New Year's Eve 2015 is here and the day-glo hoverboard world that was supposed to arrive this year, according to Back to the Future Part II, is sadly nowhere in sight. But there's another, older sci-fi opus that's perhaps even better suited these strange and wonderful times: The Twilight Zone.Yeah sure, today's world of smartphones and selfies and oversharing seems a far cry from the paranoid, nuclear doomsday-threatened Cold War era when Rod Serling's landmark TV series first aired, from 1959 to 1964. Yet over a half-century on, The Twilight Zone still feels incredibly modern. Its self-contained episode/anthology style is back in vogue, and many of its underlying themes—isolationism, discrimination, the downsides of technological progress—remain startlingly relevant to this day and age.
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If you've never seen the original series, today is a great time to start. The SyFy Channel is marathoning the entire original Twilight Zone for the next 24 hours (as it has done for the past 20 years). All five original seasons are available on Hulu Plus. Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant have everything but season four. I've picked out a few of the episodes I think are most resonant today and GIFed them for the benefit of your fickle attention span. Spoilers ahead.The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
This episode from the first season focuses on a small everytown-USA whose inhabitants turn on one another when their electrical appliances begin turning on and off at random. They're ostensibly afraid of a covert alien invasion in the wake of a mysterious meteor sighting.If this same exact scenario were to play out today, surrounded as we are with digital devices and the rumor-prone social media, you can bet the irrational panic would be even more severe and widespread. We live in a time when brief Gmail outages grind all work to a halt and Reddit-led witch hunts brand innocent people suspects in national newspapers. As always, we are the real monsters on Maple Street.It's a Good Life
Image: CBS/HuluThere's been a lot of handwringing by authors and journalists in the past few years over "helicopter parents," people who are so closely and intently focused on the lives of their children, even as their kids grow into young adulthood, they inevitably create dependency issues. This parable about an evil 6-year-old boy with godlike telekinetic and telepathic powers who gets an entire village to indulge his every whim is the perfect extreme example of helicopter parenting gone awry.
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The Eye of the Beholder
The Twilight Zone is known for its twist endings, and this episode contains one of the more devastating among them. Lots of TV shows have tackled society's obsession with appearance and the pressures to conform (including one of my all-time favorites, the underrated Nip/Tuck), but few have done it as poetically as in this story of a woman undergoing a risky facial procedure.While in recent years, the internet has helped enable a vocal backlash against overzealous Photoshopping and rigid, skinny white standard-bearers of beauty — to some arguably positive results — its also led to troubling insular communities (like "thinspo"), and, allegedly, an increase in selfie-specific plastic surgery. Which is to say, this episode's focus on the longstanding desire many of us have to change the way we look seems as strong as ever.Encounter
Image: CBS/Hulu
One of the most controversial Twilight Zone episodes in the entire series, "Encounter" follows the confrontation between an American World War II veteran and a young Japanese-American man, played by none-other than George Takei. The episode was broadcast only once in the US in 1964 and then banned from repeat syndication following complaints of racism in its fictional depiction of a Japanese spy for the attack on Pearl Harbor.But it's available now online, including on YouTube, and remains surprisingly relevant in its portrayal of mutual guilt, misunderstanding, and reflexive hostility between two people who by chance happened to find themselves on different sides of a global conflict.
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The Brain Center At Whipple's
This episode perfectly embodies humanity's longstanding fear of being taken over by machines, but in a much more realistic way than the great bloody robot-human war depicted time and time again in science fiction, ala The Matrix and Terminator: Genisys.The owner of a manufacturing plant buys a bunch of new automated machines and lays off his human employees, only to be laid off by his own board of directors and replaced with a robot. The moral is simple but poignant: if humanity is really going to be replaced by artificial life, it's going to be at the behest of other humans.In His Image
One of many Twilight Zone episodes featuring androids (not the Google kind, the humanoid robot kind), this one stands up because of its impressive special effects for the time and because who hasn't thought they might actually be a robot at some point in their lives?
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This episode from the first season focuses on a small everytown-USA whose inhabitants turn on one another when their electrical appliances begin turning on and off at random. They're ostensibly afraid of a covert alien invasion in the wake of a mysterious meteor sighting.If this same exact scenario were to play out today, surrounded as we are with digital devices and the rumor-prone social media, you can bet the irrational panic would be even more severe and widespread. We live in a time when brief Gmail outages grind all work to a halt and Reddit-led witch hunts brand innocent people suspects in national newspapers. As always, we are the real monsters on Maple Street.It's a Good Life
Image: CBS/HuluThere's been a lot of handwringing by authors and journalists in the past few years over "helicopter parents," people who are so closely and intently focused on the lives of their children, even as their kids grow into young adulthood, they inevitably create dependency issues. This parable about an evil 6-year-old boy with godlike telekinetic and telepathic powers who gets an entire village to indulge his every whim is the perfect extreme example of helicopter parenting gone awry.The Eye of the Beholder
The Twilight Zone is known for its twist endings, and this episode contains one of the more devastating among them. Lots of TV shows have tackled society's obsession with appearance and the pressures to conform (including one of my all-time favorites, the underrated Nip/Tuck), but few have done it as poetically as in this story of a woman undergoing a risky facial procedure.While in recent years, the internet has helped enable a vocal backlash against overzealous Photoshopping and rigid, skinny white standard-bearers of beauty — to some arguably positive results — its also led to troubling insular communities (like "thinspo"), and, allegedly, an increase in selfie-specific plastic surgery. Which is to say, this episode's focus on the longstanding desire many of us have to change the way we look seems as strong as ever.Encounter
This episode perfectly embodies humanity's longstanding fear of being taken over by machines, but in a much more realistic way than the great bloody robot-human war depicted time and time again in science fiction, ala The Matrix and Terminator: Genisys.The owner of a manufacturing plant buys a bunch of new automated machines and lays off his human employees, only to be laid off by his own board of directors and replaced with a robot. The moral is simple but poignant: if humanity is really going to be replaced by artificial life, it's going to be at the behest of other humans.In His Image
One of many Twilight Zone episodes featuring androids (not the Google kind, the humanoid robot kind), this one stands up because of its impressive special effects for the time and because who hasn't thought they might actually be a robot at some point in their lives?