The Twilight Zone

We invite you into a podcast, not too different from our own, a podcast of only sound. Lesley and Ben enter The Twilight Zone, the 1959 CBS produced anthology tv show about the strange, bizarre and unnatural. Written and produced by Rod Serling, the Twilight Zone is an eerie half hour format show that rides the line between science-fiction, horror and mystic and plunges audience members into tales from a bizarre dimension of the mind.

What happens in The Twilight Zone? Neighbors turn against each other in The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, a jilted millionaire fakes a nuclear war in One More Pallbearer, and a sasquatch like gremlin attacks William Shatner in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

We’re starting off our new season of Syndicated with Lesley and Ben by analyzing our favorite science-fiction shows. Ray guns, alternate dimensions, robot butlers and planetary fleets. Science fiction is a lens through which we can view all other issues and the two episodes we picked To Serve Man and Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? are prime examples.

In Season 2, Episode 28’s Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?, two state troopers find an unidentified flying object has crashed into a blizzard afflicted area. When they wander back toward civilization, they find evidence that the Martian pilot is hiding amongst a group of bus passengers in a diner. The only problem is that they have no way of identifying which human the alien is disguising itself as. Paranoia breaks out as the lights flicker and Dragnet’s Barney Phillips plays a fry cook.