5 Most Disappointing Twilight Zone Episodes Of All Time

Submitted for your approval: five episodes of “The Twilight Zone” that kind of suck. 

Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” debuted in 1959, and it almost instantly altered the zeitgeist. Serling assembled a marvelous team of his era’s most talented sci-fi writers, wrote many episodes himself, and churned out a long series of miniature morality plays that are still being imitated to this day. The original series ran for five crackerjack seasons and 156 episodes, which is massively long for a show of its vintage. Only reliable Westerns like “Gunsmoke” tended to last that long. 

“The Twilight Zone” has been rebooted numerous times over the years. There was a notorious movie in 1983. A pretty good redux lasted from 1985 to 1989, narrated by Charles Aidman. Another redux with Forest Whitaker ran from 2002 to 2003, lasting only one season. Most recently, Jordan Peele oversaw a CBS All Access version of “The Twilight Zone” that lasted two seasons and 20 episodes from 2019 to 2020. We ranked all the movies and TV shows.

Despite the franchise’s tenacity, however, it was easily capable of turning out duds with regularity. Some episodes were forgettable, and others were just plain strange. I suppose it’s difficult to write hundreds of original stories, each one with a uniquely ironic twist, and keep them at a consistent quality. Sometimes, “The Twilight Zone” was clearly out of its depth, trying to invent irony where none existed. You’ll see below, for instance, the dark ironic fate of a short man who has the temerity to wish he were tall. 

The following episodes are from across the franchise, including one reboot of a classic episode that, really, makes no sense whatsoever. Unlock this door with the key of imagination, and enter the dimension of sight, sound, and disappointment. 

One of the most celebrated episodes of the original “The Twilight Zone” was “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which was written by Richard Matheson (based on his story), directed by Richard Donner, and starred William Shatner. You remember this one. A man, recovering from a nervous breakdown, gets on a plane on a stormy night, and panics when he sees a human-sized monster outside on the wing of the plane. The monster pulls off the plane’s steel panels and begins tinkering with its electrics.

The episode was remade by George Miller for the 1983 “Twilight Zone” movie, and then remade again in 2019 for Jordan Peele’s reboot. The 2019 version, however, changes the premise into something far less creative and interesting. It doesn’t matter that it added another 10,000 feet to the title.

Adam Scott (read about Scott’s 5 best movies and TV shows) plays a reporter who boards a plane, only to find a mysterious MP3 player. He listens to it, and finds a documentary-style podcast called “Enigmatique,” which describes the details of a recent plane crash. Scott soon pieces together that the podcast is actually describing the flight he’s currently on, and begins to panic. This plane is about to crash, he finds, and does everything within his power to stop it. 

I understand that the makers of the 2019 “The Twilight Zone” wanted to update its stories for a new generation, but “haunted podcast” is a pretty limp idea. Adam Scott capably freaks out, but anyone expecting him to scream, “There’s a man on the wing of the plane!” will be sorely disappointed. And the “twist” isn’t so much a twist as a mere plot development. It wasn’t a good way to start a new series (it was the second episode). 

The premise of “I Dream of Genie” is tantalizing enough. Howard Morris plays a poor, shy schlub named Howard P. Stanley who is often looked over by the world. He’s kind and modest, and everyone around him either ignores him or treats him like dirt. He finds an old oil lamp in an antique shop and finds, quite naturally, there’s a genie inside. The Genie is played by Jack Albertson, whom Gen-Xers know as Uncle Joe in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” There appears to be a tax on wishes these days, as the genie only offers Howard one wish instead of the expected three.

The bulk of the episode involves Howard contemplating what he wants his wish to be. His darkened imagination, however, always finds a downside to every one of his ideas. If he wishes for an alternate universe where he has a wealthy movie-star girlfriend, he figures that his girlfriend would leave him in the end. He even dreams of being the president of the United States, but panics when he realizes he would be ill-prepared for any potential UFO invasions (!). 

Howard ultimately wishes to become the genie himself, more prone to help others than think of wishes for himself. What’s the message here? That some people are better off being the universe’s whipping boy? That one needs more imagination to dream of a better future for themselves? Or is it that imagination stifles reality? Whatever the actual message is, it’s muddled. And there’s no poetry or irony to Howard becoming a genie. It’s just, like, his new job. How dispiriting. 

This episode has nothing to do with the hit sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie,” which had one episode that led to its demise. 

