History Series / TheTwilightZone1959

Many television shows have [[AffectionateParody borrowed liberally]] from ''The Twilight Zone'', especially ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons''[='=] ''WesternAnimation/TreehouseOfHorror'', [[WesternAnimation/GarfieldAndFriends Garfield's Tales of Scary Stuff]], and ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'''s "[[ShowWithinAShow The Scary]] [[AffectionateParody Door]]" and "Anthology of Interest". There's also [[Ride/TheTwilightZoneTowerOfTerror a thrill-ride]] inspired by the series in Ride/DisneyThemeParks which inspired its own [[Film/TowerOfTerror non-canon TV film]] in 1997.

Many television shows have [[AffectionateParody borrowed liberally]] from ''The Twilight Zone'', especially ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons WesternAnimation/TreehouseOfHorror'' and ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'''s "[[ShowWithinAShow The Scary]] [[AffectionateParody Door]]" and "Anthology of Interest". There's also [[Ride/TheTwilightZoneTowerOfTerror a thrill-ride]] inspired by the series in Ride/DisneyThemeParks which inspired its own [[Film/TowerOfTerror non-canon TV film]] in 1997.

Almost all episodes ended with {{A|nAesop}}esops; "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," "Be tolerant," "Democracy is good," etc. Occasionally, however, you'd get a FamilyUnfriendlyAesop. Perhaps the most notorious example was the episode "Time Enough At Last," which starred Creator/BurgessMeredith and seemed to tell the viewer, "Even if you are a good and decent man, you can still have horrible things continually happen to you and end up with no hope at all", and became one of the most famous episodes of the original series. Other notorious examples are episodes that use recycled scripting employing a family-unfriendly Aesop version of the original episode's end in order to force a (rather disturbing, especially in the context of the original episode) twist. Other times, Aesops seemingly conflict with one another. "The Gift" tells you not to be bigots toward aliens, because they might just be bringing you the cure for cancer. But "To Serve Man" has all of humanity accepting and tolerant of aliens, which [[ToServeMan turns out to be a bad thing.]] It was really a sign of this show's capability of showing different aspects of the spectrum. Tolerance and acceptance is good but blind submission and passiveness is bad.

''The Twilight Zone'' had a rather remarkable ability to take silly story concepts, combine them with [[{{Anvilicious}} preachy, moralistic writing]], and produce some truly outstanding episodes. (Seriously, you think ''Series/TheWestWing'' was heavy-handed? Creator/AaronSorkin's got ''nothing'' on Rod Serling in full righteous-anger mode.) The ghost of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler travels to the United States and teaches Creator/DennisHopper to become an effective demagogue ("He's Alive")? It works. A former concentration camp commander travels back to Dachau after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and is put on trial by the ghosts of his victims ("Death's Head Revisited")? It works. Creator/WilliamShatner hams it up and yells about the monster on the wing of the plane ("Nightmare at 20,000 Feet")? It works.

Creator Creator/RodSerling wrote the majority of the scripts, and produced those of such now-legendary writers as Creator/RichardMatheson and Charles Beaumont. The series featured such soon-to-be-famous actors as Creator/RobertRedford, Creator/WilliamShatner, Creator/BurtReynolds, Robert Duvall, Creator/DennisHopper, Creator/CarolBurnett, Creator/JamesCoburn, Creator/CharlesBronson, Creator/LeeMarvin, Creator/PeterFalk, Creator/DonaldPleasence and Bill Mumy, as well as such established stars as SilentMovie giant Creator/BusterKeaton, Art Carney, Creator/MickeyRooney, Creator/IdaLupino, and Creator/JohnCarradine.

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: A]]
* AcquiredPoisonImmunity: "The Jeopardy Room". A Soviet commissar tricks a defector into drinking wine mixed with a sleep drug by drinking first. He built up an immunity to the drug by repeatedly taking increasing doses over time.
* ActorAllusion: Half of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]" is [[{{Retraux}} shot in the style]] of a SilentMovie as a tribute to Creator/BusterKeaton, who plays the protagonist Woodrow Mulligan. More specifically, the chase sequence after Mulligan arrives in 1962 recreates a scene from Keaton's 1920 short film ''Film/TheGarage'' co-starring Creator/FattyArbuckle. In both, Keaton's character's loses his trousers and is about to be arrested for public indecency. However, his heavyset partner prevents this when he walks behind him to hide him from a policeman. He then helps him to get a new pair, which Keaton puts on after being lifted up while they are walking.
* AdamAndEvePlot:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the man realizes that he and the woman, formerly a soldier in the opposing army, may be the only people left alive in the country, possibly the world.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E129Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7, Over and Out]]", Colonel Cook and Norda decide to settle in a fertile area shortly after their arrival on the new planet. [[spoiler:As their names are Adam and Eve and they name the planet "Earth," this episode is a very literal application of the trope.]]
* AdaptationalAlternateEnding: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]" ends with Rod Serling noting that Sgt. Joseph Paradine and the other members of his troop were moved to Gettysburg with the implication being that they will be killed in the battle. In the short story "The Valley Was Still" by Creator/ManlyWadeWellman, Paradine survives [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar the war]] and repeatedly claims in his old age that the cause of the Confederacy was lost not at Antietam or Gettysburg but at the titular valley hamlet of Channow.
* AdaptationalAttractiveness: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits are much less ugly than in the short story. The story describes them as looking "something like pigs and something like people." They are short with snoutlike noses, small eyes and thick, bristly brown-grey hair all over their bodies and have three fingers on each hand. In the television adaptation, they are nine feet tall and have bulbous foreheads but resemble humans facially.
* AdaptationalJobChange: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", Bill is a physicist. In the [[Literature/LittleGirlLost short story]] by Creator/RichardMatheson, he is a [=CalTech=] engineer.
* AdaptationalNameChange:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E8TimeEnoughAtLast Time Enough at Last]]", Henry Bemis' wife is named Helen. In the short story by Lynn Venable, her name is Agnes.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E9PerchanceToDream Perchance to Dream]]", the protagonist is named Edward Hall. In the short story by Charles Beaumont, his name is Philip Hall.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E12WhatYouNeed What You Need]]", Pedott's ability to see the future is taken advantage of by Fred Renard. In the short story by Lewis Padgett (the pseudonym of the writing team Creator/CLMoore and Creator/HenryKuttner), their names are Peter Talley and Tim Carmichael.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", the caretaker of the cemetery asteroid Happy Glades and the most rational crewman are named Jeremy Wickwire and Professor Kurt Meyers respectively. In the short story by Charles Beaumont, their names are Mr. Greypoole and Mr. Friden.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E31TheChaser The Chaser]]", Roger Shackleforth is madly in love with Leila. In the short story by John Collier, their names are Alan Austen and Diana.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the protagonist is named Michael Chambers. In the short story by Creator/DamonKnight, his name is Peter.
* AdaptationDeviation:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]" is only loosely based on the short story "Disappearing Act" by Creator/RichardMatheson. The episode concerns three astronauts, Colonels Ed Harrington and Clegg Forbes and Major William Gart, who are [[RetGone erased from existence]] after making the first manned flight into space. In the short story, the protagonist Bob is a largely unsuccessful writer in a tempestuous marriage to a woman named Mary. When he tries to call his mistress Jean Lane, he can find no proof of her existence. Over the course of the next week, everyone in his life ceases to exist until he eventually suffers the same fate.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E12WhatYouNeed What You Need]]", Pedott is a street peddler whose unexplained ability to determine what people will need is seemingly natural. In the short story by Lewis Padgett (the pseudonym of the writing team Creator/CLMoore and Creator/HenryKuttner), the equivalent character Peter Talley owns a curio shop on Park Avenue which typically caters to extremely wealthy customers. He is able to determine what people will need in the future by virtue of a machine that he invented. This machine allows him to examine different lines of probability by turning a calibrated dial.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E25PeopleAreAlikeAllOver People Are Alike All Over]]", Sam Conrad is the protagonist and Marcusson is his fellow astronaut who accompanies him to UsefulNotes/{{Mars}} but dies shortly after their arrival. In the short story "Brothers Beyond the Void" by Paul W. Fairman on which the episode is based, Charles Marcusson is the protagonist and the only astronaut to travel to Mars. Sam Conrad is an older friend of his who remains on Earth.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E41TheHowlingMan The Howling Man]]", David Ellington immediately realizes both the truth and his mistake when the prisoner transforms himself into a traditional depiction of Main/{{Satan}} and vanishes in front of his eyes. Many years later, Ellington captures the Devil but his housekeeper releases him. In the [[Literature/TheHowlingMan short story]] by Charles Beamount, Ellington was uncertain for years whether he had truly released the Devil as the brothers claimed. All doubt is eliminated when he sees photographs of "the carpenter from Braunau am Inn" in the newspapers and his invasion of UsefulNotes/{{Poland}} plunges the world into [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII war]]. Although it is not specifically stated, the implication is that the Devil assumed the identity of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler, who was born in Braunau am Inn, UsefulNotes/{{Austria}}. The brothers eventually recapture the Devil and imprison him in the monastery once again. Furthermore, the television adaptation gives the monastery's location as simply Central Europe whereas the short story specifically states that it is in UsefulNotes/{{Germany}}. The short story also does not include the Staff of Truth.
* AdaptationExpansion: Due to being anywhere from 5-10 minutes longer than the episodes they're based on, the radio adaptations of the episodes tended to add in additional material to make up for the length ("Time Enough at Last", for example, added in a character who's pretty much the only person actually nice to the protagonist of the story). It also constantly adds material or dialogue that was cut from the original TV script for being pointless or which there was not enough time for.
* AdaptationInducedPlotHole: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamit ambassador simply leaves the book ''To Serve Man'' behind in the UsefulNotes/UnitedNations chamber which allows the translator Patty to determine that [[spoiler:[[WhamLine it's a cookbook]]]]. In the short story by Creator/DamonKnight, the equivalent character Gregori stole the book from the Kanamits and translated its first paragraph using a limited English-Kanamit dictionary.
* AdaptationSpeciesChange: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", the caretaker of the cemetery asteroid Happy Glades Jeremy Wickwire is a [[RidiculouslyHumanRobot robot]]. In the short story, his counterpart Mr. Greypoole is a human who became a cyborg after being augmented with artificial parts to restore his health and keep him alive for centuries.
* AdultFear: The show was full of this in addition to more supernatural threats. The episode "In Praise of Pip" shows a bookie receiving news that his son Pip, who has gone to Indochina in the opening months of what is about to become UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar, has been seriously wounded in combat and is possibly dying. The rest of the episode revolves around the man possibly hallucinating that Pip is a ten year old boy again while he is dying of a gunshot wound. In what is a massively sad scene, he begs his son not to die and apologizes for not being a better father and role model to him while promising to do better, even though he realizes it may be too late for both of them. [[spoiler:In the end, the father [[HeroicSacrifice trades his own life for Pip's]].]]
* AnAesop: OncePerEpisode, with some exceptions.
* AffectionateNickname: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", Captain Farver repeatedly refers to his navigator Hatch as "Magellan."
* AfterTheEnd: The episodes "Time Enough At Last", "The Old Man in the Cave" and "Two" all take place after a civilization-ending war. In the first two episodes it's specifically a nuclear war on Earth.
* TheAgeless: The titular character from "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]" was granted this form of immortality by an alchemist. He says that he came close to death many times over the centuries due to injuries and disease, "[[WhoWantsToLiveForever but never close enough]]". [[spoiler:At the end of the episode when he is shot, he begins to [[RapidAging age rapidly]] as he dies until he is nothing but a pile of dust.]]
* AgeLift: In the short story "Literature/ItsAGoodLife" by Jerome Bixby, Anthony Fremont is three years old. In the [[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife television adaptation]], he is six.
* AlchemyIsMagic: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]", the title character became immortal after submitting to the experiments of an alchemist 2,000 years earlier.
* TheAlcoholic:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E23AWorldOfDifference A World of Difference]]", Gerald Raigan is a severe alcoholic whose drinking has cost him numerous acting jobs in the past.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E32APassageForTrumpet A Passage for Trumpet]]", Joey Crown's alcoholism has ruined his once promising career as a jazz trumpeter.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E47TheNightOfTheMeek The Night of the Meek]]", the [[MallSanta department store Santa]] Henry Corwin is a chronic alcoholic. After the store manager Mr. Dundee fires him for showing up late and falling over drunk in front of the customers, Henry angrily tells him that he drinks because he wants to forget about all of the misery and poverty that he sees on a daily basis and so that he can believe that he is the real SantaClaus.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E98TheDummy The Dummy]]", Jerry Etherson began drinking heavily after he became convinced that his ventriloquist's dummy Willie was alive. As a result of his drinking, he missed 110 performances and his agent Frank had to cover for him. Jerry tells Frank that he drinks in order to cope with his nightmares about Willie.
* AIIsACrapshoot: "From Agnes - With Love". The AI begins falling in love with whoever's been trying to deal with Agnes' "problem".
* AlienInvasion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", [[spoiler:the Martian Ross tells Haley that he was sent to Earth as an advance scout to determine whether the area was suitable for colonization. Haley then reveals that he is a Venusian and they have already colonized the area. He adds that his people have intercepted the Martian fleet.]]
* AliensInCardiff: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", Williams' ship crash-landed in the vicinity of the mountain village of Madeiro, UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}}, just over the border with Texas.
* AliensSpeakingEnglish: Pretty consistently played straight. Averted in [[spoiler:"[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]"]].
* AllJustADream: [[spoiler:"Where Is Everybody?", "Perchance to Dream", "The Arrival", "The Midnight Sun", "Person or Persons Unknown" (with an added twist), "The Time Element" (also with an added twist), "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"]].
* TheAloner: "Where Is Everybody?", "King Nine Will Not Return", "Time Enough at Last", and "Nervous Man in a Four-Dollar Room."
* AlwaysABiggerFish: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", after astronaut Peter Craig becomes mad with the power he has over the tiny aliens on the planet on which he and his now departed fellow astronaut William Fletcher have landed, [[spoiler:another group of aliens who are as large to him as he is to the planets' natives land to repair their spaceship; one of them picks him up out of curiosity and accidentally crushes him to death]].
* AmbiguousDisorder: Horace Ford in the episode "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" acts like a small child and often has NoIndoorVoice, but he's a brilliant designer. Also, he keeps bouncing around and never seems to focus on one subject.
* AmbiguousSituation:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", Rod Serling's ending narration raises the questions of this world and why it is, before saying the answers make no difference.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the episode takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear war that devastated the world but the time period is left vague. In his opening narration, Rod Serling says that it is "perhaps a hundred years from now. Or sooner. Or perhaps it already happened two million years ago."
* AmnesiacCostumeIdentity: In the episode "Where is Everybody?", a man finds himself walking along a road wearing a green jumpsuit, with no idea who he is. When he later sees a movie poster with a U.S. Air Force crewman wearing a similar suit, he realizes that he's in the Air Force.
* AmnesiaEpisode: In the very first episode "Where is Everybody?", a man finds himself walking along a road with no idea who he is. The episode shows him discovering and exploring a deserted town, trying to find out his true identity and what's going on.
* AnachronismStew:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E3MrDentonOnDoomsday Mr. Denton on Doomsday]]", the town bully Dan Hotaling forces the alcoholic Al Denton to sing "How Dry I Am" for a drink. The episode is set in the Old West, but the song as we know it probably didn't come into existence until around 1919 or so.
** Deliberately used in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]". The man wears what appears to be a Confederate uniform but military posters showing tanks and planes are seen in the ruined city. Nuclear weapons were responsible for destroying the city and the world. The woman wears what appears to be a Soviet uniform. The discarded rifles that he and the woman find are {{Ray Gun}}s.
* AnArmAndALeg: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", the sergeant lost half of his left foot in UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar [[spoiler:not long before he was killed]].
* AncientKeeper: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", Jeremy Wickwire, a RidiculouslyHumanRobot, has been the caretaker of the cemetery asteroid Happy Glades since it was founded in 1973, 213 years earlier.
* AndIMustScream:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", [[spoiler:Jamie Tennyson wins the bet that he made with Colonel Archie Taylor to remain silent for a year in exchange for $500,000. However, Taylor does not have the money. Tennyson then reveals that he had the nerves to his vocal cords severed, leaving him not only unable to speak or scream but near bankrupt.]]
** In "A Kind of a Stopwatch", Patrick [=McNulty=] uses the stopwatch that can freeze time to rob a bank, [[spoiler:only to drop the watch and break it, leaving him frozen in time forever]].
* AndThenWhat: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", as they're gathering supplies for the shelter, Grace Stockton wonders what the point is if they're destined to live in a ruined world surrounded by the bodies of their friends and neighbors. Her husband Bill tells her that their son Paul is their reason because even if that's the world he inherits, he's still only twelve years old.
* AndThereWasMuchRejoicing:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E72TheGrave The Grave]]", the only people in town who are sorry about the outlaw Pinto Sykes' death are his sister Ione, their father and Conny Miller, who wanted to kill him himself.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", [[spoiler:after their "god" Peter Craig is killed by a giant spaceman, the little people [[ToppledStatue gleefully pull down the statue of Craig]], which he had forced them to make, on his body.]]
* AngelUnaware: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E32APassageForTrumpet A Passage for Trumpet]]", Joey Crown, a down-on-his-luck trumpet player, meets a mysterious stranger after his [[DrivenToSuicide suicide attempt]], who convinces him that life is worth living. As the stranger is leaving...
-->'''Joey''': I didn't get your name!
-->'''Stranger''': How's that?
-->'''Joey''': Your name, I didn't get your name!
-->'''Stranger''': My name? Call me Gabe.
-->'''Joey''': "Gabe"?
-->'''Gabe''': Gabe; short for [[ArchangelGabriel Gabriel]]. ''[shows off his trumpet]'' Goodbye, Joey. ''[walks off into the shadows and disappears]''
* AnimateInanimateObject: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E34TheAfterHours 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.
* AnotherDimension: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", the six-year-old Tina Miller falls out of bed and into another dimension.
* ApocalypseAnarchy: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", a radio report warns people to be careful outside due to widespread looting and wandering maniacs on the streets.
* ArgentinaIsNaziLand: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]", Alfred Becker asks why Gunter Lütze has returned to Dachau as he was "quite safe down there in South America."
* ArtShift: In "Once Upon a Time", the story partly takes place in 1890, where the format changes to that of a SilentMovie, complete with cutaways to subtitles and an overlaid piano track. This is also an ActorAllusion as the protagonist Woodrow Mulligan is played by Creator/BusterKeaton.
* ArtisticLicense: To be expected, given the nature of the show. Examples include:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E17TheFever The Fever]]", there's no way a man as visibly agitated as Franklin Gibbs would be allowed to continue to play. Especially in [[TheMafia the 1960 climate of Las Vegas]]. He certainly wouldn't have been able to push down the machine without getting tackled by 3-4 security guards.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]" would have us believe that gold bricks are no more heavy than concrete bricks. Not true. Each one weighs around 30 pounds. Not only could the men not carry them in the backpack (it would rip open), but even the vehicle wouldn't have been sufficient to transport the whole stash. Not to mention that two middle-aged men couldn't possibly carry around 400 pounds in a desert for any length of time.
* ArtisticLicenseHistory:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E18TheLastFlight The Last Flight]]", Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, who has traveled forward in time from March 5, 1917, mentions the disappearance of the French flying ace Georges Guynemer. In reality, Guynemer disappeared on September 11, 1917.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", after Flight 33 arrives in what is later revealed to be 1939, the crew make contact with [=LaGuardia=] Airport. In reality, the airport was established in that year under the name Glenn H. Curtiss Airport and did not become known as [=LaGuardia=] Airport until 1953.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E80AQualityOfMercy A Quality of Mercy]]", the United States forces are depicted trying to recapture Corregidor on August 6, 1945, the day that [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima]]. In reality, Corregidor was recaptured on February 26, 1945.
** InUniverse in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]". The actor playing UsefulNotes/JesseJames objects to a scene in which James attempts to shoot Marshal Rance [=McGrew=] in the back as his research indicates that the real James would have never done anything of the sort. This was done to appeal to the actor Rance [=McGrew=]'s ego as he claims that fighting dirty is [[CanonSue the only way that anyone could hope to defeat his character]].
* ArtisticLicenseLaw: {{Lampshaded|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]". In trying to prove that it is all part of his dream, Adam Grant points out to the district attorney Henry 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.
* ArtisticLicenseLinguistics: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamit language is essentially treated like English run through a cipher, to the point of being translated by codebreakers instead of linguists. (This was averted in the original short story by Creator/DamonKnight, where the dignitary Gregori who makes the big discovery had been working in the Kanamits' embassy and learned their language in secret by stealing books.)
* AssholeVictim:
** When a protagonist is driven to murder, it usually involves being pushed over the edge by one of these. Not that this protects them from LaserGuidedKarma, mind you...
** Some of the protagonists also qualify, such as Archibald Beechcroft from "The Mind and the Matter". Most of them, though, learn their lesson by the end.
** It's pretty hard to feel sorry for anyone involved in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]".
** The [[VillainProtagonist main character]] of "Death's Head Revisited" is a [[NaziProtagonist Nazi war criminal]]. He deserves ''everything'' that the vengeful ghosts of his victims inflict on him.
* AttendingYourOwnFuneral: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", when he returns home, Hyder Simpson finds that his wife Rachel, Reverend Wood and the Miller brothers are preparing to bury him. He sees his own coffin being taken outside. Unlike most applications of this trope, Hyder is actually dead and attends the burial as a spirit.
* AuthorAvatar:
** According to biographies, "A Stop At Willoughby" was Serling's favorite episode, and he identified with the main character. The stops on the Northeast line were the same stops on the commute he made into Manhattan daily.
** "Walking Distance" was another of Serling's favorite episodes. The old-fashioned town in the story is based on the town he grew up in and the main character (as an adult and a little boy) was based on him.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: B]]
* BackFromTheDead:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E88TheLastRitesOfJeffMyrtlebank The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank]]", the title character comes back from the dead in the middle of his funeral and demands to know why someone put him in a coffin. Due to the strange changes in his behavior, the townsfolk begin to worry that it was not actually Jeff that came back but a demon. [[spoiler:It is never made clear whether this is actually the case but he certainly CameBackWrong in some way.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E152MrGarrityAndTheGraves Mr. Garrity and the Graves]]", the peddler Jed Garrity claims that he can resurrect the dead. After performing the resurrection ceremony, he swindles the townspeople of Happiness, UsefulNotes/{{Arizona}} out of their money by promising that he will not bring the people buried in Boot Hill Cemetery back to life since most of them were holding grudges when they died. [[spoiler:It turns out that the ceremony had actually succeeded in resurrecting the dead.]]
* BalancingDeathsBooks:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Lou Bookman tries to outsmart Death by asking for time enough to put together a truly great sales pitch - "[[TitleDrop one for the angels]]" - before he dies, then declaring his retirement from the sales profession. Death tells him that he's taking someone's life tonight, and if it isn't Bookman, it will be a gravely ill young girl who lives on the street on which Bookman peddles his wares.
** When Max Phillips, protagonist of "In Praise of Pip", finds that his beloved son Pip has been mortally wounded in combat in South Vietnam, he begs God to take his life and let Pip live. [[spoiler:God obliges.]]
* BananaRepublic: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]" begins with Ramos Clemente having seized power in an unnamed country in Central America, which had been ruled by General De Cruz for the previous ten years.
* BandagedFace: TheReveal of a few episodes involved one of these, perhaps most famously in [[spoiler:"[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]"]].
* BarredFromTheAfterlife: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", Hyder Simpson does this to himself. He's allowed into what appears to be heaven, but he isn't allowed to take his dog Rip with him. He decides that an afterlife without his dog is a fate worse than death (so to speak), so he refuses to enter and will just wander the path in between heaven & hell forever. Subverted when the angel comes to bring him to Heaven after the gatekeeper (of Hell) turned him away. The angel mentions that while some people walk into Hell with both eyes open, the Devil can't fool a dog, who warned his master of the danger. Turns out that a life without his trusty dog wasn't heaven, it was hell. Heaven allows dogs in.
* BaseballEpisode: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E35TheMightyCasey The Mighty Casey]]", Dr. Stillman creates a robot named Casey and offers his services as a pitcher to the Hoboken Zephyrs, an extremely unsuccessful major league baseball team. Casey's amazing pitching abilities turn the team's fortunes around, at least until he has a heart installed and cannot bring himself to hurt the feelings or damage the careers of the players on the opposing teams.
* BasedOnATrueStory: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E17TheFever The Fever]]", to a degree. When Rod Serling's ''Twilight Zone'' contract was renewed, he and his wife went to Las Vegas to celebrate. Much like Franklin Gibbs, Serling got hooked on the slot machines, and took a real beating.
* BatteringRam: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", Dr. Bill Stockton's neighbors fashion one together to break into his bomb shelter. [[spoiler:Immediately after they break the shelter's door down, they learn from a CONELRAD broadcast that the unidentified objects were satellites as opposed to missiles.]]
* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: Many. A few examples include "The Chaser", "The Last Night of a Jockey", "A Game of Pool", and "Jess-Belle".
** The advice is followed in "I Dream Of Genie". The protagonist thinks out several wishes he could make and realizes that they would all end in him being miserable. After discarding love, wealth, and power, he finally wishes to [[spoiler:be a genie himself so he can help the needy.]]
** "Time Enough at Last" [[PlayingWithATrope plays with]] this trope: Burgess Meredith's character never ''wishes'' for what eventually happens to happen, but he's always griping about never having enough time for his true love, reading. [[spoiler:Then a nuclear apocalypse happens. ''[[ButtMonkey Then]]'' [[ButtMonkey his glasses break, just as he's settling down with his books]].]]
* BeYourself: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E33MrBevis Mr. Bevis]]", Mr. James B.W. Bevis learns this {{A|nAesop}}esop after his GuardianAngel makes him a SlaveToPR.
* BecomingTheCostume:
** At the end of "The Masks", [[spoiler:Jason Foster's worthless heirs discover their faces have conformed to the hideous shapes of the masks he has made them wear for the last several hours]].
** "The Night of the Meek" concludes with [[spoiler:department store Santa Henry Corwin becoming the real thing, leaving for the North Pole with an elf in a reindeer-drawn sleigh to get a start on next year's Christmas]].
* BecomingTheGenie: "I Dream of Genie". [[spoiler:However, unlike most versions, this is an entirely voluntary example]].
* BenevolentAlienInvasion: {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]". The Kanamits come to Earth with all sorts of new and miraculous gifts to end war and want... [[spoiler:so that they can keep us as docile, happy feeding stock.]]
* TheBet: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", Colonel Archie Taylor makes a bet with Jamie Tennyson that he can remain silent for a whole year in exchange for $500,000. Taylor believes that he will last a few months at most but Tennyson fulfils his part of the bargain. [[spoiler:The humiliated Taylor is forced to admit that he lost his fortune a decade earlier and therefore cannot pay Tennyson the $500,000. Tennyson is extremely distraught and writes a note for Taylor, which the colonel reads aloud: "I knew that I would not be able to keep my part of the bargain so one year ago, I had the nerves to my vocal cords severed!" Tennyson then reveals the surgical scar on his neck.]]
* BettyAndVeronica: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", Gregory West is married to a Veronica and [[spoiler:has just created]] a Betty.
* BewareOfHitchhikingGhosts: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]", Nan Adams is driving from New York to Los Angeles and having her car repaired after a near-fatal accident. After the repairs, she keeps seeing a strange man trying to hitch-hike, and becomes convinced he is trying to kill her when she almost ends up in the path of an oncoming train. It turns out [[spoiler:her accident was more than near-fatal, it ''was'' fatal, and the hitch-hiker is the personification of Death, trying to guide her to the afterlife]].
* BigBrotherIsWatching:
** {{Implied|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third from the Sun]]". William Sturka and Jerry Riden are plotting to steal an experimental spacecraft and settle on another planet in order to avoid an impending war. When Riden comes over to Sturka's house to discuss their plan, Sturka turns on the machinery in his workshop so that the authorities won't be able to pick up on their conversation with the listening devices that they have presumably placed in his house.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", when the doctor wonders aloud why Janet Tyler and the others with her deformity can't simply be allowed to be different, the nurse warns him to be careful as he is speaking treason.
* BigGuyLittleGuy: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E57ThePrimeMover The Prime Mover]]", Ace Larson bosses the much larger and nicer Jimbo Cobb around so that he will use his telekinesis to help Ace's gambling. However, Jimbo eventually fakes the loss of his power so that Ace loses and moves on from his {{Greed}}.
* BinarySuns:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", the cemetery asteroid Happy Glades' star system has two suns.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", the planet on which the astronauts William Fletcher and Peter Craig land to repair their ship has two suns.
* ABirthdayNotABreak:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", Dr. Bill Stockton's birthday party turns into a mad scramble for survival when a nuclear alert is announced--and Bill's fallout shelter has only enough room for himself and his family.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", Dan Hollis receives a Perry Como record at his surprise birthday party. Although he wants to play it on the Fremonts' record player, the others talk him out of it because of Anthony's hatred of singing. Dan later gets drunk on whisky, another of his presents, and starts making noise, much to Anthony's annoyance. While Pat Reilly is playing "Moonglow" on the piano, Dan starts singing "Happy Birthday" and tries to convince Pat to play the song. However, he is too afraid to do so. Dan finally loses his cool and tells Anthony that he is a monster. He implores the others to attack Anthony from behind but none of them have the courage to do so. Anthony then turns Dan into a jack-in-the-box before sending him to the cornfield.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", Somerset Frisby is [[AlienAbduction abducted by aliens]] on his 63rd birthday. They plan to bring Frisby back to their own planet as the most impressive specimen that humanity has to offer. As [[CannotTellALie they have no concept of lying]], the aliens believe all of his outrageous [[TallTale tall tales]] about his past accomplishments.
* BittersweetEnding: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E49BackThere Back There]]", Peter Corrigan was never able to stop Abraham Lincoln's assassination, but his actions resulted in the cop who believed him becoming a millionaire, and his descendant William (who in the original timeline was an attendant at a club) inheriting his fortune.
* BizarreAlienBiology:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", the Martian scientist has two heads while the Venusians have antennae.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", [[spoiler:the Martians have three arms while the Venusians have three eyes]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", the aliens have a Venusian specimen who can sing at eight different pitches simultaneously and accompanies himself with his tail.
* BlackMagic:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", Teague uses a book of black magic to [[TimeStandsStill freeze Union soldiers in time]]. He would like to use it to defeat the entire Union Army but he can't as he is dying.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E77TheJungle The Jungle]]", the Kekouyu put a curse on Alan Richards using a form of black magic known as Umchawi in revenge for his company building a hydroelectric dam that will result in the loss of their homes. It first manifests in the form of a dead goat being dumped outside of his apartment. In the early hours of the following morning, Richards is haunted by sounds of the jungle and tribal drums in the street. When he returns home, he finds that his wife Doris has been killed by a lion, which then pounces on him.
* BlatantLies: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits say "There is nothing ulterior in our motives. ''Nothing at all''." It turns out that they're trying to [[spoiler:lure humans to their planet in order to eat them.]]
* BlindMusician: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", the guitarist Ignacio is blind.
* BornInTheWrongCentury:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E30AStopAtWilloughby A Stop at Willoughby]]", Gart Williams is not temperamentally suited to the stress that being an advertising executive entails. He begins to dream about an idyllic small town named Willoughby in 1888 where he can live his life full measure at a slower pace. When Gart tells his wife Janie about Willoughby, she retorts that he was born too late and that it was her mistake to marry a man whose ambition in life is to be [[Literature/AdventuresOfHuckleberryFinn Huckleberry Finn]].
** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]". Rollo, a scientist from 1962, goes back to 1890 with Mulligan expecting simpler times, only to realize that they also didn't have the simple pleasures of his time such as spring mattresses, TV dinners and bikinis. Mulligan sends him back to 1962 as he has begun to annoy him.
** {{Subverted|Trope}} again in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E112NoTimeLikeThePast No Time Like the Past]]". After thrice failing to fix history, Paul Driscoll decides to go back to 1881 where none of the modern world's problems exist. After inadvertently causing a fire he intended to stop, he accepts that history has always had disasters none of which he can stop, so he decides to return to his own time and to work to make a better future.
* BotheringByTheBook: Death does this in "One for the Angels", at least partially to [[HoistByHisOwnPetard get some mild revenge on the pitch-man that had duped him]].
* BottleEpisode: Several, including "The Whole Truth". A good tell is if the episode is on tape instead of film.
* TheBoxingEpisode:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E27TheBigTallWish The Big Tall Wish]]", the washed up boxer Bolie Jackson has a comeback fight against Joey Consiglio. After Bolie is knocked down, his young friend Henry Temple makes a [[TitleDrop big tall wish]] for the two boxers to switch places. The wish is granted and Bolie ends up winning the fight. However, Bolie does not believe that a wish could have allowed him to win and its effects are undone.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E122Steel Steel]]", the boxing promoter Steel Kelly, disguised as his malfunctioning B2 robot Battling Maxo, fights a B7 robot in Maynard, Kansas on August 2, 1974.
* BreakingTheFourthWall:
** Rod Serling not only provides narration, frequently on-camera, but he actually becomes part of the story in "A World of His Own". Temporarily, at least.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Mr. Death suddenly looks up at the camera as Serling identifies him in his opening narration.
** In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", just as Rod Serling mentions being beautiful, Marilyn Cuberle, who up until this point had been a free spirited young girl and is now a conformist looking exactly like her friend Val, looks directly into the camera when Serling muses if this might be possible in the near future.
** At the end of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", Michael Chambers directly talks to the audience, asking if "[we're] still on Earth, or on the ship with [him]," following it up by saying, "Really doesn't make very much difference, because sooner or later, all of us will be on the menu... all of us."
** A brief example: after Fats' ghost leaves in "A Game of Pool", Jesse Cardiff asks the audience if they saw him sink the winning shot, before going off on a spiel ''not'' directed to the audience but rather to ''himself'' about how now he's the greatest.
* BreakHisHeartToSaveHim: "The Trouble With Templeton", focusing on a washed-up old actor who still clings to the memory of his dead wife while the present and future seem horrendously bleak. [[spoiler:He seems to have finally reunited with his wife, but she acts strange and old, before telling him to leave a party they're attending, filled with actors he used to know. It turned out it was part of a play staged by the dead to get him to move on and focus on the present. It works: he demands a bigger role, tells off a jerk co-actor, and takes a younger actor under his wing.]]
* BrownNote: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", [[spoiler:the sound of Somerset Frisby's harmonica paralyzes the aliens with extreme pain and he manages to escape]].
* TheButlerDidIt: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", a group of people get off a bus and gather at a cafe where they are served food and drinks by the local counter jerk and dine. It is later revealed by the police that one of the people on the bus seems to have been an alien. TenLittleMurderVictims ensues, the resolution of which is only a half-subversion of TheButlerDidIt: [[spoiler:one of the people from the bus ''was'' The Mole, but the cafe worker who served them all and remained very much in the background throughout the story was also an enemy alien from a different planet, and was two steps ahead of The Mole the whole time.]]
* ButterFace:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]" (aka "A Private World of Darkness")". [[spoiler:What the surgery is supposed to correct, and everyone else in the episode.]]
** Toyed with in "The Masks". [[spoiler:Only ''after'' Fosters' relatives remove their masks do they become this.]]
* ButtMonkey:
** Henry Bemis of "Time Enough At Last". This man cannot catch a break.
** Burgess Meredith was kind of the master at this; see also "Mr. Dingle the Strong".
** Also, the titular "Mr. Bevis".
[[/folder]]

