse parts everywhere.
• Homeworld Evacuation: In "Voices in the Earth", most of humanity evacuated the dying Earth 1,000 years earlier after it became incapable of supporting life.
• Hope Spot: In "Need to Know", Edward Sayers manages to smash Amanda Strickland's radio so that she at least doesn't hear the Awful Truth that's just been broadcast all over town, but then it turns out she's already had a couple of visitors drop by...
• Human Aliens:
  • "A Small Talent for War" features a race who sowed humanity on Earth in the distant past, and so humans look like punier versions of them.
  • In "The Wall", Baret's people, who live on a Paradise Planet far from Earth, are identical to humans.
• Human Popsicle:
  • "Quarantine" concerns Matthew Foreman, who was frozen in 2023, revived into a seemingly idyllic but stagnant future in 2347. It's eventually revealed to be... not so stagnant...
  • In "Stranger in Possum Meadows", Danny Wilkins is placed in cryostasis aboard Scout's ship as the human specimen in Scout's study of Earth. However, he is frozen for at most several hours before Scout begins to feel guilty and returns him to his mother.
• Human Sacrifice:
  • In "The Beacon", the people of Mellweather believe that a lighthouse called the Beacon chooses one of them to be sacrificed every year. If the chosen one does not die, an "accident" is arranged to ensure that the Beacon is satisfied.
  • In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Merlin compelled Lancelot to bring Tom to the cave in Cornwall so that he could restore his full powers by sacrificing Tom in the true Stonehenge, which exists in the land between the worlds.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future: "Quarantine" is set in a future where survivors of World War III have reverted to living in Arcadia, eschewing all mechanical technology, but having developed a wide range of psychic powers and Organic Technology.
• Humans Are Survivors: In "Voices in the Earth", humanity settled on planets throughout the galaxy after Earth's biosphere was destroyed.
• Hunting "Accident": In "Opening Day", Joe Farrell reluctantly goes along with his lover Sally Wilkerson's plan to kill her husband Carl by making it look as he was killed while duck hunting. After Carl is killed, the police believe that it was simply an accident. Joe returns to what used to be the Wilkerson house to find that it is the previous day and that he is now Sally's husband. When Carl takes him on the same hunting trip, Joe becomes concerned that he is going to be killed and falls into the water. He refuses Carl's attempts to help him and dies.
• Hypocrite: In "Love is Blind", Jack Haines is furious at the thought of his wife Elaine cheating on him but the Blind Musician reminds that he has had at least two affairs over the years. Jack claims that this is different.

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