YMMV / The Twilight Zone (1959) S5E25: "The Masks"

• Accidental Aesop: In a similar vein of Spur of the Moment, which was far more intentional in this aesop, it sends the message of to show proper judgment in who you marry. The fact that Emily marrying Wilfred broke her mother's heart and destroyed her relationship with Jason implies she was actually a good person before meeting Wilfred and his toxicity made her something that her parents never wanted her to be and she married a nicer man, she wouldn't have turned out that way.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The conflict between Jason and his relatives is this:
  • Jason Foster's descendants are all vain and awful people to be sure, but that doesn't mean he's much better than them. While the story wants us to view him sympathetically, we know little about his life or his relationship with his family aside from this episode and for all we know his children's behavior could be, at least in part, due to how he brought them up. Considering the fact that he decided to spend his last night alive insulting and disfiguring his offspring it's entirely possible the apple didn't fall far from the tree and this was his way of spitefully denying any blame on how his heirs turned out.
  • On the other hand, none of his family members show a lick of genuine kindness to him, even when they know he is at death's door. While Jason may not have been a pleasant man, they don't treat him as anything but a meal ticket. They even have the nerve to whine over the very minor request of wearing masks to get Jason's wealth, and Emily has the gall to complain about her own (imagined) aches and pains while her father is barely hanging on. Even if Jason wasn't nice to them, it isn't like they tried to act nice to him.
  • Is the conflict between Jason and his heirs really an emotional battle between an honorable person and a bunch of gold diggers? Or are Jason and his family members all at fault for their strained relationships, and have they made those wounds worse by not trying to open up with one another?
  • One of the keys to the relationship is the reason that Jason's wife isn't around—in the original broadcast, he remarks that Emily's marriage to Wilfred "broke the heart of her late mother, in just about every sense of the word." This suggests that Mrs. Foster died of grief, but it's not explored any further. If she did, Jason's anger at his relatives seems a lot more understandable, because he both blames them for killing her and is outraged at the fact that they don't seem to care about her (none of the relatives even mentions their dead mother and grandmother). Whether or not that anger is justified, though, is another question entirely.