[[folder: C]]
* TheCaligula: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", as soon as he comes to power, Ramos Clemente proves himself to be extremely irrational, paranoid and blood-thirsty. He sees enemies all around him. As well as ordering mass executions, he becomes convinced that his lieutenants D'Alessandro, Garcia, Tabal and Cristo are plotting against him due to having seemingly foreseen it in the mirror. Clemente throws D'Alessandro off the balcony of his mansion, has Garcia and Tabal executed as enemies of the state and shoots Cristo as he believed that the wine that he offered him was poisoned. [[spoiler:When he looks in the mirror and sees only his own reflection, Clemente shoots himself. His reign lasted for only a week.]]
* CallingYourShots: In the episode "A Game of Pool", Fats and Jesse call their shots in [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a game of pool.]] The most impressive shot is when Jesse calls the side pocket after bouncing off three banks and making it.
* CameBackWrong: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E88TheLastRitesOfJeffMyrtlebank The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank]]" plays with this. Although Jeff came back to life, he doesn't seem that off. [[spoiler:But then again, he lit a match without striking it...]]
* CannotTellALie:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E50TheWholeTruth The Whole Truth]]", after buying the Model A, Harvey Hunnicut finds out to his horror that he can't tell a lie. Since he's a used car dealer who specializes in selling junk cars, his business is ruined. He eventually sells it to UsefulNotes/NikitaKhrushchev.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", the aliens mistake Somerset Frisby's [[TallTale tall tales]] about his own past for an incredible variety of impressive accomplishments because they have no idea what lying is.
* CannotTellFictionFromReality:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E26Execution Execution]]", the temporally displaced Joe Caswell mistakes a scene from a [[TheWestern TV Western]] for reality. When the TV cowboy pulls his gun, Caswell shoots the television.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]", the likewise temporally displaced Woodrow Mulligan sees a man on television, which he mistakes for a window, while in Jack's Fix-It Shop. Believing that the man is talking to him when he warns another character that someone can't be trusted, he becomes concerned that the repairman is up to something. Rollo sets him straight, though Mulligan still does not understand what television is.
* CanonForeigner:
** Carling, the villain of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third from the Sun]]", does not appear in the short story by Creator/RichardMatheson.
** Teenya, the female Martian to whom Sam Conrad is attracted in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E25PeopleAreAlikeAllOver People Are Alike All Over]]", does not appear in the short story "Brothers Beyond the Void" by Paul W. Fairman.
** Mrs. Williams, Mrs. Lucas and FBI Agent Hall, the three supporting characters in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", do not appear in the short story by Price Day.
* CanonSue: InUniverse in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]". The fictional Marshal Rance [=McGrew=] is the FastestGunInTheWest and a brave and universally admired hero who never loses.
* CantLiveWithThemCantLiveWithoutThem: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E63TheMindAndTheMatter The Mind and the Matter]]", Archibald Beechcroft initially revels in his solitude after he makes everyone else disappear. However, after several hours, he becomes incredibly bored.
* CaptivityHarmonica:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", Coley, one of Adam Grant's fellow prisoners, plays a harmonica in his dream about being on DeathRow. Grant acknowledges that it is a trope, saying that he got Coley and his harmonica from a bad movie that he saw once.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", Somerset Frisby plays his harmonica after being [[AlienAbduction abducted by aliens]]. [[spoiler:[[BrownNote The sound causes them extreme pain]] and he escapes.]]
* CaptionContest: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E17TheFever The Fever]]", Flora Gibbs enters a caption contest and wins an all expenses paid trip to UsefulNotes/LasVegas.
* CassandraTruth:
** In "The Time Element", Peter Jenson attempts to warn the authorities about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941. However, they do not believe him and come to the conclusion that he is delusional. Jenson does not help his case when he is asked to identify the President of the United States and he initially says UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]", Colonel Clegg Forbes frantically attempts to convince everyone that Colonel Ed Harrington has disappeared and they have all forgotten that he ever existed but to no avail. Major William Gart finally realizes that he was telling the truth when Forbes disappears and he is the only one to remember him.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E49BackThere Back There]]", Peter Corrigan is arrested for disturbing the peace on April 14, 1865 when he goes to Ford's Theatre and starts banging on the stage door and yelling that UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln is going to be assassinated during the performance of ''Our American Cousin'' that night. The police believe that he is either drunk or a Union soldier who is emotionally disturbed.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E92PersonOrPersonsUnknown Person or Persons Unknown]]", David Gurney awakes one morning to discover that no one recognizes him or has even heard of him. He desperately tries to convince everyone that he meets of his identity and, in most cases, that they know him very well but without success.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E98TheDummy The Dummy]]", Jerry Etherson desperately tries to convince his agent Frank that his dummy Willie really is alive. At Frank's insistence, he has gone to see numerous psychiatrists and tried to convince them of the same thing but they all diagnosed this belief as a symptom of schizophrenia.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E112NoTimeLikeThePast No Time Like the Past]]", Paul Driscoll attempts to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the impending atomic bombing on August 6, 1945 and the captain of the RMS ''Lusitania'' about its impending sinking by the ''U-20'' on May 7, 1915 but both of them believe that he is insane.
* {{Catchphrase}}: Almost every opening and closing narration features the phrase "[[TitleDrop the Twilight Zone]]."
* CausticCritic:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E40AThingAboutMachines A Thing About Machines]]", Bartlett Finchley is a misanthropic critic for a gourmet magazine who never misses an opportunity to denigrate people to their faces or humanity in general. He is ultimately [[LaserGuidedKarma destroyed by the very machines that he hates]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E87APianoIntheHouse A Piano in the House]]", the drama critic Fitzgerald Fortune is a cruel, callous man. He takes delight in humiliating his much abused wife Esther, his friends Greg Walker and Marge Moore and his butler Marvin by using the piano player to force them to reveal their most private thoughts and feelings. The tables are turned when Esther uses the piano to force Fitzgerald to admit that he is essentially a frightened little boy who lacks emotional maturity.
* CelebrityParadox: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E56Static Static]]", Vinnie mentions listening to Ed Wynn on the radio in 1940. Wynn previously played Louis J. Bookman in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]" and would later play Sam Forstmann in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E132NinetyYearsWithoutSlumbering Ninety Years Without Slumbering]]".
%%* CharacteristicTrope
%%* ChekhovsArmoury: [[spoiler:"The New Exhibit".]]
* ChessWithDeath: The climax of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]". Lou Bookman convinces Death to let him make one last pitch before he takes him, [[TitleDrop one for the angels]]. He then decides to [[LoopholeAbuse retire]]... at least until Death decides to [[BalancingDeathsBooks go after a little girl]]. As such, to make sure he misses his appointment, Lou decides to distract him by making a big pitch, ultimately selling him all of his wares. [[HeroicSacrifice Thus making his big pitch...]]
* ChildrenAreInnocent: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", Pedro immediately becomes friends with Williams because, as a mistreated orphan with no friends, he can relate to the stranger. Other than the doctor, he is the only person in Madeiro who believes that Williams is no threat to the village.
* ChristmasEpisode: "The Night of the Meek" is set on Christmas Eve, and involves alcoholic, despairing department store Santa Henry Corwin wishing he could help the poverty-stricken residents of his neighbourhood, then finding a mysterious bag which produces gifts on request. He spends the night giving gifts to children and adults alike, and when the bag is empty, he wishes he could do the same thing every year. [[spoiler:At which point a reindeer-drawn sleigh appears, and an elf sitting in the sleigh tells "Santa" that they need to get a start on next year's Christmas...]]
* ChromosomeCasting:
** Numerous episodes of the series have all-male casts, particularly when they have military themes: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E1WhereIsEverybody Where Is Everybody?]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E15IShotAnArrowIntoTheAir I Shot An Arrow Into the Air]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E18TheLastFlight The Last Flight]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E19ThePurpleTestament The Purple Testament]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E80AQualityOfMercy A Quality of Mercy]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E104TheThirtyFathomGrave The Thirty-Fathom Grave]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E106HesAlive He's Alive]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E122Steel Steel]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E125TheLastNightOfAJockey The Last Night of a Jockey]]" (in which Creator/MickeyRooney was the only actor to appear), "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E130The7thIsMadeUpOfPhantoms The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E149TheJeopardyRoom The Jeopardy Room]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E151TheEncounter The Encounter]]" and "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E153TheBrainCenterAtWhipples The Brain Center at Whipple's]]". Several of these episodes feature female extras while others have no women on screen at all.
** Conversely, two episodes feature all-female casts with the exception of a brief voice over from a male actor: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]" (in which Creator/AgnesMoorehead is the only actor seen on screen) and "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E139NightCall Night Call]]".
* CigaretteOfAnxiety: The lead character of the episode "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Hotel Room" tries to light up to relieve the stress of being called on to kill someone for the first time. He can't because he's out of matches. His reflection, on the other hand, happily puffs away while berating him.
* ClingyMacGuffin: Of the more nightmarish variety -- "[[CreepyDoll Talky Tina]]" and a guitar.
* {{Cloudcuckoolander}}: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E33MrBevis Mr. Bevis]]", Mr. James B.W. Bevis is an eccentric, accident prone man who loves zither music and stuffed animals and drives a 1924 Rickenbacker. He is beloved by the neighborhood children and many other locals but his idiosyncrasies mean that he has had eleven jobs in the last eleven months.
* ComicBookAdaptation:
** Dell Comics published two issues in 1962, after which Gold Key picked up the ball and continued publishing a ''Twlight Zone''-based comic book until 1982. Now Comics published a ''Twlight Zone'' comic in the 1990s, and in the last few years Walker & Co. has published several graphic novels adapting specific episodes of the original series, updated to today in some cases. The Gold Key title ramped up the creepiness factor by continuing to feature a cartoon version of Rod Serling introducing each story, even years after the real Serling died.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E5WalkingDistance Walking Distance]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E22TheMonstersAreDueOnMapleStreet The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E27TheBigTallWish The Big Tall Wish]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E34TheAfterHours The After Hours]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]" and "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]" were all adapted as graphic novels by Walker Paperback from 2008 to 2009.
* CompositeCharacter: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", Peter Kirby is a composite of four characters from the short story: Lt. Peterson, Chitterwick, Goeblin and Milton.
* ConspiracyTheorist: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", Oliver Crangle calls the government to alert them that all the evil people in the United States are going to shrink...
-->'''Crangle:''' ...although that call probably won't even go through. It's my understanding that [[DirtyCommunists the Reds]] are in complete control in [[UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC Washington]] now. They've probably taken over the switchboard too.... It's a complete conspiracy, you know.
* ConvenientlyCoherentThoughts: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E52APennyForYourThoughts A Penny for Your Thoughts]]", Hector B. Poole gains the ability to read minds, and hears a disgruntled bank employee named L.J. Smithers planning to rob the bank. After he denounces him, though, it turns out that Smithers has been idly ''thinking'' about robbing the bank for years, but he'd never actually go through with it.
* ConvenientlyInterruptedDocument: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", an alien who calls himself Williams brings a message to humanity. Williams is killed and the message is burned. Then the doctor reads the message, which says "Greetings to the people of Earth. [[WeComeInPeace We come as friends and in peace]]. We bring you this gift. The following chemical formula is...[[CureForCancer a vaccine against all forms of cancer]]..." The rest is burned away.
%%* CoolOldLady: Aunt T. in "The Bewitchin' Pool".
* TheCorrupter: The aliens in "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", of the exacerbate-preexisting-character-flaws variety. They qualify as {{Magnificent Bastard}}s because [[spoiler:their corrupting of the people is all done by suggestion and playing on fears; they never show themselves]].
* CorruptCorporateExecutive: William J. Feathersmith in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" (He is even called a ''Robber Baron'' in the opening), Wallace V. Whipple in "The Brain Center at Whipple's" and Alan Richards in "The Jungle".
* CosmicHorrorStory: "And When the Sky was Opened" concerns three astronauts after a mission where they fly the X-20 [[PunnyName DynaSoar]], during which they briefly disappear off of radar. Afterwards, they each [[RetGone disappear]] one after the other (and nobody remembers that they even existed after) until finally, the X-20 vanishes as well.
* CrazyMemory: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", Somerset Frisby tells outrageous lies to his friends about his past... and is promptly kidnapped by aliens, who think his lies are true.
* CreatorCameo: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E92PersonOrPersonsUnknown Person or Persons Unknown]]", the patient who believes himself to be UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill is played by the director John Brahm.
* CreepyChild:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E29NightmareAsAChild Nightmare as a Child]]", Markie is a strange, demanding child with a deadly serious manner. She tells Helen Foley that she knows every detail of her life. [[spoiler:It turns out that Markie, a manifestation of Helen's RepressedMemories concerning the murder of her mother by Peter Selden, has good intentions but she is still creepy.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", the six-year-old Anthony Fremont has [[RealityWarper extensive powers]] which allow him to read people's minds and make those who are not thinking nice things about him to disappear. As such, everyone in Peaksville, UsefulNotes/{{Ohio}}, including his parents Bill and Agnes, lives in mortal fear of him.
* CreepyChildrenSinging: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E29NightmareAsAChild Nightmare as a Child]]", Helen Foley hears Markie creepily singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in her mind.
%%* CreepyDoll[=/=]TheDollEpisode: "Living Doll", "Caesar and Me", "The Dummy".
* CripplingTheCompetition: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E3MrDentonOnDoomsday Mr. Denton on Doomsday]]", the title character Al Denton, a washed up RetiredGunfighter faces off against a young wannabee named Pete Grant in a duel, both using a potion granting quick draw abilities. Both men manage to inflict hand injuries preventing each other from ever using guns again. Denton sees this as a blessing, as it will prevent either from engaging in any more reckless duels.
* CruelAndUnusualDeath: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", Ramos Clemente intends to have his predecessor General De Cruz put to death by being covered with honey and eaten alive by ants. [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse Whether he went through with it is never revealed.]]
* CruelTwistEnding:
** "Time Enough at Last" ends with Henry Bemis, the lone survivor of an apocalypse, finally having time enough to read all the books he likes... [[spoiler:only to break his glasses, leaving the pages an indistinct blur]].
** In "The Purple Testament", a soldier gains the ability to see which of his comrades will die when they begin emitting a strange glow. His superiors decide he needs to be sent away to recuperate, and [[spoiler:he sees the glow on his own face in a mirror, and again on the driver assigned to collect him. Sure enough, they are killed by a land mine]].
** "Young Man's Fancy" opens with newlywed couple Alex and Virginia Walker preparing Alex's late mother's house to sell. However, Alex becomes so engrossed in childhood memories that Virginia feels she is competing with his mother for his attention. [[spoiler:At the end of the episode, Alex has regressed to childhood and his mother has returned from the dead, and both of them dismiss Virginia.]]
** In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", Marilyn Cuberle rebels against the Transformation, a surgical process which all humans undergo as adolescents so that everyone looks like one of a small number of standard "models", having been inspired by her father, who gave her banned books about the pre-Transformation years and committed suicide out of regret over his Transformation. [[spoiler:Her attempts to persuade her family and friends that Transformation is morally wrong go unheeded, and when she finally undergoes the process, she is also mindwiped into blind, blissful acceptance of the status quo, implying that Transformation is now more than just a physical alteration.]]
** "Black Leather Jackets" features three aliens tasked with poisoning Earth's human and animal population so that their race can colonise the planet. The youngest alien falls in love with the girl next door and tries to persuade her to run away with him to escape the mass death that will soon take place. [[spoiler:Terrified, she calls the police, and the policeman who arrives turns out to be another alien sent to punish the would-be defector, and it is implied the poisoning will go ahead unimpeded.]]
** "What's in the Box?" features unhappily married couple Joe and Phyllis, the former of whom berates the repairman working on their television. After the repairs, Joe discovers that the television now gets a station which broadcasts the past, present, and future, and he sees [[spoiler:himself killing Phyllis, being tried and convicted for her murder, and executed by electrocution. When he tries to tell Phyllis what he has just seen, she taunts him, and in his anger he attacks her and accidentally kills her, and is taken away by the police]].
** "Caesar and Me" features ventriloquist Jonathan West, whose dummy, Caesar, has a mind of his own and persuades him to turn from their unsuccessful stage act to a life of crime. One such conversation is overheard by Susan, a little girl in the same boarding house as Jonathan who taunts him for his lack of professional success. [[spoiler:After overhearing a second conversation, Susan tips off the police about Jonathan and Caesar's crime spree, and when Jonathan tries to get Caesar to confess, Caesar remains silent, leading the police to suspect Jonathan has lost his mind. He gives himself up and is led away, at which point Caesar turns his attention to recruiting Susan as a partner in crime.]]
* CryCute: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", after taking a shot at the man, the woman spends the night in the barber's shop and cries slightly because of her loneliness.
* TheCuckoolanderWasRight: [[spoiler:In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", Avery accuses Mr. Ross of being the "most suspicious of the bunch." He also suggests that they check under Ross's coat for wings. Had they done so, they would have seen his third arm and known he was the real Martian.]]
* CueTheBilliardShot: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]" starts with one of these. The camera follows the ball's trajectory, then focuses on Jesse Cardiff's reaction to it.
* CulturePolice:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", the State has banned all books, which leads to the librarian Romney Wordsworth being declared obsolete.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E137Number12LooksJustLikeYou Number 12 Looks Just Like You]]", the works of Creator/WilliamShakespeare, Creator/JohnKeats, Creator/PercyByssheShelley, Creator/{{Aristotle}}, Creator/{{Socrates}} and Creator/FyodorDostoevsky were all banned many years earlier as their ideas were considered subversive. Professor Sigmund Friend accuses Marilyn of introducing smut to the interview when she mentions that she has read them.
* CurbStompBattle: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E88TheLastRitesOfJeffMyrtlebank The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank]]", when Orgram Gatewood warns him to stay away from his sister Comfort, the title character manages to beat him up with little effort. Before Jeff's death and resurrection, Orgram had been whopping him ever since they were children.
* CureForCancer: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", Williams came to Earth in order to provide humanity with a vaccine against all forms of cancer.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: D]]
* DangerTakesABackSeat: "The Hitch-Hiker".
-->"I believe you're going my way..."
* DarkIsNotEvil:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Death is simply doing his job when he insists on taking Lou Bookman (and later a little girl named Maggie Polonski [[BalancingDeathsBooks when Lou refuses to go]]). In fact, it's implied that he ''deliberately'' bought into Lou's big pitch in order to spare Maggie. He even lets Lou know that yes, he ''is'' in fact going to Heaven.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", [[spoiler:Death takes the form of Harold Beldon, a young cop who is injured outside of the apartment of a reclusive elderly woman named Wanda Dunn in order to show her that dying is nothing to be afraid of.]]
* DeadAllAlong: Episodes [[spoiler:"Judgment Night", "The Hitch-Hiker", "The Passersby", (one possible interpretation of) "The Thirty-Fathom Grave", "Deaths-Head Revisited", "Death Ship", and "Ring-a-Ding Girl".]]
%%* DeadToBeginWith: "A Nice Place to Visit", "A Game of Pool", "The Hunt".
* DealWithTheDevil:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E6EscapeClause Escape Clause]]", the [[{{Hypochondria}} severe hypochondric]] Walter Bedeker makes a deal with the Devil, calling himself Mr. Cadwallader, for {{Immortality}} in exchange for his soul.
** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]". Making a deal with the Devil is necessary to access all of the spells in the warlock Teague's book of BlackMagic. However, the Confederate soldier Sgt. Joseph Paradine burns the book as he would rather let the Confederacy die and be buried in hallowed ground than renounce Main/{{God}}.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E111PrintersDevil Printer's Devil]]", Douglas Winter, the editor of the failing newspaper ''The Courier'', hires a reporter and linotype operator named Mr. Smith, who lends him $5,000 to keep the paper going. Winter eventually discovers that Smith is the Devil who wants his soul in exchange for saving the newspaper.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E116OfLateIThinkOfCliffordville Of Late I Think of Cliffordville]]", William J. Feathersmith is approached by the Devil in the form of a beautiful young woman named Miss Devlin. She agrees to send him back to his home town of Cliffordville, Indiana in 1910 with all of his memories of the intervening 53 years intact in exchange for his soul.
* DeathByAdaptation: At the end of the radio adaptation of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", [[spoiler:the shrunken Oliver Crangle is killed and eaten by his parrot Pete as he has mistaken him for a nut]].
* DeathOfPersonality:
** In "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room", a cowardly criminal named Jackie Rhoades is confronted by his better self, on the other side of a mirror. Eventually the other personality takes over. This is a rare example of this trope being a HappyEnding.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]", Jana Loren discovers that she is actually a robot. Unable to cope, she goes mad and her "parents" reprogram her as a maid, effectively destroying her personality.
** In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", it's revealed that the Transformation is one of these when the formerly free-spirited and rebellious Marilyn Cuberle is forced to go through the process and becomes an empty-headed conformist who loves being pretty more than anything else.
%%* DeathTrap: "The Jeopardy Room".
%%* DeliberateValuesDissonance: "No Time Like the Past".
* TheDeterminator: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", the dead gangster Dane will not let even death stop him from getting revenge on his treacherous partner Bernie Dagget, even if his shoes have to be worn by host after host after host.
* DevilInDisguise: The Devil usually appears in the guise of a regular person. In "The Howling Man" he appears to be some poor guy who's been imprisoned by a madman, but when someone takes pity and releases him his horns and tail reappear.
* DiesDifferentlyInAdaptation: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", Teague dies off-screen of natural causes. In the short story "The Valley Was Still" by Creator/ManlyWadeWellman, Sgt. Joseph Paradine decapitates him with his saber after he suggests using the book of BlackMagic to defeat the Union.
* DirtyOldMan: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E53TwentyTwo Twenty-Two]]", the doctor is very lecherous, telling his patient Liz Powell, a [[InsistentTerminology professional dancer]], that she makes an old doctor wish that he were a young intern. He then laughs creepily. As she is leaving the hospital, he says that he hopes that she will be performing the next time that he sees her and that she will throw a wink in his direction.
* DisproportionateRetribution:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E8TimeEnoughAtLast Time Enough at Last]]", Henry Bemis is InnocentlyInsensitive and inattentive at work due to his obsession with reading. AfterTheEnd, he finds a public library with more books than he could ever read but his glasses are broken before he can even read a single word.
** "Printer's Devil"
--> Douglas Winter: But why [[spoiler:Jackie]], what did she ever do to you?
--> [[spoiler:Mr. Smith]] She slapped me.
* DittoAliens: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits are all identical in appearance. The ambassador has a goatee and white robes to distinguish him from the others.
* DivideAndConquer: [[spoiler:In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E22TheMonstersAreDueOnMapleStreet The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street]]", it is revealed that aliens were responsible for shutting off all of the power on Maple Street. Within hours, the residents of the street turn on each other and start rioting. The aliens have previously conducted many similar experiments and the result is always the same. Their overall plan is to travel to numerous small communities one by one and gradually cause humanity to destroy itself.]]
* DivingSave: Near the end of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E100ISingTheBodyElectric I Sing the Body Electric]]", the robot grandmother pushes a young girl out of the way of an oncoming car and is hit herself. [[spoiler:She gets better.]]
* DivineIntervention: Possibly in "I Am the Night - ColorMeBlack". The Sun fails to rise on the day of a man's execution, and, [[spoiler:once Jagger's been hanged, the darkness starts spreading everywhere]].
* DoesNotLikeShoes: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", Norma is barefoot for the entire episode. {{Justified}} because the story's premise is the Earth heating up as it moves closer to the sun.
* DoesNotKnowHisOwnStrength: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", [[spoiler:one of the giant spacemen accidentally crushes Peter Craig to death when he picks him up to examine him. He feels guilty about it.]]
* DontFearTheReaper:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]" features elderly shut-in Wanda Dunn, who lives in fear that Death will take her if she leaves her basement apartment. A policeman named Harold Beldon (played by a young Creator/RobertRedford) is shot during an altercation outside her door, and she eventually agrees to let him in. [[spoiler:He is revealed to be a gentle, well-meaning version of TheGrimReaper, sent to show her that death is nothing to be afraid of, and they leave together.]]
** In "The Hitch-hiker", department store buyer Nan Adams has had a near-fatal car crash while driving from New York to Los Angeles, but begins seeing a mysterious hitch-hiker everywhere she goes. [[spoiler:In fact, the car crash ''was'' fatal, and the hitch-hiker is Death, trying to gently guide her toward the afterlife.]]
%%* {{Doppelganger}}: "Mirror Image", "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room", "In His Image".
* DotingGrandparent: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E58LongDistanceCall Long Distance Call]]", the extremely frail Grandma Bayles adores her grandson Billy. She gives him a toy telephone for his fifth birthday so that he will always be able to talk to her on it. She dies later that day, after mistaking Billy for her son (and his father) Chris. She begins to [[PhoneCallFromTheDead communicate with him over the toy phone from beyond the grave]] and convinces Billy to commit suicide so that they can be TogetherInDeath. When Billy is on the brink of death after being found face down in the family pond, Chris talks to his mother over the toy phone and persuades her to let Billy live if she really loves him.
* DownerEnding: A number of episodes leave on a bad note.
* DreamApocalypse: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", the District Attorney Henry Ritchie and newspaper editor Paul Carson 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. [[spoiler:It turns out that their fears are justified.]]
* DreamingOfThingsToCome: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E53TwentyTwo Twenty-Two]]", Liz Powell, who is in hospital for exhaustion, has a recurring nightmare in which she wakes up in her hospital room, accidentally breaks a glass of water and hears the sound of footsteps in the corridor. The footsteps belong to a nurse. Liz then takes an elevator down to the basement and arrives at the morgue, Room 22. The nurse comes out and says, "Room for one more, honey." Liz's doctor and her agent Barney Kamener try to convince her that it is nothing more than a delusion. After Liz is released from hospital, she is going to fly to Miami Beach for her next gig. However, she is startled when she is told that she will be flying on Flight 22. In her confusion, Liz bumps into a woman and breaks the vase that she is carrying, just as she broke the glass in her nightmare. As she prepares to board the plane, she notices that the stewardess is identical to the nurse. She says, "Room for one more, honey." Liz screams and races to the terminal. The plane takes off but explodes within seconds.
* DreamPeople:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", several of the people in Adam Grant's DeathRow nightmare are drawn from his real life. For instance, the priest who visits him before his execution is Father Beaman, an actual priest who died when he was ten years old, and the newspaper editor Paul Carson is the younger priest who replaced him. Adam is uncertain where he got the District Attorney Henry Ritchie, speculating that he may have been a teacher or a friend of his father's. Outside of his own life, he got his [[CaptivityHarmonica harmonica playing fellow prisoner]] Coley from a bad movie that he once saw.
** {{Discussed|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]". The bagpiper speculates that they are nothing more than characters in someone else's dream.
* DrinkOrder: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", after trying and failing to convince his girlfriend Wilma of his identity several times, the gangster Dane, in control of the body of homeless man Nate Bledsoe, is finally recognized by his order of "tequila...with a cube of sugar." He later uses the order to gain Bernie Dagget's attention at their nightclub.
* DrippingDisturbance: This is one of the ordinary noises played with in "Sounds and Silences".
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:The fate of Chief Bell in "The Thirty-Fathom Grave". Seeing ghosts of his dead crewmates from a sunken submarine which he served on in World War II and experiencing massive SurvivorGuilt, Bell flings himself off the side of the ship and drowns.]]
* DroppedGlasses: "Time Enough at Last". The man who wanted nothing but time to read finally gets all the time he wants, the rest of his life--everyone else being dead in a nuclear holocaust--only to drop his glasses, which shatter.
* DumbBlonde: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E52APennyForYourThoughts A Penny for Your Thoughts]]", Hector B. Poole hears the thoughts of anyone standing near him. When tries to read the mind of a blonde woman in the bank, [[BrainlessBeauty he can't hear anything.]]
* DutchAngle:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E1WhereIsEverybody Where Is Everybody?]]", they are used throughout the sequence in which Mike Ferris flees in terror from the movie theater into the town square.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E9PerchanceToDream Perchance to Dream]]", the carnival DreamSequence features them prominently.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third from the Sun]]" makes extensive use of Dutch angles.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E17TheFever The Fever]]", one is used for a shot of Franklin Gibbs at the slot machine after he's become obsessed and screamed at his wife Flora to leave him alone.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E22TheMonstersAreDueOnMapleStreet The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street]]", there are multiple such shots in the final scene when the residents of Maple Street go berserk and start rioting.
** They are used throughout "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E41TheHowlingMan The Howling Man]]".
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", two are used during tense moments in the pool game.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]", numerous Dutch angle shots are used during Gunter Lütze's trial at Dachau.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", they are used throughout the sequence set in the other dimension.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E98TheDummy The Dummy]]", they are used extensively after Jerry Etherson starts hearing Willie and seeing his shadow while leaving the theater.
* DyingDream: [[spoiler:"An Occurrence at Owl Creek", the UsefulNotes/AcademyAward-winning short, based on the UrExample of the trope, the Creator/AmbroseBierce story.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder: E-F]]
* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: The first season had neither the iconic theme nor Rod Serling appearing in the beginning to introduce the episode; instead it had a shorter theme, and Serling introducing the episode by voiceover. The familiar theme and Serling's onscreen presence both started in Season 2.
* EarthAllAlong: [[spoiler:"I Shot an Arrow into the Air", "Probe 7 - Over and Out". Inverted in "Third from the Sun" and "The Invaders".]]
* EldritchLocation: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", the other dimension to which Tina Miller is sent is a bizarre, abstract realm which distorts perceptions. For instance, Tina's father Chris believed that he was standing upright in spite of the fact that his legs were still on the other side of the portal.
* EmergencyBroadcast: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", the Stocktons and their neighbors learn from a CONELRAD broadcast that unidentified objects believed to be missiles have been detected heading towards the United States. [[spoiler:A later CONELRAD broadcast reveals that they were in fact satellites which pose no danger.]]
* EmptyPilesOfClothing: The fate of two characters in "Long Live Walter Jameson" and "Queen of the Nile".
* EnclosedExtraterrestrials: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]", a woman living alone on a farm is menaced by two small aliens in form-concealing armor. [[spoiler:At the end of the episode, we learn that the 'aliens' are actually human astronauts and the woman is a giant alien.]]
* EndlessDaytime: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", Earth's elliptical orbit suddently changed and it is moving closer and closer towards UsefulNotes/TheSun. After a month, there is no darkness and humanity is facing imminent extinction due to the heat. [[spoiler:It turns out that this is a [[FeverDreamEpisode fever dream]] being experienced by Norma. In reality, the Earth is [[EndlessWinter moving further away from the Sun]] and the world has at most three weeks before it freezes to death.]]
%%* EnfantTerrible: Anthony Fremont in "It's a Good Life", Susan in "Caesar and Me".
* EngineeredPublicConfession: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", Romney Wordsworth, who has been convicted of owning books and believing in God, chooses a televised execution with his own personal assassin. At the eleventh hour, he summons the Chancellor into his room, where he plans to destroy himself and the Chancellor by suicide bombing. Wordsworth calmly reads passasges from the Bible, and the Chancellor begs to be let go "in the name of God." Wordsworth relents, dying by suicide bombing, and releases the Chancellor. When the Chancellor leaves Wordsworth's room, he is put on trial and declared obsolete for the crime of invoking God's name in an authoritarian dictatorship whose totalitarian, atheistic government has decreed that God does not exist.
