6.5/10 Although marred by some slower, more boring episodes, season two of “The Twilight Zone” is a step up over the first mediocre season due to overall better episodes, slightly better writing and a continuation of a surprisingly high budget to work with. Season two has one of the most classic episodes of all time, “Eye of the Beholder”, which starts a little slow but has a terrific twist and payoff at the end of the episode. Other episodes which stood out as being inventive, creative and/or engrossing include but are not limited to “The Howling Man”, “Back There”, “The Prime Mover”, “The Obsolete Man” and the best episode of the season, “The Silence”. The overall quality was noticeably higher this season, making me want to binge watch the season and not stop between episodes. As stated earlier, since the budget remains high, the sets were diverse and looked great. There was more variety in terms of locations of where and in what time period episodes took place, which I enjoyed. We even get to see some famous actors in their early days like William Shatner and Burgess Meredith, who is best known as Mickey from the “Rocky” franchise. Host/narrator Rod Sterling carries the weight of the show on his shoulders as he writes the vast majority of these episodes, highlighting his artistic talent and true creativity. As for the cons this season, some of the costumes and make up have aged horribly and although that is completely expected and understandable, it doesn’t make up for how bad some of those elements look. Despite my mention of the talented Burgess Meredith, they have him act in two different episodes this season, which was more of a distraction since these are standalone episodes. It is one thing to have him act in separate seasons (he did one episode from season one), but having him act in two different episodes, separated by ten episodes, as two different characters was a strange call to make. Finally, some episodes were just awful due to either being boring, slow, having no characters to care about or a combination of all three. By far the worst episode of the season was “The Invaders”, which was very surprising since it was written by well renowned author Richard Matheson. Other lesser episodes include “The Whole Truth”, “Nick of Time”, “The Mind and the Matter”, “The Odyssey of Flight 33” and a couple others. Overall though, the show’s quality is really determined by the strength of the individual episodes and thankfully Sterling and his writing crew stepped things up this season compared to the show’s debut season. Let’s hope the show continues to move in this upward direction so much so that we may very well end up in…the twilight zone.
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