I actually liked the fact that the same guy played all the male figures. She is essentially staring into the face of her father’s killer every time she sees that face.
Also the all-white, limited cast erodes racial differences, ethnic differences and disability, suggesting that these demographics were all transformed white and able-bodied or perhaps simply don't exist... Dr. Sig's subtle hints at supporting eugenics, coupled with Rod Serling's own personal interest in addressing the Holocaust and racism in many Twilight Zone episodes, makes these implications even darker. The scene with a housemaid who is berated cruelly by Lana sadly also suggests that despite everybody looking exactly the same, classism still exists and some people in this world have much more power than others.
One of the things I love about this episode is how none of them explicitly say that the transformation is mandatory, basically pushing the societal narrative that everyone WANTS the transformation.
@@ShawnRavenfire Precisely, none of the characters who are pushing the transformation on Marilyn are malicious, and are disappointed that she doesn't want to be like them.
@@ShawnRavenfire they can't even imagine or understand the possibility that someone would NOT want, and in the beginning when she says it have to ask "what you're talking about" as if the words don't make intelligible sense in this order, which shows how deep the view is in their brains
I always found the ending of this episode to be much darker than Eye of the Beholder because despite getting exiled from society, Janet at least got to keep Her mind while Marilyn has to live the rest of Her life as a lobotomized automaton.
@@Raximus3000 And it most likely does. The forced conformity makes everyone think alike. Since everyone that comes after them is forced to think the same way as them, there is never any meaningful innovation, creativity, or adaptability. A species that refuses to adapt to the inevitable march of time and change brought via entropy is doomed to extinction by its own inaction.
@@derekstein6193 Here is the most likely scenario for this. The number of models will keep decreasing in order to force further conformity until one is left and then deviations that as we have seen are possible(her father could not handle his new identity ergo he was not like everyone else) until one being is left. That is the painless scenario the painful one is simply destruction via outside factors.
I often thought the transformation really replace the person with a robot or android, hence explaining the side effects of longer life and immunity to disease, and why everyone in the end have the same vapid personality,
When I was really young and I stumbled upon my grandpa watching a rerun of this episode, he looked over at me, and basically had to explain the entire story so I could understand it. When I rewatched this episode some time in the near, the twist still hits just as hard knowing what’s going to come.
This is one of my favorite of all time episodes of Twilight Zone, probably because I relate to it a lot. When Marilyn says "I'm not pretty, but I'm not ugly", I _feel_ that, but not everyone else understands...
It's interesting that many of the characters are named after 50's and 60's Hollywood stars, to reflect the episode's themes about beauty and appearances. You have Marilyn, Lana, Grace, Eva, Valerie and Rex. Conversely, Jane and Doe, who have the surgery, now lack individuality.
The word "Sig" means label, signature, or significant figure, whereas the name "Doe" is typically a made-up moniker used in legalese to provide anonymity, or to refer to a female animal species. This is eerie considering that Dr. Sig is in a position of authority and retains certain aspects of his unique identity (his European accent, his hand gestures and quirky mannerisms, knowledge of forbidden materials and what they're about), while the nurse named Doe is his subordinate and remains largely silent and lacking personality for the entirety of the episode.
@@melissacooper8724 I think they were all actually replaced by androids. Why would the transformation had this side effect of long life and disease immunity?
The cast is also all white, all western, all young, all English-speaking and all able-bodied... and the connotations of this are extremely disturbing, probably intentionally so.
@@RebeccaMayeHoliday perhaps not. This was the early 1960's after all and token characters were not yet a practice. You might be using a 2024 lens looking at a product from that erq.
@@shaider1982 You may be right, although Rod Serling never shied away from having a diverse cast if it suited the world of the story well. He was never much for "tokenism"; any story he featured that had a non-white or diverse cast member usually incorporated them in as just another regular part of the world they were in, unless race or ethnicity were directly brought up in the subject matter (some episodes did often address racism, antisemitism, christphobia and xenophobia). In this episode, it seems that racially-diverse people simply don't exist in this world, nor do disabled people, not necessarily even due to racism or ableism but for the mere fact that those demographics don't conform to the hegemony of the transformation.
