![]() ![]() These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which, after all, is The Twilight Zone.” But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. “Portrait of a young lady in love - with herself?” Serling muses before the fade-out. 12 look.Īs the “beautiful” Transformed teenager preens before the mirror in front of her carbon copy friend, she babbles, “And the nicest part of it all, Val, I look just like you!” At the end of the process, which takes place off camera, the newly svelte - and brainwashed - teenager emerges to meet her mother and her friend Valerie, who also models the statuesque No. However, after remedial therapy, she relents and permits herself to be Transformed. Marilyn, a literature-loving teenager with “sub-acceptable” looks, whose parents drink something called Instant Smile (read: Prozac) balks. In a future society, teenagers are compelled to go through something called the Transformation, by which they can choose a “beautiful” body type acceptable to their vacuous, Kardashian-like peers. Serling also took aim at the increasing popularity of psychotherapy and cosmetic surgery in one of his most prophetic - and heartbreaking - episodes, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” which aired Jan. Once again, there is a boom - or at least a boomlet - in building bomb shelters. Witness the hysteria created by last year’s false nuclear alert in Hawaii and the resultant pandemonium. “Just a simple statement of fact: “For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized.Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone.”įear of nuclear annihilation is still with us. “No moral, no message, no prophetic tract,” Serling intones over the closing credits. Stockton knows, however, that the experience has destroyed them as a community, anyway. The neighbors’ anger boils to the point where they break down the shelter door - just as the radio announces that the UFO sightings were a false alarm. They plead with the kindly physician for entry from outside. A beloved neighborhood physician, Doc Stockton, locks his family in their shelter, but his neighbors are unprepared. 29, 1961, the radio warns that UFOs have been sighted and everyone should run for their shelters. Serling was particularly perturbed by the bomb-shelter craze those jitters induced, including a column by a Catholic cleric who declared that Americans would be justified in keeping their neighbors out of their shelters during an actual atomic attack. The atomic bomb and the fear of the bomb were a major preoccupation of Americans during the Cold War. 20, 1959.Īnd the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.Īnd they remain deeply entrenched in 21st-century America. CBSBurgess Meredith stars in one of the most memorable of all “Twilight Zone” episodes, “Time Enough at Last,” which first aired on Nov. ![]()
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