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The episode "The Invaders" features the final, fatal voyage of United Planets Cruiser C-57D.
It's the same model; I just thought this sounded good. After the adventure on Altair IV, the ship is destroyed by a giant raging old woman in a barn. Gregory West from "A World of His Own" is the in-universe creator of all the Twilight Zone stories.
At the end of the episode, Rod Serling appears, supposedly to deliver closing narration, but Gregory West cuts him off, reveals an envelope with Rod's name on it, and throws the envelope into the fire, causing Rod to disappear. The only way this could happen is if Rod was created by Gregory, and if Rod is Gregory's creation, who's to say that all the other stories aren't his creation as well? Rod Serling is Anthony Fremont from "It's a Good Life".
As an adult, he decided to use his abilities to travel time/space/reality/whatever, and torture and madden those he happens upon for his own amusement. He then narrates as he watches his awful work.- On the other hand, he can be nice when he feels someone needs happiness, or he simply gets tired of being evil sometimes.
- It's possible he never grew out of the Blue-and-Orange Morality he had as a child, where it's noted - at least in the short story - that Anthony is usually trying to be helpful. He's still trying to help by rewarding "good people" and punishing "bad people," but his skewed interpretations mean that the results are... mixed.
- Or maybe he has matured with age an uses his powers to change the world for the better, either by rewarding the kind hearted or punishing the wicked. Keep in mind that in most Twilight Zone episodes, the endings, good or bad, are usually brought on by the actions of the main characters in the episode, with whether or not they make it out dependent on the ethics they portray. He doesn't always get it right ("Time Enough at Last" and "A Stop at Willoughby" being the first to come to mind), but he does seem to have gotten better at judging and dealing at punishment.
Rod Serling is the same type of being as Anthony Fremont.
He's just one that is in full control of his faculties and powers, unlike Anthony's inability to comprehend normal people and often-unconscious use of reality-warping. These beings generally act as neutral observers, standing outside of reality and not interfering, but Serling and Anthony are two opposite extremes: Anthony uses his powers however he pleases, directly warping reality into his own personal playpen, while Serling acquired human-like morals (possibly from observing humans for so long). He generally tries to follow the "rules" and avoid intefering, explaining some of the harsher episodes, but tries to guide things towards a happier ending (or at least a teachable moment) if he can do so without breaking things too obviously.- Due to their power, these beings have a rule that forbids them from acting against each other as conflict between them could be disastrous; this is why Serling doesn't attempt to intervene. While he usually tries to tip the balance in favor of innocent bystanders and the unjustly victimized, the laws of these beings forbid him from acting against another of his kind.
Anthony Fremont is a Q.
The Q were not allowed to reproduce for the longest time, so perhaps his parents violated this law and when the other Q found out, they banished the child from the Continuum and he ended up being incarnated on 1950s Earth. Henry Corwin was always the real Santa Claus.
Until the end of "Night Of The Meek" he had lost his way in the modern world and forgot his true identity. "Queen of the Nile" is one of T'Pau's nightmares.
Her refusal to warn Kirk what the Kal-i-fee actually entailed wore on her more than she demonstrated. Then, one day, during a fever or in another situation that might induce hallucinations, she began to dream the scenario all over again — herself as an old woman, watching a young man walk into a deathtrap completely unaware. After a while, her conscience manifested with her dream avatar trying to warn the victim, but because of her guilt, the dream would never let her succeed. Global 33 didn't really travel through time.
The plane traveled into alternate universes: one where the large dinosaurs never died out, and another where history progressed identically to our own, but everything happened a few years later chronologically. That's why Manhattan Island and the Hudson River were recognizable to the pilots when they caught sight of the sauropod, even though the geography would have been completely different in our own Mesozoic Era.- Science Marches On: Continental drift was still not fully accepted by the scientific community in the early 1960's. In its current form it was a relatively new theory, and writers educated in the 1940's and 1950's would not necessarily have been familiar with it.
- Even before continental drift was accepted, no geologist would have expected the coastline or rivers to look the same millions of years earlier, as erosion and the re-sculpting of the landscape by water were some of the first long-term geological processes to be understood by science.
Rod Serling is the Wandering Jew.
He is cursed to wander through space and time until the return of Christ, observing the missteps of others and rendering judgement on them—sometimes favorably, sometimes not so much. The fact that Serling himself was Jewish is incidental to this. The Twilight Zone is very real.
