Every week, we’re going to review an episode of Rod Serling’s classic sci-fi/horror TV series “The Twilight Zone“. We’re starting from the beginning and we will be working our way through every episode the original series offers. You can see all the reviews right here.
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” – Directed by Ron Winston
Broadcast Date: March 4th, 1960
Before I continue this “Twilight Zone” column, I wanted to say thanks to Jon for always being really helpful when I came to him with questions. He’s a great writer and I know he’ll go on and do great things. I’m picking up this column from where he left off. However, I’ll be writing weekly instead of daily. So let’s jump right into the deep end!
My first experience with “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” was in middle school language arts class. We had one of those literature books with a variety of chopped up stories from pop culture. I was excited as I entered one of my first experiences with science-fiction in literature.
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is the 22nd episode of the first season and was written by Rod Serling himself. It focuses on a street in the suburbs of some midwestern state where everyone knows their neighbor and no one locks their doors. One sunny day on Maple Street while folks are enjoying the day, a dark shadow engulfs the street. During this strange occurrence, all the electricity and machinery cease to work. After the darkness passes and everyone’s appliances are working again, the street converges to discuss what’s just happened.
Tommy, the neighbor boy, tells the adults a story from his comics. He describes aliens who visit a street following a power outage. Upon hearing this, the street becomes awash in paranoia. As the neighbors begin turning on each other, we see how easy it is for a person to flip from the harmless guy you wash your car with to an actual alien from outer space.
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone. – Closing narration by Rod Serling
It’s fitting that I pick up with this particular episode at the beginning of a new year. This year many are hoping for a better 2017 and to forget 2016 altogether. But this year we start our country out on a very different note than from the past eight years. This episode melds into today’s rhetoric of “trust no one”. I think as a society we are destined to repeat the same things over and over. This is a common theory and I think because of it, we get writers like Serling who become scared of what they see repeating around them. So they create these stories that will continue to be shared as cautionary tales. We’re lucky to live in a time in where we have such easy access to TV and other mediums.
Clearly, this episode fits in with Rod’s primary message that stretches on through the entire original series. His despair at the way racism was so carelessly regarded in the United States at the time permeates through the television screen. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is one of the most recognizable episodes the series has to offer and I think that’s exactly what Rod would want.