* EpisodeOnAPlane:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]" takes place entirely on Global Airlines Flight 33.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E123NightmareAt20000Feet Nightmare at 20,000 Feet]]" takes place on a plane with a gremlin on its wing.
* EquivalentExchange: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E98TheDummy The Dummy]]", [[spoiler:Jerry Etherson and Willie have switched places so that Jerry has become the dummy and Willie the ventriloquist. In his closing narration, Rod Serling says that he has gone from "boss to blockhead."]]
* EvenEvilHasStandards: In "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville", Miss Devlin is a manipulative devil, and ordinarily maintains a charming persona when dealing with Feathersmith. However, during her final [[TheReasonYouSuckSpeech dressing down]] of Feathersmith and his faults, she allows herself to slip into some genuine anger.
* EverybodySmokes: What with the show being made in the 60's.
* EveryEpisodeEnding: Nearly every episode ends with a short commentary from Rod Serling, usually to deliver AnAesop, almost always ending with "...in the [[TitleDrop Twilight Zone]]."
* EvilCannotComprehendGood: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E82OneMorePallbearer One More Pallbearer]]", Paul Radin sets up a fake nuclear war scenario and expects Mrs. Langsford, Reverend Hughes and Colonel Hawthorne, who all of whom humiliated him in the past, to apologize to him in exchange for their lives. He seems mystified that they would rather spend their last moments with their loved ones than try to save themselves.
* EvilDetectingDog:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", an agent of the Devil is trying to lure a recently-deceased Hyder Simpson into entering Hell. Hyder's dog Rip growls, warning him not to enter, and he avoids the trap. Later, an angel remarks "...a man, well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open. But not even the Devil can fool a dog!"
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", the Millers' dog Mack starts barking after Tina vanishes. When he's let inside, Mack runs under the bed and finds her in the other dimension.
* EvilLaugh: In "The Jeopardy Room", the Soviet commissar uses a particularly nasty laugh at the end of the taped message he leaves for the defector he's toying with.
%%* EvilMask: "The Masks", obviously.
* ExactEavesdropping: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E52APennyForYourThoughts A Penny for Your Thoughts]]", using his newfound powers of {{Telepathy}}, Hector B. Poole hears Mr Sykes thinking that he plans to use his $200,000 loan to bet on horses so that he can win back the money that he has embezzled. He later learns that Mr. Smithers plans to rob the bank and go to UsefulNotes/{{Bermuda}}, though this turns out to be nothing but a fantasy that Smithers has on an almost daily basis.
* ExactWords: To ''Serve'' Man. Also from [[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan the titular episode]], the Kanamit ambassador, when subjected to a polygraph test, states that he sincerely ''hopes humanity will believe'' that their motives are benevolent, not that said motives actually ''are''.
* ExpositionOfImmortality: In the episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]", the titular character is a history professor who knows his stuff, has a close friend and colleague named Professor Samuel Kittridge who comments on his appearance and who is seen in an [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar American Civil War]] period picture, revealing just how he knows that period so very well.
* FailedExecutionNoSentence: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E48Dust Dust]]", Luís Gallegos survives his execution by hanging because the rope breaks at the precise moment that he falls. This is the moment that everybody in town decides (on top of everything else that has happened throughout the episode that was making them undecided about whether following through with this whole charade was actually a good idea) to let him go.
* FakeOutOpening: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]" begins with what appears to be two cowboys in TheWildWest discussing whether a man will show up, seemingly for a gunfight. Rance [=McGrew=] then drives up in his Ford Thunderbird with longhorns, revealing that the cowboys were actors who were wondering when the star of the show was going to turn up for shooting.
* FalseInnocenceTrick: "The Howling Man" is basically one of these from start to end.
* FantasticAnthropologist: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", both the Martians and the Venusians conduct experiments on Luther Dingle to see how he'll react when he gains SuperStrength and then SuperIntelligence.
* FantasyForbiddingFather: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Mrs. Gann shows hints of this during this exchange with Jenny:
-->'''Mrs. Gann''': Who were you talking to?
-->'''Jenny''': Myself.
-->'''Mrs. Gann''': Cut it out. You can go crazy that way.
* FateWorseThanDeath: "A Kind of a Stopwatch" ends with [[spoiler:the entire world except for [=McNulty=] being frozen in time forever, when the stopwatch breaks.]]
* FatteningTheVictim: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", Michael Chambers discovers the alien Kanamits eat the humans they take to their planet as "ambassadors", he is taken prisoner aboard their ship. In the last scene, a Kamamit is exhorting him to eat his dinner. More terrifying is the idea that ''everything the Kanamits did'' was a form of this--they put nitrates in the soil to end world hunger and shared technologies that made weaponry obsolete, which removed all of humanity's problems and allowed them to become fat and complacent, like cattle.
* FeverDreamEpisode: [[spoiler:In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", the world moving closer towards UsefulNotes/TheSun turns out to be nothing but a fever dream being experienced by Norma. The world is in fact moving further away from it.]]
* FishOutOfTemporalWater: The lead characters of the TimeTravel episodes, especially "Execution".
* FiveFiveFive: "Night Call" used the KL-5 variant.
* FixingTheGame: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", [[spoiler:as he knew that he couldn't remain silent for a year, Jamie Tennyson hoped to ensure that he would win the bet by having surgery to have his vocal cords severed. Since Colonel Taylor is broke, it ends up not making a difference.]]
* TheFlapper: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E45TheTroubleWithTempleton The Trouble with Templeton]]", Booth Templeton's late wife Laura was one during TheRoaringTwenties.
* FlyingDutchman:
** In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", [[spoiler:it appears that Flight 33 is destined to become a time traveling Flying Dutchman as it is uncertain whether its next attempt to return to 1961 will be successful, especially since its fuel is running low.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E67TheArrival The Arrival]]", Flight 107 mysteriously disappeared in a thick fog in the early 1940s. In his closing narration, Rod Serling describes it as an airborne Flying Dutchman.
* ForegoneConclusion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", Rod Serling notes in his closing narration that Sgt. Joseph Paradine and the other Confederate troops were ordered to move up north to an obscure little place in UsefulNotes/{{Pennsylvania}} called Gettysburg.
* FortuneTeller: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E43NickOfTime Nick of Time]]", there is a little coin-operated fortune-telling machine in a diner, that answers yes-or-no questions. A superstitious Don Carter starts to think it's giving out accurate answers and gets obsessed, and his wife tries to talk sense into him. This is a definite case of MaybeMagicMaybeMundane, and a lot of questions if it is magic. All of the following are possible: the machine accurately predicted the future as it was meant to, it was designed for/attempted to trap people (which would be a lot of trouble for a few pennies), its only ability was to make you ''think'' it made accurate predictions, or it was in fact an ordinary machine and the seemingly accurate predictions were a series of improbable coincidences.
* FountainOfYouth: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E86KickTheCan Kick the Can]]", Charles Whitley convinces the other Sunnyvale Rest Home residents, with the exception of his lifelong friend Ben Conroy, that playing kick-the-can in the street is the key to recapturing their lost youth. When he and the superintendent Mr. Cox investigate, Ben finds that Charles and the others have regressed to young children. After this transformation, the young Charles fails to recognize Ben.
* FreshClue: In "Where is Everybody?", a man finds himself all alone in a deserted town with a case of amnesia. While he's exploring a police station he finds a lit cigar smoldering in an ashtray. When he looks in a cell he finds a sink with the water running and shaving equipment (including a brush with wet shaving cream) sitting around. All of this is evidence that someone was there not too long ago. The TwistEnding is that he's actually in a [[spoiler:hallucination caused by isolation]].
* FriendToAllChildren: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E72TheGrave The Grave]]", Johnny-Rob says that all children and [[FriendToAllLivingThings animals]] love him as they always follow him around.
* TheFutureIsShocking: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E59AHundredYardsOverTheRim A Hundred Yards over the Rim]]", after arriving in 1961, Chris Horn is shocked by the sight of a truck, which almost runs him over. He thinks that it is a monster.
%%* FutureMeScaresMe: [[spoiler:"Spur of the Moment" and "Walking Distance". {{I|HatePastMe}}nverted in "Nightmare as a Child".]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder: G]]
* GagCensor: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]", after Officer Flannagan tells him to watch his step, Woodrow Mulligan mutters in irritation. The intertitle reads "Censored!" Immediately afterwards, Mulligan is knocked into a pig trough by a man on a penny farthing and shouts something after him. This time, the intertitle is "Also Censored."
* GangOfBullies: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E28ANicePlaceToVisit A Nice Place to Visit]]", it is mentioned that Rocky Valentine started a street gang called the Angels when he was eight years old.
* {{Gaslighting}}:
** {{Discussed|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E92PersonOrPersonsUnknown Person or Persons Unknown]]". David Gurney believes that someone is attempting to drive him crazy by buying off everyone who knows him, including his wife Wilma, his best friend Pete and his own mother, so they will pretend not to know him.
** Again [[DiscussedTrope discussed]] in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E144WhatsInTheBox What's in the Box]]". Joe Britt accuses his wife Phyllis and the TV repairman of plotting to drive him crazy after his recently fixed TV shows him incriminating scenes of his life.
* GenderFlip:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]", the protagonist is a woman named Nan Adams. In ''The Orson Welles Show'' radio play by Lucille Fletcher on which it was based, the protagonist is a man named Ronald Adams. [[CreatorBacklash Fletcher was not pleased by this change]]. Furthermore, in the radio version, Ronald Adams picks up a woman and briefly gives her a lift but she leaves after he tries to run over the hitch-hiker. In the television version, Nan Adams gives a lift to a male sailor, who leaves for the same reason.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", a translator named Betty discovers [[ToServeMan the true meaning]] of the Kanamit book ''To Serve Man''. In the short story by Creator/DamonKnight, it is a man named Gregori.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", Oliver Crangle's parrot is a male named Pete. In the short story by Price Day, the parrot is a female named [[ADogNamedDog Pet]].
* GenreAnthology: A science fiction / fantasy anthology series.
* GenreBlindness: Some of the protagonists are a bit slow to realize they're in a paranormal situation.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E5WalkingDistance Walking Distance]]", Martin Sloan meets himself as an 11-year-boy but he does not realize that he has traveled back in time until a teenager tells him that his 1934 roadster is brand new.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E52APennyForYourThoughts A Penny for Your Thoughts]]", Hector B. Poole spends half an episode reading people's minds before realizing that no, they're not talking out loud while somehow keeping their mouths closed.
* GetAHoldOfYourselfMan:
** Episode "Death Ship". When Lieutenant Mason starts to freak out over their bizarre experiences, Captain Ross punches him in the face and knocks him down.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", when Wilma loses control over not knowing what's going on, Dane (in Nathan Bledsoe's body) slaps her to calm her down.
* GetBackToTheFuture: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", Flight 33 is sent million of years back in time after breaking the sound barrier. The crew try to return it to 1961 by reversing the process. However, they do not travel far enough forward in time as they arrive over New York City in 1939. Another attempt is made but Flight 33 is running low on fuel so there is no guarantee of success.
* GhostCity: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity has been mostly evacuated due to the extreme heat as people are looking for cooler regions elsewhere.
* GlassyPrison: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", Jamie Tennyson lives in a glass cell in the basement of his club for a year to prove that he is fulfilling his part of the bargain and remaining silent.
* AGodAmI:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", after the astronauts William Fletcher and Peter Craig stumble across a civilization of the titular miniscule aliens, Craig goes power-mad and declares himself their god. [[spoiler:He gets killed by some even bigger aliens when he attracts their attention by screaming that there's only room for one god here, and gets accidentally crushed.]]
** In "On Thursday We Leave For Home", Benteen, a man who has become the leader of a group of would-be stranded settlers, is very protective of his position, and the soldier who comes to rescue them accuses him of thinking himself a god.
* GodIsGood: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", though unseen, the Christian God takes multiple measures to help the deceased along; even offering nonchristians a test of morality to keep them out of the devil's clutches. Heaven isn't just a fluffy place with hymns in the clouds, but a paradise for everyone as it takes the form of a beautiful back-country with coon hunts and square dances for a deceased woodsmen. And yes, dogs are more than welcome into Heaven.
* GoldFever: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", [=DeCruz=], even after he arrives in the future, can only think about how they can profit off the gold. Later, he kills Brooks and extorts Farwell's share in exchange for water.
%%* GovernmentDrugEnforcement: Several episodes.
%%* {{Greed}}: "Uncle Simon," "The Masks," and "What You Need" in particular.
* GreekChorus: Rod Serling starting with "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]". [[spoiler:[[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou He picked a bad time to start appearing on screen.]] ]]
* TheGrimReaper:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Death appears to the pitchman Lou J. Bookman and tells him that his scheduled time of departure is midnight that night. Lou convinces him to wait until he makes his greatest sales pitch and then decides never to make another pitch as long as he lives. In order to [[BalancingDeathsBooks balance his books]], Death arranges for a little girl named Maggie Polonski, a friend of Lou's, to be hit by a truck. In order to save her life, Lou makes that great sales pitch, sacrificing his own life in the process.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]", Nan Adams is frightened by the fact that she sees the same strange hitchhiker at every stop no matter how fast and how far she drives. [[spoiler:She eventually learns that she has been DeadAllAlong, having been killed in a car accident six days earlier, and the hitchhiker is Death.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", Wanda Dunn is so terrified of being taken by Mr. Death that has not left her apartment in years. After a young police officer named Harold Beldon is shot, she very reluctantly brings him inside so that she can care for him. [[spoiler:It turns out that Beldon is Death and that he tricked her into letting him into her apartment to prove to her that she had nothing to fear from him.]]
* GrewBeyondTheirProgramming: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", [[spoiler:the playwright Gregory West, who has the ability to [[RewritingReality rewrite reality]] using his dictaphone, created a perfect, impeccable and flawless wife for himself named Victoria. At the beginning of the episode, she comes back to Gregory's house against his will. This is the first time that she has demonstrated independence, indicating to Gregory that she has grown beyond the parameters that he set when he created her.]]
* GrumpyOldMan: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E56Static Static]]", Ed Lindsay is a bitter bachelor in late middle age who despises television and longs for the days when radio was the most popular form of entertainment in the home. His ex-fiancé Vinnie Brown does not believe that he is really hearing radio transmissions from the 1930s and 1940s. She instead thinks that it is all a product of his imagination as they used to the listen to those programs together and he regrets not marrying her when he had the chance in 1940.
* GuardianAngel: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E33MrBevis Mr. Bevis]]", J. Hardy Hempstead has been the guardian angel of multiple Bevis family members since one of them, hundreds of years before, performed an unspecified heroic act that earned such an angel as a reward.
* GuineaPigFamily: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E107Mute Mute]]", Ilse Nielsen's parents make her the subject of an experiment: to induce telepathic ability in her by never speaking to her.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: H]]
* HairTriggerTemper: Simon and Barbara in "Uncle Simon", especially to each other.
* HammerAndSickleRemovedForYourProtection: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the man speaks English (with an American accent, of course) and the woman speaks Russian.
* HangingUpOnTheGrimReaper:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Death comes for pitchman (street salesman) Lou Bookman, but Lou doesn't want to go and argues with him. Death finally agrees to postpone Lou's departure until he makes "a pitch for the angels". Lou then says that he's going to give up being a pitchman and never make the pitch again, allowing him to literally cheat Death.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", Wanda Dunn saw Death kill a woman just by touching her many years earlier. Ever since she has hidden inside her apartment, refusing to come out in fear of the same thing happening to her. One day she reluctantly allows a wounded police officer inside. She eventually learns that he is Death, finally come for her. She initially refuses to go, but he eventually convinces her to take his hand and pass on.
* HappilyMarried:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", Hyder and Rachel Simpson have had a very happy life together since their marriage almost 50 years earlier.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E96TheTradeIns The Trade-Ins]]", John and Marie Holt have been married for 50 years and remain very much in love and completely dedicated to each other. They wish to have 100 more years together by transferring their minds into new, younger bodies. However, they only have enough money for one of them to do so. As John is in near constant pain, Marie convinces him to go ahead with the transformation. When he does so, however, John can't bear the thought of Marie still being old when he is young and strong. He has the process reversed so that he and Marie can spend the rest of their lives together. John tells her that she is worth the pain.
* HappinessIsMandatory: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", everyone in Peaksville represses negative thoughts and emotions for fear that if Anthony Fremont senses unhappiness, he will either lash out in anger at the thinker for being dissatisfied with the world he has made or make a misguided attempt to help.
* HarassingPhoneCall: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", Oliver Crangle tells FBI Agent Hall that he calls the supposedly evil people in the middle of the night to accuse them of various crimes.
%%* HauntedTechnology: "The Fever", "A Thing About Machines", "Living Doll".
* HaveAGayOldTime: In "Caesar and Me", unsuccessful ventriloquist Jonathan West breaks into a nightclub at the insistence of his evil dummy, Caesar. While there, they are found by the night watchman, who starts asking them questions. Caesar's response: "Who are you, the house dick?" At the time, "dick" was slang for a detective, but today, the idea of a "house dick" in a nightclub might bring something else to mind.
%%* HeadsTailsEdge: "Penny for Your Thoughts".
%%* HeelFaceDoorSlam
* HellOfAHeaven: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", as far as Hyder Simpson is concerned, a Heaven where his dog Rip isn't permitted in and there's no coon hunting allowed is no Heaven at all. [[Spoiler:{{Subverted|Trope}} in the end as that actually ''was'' Hell.]]
%%* HenpeckedHusband: Henry Bemis, in "Time Enough at Last".
* HereWeGoAgain:
** In "Judgment Night", U-Boat captain Carl Lanser is [[spoiler:doomed to endlessly relive the sinking of a ship which he ordered torpedoed, but as a passenger on the ship with only a vague sense of impending disaster.]]
** In "Mr. Dingle the Strong", Luther Dingle's superhuman strength has [[spoiler:been revoked by his Martian benefactors, who found his use of it disappointing - but a group of Venusians have just given him superhuman intelligence, beginning the cycle anew.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", convicted murderer Adam Grant tries to persuade everyone around him that his impending execution by electric chair is just his own nightmare. At the end of the episode, [[spoiler:he is executed, and wakes up from the "nightmare" to be sentenced to death again, but with the "roles" in his dream rotated among those who played them]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", the homeless Nate Bledsoe man who put on the dead mobster Dane's shoes [[spoiler:and was taken over by his spirit to avenge his death is shot and killed - and another homeless man named Chips finds his body and puts on the shoes]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E92PersonOrPersonsUnknown Person or Persons Unknown]]", David Gurney wakes up to find that all evidence that he ever existed, including other people's memories of him, seems to have vanished. The episode ends with [[spoiler:Gurney waking up from a nightmare - to discover that his wife, though she acts and talks as she has always done, looks nothing like he remembers]].
** In "Death Ship", a trio of astronauts land on a barren planet to discover a wrecked copy of their ship and their own dead bodies in the cockpit. Eventually, they decide that it must be a hallucination to discourage them from landing and collecting samples, but at the end of the episode, [[spoiler:they find themselves reliving their original decision to land on the planet to explore it]].
** In "Uncle Simon", Barbara Polk looks after her rich but cruel inventor uncle, Simon, purely because she is his only heir and aims to inherit his fortune when he dies. When he does die, she is freed from his cruelty, but his will requires her to look after his final invention, a robot [[spoiler:which eventually takes on his voice and personality, and she ends the episode as she began it, listlessly bringing hot chocolate to her ungrateful, now robotic, uncle]].
** In "From Agnes - With Love", computer programmer James Elwood tries to fix a bug in Agnes, an office computer, which his predecessor could not solve. However, Agnes falls in love with him and begins breaking her programming - just as she did with his predecessor. At the end of the episode, [[spoiler:Elwood is told to go on leave by his employer, and it is implied that Agnes will fall in love with his replacement as well]].
** In "Spur of the Moment", Anne Henderson sees a woman in black screaming her name from a hilltop and flees in terror. She later determines that the woman was [[spoiler:her older self, trying to warn her against marrying the wrong man. Eventually, she sees her younger self and tries to give her the same warning, but her younger self flees in terror]].
** In "Queen of the Nile", columnist Jordan Herrick interviews actress Pamela Morris, who has somehow remained youthful despite her long screen career. He learns [[spoiler:the hard way that she feeds off the life of young people around her using an Egyptian scarab - she is, in fact, Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt, now over two thousand years old. As the episode ends, another columnist arrives for an interview]].
** In "The Time Element", bartender Peter Jenson tries to warn the personnel at Pearl Harbor of the impending Japanese attack - which he knows will happen as [[spoiler:he was killed in the attack and has been reliving it ever since]].
** Implied in "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," as [[spoiler:the aliens state that this will happen again, and again on other streets, much like the first.]]
** Creator/RodSerling states the oh-so-familiar BigBad of "He's Alive" will continue to "offer advice" again and again indefinitely in his closing speech.
* HeterosexualLifePartners: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E86KickTheCan Kick the Can]]", Charles Whitley and Ben Conroy, both residents of the Sunnyvale Rest Home, have been friends for almost their entire lives.
* HijackedByGanon: "He's Alive" has [[spoiler:UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler hijacking a neo-Nazi campaign]].
* HilarityEnsues: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E50TheWholeTruth The Whole Truth]]", the fact that Harvey Hunnicut CannotTellALie after buying the haunted Model A Ford causes him some problems such as losing sales, getting into a fight with his wife and being punched by his employee Irv when he reveals that he never gives any of his employees raises in spite of all of his promises. However, he manages to avoid any serious consequences until he sells the car to UsefulNotes/NikitaKhrushchev.
* HistoricalDomainCharacter:
** Henry Rathbone, Clara Harris and [[spoiler:John Wilkes Booth]] all appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E49BackThere Back There]]".
** UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln appears briefly in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]".
** UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler is used as a character in [[spoiler:"[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E38TheManInTheBottle The Man in the Bottle]]" and "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E106HesAlive He's Alive]]"]].
** UsefulNotes/JesseJames is a major character in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]".
** Creator/WilliamShakespeare is a major character in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E120TheBard The Bard]]".
* HistoricalRapSheet: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E41TheHowlingMan The Howling Man]]", Brother Jerome tells David Ellington that the Devil is responsible for the great wars, the overwhelming pestilences and the wholesale sinning that is regularly inflicted on the world. After Ellington releases him, he causes UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, UsefulNotes/TheKoreanWar and the development of atomic weapons.
* HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct: Paul Driscoll in "No Time Like the Past" is determined to use a time machine to avert historical catastrophes, but when he goes back to August 1939 to assassinate Hitler, he is interrupted by a hotel housekeeper and two SS guards. His attempt to prevent the sinking of the ''Lusitania'' is similarly thwarted when no-one on the ship believes his story.
* HoistByHisOwnPetard:
** In "The Jeopardy Room", the assassin sent to kill Russian defector Kunchenko is killed by the bomb he set up to kill his target.
** In "The Brain Centre at Whipple's", a leader in a factory replaces all his men with machinery...and is himself replaced by a robot.
* HonestJohnsDealership: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E50TheWholeTruth The Whole Truth]]", the used car salesman Harvey Hunnicut is a wheeler and dealer who is willing to tell any and every lie necessary to sell one of the dilapidated cars in his lot. However, an elderly man sells him a haunted Model A Ford for $25 which renders him [[CannotTellALie incapable of telling a lie]].
* HopeSpot:
** "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" ends with the implication that [[spoiler:the toys in the bin will some day find children who will play with them and love them]].
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]" does a rather cruel one. Over the course of the episode, [[ApocalypseHow the Earth is getting closer and closer to the Sun, and everyone is pretty much doomed.]] But wait, [[spoiler:it's AllJustADream! The Earth isn't moving closer to the Sun, and no one is going to roast to death. The bad news: the Earth is actually moving ''away'' from the Sun, and everyone will freeze to death in total darkness instead.]]
* HotAsHell: "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville," starring Julie Newmar as {{Satan}}.
* HowWeGotHere: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]" opens with Michael Chambers in a sparse cell on a cot being commanded to eat by a voice through a loudspeaker. The rest of the episode is his reminiscence of meeting a race of ostensibly benevolent aliens [[spoiler:for whom humans are a dietary staple]].
* HumanAliens: The majority of aliens that appear in the series look exactly like humans. Probably due to the low budget.
** Part of the plot of "People Are Alike All Over." [[spoiler:The protagonists of "Third from the Sun."]]
** [[spoiler:"Probe 7, Over and Out"]].
* HumanLadder: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", the title characters form one in an attempt to escape from the large metal cylinder in which they are trapped. However, the ballet dancer is unable to reach the top as they are still several inches too short. The major then fashions a grappling hook from his sword and strips of clothing. He, the clown, the hobo and the bagpiper form another human ladder and he manages to reach the top. [[spoiler:It is then revealed that the five of them are nothing more than dolls in a collection barrel.]]
* HumanOutsideAlienInside: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Ben belongs to a race of shapeshifters but their [[ShapeShifterDefaultForm default form]] is entirely human.
* HumanPopsicle:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", after stealing $1 million worth of gold bars, Farwell, [=DeCruz=], Brooks and Erbie place themselves in suspended animation for 100 years so they can evade the authorities and spend the gold when they awaken in 2061. Erbie died when a rock broke his suspended animation animation. [[spoiler:As it turns out, it was AllForNothing as a way to manufacture gold was discovered during their long sleep.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E135TheLongMorrow The Long Morrow]]", the astronaut Commander Douglas Stansfield is placed in suspended animation when he is sent on a mission to a solar system 141 lightyears from Earth on December 31, 1987. He removes himself from suspended animation in June 1988 so that he will be the same age as his love Sandra Horn when he returns to Earth in 2027. [[spoiler:When he does eventually come home, he discovers that Sandra had herself placed in suspended animation shortly after he left. As such, he is now 71 and she is still 26.]]
* HumanityCameFromSpace: The ending of [[spoiler:"Probe 7, Over and Out".]]
* HumansAreBastards:
** In "I Shot an Arrow Into the Air", one of the astronauts kills the other two after they apparently crash on a distant asteroid.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]", it turns out that the "aliens" stalking the woman throughout the episode are actually U.S. astronauts on a planet with gigantic {{Humanoid Alien}}s.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", the benevolent alien Williams is killed by the paranoid and suspicious people of Madeiro, UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}}, who believe him to be either Main/{{Satan}} or a practitioner of BlackMagic.
** In "The Shelter", Dr. Bill Stockton's friendly neighbors turn into a hostile mob when an alert goes out to get to their shelters, and he's the only one on the block who has one.
** In "I Am the Night - Color Me Black", darkness appears all over the world in places where hate abounds.
** Most famously, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street". Aliens plan to utilize humanity's own self-hatred, loathing, and fear to destroy the Earth, block by block.
* HumansAreCthulhu: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]" tells the story of two astronauts, William Fletcher and Peter Craig, repairing their spacecraft on a planet populated by a tiny alien race. Craig proclaims himself the god of the tiny aliens and makes them build a life-size statue of him. The power he holds over them due to his size immediately goes to his head, and he begins bullying them into obeying him. In an example of LaserGuidedKarma, [[spoiler:another group of spacefarers land on the planet, and they are as large to Craig as he is to the natives; one of them picks him up to look at him and accidentally crushes him to death]].
* HumansAreFlawed: Even when the main character(s) aren't straight up bastards, many episodes still focus on them dealing with a flaw or psychological problem.
* HumansThroughAlienEyes: The twist ending of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]" reveals that [[spoiler:the strange creatures in the flying saucer who have terrified the old woman in a remote cabin are American astronauts, and the old woman is an alien on a distant planet]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder: I-K]]
* IJustWantToBeNormal: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", Janet Tyler has had ten previous reconstructive surgeries to correct her deformity over the years and is awaiting the results of her eleventh. She tells the nurse that she never wanted to be beautiful, only for people not to scream when they looked at her.
* IllegalReligion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", the State claims to have determined that Main/{{God}} does not exist and therefore has banned any form of religion. Possessing a [[Literature/TheBible Bible]] is punishable by death.
* ImAHumanitarian: The twist ending of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]" reveals that [[spoiler:the title book is a cookbook; the seemingly benevolent aliens are harvesting humans for food]].
%%* ImmortalityImmorality: "Love Live Walter Jameson", "Queen of the Nile".
* ImmuneToBullets: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", the Union soldier that Lavinia Godwin shoots suffers no ill effects from the bullet [[spoiler:as he is already dead]].
%%* ImportedAlienPhlebotinum
* IncredibleShrinkingMan: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", the fanatical ConspiracyTheorist Oliver Crangle plans to shrink all of the so-called evil people whom he believes are trying to destroy the United States at four o'clock. [[spoiler:When the time comes, Crangle is shrunk himself.]]
* InnocenceLost: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E86KickTheCan Kick the Can]]", Charles Whitley regrets that growing up means having to let go of childhood games and beliefs, recalling that Ben Conroy once believed in magic. He thinks that people start to grow old as soon as they stop playing these games.
* InjunCountry: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E59AHundredYardsOverTheRim A Hundred Yards over the Rim]]", Charlie, a member of Chris Horn's wagon train in 1847, is worried about being attacked by the Apache as the expedition is approaching their territory.
* InnerMonologue:
** Nan Adams' inner monologue, in which she tries to make sense of the hitchhiker's repeated appearances, is heard throughout "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]".
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E37KingNineWillNotReturn King Nine Will Not Return]]" features Captain James Embry's panicked thoughts when he finds that he is alone in the [[UsefulNotes/{{Africa}} African desert]] with his B-25 Mitchell bomber ''King Nine'' in 1943.
** Michael Chambers' inner monologue is heard at various points throughout "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]" as he relates the story of the Kanamits' arrival on Earth and its aftermath.
* InnocentAliens: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", Williams' goal in coming to Earth, giving humanity a CureForCancer, was entirely selfless and honorable.
* InsistentTerminology: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E53TwentyTwo Twenty-Two]]", Liz Powell's agent Barney Kamener says that she is a stripper but she corrects him by saying that she is a dancer.
* InstrumentalThemeTune: There were actually two of them. The first season featured a haunting, string-laden theme composed by Music/BernardHerrmann; this was replaced in Season 2 with a different and much more familiar theme (featuring the iconic high-pitched four-note guitar riff) composed by Marius Constant.
* InteractiveNarrator: At the end of "A World of His Own", Rod Serling appears to give his closing speech, only to be interrupted and then erased by Gregory's RealityWarper powers (complete with a ThisIsGonnaSuck remark from Rod before he vanishes). This was actually his very first onscreen appearance: it proved so popular that it set the tradition of him appearing onscreen to give the episode narration.
* InTheDoldrums: "Time Enough at Last" has a man who only wants to read be the sole survivor when everyone else on Earth is killed off. He finally has all the time in the world to read! [[spoiler:And then he breaks his glasses.]]
* InvisibleToNormals:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", only the person who is about to die, initially Lou Bookman, can see Mr. Death. After Maggie Polanski is hit by a truck, she can see him as well.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]", Nan Adams is the only one who can see the title character.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E33MrBevis Mr. Bevis]]", Mr. James B.W. Bevis is the only person who can see his GuardianAngel J. Hardy Hempstead.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", neither the two-headed Martian nor the two Venusians can be seen by humans. However, they can see each other.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", [[spoiler:the revelation that the contractor can't see Harold Beldon leads Wanda Dunn to realize that he is Death.]]
