★★★★★ January 27, 1961 Season 2 Episode 15
If you want to see where we are…HERE is a list of the episodes.
It’s so strange because of my age I remember Agnes Moorehead primarily as the Bewitched mother in law Endora. She was a great actress and was in Orson Welle’s stock company long before she was a sitcom star. She stars in this Twilight Zone and does a one woman show with a little help from special effects. I can’t say enough about her acting in this. She plays an old lonely woman and creates all of the suspense and drama to this episode. It’s worth it just to see her work at her craft.
This one is a Twilight Zone classic. The only complaint I’ve heard about this episode is that the special effects could have been a little better. The effects get the point across with no problem…so I see no problem and the episode is great.
When Agnes Moorehead learned she had no dialogue in this episode, she initially refused to do it. Rod Serling and director Douglas Heyes convinced her. Moorhead’s solo performance drew on the mime skills she had developed when, as a young actress, she studied with legendary pantomime artist Marcel Marceau in Paris.
As in other episodes, this one uses the United Planets Cruiser C57D spacecraft from Forbidden Planet , both of which were produced by MGM.
This show was written by Richard Matheson and Rod Serling
Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:
This is one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas, a house untouched by progress. This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who’s been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror, which is even now coming at her from – the Twilight Zone.
Summary
An old woman who lives alone in a ramshackle farm house comes face to face with alien invaders. She hears something on her roof and then finds a flying saucer, perhaps six or seven feet across from which emerges two small robots. She fights them as best she can and eventually succeeds in destroying their ship. The nature of the invaders however is not immediately obvious however.
Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:
These are the invaders, the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined. The invaders…who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag…and we have just seen it entered in a ledger that covers all the transactions in the universe…a bill stamped “Paid in Full” and to be found unfiled in the Twilight Zone.
CAST
Rod Serling … Narrator / Self – Host (uncredited)
Agnes Moorehead … Woman
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Interesting… a one person cast? Would take some acting to pull that off well, but she was a pro.
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Her credits are really good. Citizen Kane being one of them.
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Wow, this looks like a great episode. There’s just something about the theme of foreign invaders that continues to be fascinating.
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This is one of the classic TZ. I thought for the times, the special effects were good. One of my favorites.
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If special effects get the point across… that is all I ask for… and they did in this one really well.
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I bet this would be a fun episode to watch.
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Classic episode for sure! She does an amazing job. The other thing I was stuck with was elements of Matheson’s plot echoed the plot of the doll story in Trilogy of Terror which I think he so wrote. The missing knife. The knife attack on her foot her grabbing the invader in a towel and throwing it in the fire.
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I never put that together but you are exactly right…I loved that story in Trilogy of Terror…scared the hell out of me as a kid.
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Me too ! Just went back and watched it again last month and still creeped me out!
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They did it right…they didn’t focus on the doll all of the time…only in the action scenes and it worked great.
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Classic TZ – perfect example of the shocking Twilight Zone endings!
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I totally agree…and Moorehead is awesome in this.
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This is a great episode. I saw it a few months ago while on a T.Z. binge, and it kinda freaked me out. Moorehead did a fine acting job, and it’s amazing how that silly little toy robot could be so damn frightening.
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The only complaint I’ve seen is about the robots but they do the job great…that is all that counts.
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Agnes did some good work in her day.
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OK I finally got to see an episode! Yay! Amazing how they were able to crank up the tension. I think the fact that the place had no electricity made it all the more effective. I’m really bowled over that Morehead studied with Marcel Marceau. She played it just right. I’m guessing if a spaceship landed on my roof, I’d be terrified by whatever came out of it, especially if it was trying to get in my house and then cut me with my own knife. She was terrified but she was really brave. I can see why you rated it 5 stars.
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YAH!!!
She was a great actress and people mostly know her from Bewitched…nothing wrong with there was a lot more. I remember her in Citizen Kane playing his mom.
She created that tension and was superb. I’m glad that Serling talked her into doing it.
I’m happy you liked it.
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I know everyone is supposed to love Citizen Kane, but the only part of that movie I liked was the part when he was a kid and she was his mom.
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LOL well then you liked her acting
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Yes! She used to tick me off on Bewitched, but she added the necessary conflict to the show. I also loved that lady who played Gladys Kravitz.
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Oh the first on I really liked
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Remember this one. It kinda creeped me out.
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