The Twilight Zone: Extra!

The Time Element (1958)

The history behind this episode is interesting. Before “The Twilight Zone”, this episode was sort of written as a pilot for the proposed science-fiction anthology show. It was rejected, so Rod Serling sold it to an established anthology show and apparently it was a hit.

The episode deals with a sort of dream-like time-travel. A man dreams every day that he is waking up on the day before Pearl Harbor and insists the dream is real. At the end of the dream, he is always shot dead and the next day he repeats the dream or an actual time-travel as he insists. The episode ends with a twist, already establishing the Twilight Twist before the show even started.

4/5

Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics – The Theatre (1994)

“Melissa Sanders is having difficulty completing her Singhal Commission sculpture. Her behavior has characteristics: she delays, she defers, she refuses to commit to decisions in both her personal and professional life. She thinks she has all the time in the world, but she does not, because that world will change forever when Melissa Sanders walks through the door of a certain movie theatre into the Twilight Zone.”

Serling’s wife finds the script of this episode in the family’s garage and another writer helps to expand and finish it, and they turn it into an episode in 1994. It is about a woman that sees her life on the cinema screen, an idea kind of resembling two previous episodes, one about a camera that shows pictures of the people in the near future and another about a guy that sees his near-future life on the TV screen. Well, if it was great, Serling wouldn’t have dumped it in a garage.

2/5