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  • Alternate Character Interpretation:
    • The ep "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" is open to interpretation.
    • It's not clear if the events in "Brenda" are really happening or if Brenda is imagining the monster, with the actress who played her saying she thinks it was in her head.
  • Complete Monster: Pilot's "Escape Route": Joseph Strobe is the former commander of Auschwitz, and is personally responsible for murdering thousands of inmates in the gas chambers. Strobe also cruelly tortured the inmates that he didn't kill immediately, crucifying one man alive and leaving him to die slowly over two days. In the present, Strobe shows no remorse for his crimes and cowardly offers to sell out other high-ranking Nazis in order to save himself. When he meets a former victim of his who he routinely tortured and disfigured with a lit cigarette, Strobe mocks the man's pain before brutally strangling him to death for alerting the authorities about him.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In "Pamela's Voice", Phyllis Diller plays a woman who died before the story began and admits that she's dead to her husband. Since Diller's actual death in 2012, it's jarring to see her freely admit she's dead on screen.
  • I Am Not Shazam: The so-called caterpillar in "The Caterpillar" is an earwig.
  • Informed Wrongness: Leonard Nimoy's character in "She'll Be Company For You" is repeatedly accused of murdering his ailing wife so he'd be free of the burden and is killed by his wife's friend's cat, which morphs into a tiger at night. The audience is never actually given proof that he killed her, and all of the people who accused him are shown to already despise him. The only thing he's shown to be guilty of is cheating on his wife while she was alive. As dirty as that may be, it doesn't prove murder, and the show just expects us to take them at their word that he killed her even though she, as earlier stated, was very sick.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • The main character of "The Lone Survivor". He disguised himself as a woman to get on a lifeboat during the Titanic sinking, an act even he acknowledges was cowardly. But he only did so out of desperation and fear, and was the sole survivor of his lifeboat by sheer luck. While he may be a liar and a coward, its hard to not sympathise with him since he's been punished by being forced to wander the seas for eternity, from one doomed ship to another.
    • Brenda is a rather malicious girl but she seems to be mentally troubled, has no friends due to her alienating behavior, and is desperate for companionship of any kind, with her admission at the end that the monster is the only being who's ever loved her being very touching.
  • Magnificent Bastard ("Room with a View"): Jacob Bauman is a bedridden man who plots revenge on his unfaithful wife, while maintaining a witty, irreverent charm. Appearing to be helpless and frail, Bauman uses his binoculars to spy on people's movements, learning his wife is having an affair with another man, and that his nurse is also engaged to the same man. Manipulating his nurse to give him details about the relationship, Bauman skillfully controls the conversation until he learns that she is prone to jealous rage if she sees her fiance with another woman. Using this to his advantage, Bauman gives her a gun before sending her to her fiance's apartment to "surprise" him, knowing she will find him and his wife together. The plan goes off without a hitch, with his nurse shooting them both dead, while Bauman notes with satisfaction that there are some things he can still do on his own.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Holston crosses this in "The Academy" when he decides to send his son to the academy despite knowing full well what will happen to him. This is a notable departure from the original story where he was simply oblivious about their intentions.
  • Narm: "With Apologies to Mr. Hyde" makes it look like Jekyll's potion was turning him into Hyde, only for him to turn to his assistant and say "If I told you once, I've told you a hundred times- go easy on the vermouth!" Due to Adam West's hammy delivery of the line, the last word is rather mangled, which is not a good thing when the entire joke depends on the audience understanding what he said.
  • Retroactive Recognition:
    • In the credits, anyway, as Steven Spielberg had one of his first jobs on the show.
    • John Badham, who would direct Saturday Night Fever, WarGames and other films, also did a lot of his early directing work on this series.
    • As for in front of the camera, the episode "There Aren't Any More MacBanes" features a pre-Star Wars Mark Hamill in a small role.
    • "The Academy" has a young Larry Linville (M*A*S*H's Frank Burns) in a bit part.
    • "Room with a View" features a young Diane Keaton in one of her first Hollywood roles.
    • "The Diary" has a pre-The Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner as a nurse.
    • An early in his career René Auberjonois stars as William Sharsted in the episode "Camera, Obscura".
    • Louise Sorel stars in "Pickman's Model", years before her most famous role as Vivian Alamain on Days of Our Lives.
  • Seasonal Rot: Season 3, in which the show was cut to a half hour, is widely seen as a drop in quality, with a number of episodes recycled from earlier seasons. The series finale, "Hatred Unto Death" is So Bad, It's Good at best and almost unanimously seen as the show's worst episode.
  • Special Effects Failure: It was a low budget show of the seventies. The effects hold up about as well as you'd expect.
    • The episode "There Aren't Any More MacBanes" contains a severe one thanks to evolving picture quality; the demon's glowing eyes in the darkness look terrifying on a grainy, '70s era TV set, but a modern high-def TV reveals it to very obviously be two red lights on a cart draped in black cloth.
    • The spider in "A Fear of Spiders" is clearly not walking but rather being slid down an (admittedly well-hidden) track.
    • Surprisingly averted in "Pickman's Model", where the ghoul appears fairly convincing.
  • Ugly Cute: The ghoul in "Pickman's Model" doesn't look nearly as threatening as it's supposed to.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Sheila from “The Doll of Death”. The episode seems to go out of its way of making Sheila a tragic heroine who wants to be with Raphael, the man she loves, and will do anything to save him when he falls under voodoo from Sheila's ex, Alex. But there’s no escaping the fact that Sheila chose to marry Alex and not Raphael, and Sheila was committed to being with Alex right up until Raphael crashed their wedding and she ran off with Raphael, while essentially telling Alex in front of their wedding party that she never loved him. And when Dr. Strang calls Sheila out for her treatment of Alex, Sheila refuses to see what she did was wrong, and the scene comes off as though we’re supposed to side with Sheila and not Dr. Strang. And ultimately when Alex dies from his own voodoo magic and Sheila reunites with Raphael it’s portrayed as a triumph.
  • Values Resonance: "The Academy" is about a boys reform school where the students are taught discipline and heavy emphasis is put on drill. It quickly becomes clear it's not a reform school but rather a prison where the students never come out and their presence there is a life sentence. Nowadays, this same segment could be used as an allegory of the prison system which doesn't try to focus on lowering reoffending risk or the troubled teen industry which has a known history of exploiting minors.
  • Wangst: Frances' very over-the-top reaction to Brenda knocking over her sandcastle in "Brenda".
  • The Woobie: Ian in "Sins of the Fathers." The poor kid is starving to death and desperate for a meal, and his own mother uses that to trick him into performing the sin-eater ritual for his late father. All the more cruel when you stop to wonder why she couldn't have performed that task herself, if she was so determined to see it done.

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