The Sign Post Up Ahead: A Twilight Zone Podcast

Matt Stokes and Patrick Perot go through the eighth episode of The Twilight Zone: "Time Enough At Last." Burgess Meredith is Henry Bemis, a freakin' loser who just wants to read BOOKS. Books??? "What's this swill you're reading?!" his shrew of a wife demands. "David Copperfield? Sounds positively pornographic!" she yells as she rolls over it with a bulldozer. Then the apocalypse happens and Henry finally gets some Me Time to read. But the universe is cruel and, we shall learn by the end of this

Matt Stokes and Patrick Perot go through the seventh episode of The Twilight Zone: "The Lonely."   Jack Warden plays Corry, a man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to a most fiscally irresponsible imprisonment: solitary confinement on a faraway asteroid. His only human contact comes every three months, when space merchant marines spend 15 minutes on his asteroid delivering him supplies. He's lonely, folks. But that's about to change when he's given a miraculous gift: an artificially

Matt Stokes and Patrick Perot go through the sixth episode of The Twilight Zone: "Escape Clause." Walter Bedeker is a hypochondriac who convinces himself he's constantly dying, even though his doctor repeatedly gives him a clean bill of health. But he knows the truth, and anyone who tells him otherwise must be lying. His only way out of perpetual illness leading to an early grave is to strike a deal with the devil, here portrayed in the form of a man named Cadwallader. In exchange for Bedeker's

Patrick Perot and Matt Stokes go through the fifth episode of The Twilight Zone: "Walking Distance." Gig Young plays Martin Sloan, who's just sick of it all. Sick of his successful career as an unspecific 1950s business dad. Sick of all the phone calls. Sick of the hustle and bustle of the big city. Wouldn't it be great if he could just step back in time, back to his lovely 1930s childhood when he was hanging out at the merry-go-round and the bandstand, and everything was fine with the world? He

Patrick Perot and Matt Stokes go through the fourth episode of The Twilight Zone: "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine." Ida Lupino plays Barbara Jean, a former movie star whose early-1930s heyday has long since passed. She spends her days sequestered in a screening room of her house, re-watching her own movies... and maybe doing more than that.  Patrick calls this the first "real" episode of The Twilight Zone. And he's right. It's great from beginning to end and has the first legitimately

Matt Stokes and Patrick Perot go through the third episode of The Twilight Zone: "Mr. Denton on Doomsday." A drunkard used to be the fastest gun in the west, but now all he cares about is the bottle. Actually, being the best shooter around is more blessing than curse. Really makes you think. Anyway, some kind of weird stuff happens.  This episode could use more Satan. "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" originally aired October 16, 1959; directed by Allen Reisner; written by Rod Serling; starring Dan Duryea,

Matt Stokes and Patrick Perot go through the second episode of The Twilight Zone: "One for the Angels." Ed Wynn plays Lew Bookman, a "pitchman." You know, a peddler. A huckster. A hawker. He sells toys, notions, and trinkets, or, as Larry Burns puts it, "If this stuff's too nice for ya, I've also got some crap." Bookman longs to make the world's greatest pitch and sell all of his wares to the most difficult mark. And he'll get his chance, and perhaps much more than he bargained for, when he meets

Matt Stokes and Patrick Perot go through the very first episode of The Twilight Zone: "Where Is Everybody?" An amnesiac wanders through a town, unable to find a single human being, but always feeling like somebody is just out of reach. Creepy! How well does this episode serve as an introduction to The Twilight Zone? How well does it stand on its own? And how much does it hold up now?  Plus, there's a lot of talk about the space race, the Cold War, and America's obsession with going to the moon