They only have 20 minutes to tell the story and drive the point home that everybody's the same. So the small cast was crucial. If it was a feature length film they could expand the cast to feature more models
This is another episode that I never saw in those old 24 hour Twilight Zone marathons back in the 1990s. But when I first saw it online years later, it was an instant classic.
As opposed to the original short story, where the protagonist is forced into the transformation by a Court, nobody in the episode is malicious. They genuinely believe that it's the right thing to do, and are hurt that Marilyn doesn't want to be like them.
@@louisduarte8763 Every one of these characters is a victim of the "wiser man than I" who Dr. Sig mentions to Marilyn, the scientific magicians who found a way to craft a genocide of anybody non-conforming, both physically and ideologically, a genocide without death, the only murder being the murder of the soul, but a genocide, all the same.
As much as we admire attractive people would we truly want to look exactly like them in adulthood? This episode definitely has a topic that holds up to this day.
I mean is it really that hard to be attractive and be an individual? I mean really my only problems with this whole process is the pressure to look exactly identical to the point of needing name tags just to tell each other apart, and it clearly being just a cover for a government mandated deep physiological brainwashing procedure to strip individual will. If it was actually voluntary, allowed for significant individual personalization, and didn’t turn people into the government’s meat puppet drones it’d be amazing cosmetic procedure.
Yes? We could put breed bad genes. Disabilities, bad health, and more. If we all had good looks there’s less bullying, less mental health issues, stress and so on. But no not having a select group of people to look like. I think Sweden done this and had good results. But I don’t agree with forcing such an agenda on people.
It's so crazy how when you look at these older shows and movies that warn of such a dystopian future, we find ourselves living more and more in that version of reality. Man, the writers and producers must have been psychic! Makes you wonder just how close we'll come to this or other versions of a dysfunctional society.
I've been pumped for this episode for years! It reminds me of the Uglies series which I am a huge fan of! I've noticed my fav Twilight Zone episodes have dark endings or are dystopic.
indeed. why be an individual, you should decide what group you fit in best and mold yourself to that group! political, social, ideological, hobbiest, there's a group for every aspect of life. Find your group and your voice will finally have meaning, because who'd want to be an individual when they can be part of a group.
Agreed-life is what _you_ make of it. Can everyone have the same (outer) quality of life? No, but learning how to cultivate your inner life will allow one to be happier in more circumstances (or at the very least content).
This reminds me of a line from Silent Hill 3. The context is different but, it works well here. Douglass Cartland: "No this. No that. No nothing. A paradise for castrated sheep maybe. Sounds pretty boring."
'The future, which, afterall, is the Twilight Zone.' Love Mr. Serling's foreshadowing. Mr. Tober, thank you so much for these recap videos. I hope you do the next TZ series starting next October.
The scary thing is, its not like everyone ISN'T happy in this utopia. They are, but life should be more about just self-obsession and only living for yourself.
The lack of variety in the way men look could be a commentary on fashion. Men's fashion tends to look more uniform while women's fashion has more variety. (Though not too much if you want to stay en vogue.)
Shades of Brave New World add more or less than rods ending little speech at the end more or less gives us that this is very frightening and can be very real
the difference today, is that they tell you that youre being the most individual you can by choosing which group you'll mirror exactly and never ever stray from agreeing with.
when i read uglies, i thought of this episode. and this is so heartbreaking. it's so iconic, and Marylin's life, agency and choice was all taken away. and she was perfect how she was. in the decade, when this came out, i really hope others who felt like this, make them rethink and realise they were perfect as they and we all are. and I'm an advocate for surgery, as long as it's someone choice
I was thinking about how my grandma had proudly considered herself a plain Jane. I remember she once told me that God made us and God don't make no junk!
I watched this episode when I was a child and I remember the ending didn't scare me but rather it broke my heart but I couldn't really say as to why because I was really young. Maybe a part of me felt the loss and injustice that happened to Marilyn but couldn't possibly articulate. Maybe I related to being a person who felt that she had to conform and change who she was just to exist. Who knows, yet I never forgot this one and the message got clearer as I got older.
