Aging stage actor Booth Templeton longs for his younger days and soon gets his wish. Jack Neuman, a sad and beautiful story of loss, redemption and love from both sides of the grave. Sentiment runs high in 'The Trouble with Templeton' by E. The second and third seasons of The Twilight Zone aired between 19. Looking in her rear view mirror, Nan sees the hitch-hiker in the back seat, and realizes now who he is. After several days of this, frightened by every new appearance of the hitch-hiker, she eventually calls home, only to learn that her mother has suffered a nervous breakdown due to the death of her daughter six days earlier in a car crash. With the gender of the main character changed, Twilight Zone's version begins with young Nan Adams driving across the United States, constantly seeing the same strange man attempting to thumb a lift from her at various points along the way.

The third ghost story in that first season was 'The Hitch-Hiker' which Serling adapted from Lucille Fletcher's 1940s radio play produced by and starring Orsen Welles. A less pessimistic viewpoint of life is offered and a second chance accepted. In a near-death limbo he meets the archangel Gabriel in the guise of a jazz horn player. A poverty-stricken trumpeter, tired of the raw deal he feels his life has become, steps out in front of a truck and is run down. The second, 'A Passage For Trumpet' featuring a Serling trademark: the sad, sour, down-at-heel little man. The first, 'Judgment Night' concerns a German submarine commander doomed, Flying Dutchman-like, to not only relive his wartime atrocities each night unto eternity, but to simultaneously join the ghosts of his victims on their voyage to nowhere. There were three ghost stories in that first season of 1959 - 1960, all scripted by Serling.

The themes of 'a second chance' and 'you can't go home any more' were re-occurring ones the ironic twist became its hallmark.ĭuring the program's five year run there were sixteen of them, ghost stories in the traditional sense, distinct from episodes which meddled with time, another of the Zone's favourite obsessions. This article first appeared in All Hallows #17, March 1998ĭebuting in 1959, Rod Serling's television series The Twilight Zone presented weekly stories of robots and space travel, metaphysics and sentimental miracles, deals with the devil and encounters with Death personified, tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations.Sixteen Ghosts in The Twilight Zone by Rick Kennett

Submarine outlaw series