It is not another universe, or some identical planet on the mirror-side of ours. It is not a state of mind. The Twilight Zone is a communal system that facilitates art, commerce, romance, politics... Anything that people are capable of in the "regular world". It is a system not designed by sinister or benevolent alien intelligences, but by the very people who fall into it. It is beyond a door unlocked by the key of imagination. A dimension of sight and of sound and of mind. A world of shadow and substance, of things and ideas. A world where the bizarre is commonplace and horrors are vaunted, where hubris can be punished by the whim of technology and a king can be brought low by the condemnation of strangers in an instant. You may recognize this system, this dimension, as The Internet. But a few with the perspective to recognize the signs understand that "logging on" is tantamount to entering... The Twilight Zone.- And the Mandatory Twist Ending: The reason that so many people now spend almost all their time online is that we have, in our folly, created and mass-adopted a Lotus-Eater Machine. That you're in the clutches of right now. Go ahead. Tell yourself you can get out. Shut down the device you're reading this on and tuck it away for a day or two... if you can.
- Holy shit TV Tropes is just another one of the things: A website you can NEVER LEAVE!!
On Judgement Day, it will be more bearable for the humans from "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" than for the aliens.
The humans are far from blameless, but the aliens who created the temptation in order to destroy them... "The Invaders" were wearing Big Daddy suits.
The design is similar, the weapons are vaguely similar, and they put up as much of a fight as you could expect from a Big Daddy against something fifty times their size. The suits are also what protected them for so long, all things considered. The Russian soldier from "Two" was a spy.
Why is she Russian but speaks in an American accent? Simple. If she spoke in a Russian accent while posing as an American, she'd give herself away. Rod Serling is a Time Lord.
Because nobody else has brought up this tired old meme on this page, and yet the user who posted this theory doesn't even like Doctor Who.- And his next regenerations are Charles Aidman, Robin Ward, Forest Whitaker, and Jordan Peele.
Episodes that don't take place After the End or The End of the World as We Know It happen in the same universe, which is the main one of the Twilight Zone multiverse.
- "The Invaders"
- "The Odyssey of Flight 33"
- "Night of the Meek"
- "Third from the Sun"
- "I Shot an Arrow into the Air"
- "The Nightmare at 20,000 Ft."
In "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street", Tommy was an alien plant
His talk about alien invaders was the spark that got people turning on each other, without which they could easily have simply become frustrated and harmlessly confused. At the climax of the episode, Charlie accuses Tommy and that's the last we hear on the matter before the situation devolves into chaos. He was right. "And suspicion can destroy..."And realized after getting Susan to join him that he preferred working with young girls. And on that note... Susan's last name is Derkins
Eventually, Susie spied on Hobbes pouncing on Calvin and realized he was a real being. She tried to tell her parents, but they took away Mr. Bun and sent her to live with her aunt, freaked out that their little girl was taking after the bratty kid next door. Her animosity toward Mr. West and Caesar(as well as coming to the conclusion that Caesar was alive), was due to her past experiences with another guy and his living toy. Soon Calvin and Hobbes will have to get through to her when she goes on a crime spree with her new partner.How Gunter Lütze conducted himself during his trial was a matter of damnation or a last chance at redemption.
Would he recognize his evil and repent, or would he ignore that epiphany?Jimbo from "The Prime Mover" is the same type of being as Anthony Fremont.
Except that instead of terrorizing people, he willingly put aside his powers as a child, and never developed as far as Anthony did — with the exception of using it to do chores. And he intentionally chose a small desert town to live in to avoid the temptation to use his power. The extraterrestrial beings in "Third from The Sun" have a different mileage standard than the people of Earth.
The main characters look identical to humans and come from a planet much like the Earth, yet their concept of one mile is much longer than a mile in the Imperial system. So, although their final comment about how far away they are from Earth seems like a discrepancy to us (i.e., they are coming from a different solar system and yet are less than 93 million miles from Earth, which by the Imperial standard would put their ship closer to Earth than the Sun is), what they say holds true to them for their purposes.Henry Bemis from "Time Enough at Last" actually died in the vault.
