YMMV / Night Visions

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Like it says on the main page, did Jake Jennings from "Bitter Harvest" always intend on exacting gruesome revenge on Shane Watkins, or did he only decide to go through with it after it became clear that Shane learned nothing and had not changed at all in the two weeks that he spent working for Jennings?
• Crosses the Line Twice: Lucinda hysterically screeching "WHY DID I LISTEN TO YOU?" when the Beast actually appears at the end of "Harmony."
• Esoteric Happy Ending: "The Maze" ends with our Heroine going on a date with the Hero. However, the world will still be destroyed by a stray asteroid next year! The host even says, "Nothing lasts forever kids, try not to forget that."
  • Unless, as some viewers have speculated, the Bad Future the heroine visits is actually an Alternate Timeline.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The message Henry Rollins ends "Dead Air" with becomes downright ironic when you factor in the response his rant against rave music resulted in:
  Henry Rollins: For all you pains in the asses out there, remember: you can only irritate so many people before you piss off the wrong one.
• Jerkass Woobie: Dr. Critchley in "Patterns". Sure, he was a condescending jerk to Malcolm McDowell’s character, but it was understandable that he didn't believe his claims, especially without proof. So, his fate at the end of the episode, taking on Macdowell's characters' contract that ruined his life and drove all of his loved ones away, seems a bit excessive, especially since he didn't seem like that bad of a guy during his interactions with everyone else.
• Karmic Overkill: One episode had a crewman aboard a cargo ship discover some stowaways inside a crate. He does his job and informs his superiors about it, who ignore him, and when it becomes clear the stowaways are trapped and that there may be something inside killing them, he tries to break them out. Suddenly, his superiors reveal the stowaways are cannibals that they transport around so the mob can use them to assassinate people and stick him inside the crate, where the stowaways mock him and then brutally kill him. This would ordinarily be a Cruel Twist Ending, but the episode treats it as entirely deserved, with everyone, even the narrator, mocking him for the "crime" of being a Nice Guy who did his job to the best of his ability and didn't act like a selfish monster.
• Questionable Casting: Black Flag front man and standup comic Henry Rollins... as the host of a horror anthology series?
  Billy Brown: I never wanted a host. There should have been an introductory voice-over, a la Outer Limits. But the network said "No host, no show." So we started looking, and actually got a commitment from Gary Oldman. Having played Dracula, and being a fantastic actor, he would have been a real presence. The network said no. They wanted Henry Rollins. I didn't get it, nor did anyone else on the show's staff. It seemed like someone's desperate idea to make the show hip."
• The Scrappy: Sally Osgood from "Neighborhood Watch"; she's so quick to suspect the worst of the alleged molester that some wish that she was the one that shot the man, instead of her husband. Thus turning the ending into a Karmic Twist Ending.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: In "Cargo," apparently Mark Stevens earned his brutal death for the crime of being hardworking, empathetic, and kindhearted, considering how the narrator and the rest of the cast berate him for this.
• The Woobie:
  • Malcolm McDowell's character in "Patterns", who ruined his life and pushed away everyone he cared about in his efforts to stop the world from falling into chaos, and the few times he tried to stop lead to the death of two of his friends. Hearing him crying as Dr. Critchley has him dragged off to be medicated is heartbreaking.
    • Worse off, by the time he's finally freed from the contract, he's an old man, meaning he's spent nearly his entire life keeping the world in balance. The likelihood that he'll be able to return to a sense of normalcy is low.
  • Mark Stevens from "Cargo". A hard-working Nice Guy bullied and ignored by his superiors for noticing there were stowaways onboard and reporting it like he was trained to, and then he gets brutally killed by the people he tried to save, and then mocked by pretty much everyone for the crime of being a good man. Poor guy...
  • Dr. Sears in "Now He's Coming Up the Stairs." An Empathic Healer with the ability to absorb the mental illnesses of others, he has a genuine desire to save patients to the point of Chronic Hero Syndrome. He has to physically purge the illnesses from his body, which is slowly killing him, and it's taking longer and longer for him to recover from each incident. When he finally takes a vacation, a desperate mother finds him and begs for his help with her catatonic son, and though Dr. Sears knows he's on borrowed time, he can't resist healing the child...which ultimately drives him permanently, irreversibly insane. And like Mark Stevens in "Cargo," he did nothing to deserve this fate (he wasn't getting rich or exploiting anyone with his gift—he just wanted to help those in need).
  • The teenage girl in "My So-Called Life and Death". While she's meant to be seen as bratty and rebellious, it's not hard to empathize with her; her mother is incredibly demanding and clearly resents her, her younger brother is annoying and spoiled, and her father clearly doesn't care about any of them. The woobie factor gets turned up ten-fold in the end when it's revealed that she's a ghost, bound forever to the vacation home she died in because of the house fire her younger brother caused, with the family she kept talking about wanting to escape from. After hearing her mother's plea to her, she relents and accepts her situation, with there being no indication that she'll ever be able to move on.
  • Devon Morani from "If A Tree Falls". When he and his friends get into a car accident, die and somehow come back to life, he couldn't accept the miracle they received and did everything he could in order to pass on. However, when he went to go pull his body from the wreckage, he ends up accidentally releasing his friend and girlfriend's corpse from the car, at which they are discovered by a passing boatman and forced to pass on. The last shot is of Devon looking out over the lake with a shellshocked expression, dropping the rose that was in Bethany's hands, which sinks to where his corpse remains while Bethany's cries Tears of Blood. As the car had sunk further into the bottom on the lake, nobody will ever come across his body, condemning him to an eternity of wandering the Earth with no hope of joining his loved ones in the afterlife. All because he couldn't accept the second chance granted to him.

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