I always interpreted the ending as being comparable to the old saying, “Oh, you’ll stop talking like that once you get laid!” and that Marilyn has been swayed just like everyone else which she also looks/resembles upon transformation. Therefore the twist would be that “evil” wins.
1:42, I watched the movie BURN WITCH BURN from 1962 and he co wrote the screenplay with Richard Matheson and i thought to myself, "What if this was an attempt at a Twilight Zone movie in 1962?"
This is funny because my girlfriend put that new movie Uglies on and within the first five minutes I was like "This sounds an awfully lot like an episode of The Twilight Zone."
This is one of the episodes of The Twilight zone that seriously scared me as a kid. It introduced me to the idea of killing someone's soul but leaving the body alive.
I was waiting for this one 🤩 Something that always struck me as so tragic is that, as empty and frivolous as Lana and Val are, their concern for Marilyn never read as fake to me. They hate seeing her unhappy and they want to understand what’s “wrong” with her, but they physically can’t. The State took away their ability to sympathize and understand, but not their ability to love, and that may be the cruelest thing of all.
Something that they vaguely alluded to in the episode but doesn’t get fleshed out is the concept of prejudice. The speech made by Dr. Sig about them achieving a level of equality by making everyone look the same and “beautiful” undercuts was causes prejudice and racism in the first place, which is a sense of fear, superiority, and power. Lana might look like every other number 12, but in an earlier scene she snaps at another 12 who is a servant saying, “I don’t know why you people don’t xyz,” still implying an underlying hierarchy and social status that causes people to belittle each other. It would have been interesting to explore that bit. There are a few season 5 episodes that would benefit from having been in the hour long ones from season four and vise versa.
I would like more of Dr. Sig hinting that 'Yes, it is our, the rulers,' opinion of beauty that matters, because we are the smartest and therefor the ones with the power to decide for you, isn't that nice of us?'
I adore this episode. It might even be one of my favourites. You really feel for Marilyn because in reality the only one who seemed to understand her was her father, but the people around her are so numb to everything that they don’t see why she not only feels sad, but WANTS to feel sad. Marilyn would rather feel the grief and loss of her father for the rest of her life than be a smiling robot like everyone else. It’s heartbreaking seeing that after the procedure, there isn’t a trait of who she used to be. In a lot of ways, she dies, and her afterlife is spending the rest of her life in a soulless shell.
The real kick in the head? Rod Serling: “Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, bodybuilding and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which, after all, is the Twilight Zone.” And right after: Announcer: “This show has been brought to you in part by Prell shampoo.”
Go to a department store, look at the women's section, then at the men's. The point being if we had a society like this, there would definitely be way more female models than male ones. =D
The most disturbing monsters to me aren't the ones that kill you, but the ones that strip away your identity. The Borg, Zombies, the Cybermen, the Reapers, all take a living person with hopes, dreams and ambitions, and just turn them into empty husks.
I believe this is the saddest, or at least most tragic, TZ episode, especially after what I learned about eugenics. It did kinda tickle me when Rod Serling said at the beginning, “Let’s say this is the year 2000.” Huh, I must’ve missed that part . . .
Could you please do these as part of FanScription • What if Disney’s Peter Pan was killed by Captain Hook’s bomb (Disney’s Peter Pan 1953movie) • What if The Stabbington Brothers raised Rapunzel in Disney’s Tangled (2010movie) • What if Disney’s The Rescuers 3 happened? • RoboCop vs The Terminator • What if Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective 2 happened? • What if the 101 Dalmatian family got older (Disney’s 101 Dalmatians 2) • What if Luke Skywalker had joined The Dark Side • Batman vs Venom • Spider-man vs The Riddler • What if Shere Khan (from Disney’s The Jungle Book 1967movie) had won? • What if we fixed Hulk (2003movie)
After all the decades, for me this remains the most quintessential TZ episode, and unfortunately yes, out of all of them, the one that has over time became only more and more relevant. Probably the first one that comes to mind when the show is mentioned.