* IronicDeath:
** "A Most Unusual Camera". After the [[spoiler:main characters]] die, the waiter smugly counts the number of bodies: [[spoiler:"One... two... three... ''FOUR?!''"]] Cue screaming.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", the [[spoiler:Chancellor]], having sentenced librarian Romney Wordsworth to death for being obsolete, is lured into a trap wherein [[spoiler:Wordsworth locks him in his apartment with the time bomb he has chosen as his method of execution. The state will not rescue the Chancellor for fear of losing face, and eventually, in front of the television audience Wordsworth has requested be witness to his execution, the panicked Chancellor begs to be set free in the name of the God the state denies even exists. His cowardice causes him to be sentenced to death as obsolete]].
* IronicEcho:
** Wordsworth does this to the Chancellor a couple of times in the penultimate scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]":
--->'''Wordsworth:''' You're cheating the audience. Face the camera.\\
''((later))''\\
'''Wordsworth:''' You must face the camera. It's very important. [[LampshadeHanging You said so yourself.]]
** The semi-TitleDrop of "People Are Alike All Over".
--->'''Marcusson:''' Don't be afraid Sam! I've got a hunch... if there's anyone out there, they'll help you... As long as they have hearts and minds, they have souls! That makes them people! And... people are alike... [-[[FamousLastWords they're]] ''[[{{Foreshadowing}} bound]]'' [[{{Irony}} to be a-like...]]-]\\
''(later)''\\
'''Sam''' ''(inside [[spoiler:a Martian zoo]])'': Marcusson! Marcusson, you were right! You were right... People are alike... ''people are alike everywhere''...
* IronicHell:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E28ANicePlaceToVisit A Nice Place to Visit]]", Rocky Valentine is a small-time crook shot dead by a policeman after a robbery, but in the afterlife, he finds his every desire catered to with no effort whatever, and he wins every game he plays, and assumes he has gone to Heaven. However, he soon grows bored of endless effortless victory, and asks Pip, the spirit guide who greeted him in the afterlife, if he can go to "the other place" for a while. Pip menacingly informs him that he's ''in'' "the other place", and will spend eternity being driven insane by getting everything he wants without trying.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", Jesse Cardiff laments that he will never be regarded as the greatest pool player as long as people compare him to the deceased "Fats" Brown, and wishes he could play a game against him to settle the question once and for all. When Brown's ghost appears and Cardiff defeats him, his "reward" is to spend the afterlife as Brown had previously done, defending his "greatest" title against people who wish they could play a game against him to settle the question of whether or not they really are better than he was.
* {{Irony}}: Besides its frequent use on the show, there's a meta example. A year before Dennis Weaver played a man afraid to go to sleep in the episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", he played a man with the opposite problem in the ''Series/AlfredHitchcockPresents'' episode "Insomnia".
* IsThisAJoke: Standard explanation for anything unusual and unexplainable.
* ItsAlwaysMardiGrasInNewOrleans: "The Masks" tells the story of wealthy but terminally ill New Orleans resident Jason Foster, who is visited by his useless daughter and her even more useless husband and children. The day of this visit happens to be Mardi Gras.
* JackassGenie: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E38TheManInTheBottle The Man in the Bottle]]", a genie grants Arthur Castle four wishes. His third wish is to become the head of a contemporary foreign country who can't be voted out of office. The genie turns him into UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler at the end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, in a bunker under attack. Castle has to use his fourth wish to escape this fate.
* JerkassFacade: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E87APianoIntheHouse A Piano in the House]]", Fitzgerald Fortune is an arrogant bully because he secretly has the emotional maturity of a child. He is afraid of people, and as a result acts like an insufferable dick to everyone around him. He's even shown to be a LovingBully (of the emotional variety) towards his wife because of it. In the end, the piano makes him reveal this to everybody in the room.
* JunglesSoundLikeKookaburras: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E77TheJungle The Jungle]]", Alan Richards hears sounds of the African jungle over the telephone due to the curse placed on him by the Kekouyu, yet the kookaburra sound pops up.
* JobStealingRobot: "The Brain Center at Whipple's" has a CorruptCorporateExecutive replacing factory workers with robots, a plot that was still science fiction in 1964.
* JustFollowingOrders: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]", Gunter Lütze claims that he simply functioned as he was told in abusing and torturing the prisoners at Dachau but his flashbacks indicate that he [[PsychoForHire revelled in carrying out his orders]]. Becker describes this defense as "the Nazi theme music at Nuremberg."
%%* KafkaKomedy: "Time Enough At Last".
* KarmaHoudini: This trope is {{averted}} through most of the series, but shows up in some fifth season episodes (such as [[spoiler:"What's in the Box?" and "Caesar and Me"]]). In his book ''The Twilight Zone Companion'', Marc Scott Zicree identifies this as a symptom of SeasonalRot.
%%* KarmicTwistEnding: Former {{Trope Namer|s}} as ''Twilight Zone Twist''.
* KlingonsLoveShakespeare: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", [[spoiler:Ross]] finds the taste of cigarettes wonderful and says that they have nothing like them on UsefulNotes/{{Mars}}. [[spoiler:He and the Venusian Haley both have a taste for human music.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder: L]]
* LanguageBarrier:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", two soldiers who survived an apocalyptic war, a man and a woman, are wandering in a deserted city. They don't speak the same language. After they meet, they have to learn how to communicate.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E129Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7, Over and Out]]", two humanoid space travelers from different races, a man and a woman, are stranded on a planet. After they meet, they have to learn how to communicate with each other.
* LargeHam: More often than not, an episode will have at ''least'' one.
** Creator/RodSerling himself is a pretty big ham almost constantly in his narrations.
** Creator/WilliamShatner stars up in two episodes. (Although to be fair to Mr Shatner, he is quite reserved in his acting in "Nick Of Time". Which is ironically likely the reason most people only remember his other ''Zone'' episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet".)
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]" is filled to the brim with ham...and some interpretative dance towards the end.
* LaserGuidedKarma:
** In "Judgement Night", German U-Boat captain Karl Lanser is forced to relive the sinking of a British passenger liner by a torpedo fired by his submarine over and over - [[spoiler:but as a passenger on the liner, unable to convince anyone aboard of the impending disaster]].
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]" features SS captain Gunter Lutze, former commandant at the Dachau concentration camp, returning to the camp to reminisce. [[spoiler:The ghosts of the Jewish inmates whose deaths he ordered appear and force him to mentally experience the torture and agony to which he subjected them, and he is driven insane in a matter of hours and is taken away to an asylum.]]
* LatexPerfection: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", the aliens use masks which perfectly hide their true appearance. Somerset Frisby shatters their leader's mask when he punches him in the face.
* LaughTrack:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E98TheDummy The Dummy]]", one is used for the scenes in which Jerry Etherson is performing his ventriloquism act.
** The PoorlyDisguisedPilot "Cavender is Coming" featured a laugh track during its original showing and early syndication. It was removed from the syndication prints in the mid 1980s.
* LifeDrinker:
** The title character in "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" found that he could obtain abstract or otherwise normally non-transferable attributes from other people by simply making the deal with them. Among other attributes, he restored his youth by "buying" it from younger men who thought him to be a kook giving them money for nothing. He only took a year from each man, but was able to become young again. Incidentally, he was only an old man because he had previously sold his own youth to an elderly millionaire (he came out financially ahead after the exchanges were complete).
** "Queen of the Nile". A woman uses a scarab beetle to drain the life force of men so she can maintain her eternal youth. It's implied that she's the actual Cleopatra of Egypt.
* LiteraryAllusionTitle:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]" refers to the line "When the pie was opened" from the NurseryRhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence".
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E15IShotAnArrowIntoTheAir I Shot an Arrow into the Air]]" refers to the line "I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to Earth, I knew not where" from the 1845 poem "The Arrow and the Song" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In the episode itself, the line is misquoted as "I shot an arrow into the air, it landed, I know not where."
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E35TheMightyCasey The Mighty Casey]]" refers to the 1888 poem "Literature/CaseyAtTheBat" by Ernest Thayer.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder The Eye of the Beholder]]" refers to the line "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" from the 1878 novel ''Molly Bawn'' by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]" refers to the 1819 short story "Literature/RipVanWinkle" by Washington Irving.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]" refers to the 1945 novel ''Literature/BridesheadRevisited'' by Creator/EvelynWaugh.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]" refers to the 1921 play ''Theatre/SixCharactersInSearchOfAnAuthor'' by Luigi Pirandello.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E100ISingTheBodyElectric I Sing the Body Electric]]" refers to the 1855 poem of the same name by Creator/WaltWhitman.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E140FromAgnesWithLove From Agnes - With Love]]" refers to the 1957 ''Literature/JamesBond'' novel ''Literature/FromRussiaWithLove'' by Creator/IanFleming.
* {{Lilliputians}}:
** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]". [[spoiler:It appears for most of the episode that the invaders belong to a race of tiny aliens but it turns out that they are actually normal sized humans in a world of giants.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", the astronaut Peter Craig discovers a race of tiny people no bigger than ants on another planet and [[AGodAmI immediately sets himself up as their god]]. [[LampshadeHanging Craig even compares them to the Lilliputians]]. [[spoiler:He is later killed by a giant spaceman who picked him up and accidentally crushed him in his hand.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E155TheFear The Fear]]", Charlotte Scott and a highway patrolman named Robert Franklin are harassed by a 50 foot tall alien monster. [[spoiler:It turns out that the monster is in fact a giant balloon being controlled by two very small aliens. They soon leave Earth to avoid being crushed by the "giant" humans.]]
* LongingForFictionland:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E23AWorldOfDifference A World of Difference]]", Brinkley thinks that Gerald Raigan has [[LostInCharacter convinced himself that he is Arthur Curtis]], whom he is playing in ''The Private World of Arthur Curtis'', as he is attracted by the character's happy life with his loving wife Marian and daughter Tina.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E30AStopAtWilloughby A Stop at Willoughby]]", the extremely stressed advertising executive Gart Williams keeps dreaming of Willoughby, an idyllic 1888 town straight out of Creator/MarkTwain's work.
%%* LookMaNoPlane: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet".
* LouisCypher: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E31TheChaser The Chaser]]" features a character named Professor A. Daemon. His name is suspicious enough to make the viewer wonder about his true nature, albeit that doesn't seem the case [[spoiler:at least until the end of the episode.]]
* LovePotion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E31TheChaser The Chaser]]", Roger Shackleforth is "madly, passionately, illogically, miserably, all-consumingly in love" with Leila, who can just about stand to be around him. Under the belief that he can't live without her, he buys a love potion from Professor Daemon for $1 and slips it into her champagne. Within less than a minute, the potion takes full effect. Six months later, Roger and Leila are married but she is so [[NoSenseOfPersonalSpace exceptionally clingy and suffocating]] that Roger does not have a moment's peace. As Professor Daemon tried to warn him when he bought it, the potion [[GoneHorriblyRight worked too well]].
* LuckyRabbitsFoot:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E43NickOfTime Nick of Time]]", Don Carter carries one with him at all times, as well as a FourLeafClover.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E77TheJungle The Jungle]]", Mr. Sinclair, the president of Alan Richards' company, wears a rabbit's foot on his watch chain. Richards use this to point out that he is almost as superstitious as the Kekouyu.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: M]]
* TheMafia:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E13TheFourOfUsAreDying The Four of Us Are Dying]]", Arch Hammer imitates Virgil Sterig, a gangster who was murdered on the orders of the mob boss Penell.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E39NervousManInAFourDollarRoom Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room]]", Jackie Rhoades is a gangster who typically performs comparatively minor jobs such as breaking and entering and the occasional mugging for his boss George. As the police are well aware that Jackie does not do the big jobs, George tells him to kill the old bartender in order to throw them off the scent.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", Dane and Bernie Dagget were gangsters who were partners in the running of a nightclub. When Dagget offered to buy him out, Dane refused. Dagget was unwilling to accept this and had him murdered so that he could take over the club.
%%* MagicRealism
* MagicalSeventhSon: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", the Confederate soldier Sgt. Joseph Paradine met an old man named Teague who had magical powers because he was the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. He also made a DealWithTheDevil to use BlackMagic.
* MakeThemRot:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Death proves his identity to Lou Bookman by touching a flower, which dies instantly.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E88TheLastRitesOfJeffMyrtlebank The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank]]", the fresh roses that the title character picks for Comfort Gatewood die within minutes of his touching them. This causes her to worry that the townsfolk's fears that Jeff CameBackWrong may be justified.
* MandatoryTwistEnding: The TwistEnding was a major staple of the series that earned the show a reputation for this, though it wasn't quite as "mandatory" as it's remembered as being.
* ManlyTears: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", the major begins to cry after his numerous attempts to escape the strange room fail. He is also no closer to figuring out what is going on. The ballet dancer comforts him.
* MatterOfLifeAndDeath: "Perchance to Dream".
* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane:
** "The Thirty-Fathom Grave." Early on in the episode, Doc finds seaweed in the corridor where Bell claims to have seen the ghosts of his dead comrades. Additionally, one trip to the submarine reveals that a piece of the ship swinging loose could have been responsible for the banging noises...but it also reveals that one of the dead sailors was holding a hammer.
** In "The New Exhibit", a passionate (and slightly unhinged) man named Martin Senescu takes care of wax figures of famous killers in his basement after the wax museum where he works closes down. He firmly believes that they're alive, which disturbs his wife, brother-in-law, and former boss. All three end up being killed, apparently by the figures--but the ending suggests that it was actually ''Senescu'' committing the murders, and simply imagining the figures did it as a coping mechanism. It's not clear which is true.
** "The Fever": The events of most of the episode could be explained by Mr. Gibbs becoming increasingly unhinged through obsession and lack of sleep. Subverted at the end when the slot machine moves after his death.
* MeaningfulName:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E3MrDentonOnDoomsday Mr. Denton on Doomsday]]", the peddler who gives Al Denton the gun and later the potion is named Henry J. Fate.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", the librarian Romney Wordsworth is declared obsolete by the state as [[CulturePolice all books are banned]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", Hyder Simpson's dog is named Rip, as in RIP. This [[{{Foreshadowing}} foreshadows]] the revelation that the two of them have been DeadAllAlong.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E109JessBelle Jess-Belle]]", the title character Jess-Belle Stone is named after Jezebel from the Literature/BooksOfKings.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E137Number12LooksJustLikeYou Number 12 Looks Just Like You]]", two of the women who underwent the Number 12 transformation, as Lana did, are named Jane and Doe. This refers to the fact that the people of this society are all beautiful and therefore essentially anonymous as they lack individuality. Furthermore, the psychiatrist is named [[UsefulNotes/SigmundFreud Professor Sigmund Friend]].
* MeaninglessVillainVictory: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", a group of gold thieves put themselves to sleep for 100 years to escape the cops, only to start backstabbing and killing each other off once they awaken, just so they can hoard the gold for themselves. And then it turns out in the future, [[WorthlessYellowRocks gold is worthless]]. Fittingly, the last of them dies begging a nearby driver for water in exchange for a bar of gold, much to the driver's confusion.
* MechanisticAlienCulture: Many episodes of the classic sci-fi anthology featured aliens with ambiguously robotic characteristics. "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", for example, featured one with [[BizarreAlienBiology two heads]].
* MentalTimeTravel: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E56Static Static]]", [[spoiler:the bitter bachelor Ed Lindsay is sent back in time in 1940 so that he can marry Vinnie Brown. Not marrying her when he had the opportunity is the biggest mistake of his life.]]
* MesACrowd: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E63TheMindAndTheMatter The Mind and the Matter]]", Archibald Beechcroft eventually hits on the idea of creating a world full of Beechcrofts using his [[RealityWarper ability to manipulate reality]] but he quickly discovers that a lot of him is as bad as a lot of everyone else.
* MexicanStandOff: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the man and woman find discarded weapons and briefly point them at each other in spite of their attempts to get along.
* AMindIsATerribleThingToRead: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E52APennyForYourThoughts A Penny for Your Thoughts]]", Hector B. Poole discovers how petty and self-centered the people around him can be when he becomes inexplicably psychic. It's not as bad as some cases [[spoiler:(and it helps him get the girl, Helen Turner)]], but he's still relieved when his newfound power vanishes.
* MindRape: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", Aunt Amy was the only person who could exercise any control over Anthony Fremont, until she offended him by singing in his presence and his mind "snapped" at her. She's left as a shell of her former self, smiling vacantly and no longer watching how she acts or what she says around Anthony.
* MindOverMatter: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E57ThePrimeMover The Prime Mover]]", Jimbo Cobb has possessed the power of telekinesis all of his life. When he was young, he assumed that [[IThoughtEveryoneCouldDoThat everyone had this ability]]. He stopped using his ability as it frequently got him into trouble in school and gave him headaches. He is forced to reveal it when a car turns over outside of the Happy Daze Café, which he owns with his friend Ace Larson, and there is no other way to save the people inside. Ace sees the possibilities of Jimbo's power and the two of them take a trip to UsefulNotes/LasVegas, where Jimbo uses his ability to move the dice as Ace pleases.
* MinimalistCast:
** Earl Holliman is the only actor to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E1WhereIsEverybody Where Is Everybody?]]" until the last five minutes.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E9PerchanceToDream Perchance to Dream]]" only features three credited actors: Richard Conte, John Larch and Suzanne Lloyd.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]" only features three actors: Keenan Wynn, Phyllis Kirk and Mary [=LaRoche=].
** Robert Cummings is the only actor to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E37KingNineWillNotReturn King Nine Will Not Return]]" until the last five minutes.
** Only two actors appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E39NervousManInAFourDollarRoom Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room]]": Joe Mantell and William D. Gordon, who only appears in two scenes.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E46AMostUnusualCamera A Most Unusual Camera]]" only features four credited actors: Fred Clark, Jean Carson, Adam Williams and Marcel Hillaire.
** Creator/AgnesMoorehead is the only actor to appear on screen in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]". The director Douglas Heyes has a voice over cameo as one of the "tiny" astronauts in the final scene.
** As the title would suggest, "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]" features only two actors: Creator/CharlesBronson and Creator/ElizabethMontgomery.
** Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters are the only credited actors to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]". An uncredited female actress has a brief voice over role in the two scenes set in the afterlife.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]" features only three actors: Gladys Cooper, Creator/RobertRedford and R.G. Armstrong.
** The only credited actors to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]" are Sarah Marshall, Robert Sampson and Charles Aidman. Although they are uncredited, Tracy Stratford and Creator/JuneForay nevertheless play prominent roles.
** Creator/MickeyRooney is the only actor to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E125TheLastNightOfAJockey The Last Night of a Jockey]]".
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E128UncleSimon Uncle Simon]]" only features three credited actors: Cedric Hardwicke, Constance Ford and Ian Wolfe.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E129Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7, Over and Out]]" only features four actors: Richard Basehart, Antoinette Bower, Harold Gould and Barton Heyman.
** Collin Wilcox, Richard Long, Pamela Austin and Suzy Parker are the only actors to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E137Number12LooksJustLikeYou Number 12 Looks Just Like You]]". With the exception of Wilcox, they all play multiple roles.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E139NightCall Night Call]]" only features three credited actors: Gladys Cooper, Nora Marlowe and Martine Bartlett. The voice of an uncredited male actor is heard in the final scene.
** Creator/MartinLandau, John Van Dreelen and Bob Kelljan are the only actors to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E149TheJeopardyRoom The Jeopardy Room]]".
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E150StopoverInAQuietTown Stopover in a Quiet Town]]" only features two credited actors: Barry Nelson and Nancy Malone.
** Neville Brand and Creator/GeorgeTakei are the only actors to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E151TheEncounter The Encounter]]".
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E154ComeWanderWithMe Come Wander With Me]]" only features four actors: Gary Crosby, Bonnie Beecher, Jonathan Bolt and Hank Patterson.
** Peter Mark Richman and Hazel Court are the only credited actors to appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E155TheFear The Fear]]".
* MirrorUniverse: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E21MirrorImage Mirror Image]]", Millicent Barnes speculates that the appearance of her {{Doppelganger}} at the bus terminal is due to the normal universe converging with an alternate universe and that her doppelgänger must eliminate her in order to remain in the normal universe. Paul Grinstead later learns that she is right.
* MissedTheCall: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E86KickTheCan Kick the Can]]", Ben Conroy's failure to step out of his comfort zone, even for a moment, and play kick-the-can bars him forever from joining the other Sunnyvale Rest Home residents and [[FountainOfYouth becoming young again]].
* MissingReflection:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]", Colonel Clegg Forbes realizes that he is about to [[RetGone disappear]] when he sees that he no longer has a reflection.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E32APassageForTrumpet A Passage for Trumpet]]", Joey Crown discovers that he does not have a reflection when he looks into the mirror at the cinema. It is later revealed that this is because he is a state of limbo between life and death.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", [[spoiler:Wanda Dunn's suspicion that Harold Beldon is Death is confirmed when he tells her to look in the mirror and she sees that he has no reflection.]]
* MisspellingOutLoud: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E35TheMightyCasey The Mighty Casey]]", the Hoboken Zephyrs manager Mouth [=McGarry=] tells the robot pitcher Casey's creator Dr. Stillman never to say the word "R-O-B-B-O-T-T" as he doesn't want anyone else to find out.
* MistakenFromBehind: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E23AWorldOfDifference A World of Difference]]", Arthur Curtis mistakes a little girl for his daughter Tina from behind.
* MisterSandmanSequence: In the first scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]", Woodrow Mulligan is walking through the Harmony town square on March 10, 1890 and complains about the high prices of sirloin steak (17c per lb) and ladies' hats ($1.95). The speed limit for bicycles is then shown as being eight miles per hour.
* MobileKiosk:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Lou Bookman has a mobile pitch: a suitcase with extendable legs. When he finishes a pitch, he collapses the legs back into the suitcase and moves on.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E12WhatYouNeed What You Need]]", Pedott has a similar setup.
* MonochromeCasting: In an [[InvertedTrope inversion]] of the usual application of this trope in 1960, all of the actors with speaking roles in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E27TheBigTallWish The Big Tall Wish]]", with the exception of Walter Burke, are African-Americans. It is especially notable as the episode did not concern racial issues.
* MoodWhiplash: "A Kind of a Stopwatch" is a very funny episode until [[spoiler:the watch breaks, trapping [=McNulty=] in a timeless world forever.]]
* MotorMouth: [=McNulty=], the main character of the episode "A Kind of Stop Watch.”
* MuggleSportsSuperAthletes: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", while playing softball with Jenny and other neighborhood children, Ben uses his alien abilities to hit the ball over the fence with little to no effort.
* MultipleHeadCase: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", the Martian scientist's two heads each have their own personality. They seem to get along well.
* TheMultiverse: The main character of "The Parallel" discovers that he has accidentally stumbled into a [[AlternateDimension parallel world]] with a [[AlternateHistory similar chronology]] to his own.
* MundaneWish: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E38TheManInTheBottle The Man in the Bottle]]", Arthur and Edna Curtis' first wish (out of four) is to have a pane of glass in their shop repaired, in order to [[GodTest test the genie's power]] first. The couple then proceeds to waste their remaining wishes, but in the end console themselves with the thought that at least the glass got repaired. Arthur then accidentally breaks the pane with the end of his sweeping brush. He and Edna begin laughing.
* MundaneUtility: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E57ThePrimeMover The Prime Mover]]", Ace Larson employs Jimbo Cobb's telekinesis to help him win at gambling.
* MurderBallad: Used as a PlotDevice in "Come Wander with Me".
* MurderousMannequin: Subverted in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E34TheAfterHours The After Hours]]"; Marsha White is, at first, understandably terrified when the mannequins come to life, but it soon becomes apparent that they are friendly, and only want [[spoiler:[[TomatoInTheMirror her to remember that she is also a mannequin]]]].
* MyCarHatesMe:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E40AThingAboutMachines A Thing About Machines]]", Bartlett Finchley is chased by his car, which corrals him to his pool and pushes him in. He quickly sinks to the bottom and drowns.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E134YouDrive You Drive]]", Oliver Pope is distracted while driving and kills a young neighborhood boy named Timmy Danbers in a hit-and-run accident. His car soon begins to behave strangely, honking its horn and turning on its lights by itself. When Oliver's wife Lilian later attempts to drive it, the car drives itself to the scene of the accident. The car eventually tries to run Oliver down but stops at the last moment. It then opens its passenger door, instructing Oliver to get in, and drives him to the police station so that he can confess.
* MyGrandsonMyself: In "Queen of the Nile", Pamela Morris lives with the elderly Mrs. Viola Draper, ostensibly her mother. She is actually [[spoiler:Pamela's daughter and Pamela is at least several hundred years old, heavily implied to have been Cleopatra.]]
* MyGreatestFailure: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E67TheArrival The Arrival]]", the disappearance of Flight 107 is the only case that the FAA investigator Grant Sheckly was never able to solve in 22 years on the job. He was so [[TraumaInducedAmnesia traumatized by his failure that he repressed his memory of the case]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder: N]]
* NamedByTheAdaptation:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E9PerchanceToDream Perchance to Dream]]", the girl in the dream and the psychiatrist are named Maya and Dr. Elliot Rathmann respectively. Neither character is given a name in the short story by Charles Beaumont.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E31TheChaser The Chaser]]", the potion seller is named Professor A. Daemon. In the short story by John Collier, he is not given a name.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", Anthony Fremont's mother is named Agnes. In the [[Literature/ItsAGoodLife short story]] by Jerome Bixby, her first name is not given.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", Chris, Ruth and Tina's surname is Miller. In the [[Literature/LittleGirlLost short story]] by Creator/RichardMatheson, their surname is not given.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", the protagonist is named Oliver Crangle. In the short story by Price Day, his first name is not given.
* NamelessNarrative: None of the characters in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]" are given names.
* NapoleonDelusion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E92PersonOrPersonsUnknown Person or Persons Unknown]]", one of David Gurney's fellow patients believes that he is UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill.
* ANaziByAnyOtherName:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", the Leader is based on UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler. In his speech, he continually stresses the importance of ensuring "glorious conformity" and abiding by a single norm. He says that all that is different must be cut out like a cancerous filth as differences weaken the state.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", the State is based on various totalitarian regimes. In his opening narration, Rod Serling says that "it has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time." The Chancellor himself says that the State had predecessors who had the right idea such as UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler and UsefulNotes/JosefStalin but they did not go far enough in eliminating the undesirables such as the elderly, the sick, the maimed and the deformed.
* NaziProtagonist:
** "Death's Head Revisited" centered around a former concentration camp officer at Dachau who revisits the camp to relive his happy memories of the many atrocities he committed during the war. He eventually receives [[LaserGuidedKarma karmic justice]] from the souls of his victims.
** The main character of "He's Alive" is an American Nazi who becomes increasingly popular thanks to guidance from a mysterious advisor. Since said advice includes murdering one of his own followers to create a martyr, justice catches up with him too.
** TheReveal of "Judgment Night" is that the main character was one of these [[EvilAllAlong all along]].
%%* NeverSleepAgain: "Perchance to Dream", "Ninety Years Without Slumbering"
* NewspaperDating: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E59AHundredYardsOverTheRim A Hundred Yards over the Rim]]", Chris Horn, who is from 1847, realizes that he is in the future when he sees a calendar dated 1961 in Joe's diner.
* NiceCharacterMeanActor: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", whereas the fictional Marshal Rance [=McGrew=] is extremely courageous and never hesitates in the face of danger, [[TheDanza the actor of the same name]] turns up late for work, snaps at the director and other members of the crew at every opportunity and demands that a stuntman be used for even the simplest scenes.
* NiceShoes: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", Dane wore a very expensive and distinctive pair of two-tone black and white shoes before he was murdered. When Nate Bledsoe puts them on, Dane's personality takes over his body. [[spoiler:After Dagget kills Dane, the same thing happens again when Chips puts on the shoes.]]
* TheNightThatNeverEnds: The subject of "I Am the Night--Color Me Black". It only happens in certain areas of the world that are dominated by hatred.
* NoAntagonist: ''Many'' episodes.
* NoCelebritiesWereHarmed: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", Ramos Clemente is a not-so-subtle {{Expy}} of UsefulNotes/FidelCastro while Tabal's appearance is clearly based on that of UsefulNotes/CheGuevara. The entire episode, which was made between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, is one long TakeThat at Castro. In his closing narration, Rod Serling even says that "any resemblance to tyrants living or dead is hardly coincidental." Funnily enough, General De Cruz mentions both Castro and his predecessor General Fulgencio Batista, the former right-wing dictator of UsefulNotes/{{Cuba}} on whom De Cruz himself is based, in the first scene.
* NoChallengeEqualsNoSatisfaction: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E28ANicePlaceToVisit A Nice Place to Visit]]", an inveterate criminal dies and goes to the afterlife: a pleasant place where he gets everything he wants and all his gambles always pay off. He becomes dissatisfied and asks to be sent to [[{{Hell}} The Other Place]], saying he doesn't belong in Heaven. The reply he gets: [[spoiler:"[[ThisIsntHeaven Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven]], Mr. Valentine? [[WhamLine This]] ''[[WhamLine is]]'' [[WhamLine the other place!]]"]]
* NoDialogueEpisode:
** Throughout "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]", the main character makes plenty of noises as she fends off tiny aliens, but none of it is dialogue. Aside from Serling's narrations, the only spoken dialogue comes when the last and soon-to-be-killed invader sends a distress call back home. [[spoiler:The tiny invaders are then revealed to be humans from Earth. This revelation subsequently justifies the trope, as the woman is a (giant) alien and wouldn't know English or any other language from Earth.]]
** "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", one of the final episodes - actually an unrelated, Oscar-winning short film that Serling purchased the rights to and had re-edited into an episode - also contains virtually no dialogue beyond Serling's narration.
* NoEnding: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", we never whether the titular plane is able to return to 1961.
* NoImmortalInertia: "Long Live Walter Jameson". A man lives more than 2,000 years due to drinking a alchemical potion of immortality. When he's shot and mortally wounded, the effect wears off and he ages into dust in minutes.
* NonSpecificallyForeign: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", after the crisis begins, Frank Henderson is continually racist towards the foreign-born Marty Weiss, describing him as a "pushy, grabby, semi-American" and later refers to "you and your kind." However, it is never stated what country Marty is from.
* NoTimeToExplain: "Passage on the ''Lady Anne''". [[spoiler:As it turns out, it's a ship only meant for dying/wanting to die people.]]
%%* NostalgiaAintLikeItUsedToBe: "The Incredible World of Horace Ford"
* NostalgiaFilter: Happens in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville". CorruptCorporateExecutive Feathersmith makes a DealWithTheDevil to go back in time and relive his life, in order to enjoy once again the climb from a nobody to a tyrannical titan of industry. However, things in his youth weren't exactly as nice as he remembered. For example, he forgets that vaccines weren't invented at that time, the streets are still unpaved, and the girl he reminisced about was nowhere near as attractive or charming as he remembered. This is on top of all the ''other'' mistakes he makes...
* NotSoDifferent: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", it becomes apparent throughout the episode that there is little difference between the revolutionary Ramos Clemente and General De Cruz, the previous dictator whom he overthrew. De Cruz himself realizes this when he is brought before Clemente.
%%* NotSoImaginaryFriend: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", "Mirror Image".
[[/folder]]

