History Recap / TheTwilightZone1985S2E1

* {{Catchphrase}}: Margaret's abusive mother keeps telling her daughter that her single way of life is "not respectable".

-> "Exit one Gary Pitkin, singer, impersonator, and restless subject of a dead king named Elvis Aaron Presley. A frustrated young man, born twenty-five years too late, who is about to find his own place to dwell, down at the end of lonely street, in a neighborhood called -- the Twilight Zone."

In 1986, ElvisImpersonator Gary Pitkin (Jeff Yagher) performs his act in a underpopulated hotel lounge in Dubuque, Iowa, to general apathy from the patrons. Backstage, his manager Sandra (Lisa Jane Persky) informs him that she's booked a residency in Las Vegas for him. Gary is livid, realizing that despite his genuine enthusiasm for rock and roll, his uncanny physical resemblance to the King is going to pigeonhole him for the rest of his career. He passionately argues that Vegas is what killed Elvis, having little regard for his later career and the poor decisions he made during that time. Sandra is unmoved, as she pulled a lot of strings to get him the residency and if he turns it down, he can forget about her continuing to represent him. She bluntly informs him that he is only a nostalgia act, and the music he plays isn't ''his'' music. She further claims that she would know, having once met the real Elvis toward the end of his life, where he spouted out paranoid and delusional ravings about how he wasn't ''really'' the King. Frustrated at what this means for his future, Gary storms out and drives down a lonesome country road late that night, before a drunk driver forces him to swerve off the road and into a ditch, losing consciousness.

Gary tantalizes Elvis with his promises of the wealth and women that will come his way when he becomes a musical legend. Elvis is mostly pleased that he'll have the opportunity to provide for his beloved mother, Gladys. Excited to hear his idol play, Gary asks him to perform the song he'll be auditioning with the next day, but he's shellshocked to hear a treacly ballad Elvis titles "I Love You Because". Gary is confused as to why Elvis isn't going to be singing "That's All Right", the rockabilly number history remembers him singing. When Gary plays the song for him in a loose, rip-roaring style, complete with the King's trademark hip gyrations, Elvis is mortified, calling the performance "indecent". Not expecting this, Gary immediately becomes defensive and makes the fatal mistake of calling Elvis a "son of a bitch". Always a MommasBoy, Elvis grows livid, and comes to the conclusion that Gary is a demon disguised as his brother, playing "the Devil's music" to tempt him into a life of sin. Gary desperately pleads with Elvis to accept that the song is ''his'' music, but the enraged would-be King attacks Gary. In the ensuing fight, Elvis' guitar is broken, and in one sudden move, he's fatally impaled on the neck, dying instantly. Gary is forced to bury the would-be King of Rock & Roll in a shallow grave, wondering what to do now. He slowly begins to realize that ''he'' must take Elvis' place in order to live out Presley's life as he remembers, removing his clothes and beginning to speak in Elvis' dialect as he pledges to make the young man's momma proud.

20 years later, in a Las Vegas hotel, the now middle-aged Gary, in full costume and still acting as Elvis, discusses how his life unfolded since that fateful day. In honor of the man he killed and whose identity he assumed, he lived out Elvis' life ''exactly'' as he remembered it. He even made made all the same mistakes the King did, not because ''he'' wanted to, but because he felt ''Elvis'' would have wanted to, and he owes him for his accidental murder. Bitter and plagued by guilt, Gary admits that he has wondered over the years if the ''actual'' Elvis would have even become the King in the first place, a question which gives him headaches every time he thinks about it. It's revealed that his captive audience is a young woman recognized as Sandra, his future manager, experiencing the encounter she mentioned in the beginning of the episode. Ironically, Sandra insists that the imposter before her ''is'' the King, the ''only'' King. Gary smiles ruefully, tells her to be true to herself, and gives her his scarf before she leaves. He sits in his chair, staring out the window of his glitzy Vegas hotel suite in silence.

* BittersweetEnding: Gary accidentally kills Elvis before he achieves stardom, but he disguises himself as Elvis and manages to perserve his career as history remembers it. The bitter part comes from the fact that Gary sacrifices his identity and his promises of an independent career to do this.
* {{Bookends}}: The episode begins and ends on a conversation between Sandra and Gary, the latter dressed as Elvis.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: Gary tells Sandra that he may ''look'' like Elvis, but that doesn't mean that he has to make all of the same mistakes Elvis did. Sandra tells him that Elvis once pulled her up on stage and invited her to his hotel room, where he told her that he wasn't the King. Gary is later sent back in time and if forced to assume Elvis' identity after accidentally killing him, proceeding to live out Elvis' life the same way as he remembers. Gary reveals that he isn't the real Elvis to a younger Sandra in the 1970s, but she doesn't believe him.

* IdenticalStranger: Gary is noted to be uncannily identical in appearance to Elvis (as they're both played by Jeff Yagher), albeit with different grooming habits. Sandra even comments that he could've be his twin, to which Gary wryly comments that his twin was born dead.

* InertialImpalement: Gary gets transported to 1954, where he meets the real Elvis Presley. At first, Elvis thinks that Gary is his stillborn brother Jesse, returned from the dead. However, when Gary begins coaching Elvis about his music, Elvis is reviled at his performance of his own hit "That's All Right". The two men begin to fight, breaking a Elvis' guitar at the neck. As Elvis lunges at Gary, he dodges, leaving Elvis to fatally impale himself on the jagged guitar neck.
* {{Irony}}: It appears quite frequently throughout the episode.

* MommasBoy: Elvis is thorougly devoted to his mother Gladys, to the point where the first thing on his mind after hearing that he'll be a star is how he'll be able to use his fame to support her, as well as how happy she'll be to see that "Jesse" came back from the dead. A frustrated Gary calling an uncooperative Elvis a "son of a bitch" sets him on the warpath, since he takes it literally.

* PoliticallyCorrectHistory: Averted, as Gary is wearing an undershirt with Music/ChuckBerry on it, prompting Elvis' boss to mencacingly question why he has a "negro" on his shirt.

* RealPersonCameo: Elvis' boss at Crown Electric, Mr. Harris, is played by Red West, the real Elvis Presley's bodyguard and life-long best friend.

* HatesBeingAlone: Margaret is an extremely lonely waitress who spent years dreaming about what it would like to have a man, but has given up hope that it will ever happen. She lives with an alcoholic mother who cruelly reminds her at every opportunity that she doesn't have a husband and probably never will, and often cries herself to sleep every single night. While walking near the beach one day, a UFO appears and telepathically communicates a message to her. She is harassed by the media and 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 bottles and throws them into the ocean. A man finds one of these bottles and, after stopping her from committing suicide, reveals that he knows that the message was from an alien being who was even lonelier than her.
* HateSink: Margaret's mother, who belittles her lack of a love life and/or marital status, and throws her out of the house when she attempts to back-talk her, as well as when she starts drawing all sorts of attention to both women by the public demanding the message. What's worse is that she gets no commeuppance for any of her behavior.

* {{Irony}}: After the flying saucer "speaks" to her, Margaret is constantly surrounded by people wanting to know the message. This makes her even more lonely than before, because they don't actually want talk to her as a person.

* EstablishingCharacterMoment: Margaret's loneliness is established in the opening scene, where she sadly watches a fellow waitress basking in the flirtatious affection of her boyfriend when he visits her at work. Soon after, Margaret walks home with a friend and discusses how she fantasizes about finding love, but is losing hope she'll ever find her special someone.

* InMemoriam: The episode is dedicated to the memory of Theodore Sturgeon, who passed away in 1985.