Honestly, we should appreciate we still HAVE stories like this to refer to to remind us so even if a lot of us go to the deep end of conformity, enough people can resist on their own terms and fight for more causes. Don't get too cynical. Just keep our spirit going. Because there are places where these stories are deliberately inaccessible.
Watching these old shows/movies and seeing what they considered beautiful and youthful is absolutely a trip. It's a much more... bulky form of thinness. Like, I love how even young men in their twenties are all barrel chested with thick mats of chest hair and very rectangular bodies to the point it almost looks like they're overweight. Youthful and beautiful a lot of the times is a very much more early-thirties version of beautiful in these films/shows of this time period.
The episode that poses the question: is Happiness and Health better than having free will? The scary thing is, there might be a lot of people out there willing to have the surgery in order to escape their own depression and health issues.
I think the play on Sigmund Freud was the idea that they were tasked to get rid of all ugliness and instead of seeing it from the angle of hate and discrimination, they went a sexually charged route. Instead of the countless other paths you could take to "get rid of ugliness in the world", they went with "Let's make everyone, including myself, HOT!" lol I might be overthinking it, but that's my take.
I felt heartbroken for Marylin at the end of the episode because she lost her true identity forever after her transformation! 💔 There were times I wished that I would look like Taylor Swift. But the more I think about it the more I realize that I wouldn't be my true self!
This is also my favorite episode, especially for its relevance mentioned in the video! However, I have one issue with the scene where Marilyn tries to escape from the hospital because I don’t understand two things. 1. Why does Marilyn suddenly pull back when she sees the door at the end of the hallway? Is that the hospital’s entrance? 2. Where did the note in Marilyn’s hand come from that the nurse takes and says, “She has chosen number 8”? Unfortunately, neither the _Twilight Zone Companion_ nor this video addresses this; only a Twilight Zone Wiki writes _“due to a post-hypnotic suggestion planted during her stay, she instead goes to the operating room”,_ which I find questionable since I see no signs of hypnosis in the episode.
I feel like the reason she went with number 8 and not 12 is BECAUSE 12 looked too much like her, and no one is allowed to resemble or think like themselves in such a society. Thinking of it that way makes the title fit pretty good!
maybe the episode title is to showcase that in the end she didn’t get a choice in the operation, my theory is that in days leading up to the operation she and her family and friends were discussing to opt into model 12. But after ste declined to have the operation entirely and found herself in the operating room, she was forced into a body she would have never chosen
I don't believe things have gotten worse regarding this episode's message. While mainstream media did hit an impossible beauty standard in the 90's and 2000's, ever since the 2010's society has become much more accepting of a diversity of appearances and most everyone is encouraged to find their own look. We've definitely taken a turn towards appreciating natural, distinct beauty.
There wouldnt be any phrases from Dr Evil in this show, but there easily could be phrases and little quircks from this episode put in to the Dr Evil character
This reminds me of an animated short called "Being Pretty." Anyone here seen it? It's part of the "Autodale" anthology and it's all here on youtube. Highly recommended if you're into dark dystopian futures like this and are a fan of independent animation.
I really love this episode and I always get so sad when she chose to become a clone of vow even though that's my name but it's like Marilyn disappeared and when you said that in the video I got all weepy that was a beautiful way of putting it, but yeah, that's great
@@ianr.navahuber2195 harrison bergeron is a story by kurt vonnegut. it tells of a future where everyone is made "equal" by hobbling athletes and using brain surgery to maintain a standard (low) level IQ. the govt decided it was easier to keep people dumb than spend effort on education.
There’s another dystopian short story that comes to mind, Examination Day, where a mandatory IQ test when you reach 12 has death for those who score too highly on it. That was adapted for the 80’s Twilight Zone. It’s another variation on the theme of eliminating individuality as a means of continuing the status quo. We did this almost 15 years ago in English and I can still remember some of the analyzing we did. Stuff like the kid being called something a bit more childish and having comic books rather than proper chapter books being part of his parents limiting the kind of material he had access to that he’d properly learn from. Memory is weird.
@@ianr.navahuber2195Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story where mediocrity is mandated by society. Talented dancers, singers, athletes, and so on are forcibly handicapped so that the average person doesn't feel jealous.
