10 Awesome Sci-Fi TV Twists You Never Saw Coming
1. The Twilight Zone - The Monsters Are Already On Maple St (It's Us, We're The Monsters)
The grand-daddy of socially conscious sci-fi, Rod Serling’s
original anthology series The Twilight Zone has never been bettered or equalled
in its many subsequent revived incarnations—sorry Mr. Peele, but it’s not even
close this time.
The series wasn’t just famous for providing some iconic satire, though—the show practically invented the twist ending, or at least made it an enduring staple in television with its many extraordinarily clever reveals which managed to upend everything the viewer had seen until that point and forced them to reconsider the impact of their previous assumptions.
The Eye of the Beholder may be amongst the most iconic, but we’re picking the brilliant The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, with its searing socio-political undercurrents, for this list.
As a neighbourhood descends into slow burn chaos with neighbour accusing neighour of each being an extra-terrestrial invader in disguise, the mounting paranoia eventually boils over into a full scale riot—and that’s when we zoom out to reveal a pair of alien overseers observing this human capacity for prejudice and distrust, and eerily conversing about the ease with which they’ll be able to exploit it.
It’s a stellar scene, one which was impossible for audiences to see coming and which contained an unapologetic indictment of then-common McCarthyism—the sort of perfectly pitched twist only ever uncovered in… the Twilight Zone.