The fact that an atomic bomb hit directly after reading a newspaper about one (on the front page in giant letters, at that), and that he didn't immediately die from massive radiation poisoning after going outside is rather odd to say the least. His glasses breaking at the very end is the final straw: He's in hell, both alone for all eternity and unable to indulge in what he shunned humanity for. Either his corpse is still in the vault and the bomb really happened, or he just dropped dead during his lunch break that day.The four characters from "A Most Unusual Camera" all landed in the Ironic Hell from "A Nice Place to Visit".
Joseph Paradine from "Still Valley" was only pro-slavery because he'd grown up so immersed in the Big Lie that he honestly didn't know any better.
At one point in The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape is complaining about how God "often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes he thinks bad on the ... ground that the humans thought them good and were following the best they knew."Captain Lanser from "Judgment Night" is in Purgatory, not Hell.
There were no ghosts at Dachau.
Gunter had simply buried his conscience for years, and going back to Dachau with a fresh eye on the problem finally broke the dam between him and it. The ghosts were entirely figments of his imagination to articulate his self-loathing. Events in "A World Of His Own" will eventually repeat.
Victoria was Gregory's creation in the same way that Mary was, eventually moving past her original programming, and her unforeseen actions resulted in her uncreation. The longer that Mary remains "alive," the more capable she'll be of outgrowing her programming in a similar way; we already know that Gregory's creations have some kind of personality and retain their memories after being uncreated and recreated thanks to Mary's reaction when she's called up a second time. Eventually Mary will "evolve" to the point where she can deviate from the script and may no longer want to be Gregory's adoring housewife, potentially leading Gregory to uncreate Mary and dictate himself a third wife. The diner owner from "Nick of Time" is in on it.
He tries to upsell the couple on the chicken-fried steak, and it's after they rebuff him and he walks away that the Mystic Seer starts (apparently) exerting its influence. We can also guess their intended fate by the couple who enters the diner at the end, who are apparently trapped in town because the Mystic Seer never gives them a fortune that would "let" them leave. Don winds up ordering more food than intended to stay in the diner and something similar would likely happen with others who fall under the Seer's influence: The owner of the diner is the only one who'd benefit, as he'd not only make money off people coming in to use the Mystic Seer but he's likely one of a few places to eat in such a small town, if not the only place to eat. Maybe the owner somehow made that particular Mystic Seer, maybe it just came into his possession, but he knows about it and how it affects some people and lets it stay out on the table because hey, he profits! It's also possible that it only affects people that somehow get on the owner's bad side, the way Don did by not ordering the special. The shoes in "Dead Man's Shoes" are where the gangster personality originated, not any human.
We know they came from Italy. The city Henry Bemis lived in from “Time Enough To Last” was destroyed by conventional bombing.
If it was destroyed through an atomic bomb, Bemis would be dead from the radiation 5 minutes after coming out of the bank vault. And besides, it seemed like too small of a city to waste an atomic bomb on. The astronauts from And When the Sky Opened were devoured by a Time Crack.
This neatly explains why all trace of their existence was wiped away with them. Had the narrative stuck aorund, we'd see other people in their lives gradually wiped away too until the universe is reduced to Earth, the moon, and the exploding TARDIS. Fortunately, that means they were brought back when The Doctor rebooted the universe with the Pandorica. "Mr. Schmidt" from "Death's Head Revisited raped the hotel desk clerk years ago
It is strongly implied that Lütze – who identifies by his signature as "Mr. Schmidt" at the hotel – and the hotel's desk clerk knew each other. It is apparent that she was one of the inmates at Dachau (but survived, liberated when Allied troops seized the camp), and by her horrified reaction she was relentlessly tortured (and possibly raped if not far worse) by Lütze and is forced to relive those memories when he makes no secret to her why he is visiting the Munich region. Additionally, it is unlikely Lütze ever stood trial for his war crimes, as a case can be made he died at the asylum where he was institutionalized, either of a heart attack or form of excited delirium, before a formal indictment was made. Other possibilities: He was found unfit to stand trial, having become so insane by the torment inflicted on him (having been haunted by his victims); or he committed suicide.
Haley poisons Ross at the end of "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up"
Ross nervously takes a sip of the coffee Haley gave him while being told how thoroughly his people have been outmaneuvered, telling him that he'll see what they're like "if you're still alive." He pointedly waits to make the threat until after Ross drank to threaten him. The TV repairman from "What's in the Box?" is the Cheshire Cat in a human disguise.
Besides both being played by the late Sterling Holloway, both are otherworldly powerful beings who enjoy causing mayhem and screwing people over for their own amusement.