[[folder: O-P]]
* OddballInTheSeries:
** The first season finale "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]" marked the first time thst Rod Serling appeared on screen, but at the end, not the beginning. It's also the only time that Serling is a character in the story interacting with the other characters.
** "Literature/AnOccurrenceAtOwlCreekBridge" is a French silent film adaptation of the classic Creator/AmbroseBierce story, which Serling acquired and ran on American television as a ''Twilight Zone'' episode, with only a few minor edits.
* OneCharacterMultipleLives: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E23AWorldOfDifference A World of Difference]]", Arthur Curtis finds himself switching between two worlds - one where he's a normal businessman and another where he's an alcoholic actor named Gerry Raigan who's playing the role of businessman Arthur Curtis in the film ''The Private World of Arthur Curtis''.
* OneGenderRace: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", one Martian notes that one of the three planets on their itinery after Earth seems particularly interesting, since it contains only females.
* OneWordTitle: "Elegy", "Execution", "Dust", "Static", "Two", "Mute", "Miniature" and "Steel".
* OnOneCondition:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", Fats Brown agrees to play one game of pool with Jesse Cardiff on condition that Jesse will die if he loses. Although he is initially reluctant, Jesse accepts.
** In "The Masks", Jason Foster tells his daughter and her family that unless they wear the Mardi Gras masks he has made for them until midnight, their inheritance when he dies will consist solely of train fare back to their home in UsefulNotes/{{Boston}}.
** In "Uncle Simon", Barbara Polk is told she has inherited her misanthropic uncle's entire estate, as long as she sells none of it and looks after his last invention: a robot which [[spoiler:gradually takes on his personality, and eventually speaks in his voice.]]
* OnTheNext: Each episode ends with Rod Serling telling the audience about the next episode. For season four, clips from the episodes were also shown.
* OntologicalInertia: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E49BackThere Back There]]", during a discussion about traveling back to time to the day before the Wall Street Crash, Peter Corrigan argues that history cannot be changed as the events of October 24, 1929 are a part of established history. When he is sent back in time himself, he learns that some things can in fact be changed. Peter was unable to prevent Lincoln's assassination but inadvertently changes history in a more minor way. The police officer who believed his story made a name for himself for seemingly predicting the assassination. As a result, he became Chief of Police, a councilman and a millionaire after investing in real estate. In the original history, his great-grandson William was an attendant at the Potomac Club but a member of the club in the altered history.
* OntologicalMystery: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E1WhereIsEverybody Where Is Everybody?]]", "Judgment Night", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", and "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E150StopoverInAQuietTown Stopover in a Quiet Town]]" all deal with the protagonists [[YouWakeUpInARoom awakening]] in strange environments under mysterious circumstances, then trying to figure out where they are and how they got there.
* OpenDoorOpening: During the fourth and fifth seasons.
* OpeningNarration: Over the course of the series, five different opening narrations were used in the title sequence:
** The first was used from "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E1WhereIsEverybody Where is Everybody?]]" to "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E32APassageForTrumpet A Passage for Trumpet]]".
--->"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to Man. It is a dimension as vast as space, and as timeless as infinity. It is the middleground between light and shadow, between science and superstition; and it lies between the pit of Man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call...the Twilight Zone."
** The second was used from "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E33MrBevis Mr. Bevis]]" to "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", the final four episodes of Season One.
--->"You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"
** The third was used in Season Two.
--->"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!"
** The fourth was used in Season Three.
--->"You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"
** The fifth was used in Seasons Four and Five.
--->"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."
* OurGhostsAreDifferent:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", Fats Brown comes down from the afterlife as soon as Jesse inadvertently challenges him to a pool game. [[spoiler:Jesse beats Fats and, after he dies, he has to return to Earth every time that he is challenged, having become trapped in a kind of IronicHell.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", UsefulNotes/JesseJames returns to Earth to tell Rance [=McGrew=] that he, his brother Frank, UsefulNotes/BillyTheKid, Sam Starr and the Dalton brothers, among others, are angry at the inaccurate way in which they are depicted in his show. He eventually assumes the role of [=McGrew=]'s agent to ensure that the series is more accurate from now on.
* OutlivingOnesOffspring: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E58LongDistanceCall Long Distance Call]]", Grandma Bayles lost two children before her son Chris was born. She never forgave Chris for marrying Sylvia and leaving her. Part of the reason that she was so attached to her grandson Billy was that he [[FreudianExcuse reminded her of her first two children]].
* ParodyAssistance: Serling played a dual role in ''Radio/TheJackBennyProgram'''s TZ spoof, appearing both AsHimself and as the mayor of the actual Twilight Zone.
%%* PeggySue: "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville".
* PeopleZoo: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E25PeopleAreAlikeAllOver People Are Alike All Over]]", the inhabitants of the planet UsefulNotes/{{Mars}} put the Earth astronaut Sam Conrad in a house that acts as a zoo habitat.
* ThePerilsOfBeingTheBest: This theme was explored in several episodes.
** "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" shows us RetiredGunfighter Al Denton, who took the lives of so many challengers who wanted to defeat him and claim his title of FastestGunInTheWest that it psychologically broke him and turned him into a washed up drunk. When he regains his gunfighter abilities, he has to go through it all for a second time against a new set of challengers. When his hand is crippled at the end of the episode so that he'll never be able to use a gun again, he considers it a blessing.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]" throughly [[DeconstructedTrope deconstructs]] this trope. Jesse Cardiff, a pool shark praised as the best living player, complains that no matter what he does, he'll never be as good as "Fats" Brown, a deceased legend. Fats arrives from the afterlife to play a game which will determine which of them is truly the best. As they do, they discuss what it means to excel at something--Fats points out that while he's only a pool player, he's the ''greatest'' pool player, which allows him pride. The ending, though, reveals that whoever holds that title is forced to spend his or her entire afterlife defending it from those who want to try for it, until someone else defeats the champ. Serling sums it up when he remarks that "being the best of anything carries with it a special obligation to keep on proving it."
* PerpetualFrowner: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E87APianoIntheHouse A Piano in the House]]", the butler Marvin never smiles to the point that Fitzgerald Fortune considers firing him because he finds his presence depressing. However, the piano reveals that Marvin is a very happy person who often has to stop himself from laughing at Fortune when he has one of his tantrums.
* PersecutedIntellectuals:
** In "Time Enough at Last", everyone looks down on and picks on Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) for being a reader.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", Romney Wordsworth, the librarian (also played by Burgess Meredith) is considered obsolete, as books have been banned.
* PhoneCallFromTheDead:
** In "Night Call", an invalid starts receiving mysterious phone calls. The calls are eventually traced to a cemetery, where a fallen phone line is in contact with the grave of her deceased fiancé.
** "Long Distance Call" has a grandmother calling from beyond the grave and urging her beloved grandchild toward acts of suicide so they can be together again.
* PilotMovie: In 1958, Rod Serling wrote a teleplay ("The Time Element") which he hoped to turn into a weekly anthology series. It's often included in the series' canon as its lost pilot episode.
* PlayingWithFire:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", it is mentioned that Anthony set Teddy Reynolds on fire for thinking mean thoughts about him.
** In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E88TheLastRitesOfJeffMyrtlebank The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank]]", the title character demonstrates this ability when he lights a match without striking it. He tells his fiancée Comfort Gatewood that it was just her imagination.
* PleaseDontLeaveMe: A rare non-dying example occurs at the end of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E87APianoIntheHouse A Piano in the House]]". The titular instrument reveals that {{Jerkass}} Fitzgerald Fortune's cruelty is simply a mask for his true persona: a misanthropic, frightened child terrified of the world and unable to react to others with anything but disgust and hatred. This revelation comes during a party, and all of the guests (including Fortune's wife) leave after Fortune's breakdown; he screams like a toddler, declaring that he doesn't want them to go and threatening to be "very naughty" if they do.
* PoorlyDisguisedPilot: "Mr. Bevis" and "Cavender is Coming" were both intended as possible pilot episodes for a spinoff show, but this never materialized.
* PragmaticAdaptation: Episodes adapted from short stories were often massaged a bit. In Creator/DamonKnight's short story "To Serve Man", the alien representatives are described as looking like pigs. The producers thought the audience would find this too silly, so the alien makeup is the more conventional [[MyBrainIsBig tall-head]] variety. (Ironically, another iconic episode, "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", ''did'' feature characters wearing pig-like masks.)
* PrestigePeril: The episode "The Man in the Bottle" has a man wish to be the leader of a modern country who cannot be voted out of position...only to find that he's Adolf Hitler, and it's the end of World War II.
* PrettyInMink: Some furs are worn in some episodes, such as "Twenty-Two", and especially in "A Nice Place to Visit" to show the supposed grand nature of the place.
* ProfessionalGambler: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E96TheTradeIns The Trade-Ins]]", in the hope of winning enough money to afford a second procedure so that he and his wife Marie can both be young again, John Holt takes part in a high stakes poker game run by the professional gambler Mr. Farraday. He loses most of his money over several hands. Farraday is moved when he learns why John is playing and by the fact that he is desperate to have the procedure done due to the terrible pain that he is experiencing. John has three kings and hopes to win back the $5,000 that he lost. Although Farraday has three aces, he takes sympathy and allows John to win.
%%* PropheticFallacy
* ProsceniumReveal: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E4TheSixteenMillimeterShrine The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine]]" opens with Barbara Jean Trenton bidding farewell to her man, a soldier who is going off to war. It is soon revealed to be a scene from ''Farewell Without Tears'', one of Barbara's old films.
* PsychicStrangle: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E41TheHowlingMan The Howling Man]]", the Devil uses one on David Ellington [[UngratefulBastard as soon as he releases him from his confinement]].
* PublicExecution:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", Romney Wordsworth uses the opportunity provided by his televised execution for being obsolete to demonstrate that [[spoiler:the Chancellor is nothing more than a DirtyCoward by trapping him in his room until just before the bomb explodes]]. The Chancellor also mentions that the executions of 1,300 people in six hours were shown on television the previous year.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", Ramos Clemente orders the mass public execution of 1,000 prisoners, all of whom are former followers of General De Cruz. The executions continue unabated for a week, to the horror of the people. Clemente tells Father Tomas that they will continue so long as he has enemies.
* PurgatoryAndLimbo:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E32APassageForTrumpet A Passage for Trumpet]]", after the drunken Joey Crown deliberately steps off the curb as [[DrivenToSuicide part of a suicide attempt]], he is hit by a truck and enters a limbo state between life and death.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", [[spoiler:it turns out that the dirt road outside Lavinia Godwin's house is Purgatory. She and UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln are the last people to walk down the road and into the afterlife.]]
** {{Discussed|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]". The hobo speculates that they are trapped in Limbo.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: R]]
* RaisedByRobots:
** {{Inverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]". [[spoiler:Jana Loren is a robot who was "raised" by humans, namely her creator Dr. William Loren and his wife. As they were unable to have children of their own, they programmed memories of a fictional childhood into her. [[TomatoInTheMirror She eventually discovers the truth]] when she realizes that the family album contains no photographs of her.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E100ISingTheBodyElectric I Sing the Body Electric]]", Mr. Rogers purchases a robotic grandmother from Facsimile Ltd. to raise his children Tom, Karen and Anne after the death of his wife.
* RayGun: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the soldiers from both armies were equipped with laser weapons, judging by the discarded rifles that the man and woman find.
* RealAwardFictionalCharacter: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", the title character tells UsefulNotes/JesseJames that he has been nominated for two [[UsefulNotes/EmmyAward Emmys]]. The unimpressed James thinks that [=McGrew=] did not deserve to be nominated.
* RealityWarper:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E63TheMindAndTheMatter The Mind and the Matter]]", Archibald Beechcroft develops the ability to manipulate reality after reading the occult book ''The Mind and the Matter''. He uses his newfound powers to make everyone disappear as he is an misanthrope who hates people. After he gets bored on his own, he causes an earthquake and then creates an electrical storm. He then fills the world with copies of himself but that doesn't satisfy him either.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", Anthony Fremont has seemingly unlimited mental powers. His {{Telepathy}} allows him to ensure that everyone in Peaksville thinks nice thoughts about him. If they don't, Anthony uses his powers to punish them. He typically does so by sending them to the cornfield but he also [[PlayingWithFire set Teddy Reynolds on fire]] and turned Dan Hollis into a jack-in-the-box. Anthony can also kill with his mind, which he does to a three-headed gopher that he created. The largest scale demonstration of his power was when he made the world outside of Peaksville disappear. The townspeople were never sure whether the world had been destroyed or whether Peaksville had been transported somewhere else.
* RealTime: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]" takes place in real time as there are no discernible time skips in the narrative.
* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech:
** The unpleasant family in "The Masks" receive one from Jason Foster, just before he finally dies.
** Fitzgerald Fortune is on the receiving end of several of these in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E87APianoIntheHouse A Piano in the House]]" but he shrugs them off, largely because he's using a magical player piano to force people to reveal their hidden secrets. At the end of the episode, though, one of the piano's songs prompts Fortune to give a Reason You Suck Speech to ''himself''.
** Feathersmith gets one too in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville".
* RecurringDreams:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E53TwentyTwo Twenty-Two]]", Liz Powell experiences a recurring dream in which she follows a strange nurse to the hospital morgue, Room 22. [[spoiler:It turns out to be [[DreamingOfThingsToCome a prophetic dream]] warning her not to board Flight 22 to Miami Beach. She doesn't and the plane explodes immediately after take off.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", Adam Grant suffers a recurring nightmare in which he is convicted of murder and sent to the electric chair every night.
* [[ReferencedBy/WilliamShakespeare ReferencedBy: William Shakespeare]]:
** Three of the episode titles are "[[Theatre/{{Hamlet}} Perchance to Dream]]", "[[Theatre/RichardII The Purple Testament]]" and "[[Theatre/TheMerchantOfVenice A Quality of Mercy]]"; Rod Serling even quotes Portia's words to Shylock at the end of the latter episode ("The quality of mercy is not strained, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath: it is thrice blessed, / It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes"; ''The Merchant of Venice'', IV.i).
** A running joke in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E120TheBard The Bard]]" (in which the hack would be TV writer Julius Moomer brings Shakespeare to life and puts him to work writing for television) has Shakespeare quoting his plays, title and verse. At one point the Bard says, "To be or not to be - that is...." looks confused, and then exits.
** The closing narration of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E18TheLastFlight The Last Flight]]" is "Dialogue from [[Theatre/{{Hamlet}} a play]], Hamlet to Horatio: 'There are more things in Main/{{Heaven}} and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Dialogue from a play written long before men took to the sky: There are more things in heaven and earth and in the sky than perhaps can be dreamt of. And somewhere in between Heaven, the sky and the Earth lies the Twilight Zone."
** In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", [[spoiler:UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln]] quotes the following line from ''Theatre/JuliusCaesar'', Act II, Scene II: "Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come."
* ReallySevenHundredYearsOld:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]", the title character is more than 2,000 years old. He tells his close friend Professor Samuel Kittridge that he is old enough to have known Creator/{{Plato}} personally.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Ben ruled his planet for more than 1,000 years before coming to Earth. He will live for at least another 4,000 years.
* ReminiscingAboutYourVictims: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]", the former SS officer Gunter Lütze returns to Dachau after [[ArgentinaIsNaziLand 17 years in South America]] to reminisce about all the suffering that he caused there.
* ReplacementScrappy: InUniverse example with "I Sing The Body Electric". A widowed husband gets a robot granny to help raise his children, but the oldest child rejects her for not being her deceased mother.
* RepressedMemories: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E29NightmareAsAChild Nightmare as a Child]]", Helen Foley repressed the memory of witnessing Peter Selden murder her mother in her bedroom when she was ten years old.
* RetGone: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]", the astronauts Colonel Ed Harrington, Colonel Clegg Forbes and Major William Gart are erased from existence one by one shortly after their return to Earth. The same fate befalls their spacecraft, the X-20.
* RewritingReality: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", the playwright Gregory West discovered that he had the ability to rewrite reality using his dictaphone when Philip Wainwright, a character from his play ''Fury in the Night'', came alive. He subsequently created [[spoiler:his perfect, regal wife Victoria]] and his sweet, affectionate lover Mary, who caters to his every whim.
* RidiculouslyHumanRobots:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E7TheLonely The Lonely]]", Captain Allenby gives James A. Corry, who is serving in solitary confinement on an asteroid, a RobotGirl named Alicia in order to combat his loneliness. At first, Corry rejects her as JustAMachine who was sent to mock him but realizes that AndroidsArePeopleToo when Alicia begins to cry, indicating that she is capable of the same feelings as any human.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", Jeremy Wickwire, the robot caretaker of the cemetery asteroid Happy Glades, has the appearance and manner of a kindly, grandfatherly old man. Captain James Webber, Professor Kurt Meyers and Peter Kirby don't suspect that he is anything other than human until he tells them that he is a robot.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]", Dr. William Loren created five robots to perform various domestic duties around the house for himself and his wife. Their daughter Jana objects to their presence as she feels that her parents have become increasingly dependent on them for everything. The robots are completely human in appearance and possess emotions. They even appear to have the will to survive as the robot butler Robert initially objects to Dr. Loren's plan to dismantle them. [[spoiler:It turns out that Jana herself is a robot who was programmed to believe that she was the Lorens' daughter.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E100ISingTheBodyElectric I Sing the Body Electric]]", the robot grandmother that Mr. Rogers bought for his children Tom, Karen and Anne has a great capacity for warmth, compassion and empathy. When the time comes for her to leave, she is saddened but says that the children brought her great joy.
* RippedFromTheHeadlines:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E37KingNineWillNotReturn King Nine Will Not Return]]" was inspired by the story of the ''Lady Be Good'', a World War II bomber which crashed in the Libyan desert on April 4, 1943, but was rediscovered in 1958, only two years before this episode aired. The missing crew likewise refers to the missing crew of the ''Lady Be Good'', who were later discovered to have perished trekking across the desert under the mistaken belief they were near the Mediterranean Sea, instead of over 400 miles inland. Finally, the date on Sgt. William F. Kline's grave is April 5, 1943, the day after that the ''Lady Be Good'' vanished.
** Rod Serling wrote "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]" in direct response to the social discourse and anxieties during the ongoing Berlin Crisis.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]" was inspired by the capture and ongoing trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust.
* RippleEffectIndicator:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]", ''The Daily Chronicle'' initially features the headline "Three Spacemen Return from Crash; All Alive" and a photograph of Colonel Ed Harrington, Colonel Clegg Forbes and Major William Gart. After Harrington ceases to exist, the headline changes to "Two Spacemen Return from Crash in Desert" and only Forbes and Gart are pictured. When Forbes likewise ceases to exist, the headline reads "Lone Spaceman Completes Journey; Lands in Desert" and only Gart appears in the accompanying photo.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E92PersonOrPersonsUnknown Person or Persons Unknown]]", although there's no confirmation that the plot is time travel induced, David Gurney finds a picture of himself with his wife Wilma taken before he vanished but she vanishes from the picture before he can show it to Dr. Koslenko to prove that he does know her.
* RippleEffectProofMemory:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]", Colonel Clegg Forbes is the only person to remember that Colonel Ed Harrington ever existed after he fades from existence. Similarly, Major William Gart is the only one to remember Forbes after he disappears.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E27TheBigTallWish The Big Tall Wish]]", Bolie Jackson is the only one to remember the timeline in which he defeated Joey Consiglio in the ring after Henry Temple's wish is undone.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E33MrBevis Mr. Bevis]]", the GuardianAngel J. Hardy Hempstead changes Mr. James B.W. Bevis' life so that he is a normal, straitlaced and successful person. The two of them are the only ones to remember the ways things used to be.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E49BackThere Back There]]", when Peter Corrigan returns to his own time after his failed attempt to [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong prevent the assassination]] of UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln, he discovers that the Potomac Club attendant William has become a millionaire and a prominent member of the club. He is the only one to realize that history has been altered.
* TheRoaringTwenties: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E45TheTroubleWithTempleton The Trouble with Templeton]]", Booth continually hearkens back to the 1920s when he was young and his beloved wife Laura and his best friend Barney Flueger were still alive to the point that he no longer lives in the present.
* RobotAthlete:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E35TheMightyCasey The Mighty Casey]]", the robot Casey becomes the pitcher for the Hoboken Zephyrs. After he has a heart installed and can't bring himself to strike out the members of the opposing team, Mouth has Stillman create a series of robot pitchers to help the Zephyrs win championships.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E122Steel Steel]]", human boxers were replaced by robots in 1968.
* RoomFullOfCrazy: Rod Serling said that when he first called for scripts, "I got 15,000 manuscripts in the first five days. Of those 15,000, I and members of my staff read about 140. And 137 of those 140 were wasted paper; hand-scrawled, laboriously written, therapeutic unholy grotesqueries from sick, troubled, deeply disturbed people." The other three were well-written, but unsuitable for the show.
* RuleOfThree: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", said Martian has three arms. [[spoiler:The Venusian has three eyes.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder: S]]
* SameLanguageDub: In "The Bewitchin' Pool", it happened to Mary Badham, whose lines and voice in the outdoor scenes were so unintelligible, the directors had to have Creator/JuneForay dub her lines.
* {{Satan}}: Popular character. Played by Julie Newmar (in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville") and Burgess Meredith (in "Printer's Devil") among others.
* ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: Several SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfDistance examples.
** In "On Thursday We Leave For Home" an Earth colony is stranded on a hellish planet orbiting two suns. The planet is described as being two billion miles from Earth, which would make it closer to the Sun than Neptune.
** "Third From the Sun". Aliens living on an Earth-like planet say they're going to Earth, which is 11 million miles away. Since it would be impossible for another Earth-like planet to be that close without us knowing about it, the writers must have thought that a planet 11 million miles away could be in another solar system.[[note]]That is, assuming that a "mile" in the characters' language is the same distance as a "mile" in Terran English.[[/note]]
** "Elegy". The episode says that the astronauts are "lost amongst the stars" in a "a far corner of the universe" and they end up on an asteroid in a solar system with two suns, which shows that they're outside Earth's solar system. However, they say (twice!) that they're 655 million miles from Earth, which shows that not only are they not lost but they're actually inside the Earth's solar system between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn!
** "Probe 7: Over and Out". Colonel Cook says that he has crashlanded on a planet (which turns out to be Earth) 4.3 light years from his home planet, presumably in the Alpha Centauri system. In the narration Rod Serling says that he's "several million miles" from his launching point, which would put said point somewhere in the Solar System, not the Alpha Centauri system.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", prior to boarding an alien spaceship, a woman says that the aliens' planet is "billions" of miles from Earth. The nearest it could possibly be is in the Alpha Centauri system, around 4.3 light years (more than 25 '''trillion''' miles) away. By comparison, Pluto is on average 3.67 billion miles from the Sun.
* ScreamDiscretionShot: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E77TheJungle The Jungle]]", the lion leaps towards Alan Richards. His screams are heard as the episode ends.
* ScrewPolitenessImASenior: Jason Foster in "The Masks", though this is both a subversion and a JustifiedTrope. Jason's cranky and crotchety because he knows he's going to die soon and he's surrounded by {{Jerkass}} family members waiting for him to die like vultures. However, while certainly cranky, he never comes off as needlessly cruel to his doctor or his servants and shares a sort-of rapport with them. They're also quite understanding of why he's cranky, and share his contempt for his so-called "family".
* SealedEvilInACan: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E41TheHowlingMan The Howling Man]]", Brother Jerome tells David Ellington that the Brotherhood of Truth has had the Devil imprisoned in Wolfring Castle for the last five years and the world has therefore been spared his evil. Ellington does not believe Brother Jerome and releases the prisoner. Unfortunately, it turns out that he was telling the truth. Ellington spends more than 30 years attempting to [[TheAtoner atone for his mistake and recapture the Devil]]. He is eventually successful but a maid, who does not believe his claims, [[HistoryRepeats releases him]].
-->'''Rod Serling''': Ancient folk saying - you can catch the Devil, but you can't hold him long.
* SecondPlaceIsForWinners: Invoked in the ending of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", alongside BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor. Yeah, Jesse Cardiff defeated the legendary Fats Brown and is the best pool player ever. What prize does he get? [[spoiler:[[AndIMustScream Spending eternity defending his pool title until he loses.]]]]
* SecretTest: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E105ValleyOfTheShadow Valley of the Shadow]]", an [[IntrepidReporter newspaper reporter]] named Philip Redfield learns too much and is taken prisoner by the inhabitants of Peaceful Valley, UsefulNotes/NewMexico. An attractive woman named Ellen Marshall sets him free and he takes advantage of this to steal their secrets, killing several of them in the process. After Philip escapes with Ellen, she turns on him, revealing that the whole set-up was a test of his worthiness to know the information. He failed.
* SecretTestOfCharacter: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", Hyder Simpson and his dog Rip both drown. They then find themselves walking down a path. At one point, they meet a gatekeeper who says that they've reached Heaven, but dogs aren't allowed. Hyder says any Heaven that doesn't allow his dog can count him out. Further down the road, he found it was a test, as an actual angel tells him the gatekeeper was a demon and the place he wanted Hyder to enter was Hell. The angel warmly invites Hyder and Rip into the real Heaven.
* SelfFulfillingProphecy:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E46AMostUnusualCamera A Most Unusual Camera]]", when Chester Diedrich and Woodward begin fighting over the camera that can predict the future, Chester accidentally takes a photograph. It shows Paula, Chester's wife and Woodward's sister, screaming. Chester and Woodward each conclude that Paula is screaming because the other tried to kill him. The two of them fall out the window to their deaths while fighting, causing Paula to scream. When the crooked waiter Pierre comes up to their hotel suite to blackmail Paula, he notices that the photograph has more than two bodies. Paula rushes over to the window to see and trips on the carpet, falling to her death. Pierre then notices that there is a fourth body in the photograph and falls out the window himself.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E112NoTimeLikeThePast No Time Like the Past]]", after traveling back in time to Homeville, Indiana on July 3, 1881, Paul Driscoll recalls that the schoolhouse is going to burn down as a result of a kerosene lantern falling off a passing wagon and twelve children will be badly injured. He vows not to make any efforts to change history as previous attempts to SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong all ended in failure. However, when the time comes, he tries to unhitch the horses from the wagon carrying the kerosene lantern. In the process, he frightens the horses, causing the kerosene to fall off the wagon and start the fire that burns down the schoolhouse.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E144WhatsInTheBox What's in the Box]]", Joe Britt, who has a tempestuous relationship with his wife Phyllis, begins to see his past, present and future on his recently repaired television. A vision of the future shows Joe killing Phyllis in a fight. When Joe attempts to reconcile with Phyllis, she spurns him. Angered by this and another vision of the future showing him being sent to the electric chair, Joe kills Phyllis, just as he saw himself do on television. He is then arrested by the police.
* ShapeShifterSwanSong: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E13TheFourOfUsAreDying The Four of Us Are Dying]]", Arch Hammer's face changes to those of Johnny Foster, Virgil Sterig and Andy Marshak [[spoiler:after he is shot by Marshak's father]].
* SharpDressedMan:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", Death wears an expensive looking black suit.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E38TheManInTheBottle The Man in the Bottle]]", the genie wears an elegant suit.
* ShatteringTheIllusion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E67TheArrival The Arrival]]", [[spoiler:Grant Sheckly's theory that Flight 107, which arrived without any crew or passengers, is nothing more than an illusion is proven when he puts his arm in the spinning propeller and the plane vanishes. His fellow investigators Bengston and Paul Malloy disappear as well.]]
* SheCleansUpNicely: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", after washing her face and putting on the dress from the department store window, the woman looks beautiful. The man is clearly smitten.
* TheSheriff: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E48Dust Dust]]", Sheriff Koch is sympathetic to Luís Gallegos, who was sentenced to be hanged for running over the Canfield girl in his wagon while drunk. He chastises Sykes for taunting him and protects his father from the angry crowd. Koch is depressed by the thought of Gallegos being hanged and clearly believes that he does not deserve to be hanged but still performs his duty as laid down by the law.
* ShootTheShaggyDog:
** [[spoiler:Especially heartbreaking in "The Time Element" because Peter Jenson not only is unable to prevent the death of a young couple (oh, and prevent the mass death and disaster at Pearl Harbor), he also gets ''himself'' killed and part of his life erased from existence as well.]] This episode not only shot the shaggy dog, it skinned and made it into a floor rug.
** Nonlethal version in [[spoiler:"The Big Tall Wish"]].
** "It's a Good Life". No, it isn't!
* ShowWithinAShow:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E4TheSixteenMillimeterShrine The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine]]", Barbara Jean Trenton starred in ''Farewell Without Tears'' in 1933 and ''A Night in Paris'' in 1934.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E23AWorldOfDifference A World of Difference]]", Gerald Raigan plays the title character in the film ''The Private World of Arthur Curtis''.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", the title character stars in a popular [[TheWestern Western TV series]] about [[TheDanza a heroic marshal of the same name]].
* TheShutIn: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", having once seen Mr. Death kill an old woman on the bus, Wanda Dunn has not left her apartment in many years out of fear that she will be next. [[spoiler:Death has to resort to tricking her by pretending that he is an injured police officer named Harold Beldon who needs her help.]]
* SilenceIsGolden:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]" has no dialogue until the very end (when what little dialogue the episode has constitutes TheReveal).
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]", there is no spoken dialogue in the 1890 scenes, which emulate a SilentMovie.
** "Literature/AnOccurrenceAtOwlCreekBridge" has no dialogue except for the shouts of Union soldiers as Peyton Farquhar gets away.
* SleazyPolitician: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E50TheWholeTruth The Whole Truth]]", Harvey Hunnicut tries to sell the Model A Ford to a local politician named Honest Luther Grimbley in order to [[CannotTellALie escape its effects]]. However, his inability to lie means that he is forced to reveal the fact that it is haunted. Grimbley refuses to buy it on the grounds that he would not be able to deliver a single speech if he could not tell a lie.
* SleepingSingle:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third from the Sun]]", William and Eve Sturka's bedroom has two single beds.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E17TheFever The Fever]]", Franklin and Flora Gibbs sleep in separate beds in their UsefulNotes/LasVegas hotel room.
* SleptThroughTheApocalypse:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E8TimeEnoughAtLast Time Enough at Last]]", Henry Bemis goes into the bank vault to have his lunch and read, which protects him from the nuclear blast that kills everyone else. He is knocked out by the force and eventually awakens to find the world destroyed.
** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E82OneMorePallbearer One More Pallbearer]]". In the final scene, Paul Radin discovers that a nuclear war has devastated the world while he was in his bomb shelter attempting to fool Mrs. Langsford, Reverend Hughes and Colonel Hawthorne that such a war was beginning. [[spoiler:However, it turns out that this is nothing but Radin's fantasy, his mind having been broken.]]
* SlidingScaleOfBeauty:
** The show [[PlayingWithATrope plays with this]] in the famous episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", where Janet Tyler undergoes plastic surgery to become beautiful because she falls into the Most Horrible Ever category (there's a village made just for ugly people so nobody would be forced to look at them). Of course being ''The Twilight Zone'' there's a twist: [[spoiler:it's reversed. Being ugly is beautiful and vice versa.]]
** Also played with in "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", in which a young Common Beauty is described by others as "hideous" because she hasn't traded her original appearance in for a carbon-copy World Class Beauty body.
* SlidingScaleOfContinuity: Level 0 (Non-Linear Installments).
* SocietyOnEdgeEpisode: "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" concerns neighbors on a street who become paranoid when the power goes out and odd things start happening, putting the blame on aliens and then turning on one another due to suspicion.
* SociopathicSoldier: Lieutenant Katell in "A Quality of Mercy" wants to be one, wanting to prove himself and completely destroy the enemy (in this case, the Japanese during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII). The KarmicTwistEnding forces him to the other side, where a gung-ho Japanese soldier does the same thing he was about to do to some wounded Americans hiding in the very same cave. He doesn't like it.
* SomethingCompletelyDifferent:
** "Cavender Is Coming", a PoorlyDisguisedPilot for a prospective comedy series starring Jesse White as the title character, an apprentice [[GuardianEntity guardian angel]] who assists a klutzy mortal played by Carol Burnett.
** Also, the comedy episodes, such as 'Mr. Bevis', 'A Penny For Your Thoughts' and 'Once Upon A Time'. The most sitcom-like one of all (complete with HereWeGoAgain ending, even) is probably "The Bard", which, as mentioned above, is one giant AuthorTract about the pitfalls of network television.
** For the episode "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", Rod Serling ditches his usual method of introduction and says, apparently out of character, that tonight they're going to do something very special that they've never yet done in the five years they've been running the show and show you a French film made by somebody else. Justified, in that it's up to the show's usual quality.
** For Season 2, six episodes were [[VideoInsideFilmOutside recorded on videotape]] using four video cameras on a studio soundstage at CBS Television City, as a cost-cutting measure mandated by CBS programming head James T. Aubrey. However, videotape was a relatively primitive medium in the early 1960s, thus the editing of tape was next to impossible. Even worse, the requisite multicamera setup of the videotape experiment made location shooting difficult, severely limiting the potential scope of the storylines, so the crew had to abandon the videotaping project. The six "videotape episodes" are "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E47TheNightOfTheMeek The Night of the Meek]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E50TheWholeTruth The Whole Truth]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E53TwentyTwo Twenty-Two]]", "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E56Static Static]]" and "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E58LongDistanceCall Long Distance Call]]".
** The entire fourth season which CBS expanded into an hour, creating scripts that were for the most part overly padded, and signaled to many the ''Zone'' Jump the Shark moment.
* SpaceMadness: Discussed in [[spoiler:"Where Is Everybody?" The town the protagonist is in is just a hallucination. He's really in an isolation chamber, and he's part of an experiment the government is running to see how humans would handle a solo mission to the Moon. He does make it through the experiment though and seems optimistic about mankind's chances of actually reaching the Moon despite his mental breakdown.]]
* SpaceWhaleAesop: "Stopover In a Quiet Town": Don't drink and drive, [[spoiler:or you'll wake up in a toy town owned by a gigantic extraterrestrial little girl after having been abducted.]]
* SpeculativeFiction: The SciFi elements and stories.
* SpookySilentLibrary: "Time Enough at Last" ends with a lone man, an empty library, and a broken pair of glasses. Possibly [[WeirdAlEffect better known by now through parodies than through the original.]]
* StableTimeLoop:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E18TheLastFlight The Last Flight]]", the terrified UsefulNotes/WorldWarI Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker abandons his friend and flying partner Alexander Mackaye, whose plane is surrounded by seven German ones, on March 5, 1917. He flies through a strange white cloud and travels forward in time to March 5, 1959. When he lands at Lafayette Airbase in Reims, UsefulNotes/{{France}}, Decker learns that Mackaye survived the dogfight and went on to save hundreds of lives during [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII the Blitz]]. He then realizes that he must return to his own time and save Mackaye to ensure that the course of history is preserved. Decker does so at the cost of [[HeroicSacrifice his own life]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E59AHundredYardsOverTheRim A Hundred Yards over the Rim]]", Chris Horn's eight-year-old son Christian is dying of pneumonia in 1847. When he is sent forward in time to September 1961, Chris finds an encyclopedia which states that Dr. Christian Horn, Jr. was a pioneer in vaccine research for childhood diseases in UsefulNotes/{{California}} who died in 1914. After returning to his own time, Chris tells his wife Martha to give Christian a dose of penicillin that he obtained in 1961, which cures his pneumonia.
* StockFootage:
** The countdown and launch footage from "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" was reused in "People Are Alike All Over".
** Footage of the ''C-57-D'' from ''Film/ForbiddenPlanet'' appears in some episodes. At the end of "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" the footage is disguised by being shown upside down and backwards - this was achieved by simply turning the clip upside down before splicing it in. In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", however, although the full-size ''C-57-D'' landing ramp is used, the Kanamit spaceship's takeoff is represented by one of the titular spacecraft from ''Film/EarthVsTheFlyingSaucers'', animated by Creator/RayHarryhausen.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E10JudgementNight Judgement Night]]", footage of the titular ship from the 1959 film ''The Wreck of the Mary Deare'' is used to depict the S.S. ''Queen of Glasgow''.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E35TheMightyCasey The Mighty Casey]]", footage of crowd scenes from the Polo Grounds and Fenway Park is shown during the montage of the Hoboken Zephyrs' winning streak.
** The final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]" features stock footage of the 1939 New York World's Fair, specifically the Trylon and the Perisphere.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the arrival of the Kanamit ambassador's ship is taken from ''Film/TheDayTheEarthStoodStill1951''. Later, a clip from ''Film/EarthVsTheFlyingSaucers'' is used to represent a departing Kanamit ship. Furthermore, footage of a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly is used when the Kanamit ambassador's polygraph test is shown to that body.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]" uses footage from a Mercury Program launch to represent William Fletcher departing.
* StoppedClock: In "Where is Everybody?", Mike Ferris accidentally breaks a clock when he is in the diner's kitchen. While it is later revealed that this is a delusion being experienced by Ferris after more than two weeks of isolation, he broke a clock in the isolation chamber as part of his torment.
* StrangerInAFamiliarLand: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E45TheTroubleWithTempleton The Trouble with Templeton]]", Booth Templeton is sent back to 1927 and meets his beloved wife Laura and his best friend Barney Flueger, both long dead, in a speakeasy. They soon shun and insult him. Laura even slaps him and says, "Go back where you came from! We don't want you here!" [[spoiler:As Laura had a script entitled ''What to Do When Booth Comes Back'', Booth realizes that it was merely a performance to shake him out of his obsession with the past and convince him to live his own life.]]
* StrippedToTheBone: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", Farwell, [=DeCruz=] and Brooks discover that their fellow criminal Erbie has been reduced to a skeleton as a rock broke his suspended animation chamber years earlier. This provides proof that their plan was successful and it is now 2061.
* {{Subtext}}: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]" might also seem creepy to modern eyes. Especially when it's revealed that the elderly man eventually marries the little girl. [[spoiler:Of course, he's a shapeshifting alien who's actually handsome and can take on a younger form and he waited until she got older before marrying her, but it still [[WifeHusbandry sounds a bit squicky.]]]]
%%* SufficientlyAdvancedAlien
* SuperiorSpecies: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits are far more advanced than humans. Michael Chambers estimates that they are 500 times more intelligent than humans and 1,000 times more complex.
* SuperpowersForADay: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E52APennyForYourThoughts A Penny for Your Thoughts]]", Hector B. Poole gains the ability to read minds after he pays for his newspaper and the coin lands on its edge. When he returns to the newstand and buys the late afternoon edition, he tosses another coin and knocks over the first one. As a result, his power disappears as quickly as it came.
%%* SurvivorGuilt:
%%** Suffered by James Embry in "King Nine Will Not Return".
%%** Happens again in "The Thirty-Fathom Grave".
* SuspectExistenceFailure: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", Adam Grant is on DeathRow trying to convince people that the world is a nightmare he keeps having, [[GroundhogDayLoop night after night, over and over again]]. The district attorney Henry Ritchie is finally convinced that he may be telling the truth and calls the Governor to ask for a stay. The stay comes too late, the electric chair is fired up, and we find he was right: everyone else dies and his nightmare starts all over again.
* SymbolSwearing: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]", when Officer Flannagan chastises Woodrow Mulligan for walking in the street and nearly being hit by a horse and carriage, the first word in the intertitle is represented by a star, an exclamation mark, an asterisk and a lightning bolt.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: T]]
* TakeMeToYourLeader: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", Avery says this to the Hi-Way Café jukebox that had spontaneously started playing music while police officers are searching for an alien.
* TakeThat:
** The entirety of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]" against [[TheWestern the TV westerns]] of the time. It also serves as a deconstruction of sorts. Serling hated the Westerns of the time, deeming them too unrealistic and predictable, and later went on to make a Western series (''Series/TheLoner'') himself. Furthermore, Rance [=McGrew=] is a parody of arrogant, conceited and temperamental actors in general.
** The hour long episode "The Bard" features a hack writer who, while researching a book of black magic, inadvertently brings Creator/WilliamShakespeare back from the dead, and uses him as a literal ghost writer. Serling uses this setup to parody everything about television at the time including sponsors making inane changes, and the concept of taking a half hour show and making an hour show of it, such as CBS did to ''Zone'' that season, much to Serling's dismay.
* TakingTheFightOutside: In the episode entitled "The Bewitchin' Pool", Sport and Jeb enter the titular pool at the behest of a boy named Wit, who appeared there suddenly while their parents were arguing. They descend to a place for unloved children and meet "Aunt T" an [[CoolOldLady elderly, loving matriarch]]. Wit makes a comment that upsets Sport and she resolves to fight him. Aunt T calmly hands them each a pair of boxing gloves and tells them to go outside, fight fair and to avoid hitting below the belt. She then turns to Jeb and asks for help frosting the cake she's made. Sport asks to help too only for Aunt T to reply "But I thought you two were gonna beat each other up." Wit and Sport inform her that they'd rather frost the cake instead.
* TalkingToThemself: "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" features a small-time gangster holding a conversation with his reflection in the mirror, with the latter determined that he, or rather they, should stop being so cowardly and actually make something of themselves.
* TallTale: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", Somerset Frisby continually tells [[TallTale tall tales]]. During the episode he's [[AlienAbduction abducted by aliens]] (ironically, because they ''believe'' all his stories) and escapes, but when he tells his friends, they believe he is just CryingWolf. (Of course, the whole episode could be a tall tale... from Rod Serling's point of view.)
* TaxmanTakesTheWinnings: In "The Man in the Bottle", the Castles' second wish is for a million dollars in cash. After they give away some of the money, an IRS agent shows up and gives them a bill for the taxes (Federal and state) they owe on it. This leaves them with only five dollars.
* TearsFromAStone: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", [[spoiler:having been revealed to be dolls]], the ballet dancer cries as she moves her hand towards the major.
* TechnologyUplift: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits arrive on Earth and provide technology that ends war by nullifying all weaponry, cures to all known diseases and provides other remarkable benefits.
* {{Technopath}}: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", the Martian [[spoiler:Ross]] was the ability to control technology, turning both the jukebox and the lights in the Hi-Way Café off and on. [[spoiler:He]] describes it as a parlor trick.
* {{Technophobia}}: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E40AThingAboutMachines A Thing About Machines]]", Bartlett Finchley despises all machines, even more than he hates people, and destroys his appliances if he can't get them to work. For instance, he kicked in the screen of his television and threw his radio down the stairs.
* {{Telepathy}}: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits' means of communication is mental rather than verbal. As such, the voice that humans hear when speaking with Kanamits is "totally mechanical."
* ThisIsntHeaven: When petty crook Rocky Valentine goes to the afterlife in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E28ANicePlaceToVisit A Nice Place to Visit]]", he finds his every desire fulfilled with minimal effort, and assumes he has gone to Heaven. Before long, getting everything so easily starts to drive him insane, and he begs to go to "the other place"... only to be told he's already there.
* ThousandYardStare:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", Dr. Bill Stockton exhibits one after he emerges from the shelter, having seen and heard everything going on with the people that he considered friends for twenty years.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E80AQualityOfMercy A Quality of Mercy]]", Lt. Katell has one when he returns to August 6, 1945 as he has seen UsefulNotes/WorldWarII from another perspective and has come to realize that killing a weakened enemy is not as black and white as he initially believed.
** In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E82OneMorePallbearer One More Pallbearer]]", Paul Radin exhibits one as he believes that the world has been destroyed by a [[WorldWarIII nuclear war]] and he may be the SoleSurvivor. [[spoiler:The nuclear devastation is in fact a hallucination that he is experiencing.]]
* ThroughTheEyesOfMadness: A number of episodes leave open the question of how much of what the audience sees is real. Most overtly explored in the episode "The Arrival", which ends with Rod Serling outright asking the audience to decide whether we've been watching the main character's mental breakdown or his encounter with the supernatural, and "The Mirror" is much the same.
* TimeSkip: The first half of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E141SpurOfTheMoment Spur of the Moment]]" takes place on June 13, 1939 while the second half takes place in 1964.
* TimeStandsStill:
** {{Discussed|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]". Professor Kurt Meyers speculates that the motionless people that he, Captain James Webber and Peter Kirby encounter on the asteroid are frozen in time. However, he admits that he does not really believe it himself.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", the warlock Teague uses BlackMagic to freeze numerous Union soldiers in time.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Ben's pursuers freeze Mrs. Gann and the doctor in time so that they can leave with Ben without them noticing.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E124AKindOfAStopwatch A Kind of a Stopwatch]]", Patrick Thomas [=McNulty=] is given a watch with the power to freeze time by a drunken man named Potts.
* TimeTravelEpisode:
** In "The Time Element", Peter Jenson, a time traveler from 1958, is sent back in time to UsefulNotes/{{Hawaii}} on December 6, 1941 and [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong tries to warn people]] about the impending Japanese attack.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E5WalkingDistance Walking Distance]]", Martin Sloan, an unhappy 36-year-old advertising executive from 1959 who regards the summers of his childhood as the best times of his life, is transported back in time to his home town of Homewood in the summer of 1934.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E18TheLastFlight The Last Flight]]", on March 5, 1917, Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker of the Royal Flying Corps travels exactly 42 years forward in time and lands his plane in an American airbase in Reims, UsefulNotes/{{France}}.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E26Execution Execution]]", Professor Manion transports Joe Caswell, who is about to be hanged on November 14, 1880, forward in time to 1960 using his experimental TimeMachine.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E49BackThere Back There]]", Peter Corrigan is sent back in time to April 14, 1865 and [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong tries to prevent the assassination]] of UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", Global Airlines Flight 33 is sent millions of years back in time to before the extinction of the dinosaurs. The flight crew then attempts to return the plane to its native time of 1961. [[spoiler:However, they do not come back far enough, arriving during the 1939 New York World's Fair.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E56Static Static]]", a cantankerous old bachelor named Ed Lindsay hates television so he brings his old radio up from the basement of the boarding house where he lives. He begins to hear radio broadcasts from radio's heyday of the 1930s and 1940s such as Tommy Dorsey singing "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You", the ''Major Bowes Amateur Hour'' and ''The Fred Allen Show''. However, no one else can hear that his ex-fiancée Vinnie Brown and Professor Ackerman are concerned that he is suffering from delusions. [[spoiler:Ed is eventually sent back in time to 1940. He intends to do things right the second time around and marry Vinnie.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E59AHundredYardsOverTheRim A Hundred Yards over the Rim]]", Chris Horn, the leader of a wagon train headed to UsefulNotes/{{California}} in 1847, is transported forward in time to September 1961. He learns that his son Christian will grow up to become an expert in childhood diseases in California. [[spoiler:He returns to 1847 with penicillin to cure Christian's pneumonia and the knowledge that the wagon train will reach its destination.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E78OnceUponATime Once Upon a Time]]", on March 10, 1890, a janitor named Woodrow Mulligan travels forward in time to 1962 using a time helmet invented by Professor Gilbert.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E80AQualityOfMercy A Quality of Mercy]]", Second Lieutenant Katell, an American soldier fighting in the UsefulNotes/{{Philippines}} on August 6, 1945, is transported back in time to May 4, 1942. He finds that he has become an Imperial Japanese Army officer named Lt. Yamuri.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", the title character, an actor who stars in a [[TheWestern Western TV series]], is transported back in time and gets to experience TheWildWest firsthand.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E112NoTimeLikeThePast No Time Like the Past]]", Paul Driscoll tries to SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong by warning the authorities in Hiroshima of the upcoming atomic bombing on August 6, 1945, assassinating UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler in August 1939 and preventing the sinking of the RMS ''Lusitania'' on May 7, 1915. After all of his efforts fail, he decides to settle in the town of Homeville, Indiana on July 1, 1881.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E116OfLateIThinkOfCliffordville Of Late I Think of Cliffordville]]", William J. Feathersmith makes a DealWithTheDevil in 1963 and is transported back in time to his home town of Cliffordville, Indiana in 1910.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E117TheIncredibleWorldOfHoraceFord The Incredible World of Horace Ford]]", the title character, who constantly reminisces about his supposedly idyllic childhood, is transported back in time to June 1935 and discovers that [[NostalgiaFilter the past was not as pleasant as he remembers it being]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E130The7thIsMadeUpOfPhantoms The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms]]", Sgt. William Connors, Corporal Richard Langsford and Private Michael [=McCluskey=] are sent back in time to June 25, 1876 and end up fighting in [[spoiler:and dying in]] the Battle of Little Bighorn.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E141SpurOfTheMoment Spur of the Moment]]", the 18-year-old Anne Henderson is chased by a screaming woman while riding a horse around her family's property on June 13, 1939. [[spoiler:It turns out that the screaming woman was Anne's future self from 1964 who was trying to warn her against running away with her ex-fiancé David Mitchell and ruining her life]].
* TitledAfterTheSong:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E114IDreamOfGenie I Dream of Genie]]" refers to the line "I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair" from the 1854 song "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" by Stephen Foster.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E132NinetyYearsWithoutSlumbering Ninety Years Without Slumbering]]" refers to the first line of the chorus of the 1876 song "My Grandfather's Clock" by Henry Clay Work.
* TitleDrop:
** With the exception of "Jess-Belle", which skipped the closing narration, every episode opens and closes with a narration from Rod Serling. In many of the opening narrations, and in almost every closing one, the narration ends with "The Twilight Zone." After setting the premise for the episode, the opening narration often states the character(s) is/are about to enter The Twilight Zone. The closing ones summarizes the events of the episode in an eerie and cryptic manner, and a moral or message about what happened is either hinted at or outright stated; but it always ends in the phrase "The Twilight Zone." The exceptions are "The Four of Us Are Dying", "He's Alive", "Long Live Walter Jameson", "Deaths-Head Revisited" and "On Thursday We Leave For Home".
** In the original broadcast of "Night of the Meek", Serling expresses a holiday greeting after the "...in the Twilight Zone" statement, which was generally edited out in syndication.
** Almost every episode will feature a character saying the episode title. If they don't you can expect the narrator to chime in.
* TitleSequenceReplacement: The first season opening is often pasted over by the second season opening in syndicated reruns.
* TomatoInTheMirror:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E34TheAfterHours The After Hours]]", [[spoiler:after seemingly been harassed by {{Murderous Mannequin}}s around the department store, Marsha White remembers that she is a mannequin who left the store to live among humans for a month. The other mannequins were not trying to harm her but to help her remember her true nature.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", [[spoiler:Victoria is one of Gregory West's fictional characters brought to life. After throwing the envelope containing the tape that he used to create her into the fire, Victoria realizes that he was telling the truth about her being fictional at the last moment before she disappears.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]", [[spoiler:Jana Loren is disturbed by the five RidiculouslyHumanRobots whom her parents use as servants. She eventually realizes that she is a robot herself, albeit a much more sophisticated one, and that all of her memories of her earlier life by programmed into her by her "father" Dr. William Loren.]]
* TomatoSurprise:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third from the Sun]]", the Sturkas and Ridens steal an experimental ship and travel to another planet [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfDistance 11 million miles away]] in order to escape a nuclear war that is likely to begin within 48 hours. [[spoiler:Having picked up [[AliensStealCable radio signals from the planet]], Jerry Riden learns that the natives call it "Earth."]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", Janet Tyler, a woman with a horribly misshapen shape, is undergoing her eleventh reconstructive surgery to make her appear normal. When her bandages are removed, the doctors discover that the surgery was unsuccessful. [[spoiler:It is revealed that, from the audience's perspective, Janet is a beautiful woman and the doctors and nurses are hideously ugly.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]", an aging farm woman is attacked by tiny creatures from another planet in her cabin. [[spoiler:The woman discovers the supposed aliens' spacecraft on her roof. Its markings read "U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1." It is revealed that the woman belongs to a race of giants and the "aliens" are astronauts from Earth.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", an army major, a ballet dancer, a clown, a hobo and a bagpiper find themselves trapped in a large cylinder with no memory of who they are or how they got there. [[spoiler:The final scene reveals that the five of them are dolls in a donation barrel for a girls' orphanage.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", Earth is moving closer and closer towards UsefulNotes/TheSun and society is breaking down as people are dying of heat stroke. [[spoiler:The final scene reveals that it was AllJustADream of the protagonist Norma. The world is in fact moving further away from the Sun and the world's population is rapidly freezing to death.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E129Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7, Over and Out]]", an astronaut named Colonel Cook crashlands on a planet 4.3 lightyears from his home system. After contacting his planet, he learns that a nuclear war has begun and a rescue ship will therefore not be sent for him. Shortly afterwards, Cook meets an alien woman. Although they do not speak each other's languages, the woman manages to communicate to him that her name is Norda and that she is the SoleSurvivor of her planet, which left its orbit. [[spoiler:Cook tells her that [[AdamAndEvePlot his first name is Adam and learns that hers is Eve]]. They settle in [[GardenOfEden beautiful garden]] containing [[ForbiddenFruit fruit]] that Eve calls "[[SignificantAnagram seppla]]." Eve decides to call the planet "Earth."]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E150StopoverInAQuietTown Stopover in a Quiet Town]]", a married couple named Bob and Millie Frazier wake up in a strange house, hungover after a party the previous night. They discover that almost everything in the house and the surrounding neighborhood is fake such as a prop phone, a stuffed squirrel in a tree and papier-mâché grass. [[spoiler:In the final scene, the Fraziers see a giant girl and realize that they are in her model village. The girl is a member of a race of giants whose father traveled to Earth and brought the two of them back for her to play with.]]
* ToServeMan: [[spoiler:{{Trope Namer|s}}]] are in the titular episode, where an alien race called the Kanamits come to Earth and establish diplomacy. [[spoiler:It's only at the very end when the humans decipher their handbook, ''To Serve Man'', to be a cookbook, and not in time to save the life of Michael Chambers.]]
* TouchedByVorlons: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", the two-headed Martian gives Luther Dingle the [[SuperStrength strength of 300 men]]. He quickly becomes a celebrity and is hailed as a modern day [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Hercules]] or [[Literature/SamsonAndDelilah Samson]]. However, the Martian is disappointed that Dingle is using his strength to show off and settle scores and it is removed. Two Venusian scientists then arrive and, on the recommendation of the two-headed Martian, bestow SuperIntelligence on Dingle as part of an experiment.
%%* TownWithADarkSecret: "Valley of the Shadow."
%%* TragicHero: Captain Benteen in "On Thursday We Leave For Home."
* TransformationSequence: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E41TheHowlingMan The Howling Man]]", after being released by David Ellington, the prisoner transforms into a traditional depiction of the Devil with every step that he takes.
* TranslatorMicrobes: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E25PeopleAreAlikeAllOver People Are Alike All Over]]", Sam Conrad believes that the [[AliensSpeakingEnglish Martians are speaking English]] but he is told that he is in fact speaking their language as a result of unconscious transference, a sort of hypnosis.
* TraumaInducedAmnesia: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E67TheArrival The Arrival]]", Grant Sheckly was so traumatized by his failure to solve the mystery of Flight 107's disappearance that he repressed his memory of it. It eventually returned in the form of an illusion.
* TravelingSalesman: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E55MrDingleTheStrong Mr. Dingle, the Strong]]", Luther Dingle is a dismally unsuccesssful door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.
* TrialOfTheMysticalJury: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]", Gunter Lütze is put on trial by the ghosts of his victims at Dachau. He is found guilty and sentenced to a lifetime of insanity.
* {{Troll}}: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", did Oliver Crangle shrink because what he was trying to do went wrong, was the whole thing a hallucination...or did every single evil person on Earth actually shrink, including him because he was evil?! The last possibility would have had very interesting results.
* {{Tuckerization}}:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E5WalkingDistance Walking Distance]]", a sign says that Ralph N. Nelson is the proprietor of the service station where Martin Sloan stops. He is named after the series' production manager Ralph W. Nelson.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E12WhatYouNeed What You Need]]", the jockeys riding in the race on which Fred Renard bets include Serling, Houghton, Clemens, Denault and Butler. They are named after Rod Serling, the producer Buck Houghton, the director of photography George T. Clemens, the assistant director Edward Denault and the set decorator Rudy Butler.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third from the Sun]]", Jody Sturka and Ann Riden are named after Rod Serling's daughters Jodi and Ann.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]", Nan Adams was also named after Ann Serling, whose nickname was Nan. The same is true of the minor character Nan in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E32APassageForTrumpet A Passage for Trumpet]]".
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E19ThePurpleTestament The Purple Testament]]", one of the soldiers in Lt. Fitzgerald's company is named Denault. He was also named after Edward Denault.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E29NightmareAsAChild Nightmare as a Child]]", Helen Foley is named after Rod Serling's favorite teacher.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E30AStopAtWilloughby A Stop at Willoughby]]", Gart Williams' advertising company is handling the Bradbury account. This is a reference to Creator/RayBradbury, who later wrote "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E100ISingTheBodyElectric I Sing the Body Electric]]".
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E32APassageForTrumpet A Passage for Trumpet]]", the Houghton & Co Truck Company is named after the producer Buck Houghton.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E33MrBevis Mr. Bevis]]", Mr. James B.W. Bevis' ancestors include Magellan Bevis, a 16th Century explorer, and Parnell Bevis, a member of the British Parliament who fought for Home Rule for UsefulNotes/{{Ireland}}.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E47TheNightOfTheMeek The Night of the Meek]]", Henry Corwin is named after the writer Norman Corwin.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E57ThePrimeMover The Prime Mover]]", Big Phil Nolan is named after the writer William F. Nolan, a friend of the screenwriter Charles Beaumont.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", the Old West funeral parlor is run by C. Nyby, a reference to this episode's director Christian Nyby.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E88TheLastRitesOfJeffMyrtlebank The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank]]", one of the mailboxes has the name M. Pittman on it, a reference to this episode's writer and director Montgomery Pittman.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", Ruth and Bettina "Tina" Miller are named after Creator/RichardMatheson's wife and daughter.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E118OnThursdayWeLeaveForHome On Thursday We Leave for Home]]", the protagonist Captain William Benteen is named after Captain Frederick William Benteen, who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn. The real Benteen is mentioned several times in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E130The7thIsMadeUpOfPhantoms The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms]]".
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E138BlackLeatherJackets Black Leather Jackets]]", the alien bikers Scott, Steve and Fred are named after Earl Hamner, Jr.'s son Scott and two of his friends.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E150StopoverInAQuietTown Stopover in a Quiet Town]]", a sign outside the church in the apparent deserted town states that the reverend is Kogh Gleason. This is a reference to F. Keogh Gleason, a regular Creator/{{MGM}} set decorator who worked on the series during its first three seasons.
* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", Professor Kurt Meyers tells Jeremy Wickwire that Earth was devastated by a nuclear war in 1985 and it has taken 200 years for humanity to rebuild. It is also mentioned that the cemetery asteroid Happy Glades was established in 1973.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E108DeathShip Death Ship]]", the spaceship E-89 lands on the thirteenth planet of Star System 51 to investigate the feasibility of establishing a colony in 1997.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E118OnThursdayWeLeaveForHome On Thursday We Leave for Home]]", the Earth ship Pilgrim I containing 113 people landed on the planet V9-Gamma in August 1991. A ship arrives to bring the impoverished survivors back to Earth in 2021.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E122Steel Steel]]", it is mentioned that boxing matches between human fighters were banned in 1968 and that the sport came to be dominated by robots. The episode takes place on August 2, 1974.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E127TheOldManInTheCave The Old Man in the Cave]]", a nuclear war devastated Earth in 1964. Millions of people were killed and [[PollutedWasteland the world is contaminated with radiation]]. The episode takes place ten years AfterTheEnd in 1974.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E135TheLongMorrow The Long Morrow]]", the astronaut Commander Douglas Stansfield embarks on a 40 year round trip mission to a solar system 141 lightyears from Earth on December 31, 1987.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E137Number12LooksJustLikeYou Number 12 Looks Just Like You]]", the opening narration gives the date as 2000 "for want of a better estimate." It takes place in a world where people undergo surgery called the Transformation at 18 years old to make them look like everyone else.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E153TheBrainCenterAtWhipples The Brain Center at Whipple's]]", Wallace V. Whipple replaces the workers at his factory with an automatic assembly machine called the [=X109B14=] in 1967.
* TwistEnding: Became infamous for this sort of thing.
* TwoOfYourEarthMinutes:
** A weird and somewhat baffling variation occurs in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", when Michael Chambers, onboard a flying saucer in transit asks his Kanamit [[spoiler:captors]] what time it is, only to be told there isn't one, because there's no way to measure time in space, to which the hero responds "What time is it ''on Earth''?
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", after Somerset Frisby is lured into a FlyingSaucer, the aliens' leader tells him that they will be taking off in "fourteen minutes, by your measure of time."
[[/folder]]

