Subscribe to Podcast with iTunes     Subscribe to Podcast using RSS Feed


The Twilight Zone
In the original pilot for The Twilight Zone, writer Rod Serling came up with an interesting idea. What if a man from 1958 kept waking up in Hawaii on Dec. 6, 1941, the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor? What if he tried to warn everybody of the coming disaster? And what if nobody listened?

"The Time Element" was written when Serling was still just in college, but it included many of the elements that later episodes of The Twilight Zone would come to exemplify. Mind-bending twists, lonely or confused characters in unfamiliar surroundings, and maybe most importantly, internal commentary on the way these characters deal with the strange situations in which they find themselves.



SYNOPSIS

listen: The Twilight Zone - 4 o'clock

Rod Serling adapted the script for this Twilight Zone episode from a short story by Price Day, which first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Decked out in coke-bottle glasses and greased-down hair, Theodore Bikel is malevolence personified as Oliver Crangle, a self-appointed "social conscience" who spends all his waking hours persecuting innocent people whom he has designated as evil. After casually ruining several lives, this Crangle declares that he has in his possession the means to shrink all evil people in the world to a height of two feet -- and that this metamorphosis will occur exactly at Four O'Clock.

[Add/Edit Synopsis]

EPISODES

The Twilight Zone - The Passersby
The Twilight Zone - The Rip van Winkle Caper
The Twilight Zone - 4 o'clock
The Twilight Zone - The Obsolete Man
The Twilight Zone - A Kind of Stopwatch