“The Last Night of a Jockey” is just plain stupid. Mickey Rooney plays a professional jockey named Michael Grady who, like everyone in his profession, is quite small. Grady is something of a scumbag who has been drummed out of horse racing because he was doping horses and betting on the results. When wallowing in self-pity in his apartment, Grady is visited by a magical wish-granting entity. Perhaps to save money, the entity is a disembodied voice. One can see the showrunners trying something theatrical, but the one-man-show-like result just looks cheap. 

Grady, like Josh in “Big” (which Steven Spielberg didn’t direct for personal reasons), wishes that he were big. He takes a nap, and when he arises, he finds that he’s now eight feet tall. Grady calls his ex-girlfriend to brag that he’s a big ol’ fella now, but she’s not impressed. Ironically, the racing commission calls him up to tell him that he has been forgiven for his crimes and is now welcome to race again. Only now he can’t because he’s so large. And he keeps growing. By the end of the episode, he’s bursting out of his clothes and even his tiny apartment. 

The message of the episode is that, externally, Grady is big, but his soul is small. He’s a small-time, pathetic, sweaty guy, no matter how tall he might grow. Yeah, really profound there, Rod. I find little poetry in this story of a jockey who turns into a giant. And, disappointingly, it features no elaborate kaiju attacks where a 200-foot Mickey Rooney stomps on an American city. That would have made the episode a hundred times better. 

One of the weirdest and worst episodes of the 1980s rendition of “The Twilight Zone,” called “The Wall,” was written by future “Babylon 5” creator J. Michael Straczynski (and be sure to read the correct order to watch the “Babylon 5” franchise), and directed by Canadian master Atom Egoyan of “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Exotica” fame. The episode stars John Beck as a washed-up test pilot named Major McAndrews who has been tasked with investigating a mysterious portal that has opened in a lab. All the previous explorers haven’t returned. 

Traversing the portal, McAndrews finds what is essentially the Garden of Eden on the other side. There is a small village of gentle, good-natured farmers living in a natural paradise, and all the previous test pilots are living with them, unwilling to return to the modern world. McAndrews also loves this Edenic place, but decides to report back to his superiors. This causes the denizens of paradise to essentially hold McAndrews prisoner. If the U.S. Army finds out about this place, they’ll only charge through the portal and ruin everything. The Army, you see, would be the serpent in Eden.

It’s a very, very obvious metaphor, and one that, in 1989, felt immensely dated. The antiwar messaging of “The Wall” might have been more at home in the 1960s, during the original series. This episode is preachy and blunt, even for “The Twilight Zone.” The episode concludes with McAndrews doing the right thing by returning to Earth and destroying the portal. There is no ironic lesson here, and it’s already clear that the Army wants to exploit any exploitable asset they discover. There’s also no poetic ending. Everyone just kind of gets what they want. Thanks for coming on this non-educational, disappointing journey with us. 

Call me kooky, but baseball and sci-fi don’t mix well. Baseball is a pastoral, picnic-like game that is closely associated with corny Americana and (in the modern age) commercial bloat. In “The Mighty Casey,” one of “The Twilight Zone’s” “funny” episodes, the integrity of the game is threatened by the introduction of androids. 

Jack Warden plays an aging manager of a crappy baseball team called the Hoboken Zephyrs. His team gets a boost, however, when a mad scientist named Dr. Stillman (Abrahan Sofaer) offers to build a realistic humanoid android for them. The android is built, nicknamed Casey, and played by Robert Sorrells. As a pitcher, the android Casey is impeccable, and no one can hit his balls. 

Sadly, Casey is thwacked in the head by an errant baseball and needs to be repaired. Dr. Stillman installs a more human-like heart, and Casey instantly becomes too compassionate to play baseball. He refuses to strike out any players, as the constant strikeouts would ruin their careers. Casey quits to become a social worker. The twist at the end is that the Jack Warden character uses android blueprints to build a whole team of baseball-bots. 

What’s … what’s the lesson here? What’s the theme? That one needs to be soulless to succeed at baseball? That the game is being threatened by artificiality? Is this meant to be like “Moneyball” (whose true story has been explained by /Film)? I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone was. I think Rod Serling just wanted the show to be funny that week and wrote a “kooky” idea after one too many cocktails. Yeah, there’s a reason that “The Mighty Casey” rarely made its way into the Thanksgiving Day “Twilight Zone” marathons on CBS back in the day.