[[folder: U-V]]
* UnbuiltTrope: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]" milked the concept of [[spoiler:sentient toys]] for all its inherent horror and existential angst about three decades before [[spoiler:''WesternAnimation/ToyStory'']] made the idea famous. The ending, where we find out that [[spoiler:the titular five characters are actually dolls put in a donation bin for a girls' orphanage]], is absolutely ''terrifying''.
* UnPaused: "A Kind of a Stopwatch", until [[spoiler:[[KarmicTwistEnding the stopwatch breaks.]]]]
* UrbanFantasy: Anything that takes place in a city, natch.
%%* UrbanLegends: The basis of many episodes.
* UrbanRuins:
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E8TimeEnoughAtLast Time Enough at Last]]" ends in this setting, since the world was destoyed by [[WorldWarIII nuclear war]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the man and woman are the first people to set foot in the ruined city since the war that devastated the world five years earlier. They discover the skeletal remains of several people and even two birds that someone kept as pets.
* VampiricDraining: In "Queen of the Nile", a middle-aged actress named Pamela Morris is actually [[spoiler:thousands of years old - she maintains her youth by draining the LifeEnergy of young men]].
* VideoInsideFilmOutside: The six Season 2 "videotape episodes"; see SomethingCompletelyDifferent.
* VideoPhone: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E96TheTradeIns The Trade-Ins]]", the New Life Corporation receptionist tells Mr. Vance that there is a call for him on the video phone.
* VillainProtagonist: Several episodes feature them, and they usually end up badly.
** "The Four of Us Are Dying" is about a petty crook who uses his VoluntaryShapeshifting power to defraud people.
** The main characters of "A Most Unusual Camera" are a trio of not so bright thieves.
** "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" also focuses on a gang of thieves.
** The aforementioned {{Nazi Protagonist}}s of "Death's Head Revisited", "He's Alive" and "Judgment Night".
** The disguised alien invaders in "Black Leather Jackets".
** In "Mr. Garrity and the Graves", the titular character is a ConArtist.
* TheVoiceless: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", "pryekrasnyy," the Russian word for beautiful, is the only word that the woman says the entire episode.
* VoluntaryShapeShifting: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Ben can change his shape into anything that he can imagine. Aside from the old man shape that he has been using since he met Jenny, he turns into a [[UsefulNotes/{{Mars}} Martian]], a mouse, a fly and Jenny herself. [[spoiler:His [[ShapeShifterDefaultForm true form]] is that of a handsome young man who looks completely human.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder: W]]
* WaitHere: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", a Confederate scout named Sgt. Joseph Paradine gives orders to his partner Dauger:
-->'''Paradine:''' Now you stay here. If you hear a shot, you get back to the lieutenant at a fast gallop...If you haven't heard from me in 15 minutes, you get back there anyway.
* TheWallAroundTheWorld: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits provide every country on Earth with the technology to project a forcefield around their borders, ending the possibility of any nation attacking another.
* WarIsHell:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", this is the man's opinion on the conflict that devastated the world five years earlier. He no longer has any urge or any reason to fight.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", when Lavinia Godwin tells the sergeant that she plans to shoot the next Union soldier that she sees out of revenge for the death of her husband Jud, he says that he does not want to hear any more talk of butchery or bloodshed due to the thousands of men and boys killed in [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar the war]].
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", Dauger says that he went to war as if he were playing a children's game but the experience of fighting has shown him the realities of war. His only desire is to remain alive and he even suggests surrendering to the Union troops. Sgt. Joseph Paradine slaps him across the face in response.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E80AQualityOfMercy A Quality of Mercy]]", the battle-hardened marines have been fighting the Japanese for two years, which has made them war-weary. Andrew J. Watkins tells the gung-ho Lt. Katell that they have seen enough dead man to last the rest of their lives and that they aren't going to stand up and cheer at the opportunity to kill more. Sgt. Causarano later says that the platoon consists of "dirty, tired men who have their craw full of this war."
%%* WastelandElder: "On Thursday We Leave For Home". [[spoiler:Subverted.]]
* WaterSourceTampering: In "Black Leather Jackets", a group of aliens is sent to Earth to KillAllHumans by contaminating city water reservoirs with deadly bacteria.
* WaterWakeUp: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the man revives the woman by throwing a bucket of water over her after knocking her out.
* WeComeInPeace: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", Williams tells the mob that he has come to Earth in peace shortly before they kill him. Similarly, the document that he gave to Pedro says, "We come as friends and in peace."
%%* WeComeInPeaceShootToKill: Type 1: "The Gift", Type 2: "To Serve Man"
* WellIntentionedExtremist: According to Bill Mumy (who played him), Anthony Fremont from "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]" is honestly trying to make the world a better place, he simply doesn't grasp that what makes ''him'' happy isn't best for everyone. In short, his immaturity prevents him from taking other's views into consideration. This is explored further in the short story on which the episode is based. A notable example excluded from the episode is his reanimating a man's corpse after hearing his widow mourn his death, much to her (and everybody else's) horror. The town folk mostly try to avoid any negative thoughts at all after that, because Anthony might make things so much worse by trying to make them better.
%%* WhackAMole: "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"
* WhatDidIDoLastNight: Bob and Millie in "Stopover in a Quiet Town" wake up in a strange house with no memory of how they got there, only that they had far too much to drink the previous night and tried to drive home anyway, only for a large shadow to pass over their car.
* WhamLine: A memorable one in "The Man in The Bottle": "Well?? What about it, [[spoiler:''Fuehrer?!'']]" Paired with a [[TheReveal shot]] of Arthur: he wished to be a [[spoiler:the leader of a modern and powerful country in which he cannot be voted out of office]]: he's now [[spoiler:Adolf Hitler, moments before his suicide in the bunker.]]
* WhamShot: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]", after the woman destroys the seemingly tiny aliens' spacecraft, the camera pans to reveal [[spoiler:the words "U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1" on the opposite side, indicating that the invaders were in fact humans and the woman is a giant alien]].
* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E7TheLonely The Lonely]]", Corry initially rejects Alicia, calling her a lie and something to mock him. However, when he sees that she's capable of feeling the same things as him and can even cry, he changes his mindset and sees her as a person. When Allenby's crew returns, Corry can't part with her so Allenby shoots her in the face, exposing the machinery underneath. He assures Corry that all he's leaving behind is loneliness.
* WhatYouAreInTheDark: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", out of all the Confederates, Sgt. Joseph Paradine is the only one to realize that it's better to go off to war and lose than win by BlackMagic that would tarnish their souls. He believes that if is the Confederacy is going to be buried, it should be in hallowed ground.
* WhenSheSmiles: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the woman smiles when the man says that her dress is "pryekrasnyy," meaning "beautiful."
* WhenTheClockStrikesTwelve:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", Adam Grant is a convicted murderer sentenced to be executed at midnight, who claims that the whole situation is a dream he's having. Prosecutor Henry Ritchie talks with newspaper editor Paul Carson about it:
--->'''Carson:''' That's another thing. Why does this always happen around midnight?\\
'''Ritchie:''' Because that's when it happens!\\
'''Carson:''' Yeah, but why?\\
'''Ritchie:''' You tell me why!\\
'''Carson:''' According to Grant, he doesn't know anything about these matters except what he sees in the movies. In the movies it always happens at midnight.\\
'''Ritchie:''' Because movies are technically accurate!\\
'''Carson:''' Yeah, that's strange too when you come to think of it.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E2OneForTheAngels One for the Angels]]", a sidewalk pitchman named Lou Bookman is scheduled to die at midnight. When he tricks Death into not taking him, a young girl, Maggie Polonski, is scheduled to die in his place at that time. He must make his best pitch ever to distract Death from taking her.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", when the prosecutor asks Mr. Wordsworth when he wants to be executed, Wordsworth picks the traditional time: midnight.
** "The Masks". The dying Jason Foster forces his evil relatives to wear their masks until midnight, on pain of losing their inheritance. Foster dies at the stroke of midnight, but when the relatives remove their masks they discover that something unusual has occurred.
** "Mr. Garrity and the Graves". Mr. Garrity tells the people of Happiness, Arizona that he will resurrect the people buried in Boot Hill at midnight.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E72TheGrave The Grave]]", Johnny-Rob makes a bet with Conny Miller that he won't go to Pinto Sykes' grave at midnight.
%%* WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue: [[spoiler:"I Sing the Body Electric."]]
* WholePlotReference: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]" is a sci-fi version of the story of UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}}. Williams is an alien visitor who has arrived on Earth with a gift for humanity, a CureForCancer, but he is killed and the gift is destroyed. The parallel is made clear when the doctor says that the bartender Manolo, who has told the Mexican Army of Williams' presence, should have been christened "Judas."
* WifeHusbandry: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Rod Serling says in his closing narration that [[spoiler:Jenny will grow to be "an honest-to-goodness queen," suggesting that she will one day marry Ben.]]
* WishingForMoreWishes: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E38TheManInTheBottle The Man in the Bottle]]", the genie explicitly forbids this. He tells Arthur Castle that he dreads to think of the consequences of making such a wish.
* WholeEpisodeFlashback: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E41TheHowlingMan The Howling Man]]", David Ellington tells a maid the story of his visit to Wolfring Castle and releasing the Devil from his confinement in the 1920s.
* WhoWantsToLiveForever:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E6EscapeClause Escape Clause]]", Walter Bedeker makes a DealWithTheDevil for immortality. He uses his new situation to commit a series of insurance fraud scams by jumping in front of buses and under trains but the thrill of cheating death over and over again eventually fades. After his wife Ethel falls to her death while trying to prevent him from jumping off the roof of their apartment building, Walter confesses to having murdering her. He is looking forward to the experience of being sent to the electric chair. [[spoiler:However, he is instead sentenced to life imprisonment. In order to avoid the unimaginable boredom of being confined for millennia, Walter exercises his escape clause and has the Devil end his life.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]", the title character is an immortal who has lived for more than 2,000 years. He admits to his close friend Professor Samuel Kittridge that he has grown tired of his eternal life but he does not have the courage to bring it to an end. He sits with a revolver in his hands every night and hopes that this will be the night that he will force myself to pull the trigger. [[spoiler:Laurette Bowen, one of the many wives that Walter deserted as they grew old, finally puts him out of his misery and shoots him. [[EmptyPileOfClothing He is quickly reduced to dust.]]]]
* TheWildWest:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E3MrDentonOnDoomsday Mr. Denton on Doomsday]]", Al Denton was once the fastest gun in the West but he became [[TheAlcoholic a severe alcoholic]] when the latest man to challenge him turned out to be a sixteen-year-old boy. Like all of the others, he killed him. Denton gets a second change from a peddler named Henry J. Fate.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E26Execution Execution]]", as he is about to be hanged for murder on November 14, 1880, Joe Caswell is transported forward in time to 1960 by Professor Manion.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E48Dust Dust]]", in a Wild West village "built of crumbling clay and rotting wood," a man named Luis Gallegos, who got drunk, went out in his wagon and struck and killed a little girl, is about to be hanged. A peddler named Sykes arrives in town and tells Gallegos' father that he can save his son by spreading special dust, which will cause the crowd to have a change of heart.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E59AHundredYardsOverTheRim A Hundred Yards over the Rim]]", while searching for a source of food and water for his wagon train in 1847, Chris Horn is transported forward in time to UsefulNotes/NewMexico in September 1961.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E72TheGrave The Grave]]", the hired gunman Conny Miller arrives in a western town to discover that his rival Pinto Sykes, a notorious outlaw, has been killed by the townsfolk. Conny learns that Pinto make a vow to reach up from his grave and grab Conny if he ever came close to it.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E85ShowdownWithRanceMcGrew Showdown with Rance McGrew]]", the title character, a conceited actor who plays a hero named after himself in a [[TheWestern Western TV series]] featuring UsefulNotes/JesseJames, is transported back in time to the Wild West and meets the real Jesse James.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E130The7thIsMadeUpOfPhantoms The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms]]", Sgt. William Connors, Corporal Richard Langsford and Private Michael [=McCluskey=], three US Army soldiers from 1964, are transported back in time to the Battle of Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E152MrGarrityAndTheGraves Mr. Garrity and the Graves]]", the peddler Jared Garrity arrives in the small town of Happines, UsefulNotes/{{Arizona}} in 1890. He claims that he can [[BackFromTheDead bring the dead back to life]].
* WorldOfSymbolism: Some of the more esoteric [[TheReveal reveals]] involve this.
* WorldWarIII:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E8TimeEnoughAtLast Time Enough at Last]]", a nuclear war breaks out. Henry Bemis [[SoleSurvivor survived]] as he was reading in the bank vault when the H-Bomb that destroyed his city was detonated.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", Professor Kurt Meyers tells Jeremy Wickwire that Earth was devastated by a nuclear war in 1985 and it has taken 200 years for humanity to rebuild.
** {{Played with}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]". The man and woman appear to be American and Soviet soldiers respectively who are still alive five years after the war devastated the world but Rod Serling's opening narration leaves the time period vague, even stating that the story could have taken place two million years ago.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E127TheOldManInTheCave The Old Man in the Cave]]", a nuclear war devastated Earth in 1964. Millions of people were killed and [[PollutedWasteland the world is contaminated with radiation]].
* WorthlessYellowRocks:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", Farwell is the last survivor of the four criminals who stole $1 million in gold bars and placed themselves in suspended animation for 100 years. Dying of dehydration in Death Valley, he offers all of his gold to a passing motorist named George in exchange for water. He dies before George can do anything to help him. [[spoiler:George is surprised that he offered him gold as if it were really worth something since a way to manufacture it was developed decades earlier. As he and his wife drive away, he throws the worthless bar of gold to the ground.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the man finds money in a cash register in the ruined city but discards it since it is worthless in the aftermath of the war that destroyed his civilization.
* WouldHitAGirl: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E66Two Two]]", the man gets into a fistfight with an enemy soldier, who is a woman, and knocks her out.
* WriterOnBoard: Serling was an outspoken liberal, even for his day, and many of the show's recurring themes of corporate oppression, racism, censorship, isolationism, and the horrors of war were not simply ideas he liked to discuss, but the very reason he created the series was to use as a sounding board for such taboos.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: X-Z]]
* YouAllMeetInACell: The premise of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]": an Army major wakes up to find himself trapped inside in a large metal cylinder, along with a hobo, a ballet dancer, a bagpiper, and a clown. None of them have any memory of who they are or how they got there.
* YouCantFightFate: Or at least, you can't change the past. Several episodes revolve around characters trying to avert disasters, but failing or only making small changes.
* YouHaveToBelieveMe: A common occurrence in the series, but especially in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]" when Somerset Frisby, who has a penchant for [[TallTale tall tales]], tries and fails to convince his friends that he was [[AlienAbduction abducted by aliens]].
* YouNeverAsked: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E28ANicePlaceToVisit A Nice Place to Visit]]", Rocky Valentine automatically assumed he was in Heaven and Pip was an angel. Pip chuckles, essentially, "Whatever gave you ''that'' idea?"
* YouWakeUpInARoom:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", a man dressed in the uniform of a US Army major wakes up a strange metal cylinder with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He discovers that four others, a clown, a ballet dancer, a hobo and a bagpiper, are in the same boat. [[spoiler:It turns out that they are dolls in a Christmas collection barrel for a girls' orphanage.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E150StopoverInAQuietTown Stopover in a Quiet Town]]", Bob and Millie Frazier wake up in a strange house. They are hungover from a party the night before and have no idea how they got there. [[spoiler:It turns out that that they were abducted by a giant alien, who brought them back to his planet for his daughter to play with. They have been in a model village all this time.]]
* YourDaysAreNumbered: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E76StillValley Still Valley]]", Teague can sense that he is going to die when UsefulNotes/TheSun goes down and gives his book of black magic to Sgt. Joseph Paradine to use against the Union.
* YourMindMakesItReal:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E9PerchanceToDream Perchance to Dream]]", Edward Hall, who has a rheumatic heart, dreams in chapters like an old FilmSerial. He has been dreaming about a strange woman named Maya at a carnival who has been trying to scare him to death by bringing him to a funhouse and for a ride on a roller coaster. As a result, Edward believes that he will die the next time that he goes to sleep. [[spoiler:It turns out that he is right.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", Adam Grant doesn't die from his dreams of being execuited but the fear and pain that come along with the whole thing feel very real to him, no matter how many times they happen.
* {{Zeerust}}: A lot of outer space-themed episodes take place in the year 2000 or the late 90's.
** "Steel", in which human fighters have been replaced by boxing robots, takes place in the far off year of 1974.
** "Third from the Sun" showcased a sleek white phone that gave off soft, elevator-like tones when it rang. In fact, the rotary dial was on the bottom!
** "Elegy" starts with the landing of a rocket that in many ways works like how we imagine a UFO. They open the hatch, and down comes a ladder on a hinge.
[[/folder]]

* EquivalentExchange: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E98TheDummy The Dummy]]", [[spoiler:Jerry Etherson and Willie have switched places so that Jerry has become the dummy and Willie the ventriloquist.]]

* ConvenientlyInterruptedDocument: In "The Gift", an alien brings a message to the people of Earth. The alien gets killed and the message burned. Then someone reads the message, which is something like, "As a symbol of our friendship we offer the following, a [[CureForCancer cure for all forms of cancer]]." The rest is burned away.

%%* EquivalentExchange

** In "The Gift", the inhabitants of a small town murder a benevolent alien.

** The PoorlyDisguisedPilot "Cavender is Coming" featured a laugh track during its original showing and early syndication. It was removed from the syndication prints in the mid eighties.
** The Night Club scenes in the episode "The Dummy" have an obvious laugh track standing in for the audience laughter.

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", the protagonist is named Oliver Crangle. In the short story, his first name is not given.

* CannotTellALie: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", the aliens mistake Somerset Frisby's [[TallTale tall tales]] about his own past for an incredible variety of impressive accomplishments because they have no idea what lying is.

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", Farwell is the last survivor of the four criminals who stole £1 million in gold bars and placed themselves in suspended animation for 100 years. Dying of dehydration in Death Valley, he offers all of his gold to a passing motorist named George in exchange for water. He dies before George can do anything to help him. [[spoiler:George is surprised that he offered him gold as if it were really worth something since a way to manufacture it was developed decades earlier. As he and his wife drive away, he throws the worthless bar of gold to the ground.]]

* GrowOldWithMe: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E96TheTradeIns The Trade-Ins]]", John and Marie Holt have grown old together during their 50 year marriage and remain very much in love and completely dedicated to each other. They wish to have 100 more years together by transferring their minds into new, younger bodies. However, they only have enough money for one of them to do so. As John is in near constant pain, Marie convinces him to go ahead with the transformation. When he does so, however, John can't bear the thought of Marie still being old when he is young and strong. He has the process reversed so that he and Marie can spend the rest of their lives together. John tells her that she is worth the pain.

* HappilyMarried: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", Hyder and Rachel Simpson have had a very happy life together since their marriage almost 50 years earlier.

* GrowOldWithMe:
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", Hyder and Rachel Simpson have had a very happy life together since their marriage almost 50 years earlier.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E96TheTradeIns The Trade-Ins]]", John and Marie Holt have grown old together during their 50 year marriage and remain very much in love and completely dedicated to each other. They wish to have 100 more years together by transferring their minds into new, younger bodies. However, they only have enough money for one of them to do so. As John is in near constant pain, Marie convinces him to go ahead with the transformation. When he does so, however, John can't bear the thought of Marie still being old when he is young and strong. He has the process reversed so that he and Marie can spend the rest of their lives together. John tells her that she is worth the pain.

* HappilyMarried: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", Hyder and Rachel Simpson have had a very happy life together since their marriage almost 50 years earlier.

* UnbuiltTrope: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]" milked the concept of [[spoiler:sentient toys]] for all its inherent horror and existential angst about three decades before [[spoiler:''WesternAnimation/ToyStory'']] made the idea famous. The ending, where we find out that [[spoiler:the titular five characters are actually dolls dumped in a Salvation Army bin by their owner,]] is absolutely ''terrifying''.

* BrownNote: [[spoiler:How Frisby's harmonica affects the aliens]] in "Hocus Pocus and Frisby".

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", Somerset Frisby plays his harmonica after being [[AlienAbduction abducted by aliens]]. [[spoiler:[[BrownNote The sound causes them extreme pain]] and they are forced to release him.]]

* CrazyMemory: "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" is about a man who tells outrageous lies to his friends about his past... and is promptly kidnapped by aliens, who think his lies are true.

* TallTale: "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" features a man who continually tells tall tales. During the episode he's [[AlienAbduction abducted by aliens]] (ironically, because they ''believe'' all his stories) and escapes, but when he tells his friends, they believe he is just CryingWolf. (Of course, the whole episode could be a tall tale... from Rod Serling's point of view.)

** "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby". After Mr. Frisby is lured into a flying saucer, the aliens' leader tells him that they will be taking off in "fourteen minutes, by your measure of time".

* YouHaveToBelieveMe: A common occurrence in the series, but especially in "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby".

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", Oliver Crangle's parrot is a male named Pete. In the short story by Price Day, she is a female named [[ADogNamedDog Pet]].

* AlwaysABiggerFish: The twist ending of "The Little People". After astronaut Peter Craig becomes mad with the power he has over the tiny aliens on the planet on which he and his now departed fellow astronaut have landed, [[spoiler:another group of aliens who are as large to him as he is to the planets' natives land to repair their spaceship; one of them picks him up out of curiosity and accidentally crushes him to death]].

* AndThereWasMuchRejoicing: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E72TheGrave The Grave]]", the only people in town who are sorry about the outlaw Pinto Sykes' death are his sister Ione, their father and Conny Miller, who wanted to kill him himself.

* BinarySuns: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]", the cemetery asteroid Happy Glades' star system has two suns.

** In "The Little People", after two astronauts stumble on a civilization of the titular miniscule aliens, one of them goes power-mad and declares himself their god. He gets killed by some even bigger aliens when he attracts their attention by screaming that there's only room for one god here, and gets accidentally crushed.

* HumansAreCthulhu: "The Little People" tells the story of two astronauts, William Fletcher and Peter Craig, repairing their spacecraft on a planet populated by a tiny alien race. Craig proclaims himself the god of the tiny aliens and makes them build a life-size statue of him. The power he holds over them due to his size immediately goes to his head, and he begins bullying them into obeying him. In an example of LaserGuidedKarma, [[spoiler:another group of spacefarers land on the planet, and they are as large to Craig as he is to the natives; one of them picks him up to look at him and accidentally crushes him to death]].

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", the fanatical ConspiracyTheorist Oliver Crangle plans to shrink all of the so-called evil people whom he believes are trying to destroy the United States at four o'clock. [[spoiler:When the time comes, Crangle is shrunk himself.]]

** ''The Little People'' uses footage from a Mercury Program launch.

* {{Troll}}: Oliver Crangle in "Four O'Clock". Did he shrink because what he was trying to do went wrong, was the whole thing a hallucination...or did every single evil person on Earth actually shrink, including him because he was evil?! The last possibility would have had very interesting results.

[[folder: Tropes A-B]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E129Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7, Over and Out]]", Colonel Cook and Norda decide to settle in a fertile area shortly after their arrival on the new planet. [[spoiler: As their names are Adam and Eve and they name the planet "Earth," this episode is a very literal application of the trope.]]

* AdaptationInducedPlotHole: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamit ambassador simply leaves the book ''To Serve Man'' behind in the UsefulNotes/UnitedNations chamber which allows the translator Patty to determine that [[spoiler: [[WhamLine it's a cookbook]]]]. In the short story by Creator/DamonKnight, the equivalent character Gregori stole the book from the Kanamits and translated its first paragraph using a limited English-Kanamit dictionary.

* TheAgeless: The titular character from "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]" was granted this form of immortality by an alchemist. He says that he came close to death many times over the centuries due to injuries and disease, "[[WhoWantsToLiveForever but never close enough]]". [[spoiler: At the end of the episode when he is shot, he begins to [[RapidAging age rapidly]] as he dies until he is nothing but a pile of dust.]]

* AlienInvasion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", [[spoiler: the Martian Ross tells Haley that he was sent to Earth as an advance scout to determine whether the area was suitable for colonization. Haley then reveals that he is a Venusian and they have already colonized the area. He adds that his people have intercepted the Martian fleet.]]

* AnArmAndALeg: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", the sergeant lost half of his left foot in UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar [[spoiler: not long before he was killed]].

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", [[spoiler: Jamie Tennyson wins the bet that he made with Colonel Archie Taylor to remain silent for a year in exchange for $500,000. However, Taylor does not have the money. Tennyson then reveals that he had the nerves to his vocal cords severed, leaving him not only unable to speak or scream but near bankrupt.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E88TheLastRitesOfJeffMyrtlebank The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank]]", the title character comes back from the dead in the middle of his funeral and demands to know why someone put him in a coffin. Due to the strange changes in his behavior, the townsfolk begin to worry that it was not actually Jeff that came back but a demon. [[spoiler: It is never made clear whether this is actually the case but he certainly CameBackWrong in some way.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E152MrGarrityAndTheGraves Mr. Garrity and the Graves]]", the peddler Jed Garrity claims that he can resurrect the dead. After performing the resurrection ceremony, he swindles the townspeople of Happiness, UsefulNotes/{{Arizona}} out of their money by promising that he will not bring the people buried in Boot Hill Cemetery back to life since most of them were holding grudges when they died. [[spoiler: It turns out that the ceremony had actually succeeded in resurrecting the dead.]]

* BatteringRam: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", Dr. Bill Stockton's neighbors fashion one together to break into his bomb shelter. [[spoiler: Immediately after they break the shelter's door down, they learn from a CONELRAD broadcast that the unidentified objects were satellites as opposed to missiles.]]

* BecomingTheGenie: "I Dream of Genie". [[spoiler: however, unlike most versions, this is an entirely voluntary example]].
* BenevolentAlienInvasion: {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]". The Kanamits come to Earth with all sorts of new and miraculous gifts to end war and want... [[spoiler: so that they can keep us as docile, happy feeding stock.]]
* TheBet: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", Colonel Archie Taylor makes a bet with Jamie Tennyson that he can remain silent for a whole year in exchange for $500,000. Taylor believes that he will last a few months at most but Tennyson fulfils his part of the bargain. [[spoiler: The humiliated Taylor is forced to admit that he lost his fortune a decade earlier and therefore cannot pay Tennyson the $500,000. Tennyson is extremely distraught and writes a note for Taylor, which the colonel reads aloud: "I knew that I would not be able to keep my part of the bargain so one year ago, I had the nerves to my vocal cords severed!" Tennyson then reveals the surgical scar on his neck.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", [[spoiler: the Martians have three arms while the Venusians have three eyes]].

[[folder: Tropes C-D]]
* TheCaligula: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", as soon as he comes to power, Ramos Clemente proves himself to be extremely irrational, paranoid and blood-thirsty. He sees enemies all around him. As well as ordering mass executions, he becomes convinced that his lieutenants D'Alessandro, Garcia, Tabal and Cristo are plotting against him due to having seemingly foreseen it in the mirror. Clemente throws D'Alessandro off the balcony of his mansion, has Garcia and Tabal executed as enemies of the state and shoots Cristo as he believed that the wine that he offered him was poisoned. [[spoiler: When he looks in the mirror and sees only his own reflection, Clemente shoots himself. His reign lasted for only a week.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E95HocusPocusAndFrisby Hocus-Pocus and Frisby]]", Somerset Frisby plays his harmonica after being [[AlienAbduction abducted by aliens]]. [[spoiler: [[BrownNote The sound causes them extreme pain]] and they are forced to release him.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E29NightmareAsAChild Nightmare as a Child]]", Markie is a strange, demanding child with a deadly serious manner. She tells Helen Foley that she knows every detail of her life. [[spoiler: It turns out that Markie, a manifestation of Helen's RepressedMemories concerning the murder of her mother by Peter Selden, has good intentions but she is still creepy.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", [[spoiler: Death takes the form of Harold Beldon, a young cop who is injured outside of the apartment of a reclusive elderly woman named Wanda Dunn in order to show her that dying is nothing to be afraid of.]]

* DivideAndConquer: [[spoiler: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E22TheMonstersAreDueOnMapleStreet The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street]]", it is revealed that aliens were responsible for shutting off all of the power on Maple Street. Within hours, the residents of the street turn on each other and start rioting. The aliens have previously conducted many similar experiments and the result is always the same. Their overall plan is to travel to numerous small communities one by one and gradually cause humanity to destroy itself.]]

* DreamApocalypse: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E62ShadowPlay Shadow Play]]", the District Attorney Henry Ritchie and newspaper editor Paul Carson 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. [[spoiler: It turns out that their fears are justified.]]

* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: The fate of Chief Bell in "The Thirty-Fathom Grave". Seeing ghosts of his dead crewmates from a sunken submarine which he served on in World War II and experiencing massive SurvivorGuilt, Bell flings himself off the side of the ship and drowns.]]

* DyingDream: [[spoiler: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek", the UsefulNotes/AcademyAward-winning short, based on the UrExample of the trope, the Creator/AmbroseBierce story.]]

[[folder: Tropes E-F]]

* EmergencyBroadcast: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E68TheShelter The Shelter]]", the Stocktons and their neighbors learn from a CONELRAD broadcast that unidentified objects believed to be missiles have been detected heading towards the United States. [[spoiler: A later CONELRAD broadcast reveals that they were in fact satellites which pose no danger.]]

* EndlessDaytime: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", Earth's elliptical orbit suddently changed and it is moving closer and closer towards UsefulNotes/TheSun. After a month, there is no darkness and humanity is facing imminent extinction due to the heat. [[spoiler: It turns out that this is a [[FeverDreamEpisode fever dream]] being experienced by Norma. In reality, the Earth is [[EndlessWinter moving further away from the Sun]] and the world has at most three weeks before it freezes to death.]]

* FateWorseThanDeath: "A Kind of a Stopwatch" ends with [[spoiler: the entire world except for [=McNulty=] being frozen in time forever, when the stopwatch breaks.]]

* FeverDreamEpisode: [[spoiler: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", the world moving closer towards UsefulNotes/TheSun turns out to be nothing but a fever dream being experienced by Norma. The world is in fact moving further away from it.]]

* FixingTheGame: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E61TheSilence The Silence]]", [[spoiler: as he knew that he couldn't remain silent for a year, Jamie Tennyson hoped to ensure that he would win the bet by having surgery to have his vocal cords severed. Since Colonel Taylor is broke, it ends up not making a difference.]]

** In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", [[spoiler: it appears that Flight 33 is destined to become a time traveling Flying Dutchman as it is uncertain whether its next attempt to return to 1961 will be successful, especially since its fuel is running low.]]

[[folder: Tropes G-H]]

* GreekChorus: Rod Serling starting with "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]". [[spoiler: [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou He picked a bad time to start appearing on screen.]] ]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]", Nan Adams is frightened by the fact that she sees the same strange hitchhiker at every stop no matter how fast and how far she drives. [[spoiler: She eventually learns that she has been DeadAllAlong, having been killed in a car accident six days earlier, and the hitchhiker is Death.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", Wanda Dunn is so terrified of being taken by Mr. Death that has not left her apartment in years. After a young police officer named Harold Beldon is shot, she very reluctantly brings him inside so that she can care for him. [[spoiler: It turns out that Beldon is Death and that he tricked her into letting him into her apartment to prove to her that she had nothing to fear from him.]]
* GrewBeyondTheirProgramming: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", [[spoiler: the playwright Gregory West, who has the ability to [[RewritingReality rewrite reality]] using his dictaphone, created a perfect, impeccable and flawless wife for himself named Victoria. At the beginning of the episode, she comes back to Gregory's house against his will. This is the first time that she has demonstrated independence, indicating to Gregory that she has grown beyond the parameters that he set when he created her.]]

* HellOfAHeaven: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", as far as Hyder Simpson is concerned, a Heaven where his dog Rip isn't permitted in and there's no coon hunting allowed is no Heaven at all. [[Spoiler: {{Subverted|Trope}} in the end as that actually ''was'' Hell.]]

** Implied in "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," as [[spoiler: the aliens state that this will happen again, and again on other streets, much like the first.]]

** Henry Rathbone, Clara Harris and [[spoiler: John Wilkes Booth]] all appear in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E49BackThere Back There]]".

** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]" does a rather cruel one. Over the course of the episode, [[ApocalypseHow the Earth is getting closer and closer to the Sun, and everyone is pretty much doomed.]] But wait, [[spoiler: it's AllJustADream! The Earth isn't moving closer to the Sun, and no one is going to roast to death. The bad news: the Earth is actually moving ''away'' from the Sun, and everyone will freeze to death in total darkness instead.]]

** Part of the plot of "People Are Alike All Over." [[spoiler: The protagonists of "Third from the Sun."]]
** [[spoiler: "Probe 7, Over and Out"]].
* HumanLadder: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", the title characters form one in an attempt to escape from the large metal cylinder in which they are trapped. However, the ballet dancer is unable to reach the top as they are still several inches too short. The major then fashions a grappling hook from his sword and strips of clothing. He, the clown, the hobo and the bagpiper form another human ladder and he manages to reach the top. [[spoiler: It is then revealed that the five of them are nothing more than dolls in a collection barrel.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", after stealing $1 million worth of gold bars, Farwell, [=DeCruz=], Brooks and Erbie place themselves in suspended animation for 100 years so they can evade the authorities and spend the gold when they awaken in 2061. Erbie died when a rock broke his suspended animation animation. [[spoiler: As it turns out, it was AllForNothing as a way to manufacture gold was discovered during their long sleep.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E135TheLongMorrow The Long Morrow]]", the astronaut Commander Douglas Stansfield is placed in suspended animation when he is sent on a mission to a solar system 141 lightyears from Earth on December 31, 1987. He removes himself from suspended animation in June 1988 so that he will be the same age as his love Sandra Horn when he returns to Earth in 2027. [[spoiler: When he does eventually come home, he discovers that Sandra had herself placed in suspended animation shortly after he left. As such, he is now 71 and she is still 26.]]
* HumanityCameFromSpace: The ending of [[spoiler: "Probe 7, Over and Out".]]

[[folder: Tropes I-J]]

* ImmuneToBullets: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", the Union soldier that Lavinia Godwin shoots suffers no ill effects from the bullet [[spoiler: as he is already dead]].

* InTheDoldrums: "Time Enough at Last" has a man who only wants to read be the sole survivor when everyone else on Earth is killed off. He finally has all the time in the world to read! [[spoiler: And then he breaks his glasses.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", [[spoiler: the revelation that the contractor can't see Harold Beldon leads Wanda Dunn to realize that he is Death.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Tropes K-L]]

* KlingonsLoveShakespeare: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", [[spoiler: Ross]] finds the taste of cigarettes wonderful and says that they have nothing like them on UsefulNotes/{{Mars}}. [[spoiler: He and the Venusian Haley both have a taste for human music.]]

** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]". [[spoiler: It appears for most of the episode that the invaders belong to a race of tiny aliens but it turns out that they are actually normal sized humans in a world of giants.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E94FourOClock Four O'Clock]]", the fanatical ConspiracyTheorist Oliver Crangle plans to shrink all of the so-called evil people whom he believes are trying to destroy the United States at four o'clock. [[spoiler: When the time comes, Crangle is shrunk himself.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E155TheFear The Fear]]", Charlotte Scott and a highway patrolman named Robert Franklin are harassed by a 50 foot tall alien monster. [[spoiler: It turns out that the monster is in fact a giant balloon being controlled by two very small aliens. They soon leave Earth to avoid being crushed by the "giant" humans.]]

* LouisCypher: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E31TheChaser The Chaser]]" features a character named Professor A. Daemon. His name is suspicious enough to make the viewer wonder about his true nature, albeit that doesn't seem the case [[spoiler: at least until the end of the episode.]]

[[folder: Tropes M-N]]

* MentalTimeTravel: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E56Static Static]]", [[spoiler: the bitter bachelor Ed Lindsay is sent back in time in 1940 so that he can marry Vinnie Brown. Not marrying her when he had the opportunity is the biggest mistake of his life.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", [[spoiler: Wanda Dunn's suspicion that Harold Beldon is Death is confirmed when he tells her to look in the mirror and she sees that he has no reflection.]]

* MoodWhiplash: "A Kind of a Stopwatch" is a very funny episode until [[spoiler: the watch breaks, trapping [=McNulty=] in a timeless world forever.]]

* MurderousMannequin: Subverted in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E34TheAfterHours The After Hours]]"; Marsha White is, at first, understandably terrified when the mannequins come to life, but it soon becomes apparent that they are friendly, and only want [[spoiler: [[TomatoInTheMirror her to remember that she is also a mannequin]]]].

* MyGrandsonMyself: In "Queen of the Nile", Pamela Morris lives with the elderly Mrs. Viola Draper, ostensibly her mother. She is actually [[spoiler: Pamela's daughter and Pamela is at least several hundred years old, heavily implied to have been Cleopatra.]]

* NiceShoes: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", Dane wore a very expensive and distinctive pair of two-tone black and white shoes before he was murdered. When Nate Bledsoe puts them on, Dane's personality takes over his body. [[spoiler: After Dagget kills Dane, the same thing happens again when Chips puts on the shoes.]]

[[folder: Tropes O-P]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", Fats Brown comes down from the afterlife as soon as Jesse inadvertently challenges him to a pool game. [[spoiler: Jesse beats Fats and, after he dies, he has to return to Earth every time that he is challenged, having become trapped in a kind of IronicHell.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E65TheObsoleteMan The Obsolete Man]]", Romney Wordsworth uses the opportunity provided by his televised execution for being obsolete to demonstrate that [[spoiler: the Chancellor is nothing more than a DirtyCoward by trapping him in his room until just before the bomb explodes]]. The Chancellor also mentions that the executions of 1,300 people in six hours were shown on television the previous year.

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", [[spoiler: it turns out that the dirt road outside Lavinia Godwin's house is Purgatory. She and UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln are the last people to walk down the road and into the afterlife.]]

[[folder: Tropes Q-S]]

** {{Inverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]". [[spoiler: Jana Loren is a robot who was "raised" by humans, namely her creator Dr. William Loren and his wife. As they were unable to have children of their own, they programmed memories of a fictional childhood into her. [[TomatoInTheMirror She eventually discovers the truth]] when she realizes that the family album contains no photographs of her.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E53TwentyTwo Twenty-Two]]", Liz Powell experiences a recurring dream in which she follows a strange nurse to the hospital morgue, Room 22. [[spoiler: It turns out to be [[DreamingOfThingsToCome a prophetic dream]] warning her not to board Flight 22 to Miami Beach. She doesn't and the plane explodes immediately after take off.]]

** In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]", [[spoiler: UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln]] quotes the following line from ''Theatre/JuliusCaesar'', Act II, Scene II: "Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come."

* RewritingReality: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", the playwright Gregory West discovered that he had the ability to rewrite reality using his dictaphone when Philip Wainwright, a character from his play ''Fury in the Night'', came alive. He subsequently created [[spoiler: his perfect, regal wife Victoria]] and his sweet, affectionate lover Mary, who caters to his every whim.

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]", Dr. William Loren created five robots to perform various domestic duties around the house for himself and his wife. Their daughter Jana objects to their presence as she feels that her parents have become increasingly dependent on them for everything. The robots are completely human in appearance and possess emotions. They even appear to have the will to survive as the robot butler Robert initially objects to Dr. Loren's plan to dismantle them. [[spoiler: It turns out that Jana herself is a robot who was programmed to believe that she was the Lorens' daughter.]]

* RuleOfThree: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", said Martian has three arms. [[spoiler: The Venusian has three eyes.]]

* SecondPlaceIsForWinners: Invoked in the ending of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", alongside BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor. Yeah, Jesse Cardiff defeated the legendary Fats Brown and is the best pool player ever. What prize does he get? [[spoiler: [[AndIMustScream Spending eternity defending his pool title until he loses.]]]]

* ShapeShifterSwanSong: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E13TheFourOfUsAreDying The Four of Us Are Dying]]", Arch Hammer's face changes to those of Johnny Foster, Virgil Sterig and Andy Marshak [[spoiler: after he is shot by Marshak's father]].

* ShatteringTheIllusion: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E67TheArrival The Arrival]]", [[spoiler: Grant Sheckly's theory that Flight 107, which arrived without any crew or passengers, is nothing more than an illusion is proven when he puts his arm in the spinning propeller and the plane vanishes. His fellow investigators Bengston and Paul Malloy disappear as well.]]

** [[spoiler: Especially heartbreaking in "The Time Element" because Peter Jenson not only is unable to prevent the death of a young couple (oh, and prevent the mass death and disaster at Pearl Harbor), he also gets ''himself'' killed and part of his life erased from existence as well.]] This episode not only shot the shaggy dog, it skinned and made it into a floor rug.

* TheShutIn: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E81NothingInTheDark Nothing in the Dark]]", having once seen Mr. Death kill an old woman on the bus, Wanda Dunn has not left her apartment in many years out of fear that she will be next. [[spoiler: Death has to resort to tricking her by pretending that he is an injured police officer named Harold Beldon who needs her help.]]

** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E82OneMorePallbearer One More Pallbearer]]". In the final scene, Paul Radin discovers that a nuclear war has devastated the world while he was in his bomb shelter attempting to fool Mrs. Langsford, Reverend Hughes and Colonel Hawthorne that such a war was beginning. [[spoiler: However, it turns out that this is nothing but Radin's fantasy, his mind having been broken.]]

* SpaceMadness: Discussed in [[spoiler: "Where Is Everybody?" The town the protagonist is in is just a hallucination. He's really in an isolation chamber, and he's part of an experiment the government is running to see how humans would handle a solo mission to the Moon. He does make it through the experiment though and seems optimistic about mankind's chances of actually reaching the Moon despite his mental breakdown.]]

* StrangerInAFamiliarLand: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E45TheTroubleWithTempleton The Trouble with Templeton]]", Booth Templeton is sent back to 1927 and meets his beloved wife Laura and his best friend Barney Flueger, both long dead, in a speakeasy. They soon shun and insult him. Laura even slaps him and says, "Go back where you came from! We don't want you here!" [[spoiler: As Laura had a script entitled ''What to Do When Booth Comes Back'', Booth realizes that it was merely a performance to shake him out of his obsession with the past and convince him to live his own life.]]

[[folder: Tropes T]]

* TearsFromAStone: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", [[spoiler: having been revealed to be dolls]], the ballet dancer cries as she moves her hand towards the major.

* {{Technopath}}: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E64WillTheRealMartianPleaseStandUp Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?]]", the Martian [[spoiler: Ross]] was the ability to control technology, turning both the jukebox and the lights in the Hi-Way Café off and on. [[spoiler: He]] describes it as a parlor trick.

** In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E82OneMorePallbearer One More Pallbearer]]", Paul Radin exhibits one as he believes that the world has been destroyed by a [[WorldWarIII nuclear war]] and he may be the SoleSurvivor. [[spoiler: The nuclear devastation is in fact a hallucination that he is experiencing.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E54TheOdysseyOfFlight33 The Odyssey of Flight 33]]", Global Airlines Flight 33 is sent millions of years back in time to before the extinction of the dinosaurs. The flight crew then attempts to return the plane to its native time of 1961. [[spoiler: However, they do not come back far enough, arriving during the 1939 New York World's Fair.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E56Static Static]]", a cantankerous old bachelor named Ed Lindsay hates television so he brings his old radio up from the basement of the boarding house where he lives. He begins to hear radio broadcasts from radio's heyday of the 1930s and 1940s such as Tommy Dorsey singing "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You", the ''Major Bowes Amateur Hour'' and ''The Fred Allen Show''. However, no one else can hear that his ex-fiancée Vinnie Brown and Professor Ackerman are concerned that he is suffering from delusions. [[spoiler: Ed is eventually sent back in time to 1940. He intends to do things right the second time around and marry Vinnie.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E59AHundredYardsOverTheRim A Hundred Yards over the Rim]]", Chris Horn, the leader of a wagon train headed to UsefulNotes/{{California}} in 1847, is transported forward in time to September 1961. He learns that his son Christian will grow up to become an expert in childhood diseases in California. [[spoiler: He returns to 1847 with penicillin to cure Christian's pneumonia and the knowledge that the wagon train will reach its destination.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E130The7thIsMadeUpOfPhantoms The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms]]", Sgt. William Connors, Corporal Richard Langsford and Private Michael [=McCluskey=] are sent back in time to June 25, 1876 and end up fighting in [[spoiler: and dying in]] the Battle of Little Bighorn.
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E141SpurOfTheMoment Spur of the Moment]]", the 18-year-old Anne Henderson is chased by a screaming woman while riding a horse around her family's property on June 13, 1939. [[spoiler: It turns out that the screaming woman was Anne's future self from 1964 who was trying to warn her against running away with her ex-fiancé David Mitchell and ruining her life]].

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E34TheAfterHours The After Hours]]", [[spoiler: after seemingly been harassed by {{Murderous Mannequin}}s around the department store, Marsha White remembers that she is a mannequin who left the store to live among humans for a month. The other mannequins were not trying to harm her but to help her remember her true nature.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E36AWorldOfHisOwn A World of His Own]]", [[spoiler: Victoria is one of Gregory West's fictional characters brought to life. After throwing the envelope containing the tape that he used to create her into the fire, Victoria realizes that he was telling the truth about her being fictional at the last moment before she disappears.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E44TheLatenessOfTheHour The Lateness of the Hour]]", [[spoiler: Jana Loren is disturbed by the five RidiculouslyHumanRobots whom her parents use as servants. She eventually realizes that she is a robot herself, albeit a much more sophisticated one, and that all of her memories of her earlier life by programmed into her by her "father" Dr. William Loren.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third from the Sun]]", the Sturkas and Ridens steal an experimental ship and travel to another planet [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfDistance 11 million miles away]] in order to escape a nuclear war that is likely to begin within 48 hours. [[spoiler: Having picked up [[AliensStealCable radio signals from the planet]], Jerry Riden learns that the natives call it "Earth."]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", Janet Tyler, a woman with a horribly misshapen shape, is undergoing her eleventh reconstructive surgery to make her appear normal. When her bandages are removed, the doctors discover that the surgery was unsuccessful. [[spoiler: It is revealed that, from the audience's perspective, Janet is a beautiful woman and the doctors and nurses are hideously ugly.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]", an aging farm woman is attacked by tiny creatures from another planet in her cabin. [[spoiler: The woman discovers the supposed aliens' spacecraft on her roof. Its markings read "U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1." It is revealed that the woman belongs to a race of giants and the "aliens" are astronauts from Earth.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", an army major, a ballet dancer, a clown, a hobo and a bagpiper find themselves trapped in a large cylinder with no memory of who they are or how they got there. [[spoiler: The final scene reveals that the five of them are dolls in a donation barrel for a girls' orphanage.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E75TheMidnightSun The Midnight Sun]]", Earth is moving closer and closer towards UsefulNotes/TheSun and society is breaking down as people are dying of heat stroke. [[spoiler: The final scene reveals that it was AllJustADream of the protagonist Norma. The world is in fact moving further away from the Sun and the world's population is rapidly freezing to death.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E129Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7, Over and Out]]", an astronaut named Colonel Cook crashlands on a planet 4.3 lightyears from his home system. After contacting his planet, he learns that a nuclear war has begun and a rescue ship will therefore not be sent for him. Shortly afterwards, Cook meets an alien woman. Although they do not speak each other's languages, the woman manages to communicate to him that her name is Norda and that she is the SoleSurvivor of her planet, which left its orbit. [[spoiler: Cook tells her that [[AdamAndEvePlot his first name is Adam and learns that hers is Eve]]. They settle in [[GardenOfEden beautiful garden]] containing [[ForbiddenFruit fruit]] that Eve calls "[[SignificantAnagram seppla]]." Eve decides to call the planet "Earth."]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E150StopoverInAQuietTown Stopover in a Quiet Town]]", a married couple named Bob and Millie Frazier wake up in a strange house, hungover after a party the previous night. They discover that almost everything in the house and the surrounding neighborhood is fake such as a prop phone, a stuffed squirrel in a tree and papier-mâché grass. [[spoiler: In the final scene, the Fraziers see a giant girl and realize that they are in her model village. The girl is a member of a race of giants whose father traveled to Earth and brought the two of them back for her to play with.]]

[[folder: Tropes U-Z]]
* UnbuiltTrope: "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]" milked the concept of [[spoiler: sentient toys]] for all its inherent horror and existential angst about three decades before [[spoiler: ''WesternAnimation/ToyStory'']] made the idea famous. The ending, where we find out that [[spoiler: the titular five characters are actually dolls dumped in a Salvation Army bin by their owner,]] is absolutely ''terrifying''.

* VoluntaryShapeShifting: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Ben can change his shape into anything that he can imagine. Aside from the old man shape that he has been using since he met Jenny, he turns into a [[UsefulNotes/{{Mars}} Martian]], a mouse, a fly and Jenny herself. [[spoiler: His [[ShapeShifterDefaultForm true form]] is that of a handsome young man who looks completely human.]]

%%* WastelandElder: "On Thursday We Leave For Home". [[spoiler: Subverted.]]

* WhamLine: A memorable one in "The Man in The Bottle": "Well?? What about it, [[spoiler:''Fuehrer?!'']]" Paired with a [[TheReveal shot]] of Arthur: he wished to be a [[spoiler: the leader of a modern and powerful country in which he cannot be voted out of office]]: he's now [[spoiler: Adolf Hitler, moments before his suicide in the bunker.]]
* WhamShot: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]", after the woman destroys the seemingly tiny aliens' spacecraft, the camera pans to reveal [[spoiler: the words "U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1" on the opposite side, indicating that the invaders were in fact humans and the woman is a giant alien]].

* WifeHusbandry: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E90TheFugitive The Fugitive]]", Rod Serling says in his closing narration that [[spoiler: Jenny will grow to be "an honest-to-goodness queen," suggesting that she will one day marry Ben.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E6EscapeClause Escape Clause]]", Walter Bedeker makes a DealWithTheDevil for immortality. He uses his new situation to commit a series of insurance fraud scams by jumping in front of buses and under trains but the thrill of cheating death over and over again eventually fades. After his wife Ethel falls to her death while trying to prevent him from jumping off the roof of their apartment building, Walter confesses to having murdering her. He is looking forward to the experience of being sent to the electric chair. [[spoiler: However, he is instead sentenced to life imprisonment. In order to avoid the unimaginable boredom of being confined for millennia, Walter exercises his escape clause and has the Devil end his life.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]", the title character is an immortal who has lived for more than 2,000 years. He admits to his close friend Professor Samuel Kittridge that he has grown tired of his eternal life but he does not have the courage to bring it to an end. He sits with a revolver in his hands every night and hopes that this will be the night that he will force myself to pull the trigger. [[spoiler: Laurette Bowen, one of the many wives that Walter deserted as they grew old, finally puts him out of his misery and shoots him. [[EmptyPileOfClothing He is quickly reduced to dust.]]]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", Farwell is the last survivor of the four criminals who stole £1 million in gold bars and placed themselves in suspended animation for 100 years. Dying of dehydration in Death Valley, he offers all of his gold to a passing motorist named George in exchange for water. He dies before George can do anything to help him. [[spoiler: George is surprised that he offered him gold as if it were really worth something since a way to manufacture it was developed decades earlier. As he and his wife drive away, he throws the worthless bar of gold to the ground.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", a man dressed in the uniform of a US Army major wakes up a strange metal cylinder with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He discovers that four others, a clown, a ballet dancer, a hobo and a bagpiper, are in the same boat. [[spoiler: It turns out that they are dolls in a Christmas collection barrel for a girls' orphanage.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E150StopoverInAQuietTown Stopover in a Quiet Town]]", Bob and Millie Frazier wake up in a strange house. They are hungover from a party the night before and have no idea how they got there. [[spoiler: It turns out that that they were abducted by a giant alien, who brought them back to his planet for his daughter to play with. They have been in a model village all this time.]]

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E9PerchanceToDream Perchance to Dream]]", Edward Hall, who has a rheumatic heart, dreams in chapters like an old FilmSerial. He has been dreaming about a strange woman named Maya at a carnival who has been trying to scare him to death by bringing him to a funhouse and for a ride on a roller coaster. As a result, Edward believes that he will die the next time that he goes to sleep. [[spoiler: It turns out that he is right.]]

Guess what? [[spoiler: Your whole life has been a dream, one of your family members is a robot, and that nice man that just moved into town is a Martian. Welcome to the Twilight Zone. Hey, look at that weird mirror!]]

* EvilDetectingDog: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", an agent of the Devil is trying to lure a recently-deceased Hyder Simpson into entering Hell. Hyder's dog Rip growls, warning him not to enter, and he avoids the trap. Later, an angel remarks "...a man, well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open. But not even the Devil can fool a dog!"

* {{Gaslighting}}: "What's In the Box?" : Joe accuses his wife and the TV repairman of plotting to drive him crazy after his recently fixed TV shows him incriminating scenes of his life.

** In "Person or Persons Unknown", David Gurney wakes up to find that all evidence that he ever existed, including other people's memories of him, seems to have vanished. The episode ends with [[spoiler:Gurney waking up from a nightmare - to discover that his wife, though she acts and talks as she has always done, looks nothing like he remembers]].

* RippleEffectIndicator: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E11AndWhenTheSkyWasOpened And When the Sky Was Opened]]", ''The Daily Chronicle'' initially features the headline "Three Spacemen Return from Crash; All Alive" and a photograph of Colonel Ed Harrington, Colonel Clegg Forbes and Major William Gart. After Harrington ceases to exist, the headline changes to "Two Spacemen Return from Crash in Desert" and only Forbes and Gart are pictured. When Forbes likewise ceases to exist, the headline reads "Lone Spaceman Completes Journey; Lands in Desert" and only Gart appears in the accompanying photo.

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E47TheNightOfTheMeek The Night of the Meek]]", Henry Corwin is named after the writer Henry Corwin.

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E91LittleGirlLost Little Girl Lost]]", Bettina "Tina" Miller is named after Creator/RichardMatheson's daughter Bettina.

** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the arrival of the Kanamit ambassador's ship is taken from ''Film/TheDayTheEarthStoodStill1951''. Furthermore, footage of a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly is used when the Kanamit ambassador's polygraph test is shown to that body.

* DittoAliens: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]", the Kanamits are all identical in appearance. The ambassador has a goatee and a white gown to distinguish him from the others.

** At the end of "To Serve Man", Michael Chambers directly talks to the audience, asking if "[we're] still on Earth, or on the ship with [him]," following it up by saying, "Really doesn't make very much difference, because sooner or later, all of us will be on the menu... all of us."

* ExactWords: To ''Serve'' Man. Also from that episode, the alien subjected to polygraph states that he sincerely ''hopes humanity will believe'' that their motives are benevolent, not that said motives actually ''are''.

* FatteningTheVictim: In the episode "To Serve Man", after the hero discovers the alien Kanamits eat the humans they take to their planet as "ambassadors", he is taken prisoner aboard their ship. In the last scene a Kamamit is exhorting him to eat his dinner. More terrifying is the idea that ''everything the Kanamits did'' was a form of this--they put nitrates in the soil to end world hunger and shared technologies that made weaponry obsolete, which removed all of humanity's problems and allowed them to become fat and complacent, like cattle.

* GenderFlip: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]", the protagonist is a woman named Nan Adams. In ''The Orson Welles Show'' radio play by Lucille Fletcher on which it was based, the protagonist is a man named Ronald Adams. [[CreatorBacklash Fletcher was not pleased by this change]]. Furthermore, in the radio version, Ronald Adams picks up a woman and briefly gives her a lift but she leaves after he tries to run over the hitch-hiker. In the television version, Nan Adams gives a lift to a male sailor, who leaves for the same reason.

* HowWeGotHere: "To Serve Man" opens with Michael Chambers in a sparse cell on a cot being commanded to eat by a voice through a loudspeaker. The rest of the episode is his reminiscence of meeting a race of ostensibly benevolent aliens [[spoiler:for whom humans are a dietary staple]].

* ImAHumanitarian: The twist ending of "To Serve Man" reveals that [[spoiler:the title book is a cookbook; the seemingly benevolent aliens are harvesting humans for food]].

* PragmaticAdaptation: Episodes adapted from short stories were often massaged a bit. In Creator/DamonKnight's short story "To Serve Man" the alien representatives are described as looking like pigs. The producers thought the audience would find this too silly, so the alien makeup is the more conventional [[MyBrainIsBig tall-head]] variety. (Ironically, another iconic episode, "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E42TheEyeOfTheBeholder Eye of the Beholder]]", ''did'' feature characters wearing pig-like masks.)

* ReallySevenHundredYearsOld: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]", the title character is more than 2,000 years old. He tells his close friend Professor Samuel Kittridge that he is old enough to have known Creator/{{Plato}} personally.

** "To Serve Man". Prior to boarding an alien spaceship, a woman says that the aliens' planet is "billions" of miles from Earth. The nearest it could possibly be is in the Alpha Centauri system, around 4.3 light years (more than 25 '''trillion''' miles) away. By comparison, Pluto is on average 3.67 billion miles from the Sun.

** Footage of the ''C-57-D'' from ''Film/ForbiddenPlanet'' appears in some episodes. At the end of "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" the footage is disguised by being shown upside down and backwards - this was achieved by simply turning the clip upside down before splicing it in. In "To Serve Man", however, although the full-size ''C-57-D'' landing ramp is used, the Kanamit spaceship's takeoff is represented by one of the titular spacecraft from ''Film/EarthVsTheFlyingSaucers'', animated by Creator/RayHarryhausen.

* {{Subtext}}: "The Fugitive" might also seem creepy to modern eyes. Especially when it's revealed that the elderly man eventually marries the little girl. [[spoiler:Of course, he's a shapeshifting alien who's actually handsome and can take on a younger form and he waited until she got older before marrying her, but it still [[WifeHusbandry sounds a bit squicky.]]]]

* TearsFromAStone: In the final scene of "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E79FiveCharactersInSearchOfAnExit Five Characters in Search of an Exit]]", [[spoiler: having been revealed to be dolls]], the ballet dancer cries as she moves her hand towards the major.

* ToServeMan: [[spoiler:{{Trope Namer|s}}]] are in the titular episode, where aliens come to Earth and establish diplomacy. [[spoiler:It's only at the very end when the humans decipher their handbook, ''To Serve Man'', to be a cookbook, and not in time to save the life of one Mr. Chambers.]]

** A weird and somewhat baffling variation occurs in the episode "To Serve Man", when the human protagonist onboard a flying saucer in transit asks his alien [[spoiler:captors]] what time it is, only to be told there isn't one, because there's no way to measure time in space, to which the hero responds "What time is it ''on Earth''?

* WaitHere: In the episode "Still Valley" a Confederate scout gives orders to his partner.

%%* WifeHusbandry: "[[spoiler:The Fugitive]]".

%%* BackFromTheDead: "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank", "Mr. Garrity and the Graves"; "Father and Son Game" (1985 revival).

* CameBackWrong: "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" plays with this. Although Jeff came back to life, he doesn't seem that off. [[spoiler:But then again, he lit a match without striking it...]]

* CruelAndUnusualPunishment: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E71TheMirror The Mirror]]", Ramos Clemente intends to have his predecessor General De Cruz put to death by being covered with honey and eaten alive by ants. [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse Whether he went through with it is never revealed.]]

* JerkassFacade: Fitzgerald Fortune from "A Piano in the House" is an arrogant bully because he secretly has the emotional maturity of a child. He is afraid of people, and as a result acts like an insufferable dick to everyone around him. He's even shown to be a LovingBully (of the emotional variety) towards his wife because of it. In the end, the piano makes him reveal this to everybody in the room.

* PlayingWithFire: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]", it is mentioned that Anthony set Teddy Reynolds on fire for thinking mean thoughts about him.
* PleaseDontLeaveMe: A rare non-dying example occurs at the end of "A Piano in the House." The titular instrument reveals that {{Jerkass}} Fitzgerald Fortune's cruelty is simply a mask for his true persona: a misanthropic, frightened child terrified of the world and unable to react to others with anything but disgust and hatred. This revelation comes during a party, and all of the guests (including Fortune's wife) leave after Fortune's breakdown; he screams like a toddler, declaring that he doesn't want them to go and threatening to be "very naughty" if they do.

** Fitzgerald Fortune is on the receiving end of several of these in "A Piano in the House," but he shrugs them off, largely because he's using a magical player piano to force people to reveal their hidden secrets. At the end of the episode, though, one of the piano's songs prompts Fortune to give a Reason You Suck Speech to ''himself''.

* CanonSue: InUniverse; the main character in "Showdown with Rance [=McGrew=]" plays one in a TV Western... and UsefulNotes/JesseJames isn't pleased with it at all.

* OurGhostsAreDifferent: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E70AGameOfPool A Game of Pool]]", Fats Brown comes down from the afterlife as soon as Jesse inadvertently challenges him to a pool game. [[spoiler: Jesse beats Fats and, after he dies, he has to return to Earth every time that he is challenged, having become trapped in a kind of IronicHell.]]

%%* PantheraAwesome: "[[spoiler:The Jungle]]".

* PeopleZoo: In "People Are Alike All Over", the inhabitants of the planet Mars put an Earth astronaut in a house that acts as a zoo habitat.

** The entirety of "Showdown with Rance [=McGrew=]" against [[TheWestern the TV westerns]] of the time. It also serves as a deconstruction of sorts. Serling hated the Westerns of the time, deeming them too unrealistic and predictable, and later went on to make a [=Western=] series (''The Loner'') himself.

** In "The Fever", there's no way a man as visibly agitated as Franklin would be allowed to continue to play. Especially in [[TheMafia the 1960 climate of Las Vegas]]. He certainly wouldn't have been able to push down the machine without getting tackled by 3-4 security guards.

* HellOfAHeaven: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]", as far as Hyder Simpson concerned, a Heaven where his dog Rip isn't permitted in and there's no coon hunting allowed is no Heaven at all. [[Spoiler: {{Subverted|Trope}} in the end as that actually ''was'' Hell.]]

* NiceShoes: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", Dane wore a very expensive and distinctive pair of two-tone black and white shoes before he was murdered. When Nate Bledsoe puts them on, Dane's personality takes over his body. After Dagget kills Dane, the same thing happens again when Chips puts on the shoes.

* DrinkOrder: In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E83DeadMansShoes Dead Man's Shoes]]", after trying and failing to convince his girlfriend Wilma of his identity several times, the gangster Dane, in the control of the body of homeless man Nate Bledsoe, is finally recognized by his order of "tequila...with a cube of sugar." He later uses the order to gain Bernie Dagget's attention at their nightclub.