The Only Episodes Without Rod Serling’s Iconic Ending Line

In “The Twilight Zone,” the twists always come at the end. Our protagonists — soldiers, criminals, salesmen, astronauts, movie stars, and more — spend the majority of the episode wondering exactly what the hell is going on, only for Rod Serling to serve up a curveball of epic, sometimes shocking proportions at episode’s end. The series invented and perfected plenty of classic TV twist ending tropes, but it also featured some less guessable twists, like the circumstances surrounding “Five Strangers in Search of An Exit,” or the bait-and-switch conclusion to “The Invaders.”

In a few rare cases, though, the most surprising part of “The Twilight Zone” comes even later on, when Serling himself closes out the show with his signature concluding sign-off. As the show’s creator, head writer, and host, Serling was our guide through the strange and uncanny place he dubbed the Twilight Zone, and he often appeared on screen to usher us back to reality, drawing a dividing line between the show’s haunting, science fiction and fantasy-fueled world and our own. He did this by shoehorning the phrase “The Twilight Zone” into nearly every episode ending, closing things out by either reassuring us that the episode’s horrors couldn’t happen to us, or in the case of moralizing episodes, reminding us that they already have.

In exactly seven instances, though, Serling doesn’t invoke the name of the series in his closing monologue at all. It’s unclear why he skips over the title tie-in in these cases, though in several cases he moves the name drop to the opening monologue instead. Others take place in the first season when the show was no doubt still ironing out its kinks. Still, the title’s absence is a small shock every time, and these alternate monologues almost always make the story we’ve just seen feel a little bit weirder without the expected closure.

An early episode of the series based on a short story by George Clayton Johnson, “The Four of Us Are Dying” features a straightforward but cool premise. Harry Townes plays Arch Hammer, an incredibly named con man with a secret superpower: he can change his face. When Arch sees a person’s likeness, he’s able to assume it, and he uses the talent to live a life of crime and evade capture. The episode doesn’t dive into what made Arch this way, but it ends with him dying on the ground, flickering through the faces he’s captured as the life leaks out of him.

There’s no known reason why “The Four of Us Are Dying” doesn’t include the signature “Twilight Zone” mention in its sign-off, as Serling still delivers a pretty verbose monologue. “He was Arch Hammer, a cheap little man who just checked in. He was Johnny Foster, who played a trumpet and was loved beyond words,” Serling says, going through all of the con man’s identities before concluding, “all four of them were dying.” Perhaps this is a situation where squeezing in the Twilight Zone mention would have meant cutting some of the episode’s lengthy introduction, which helped provide context and synthesize Johnson’s story.

The most disturbing entry on this list comes later in season 1, in the immortality tale “Long Live Walter Jameson.” This is one of a few episodes in the show that deals with the concept of immortality, and one of the best to do so. In it, a man discovers that the professor (Kevin McCarthy) his daughter intends to marry is immortal, having been granted eternal life – but not invulnerability – from an alchemist a couple thousand years ago. Written by author and frequent “Twilight Zone” contributor Charles Beaumont, the episode is contemplative and emotional, full of existential ideas about the limits and drawbacks to living forever.

In the end, the immortal professor is shot by a jilted lover, and he ages and turns to dust on the floor. The haunting final moment in which his horrified fiance is told that his empty clothes are full of “dust, only dust” is made all the more upsetting by Serling’s failure to delineate between this story and the real world. Instead, he ends with a deeply depressing thought on mortality, one that doesn’t include the typical reassuring reminder that this is all just in the Twilight Zone. “Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end,” Serling morbidly concludes. Comforting!

Christmas specials are known for breaking the rules of TV reality (plenty of otherwise grounded shows have had a “Santa-is-real” plot), so it’s no surprise that one of the episodes in which Serling doesn’t mention the Twilight Zone by name is a holiday special. Season 2’s “The Night of the Meek” follows a drunken department store Santa Clause named Henry (Art Carney) whose fortunes turn around when he’s granted a desperate wish to be able to bring joy to the needy.

In uncharacteristic fashion, the episode ends happily, with Henry handing out toys from a magical bag and eventually being promoted to full-time real-life Santa. Serling closes out the episode with a sweet declaration that “there’s nothing mightier than the meek,” shouting out “all the children of the twentieth century, whether their concern be pediatrics or geriatrics, whether they crawl on hands and knees and wear diapers or walk with a cane and comb their beards.”

There’s a simple reason the Twilight Zone shout-out wasn’t at the end of the episode: it’s at the beginning instead. When we first meet Henry, Serling introduces his sad background, then says that the episode will be made up of “one part the wondrous spirit of Christmas and one part the magic that can only be found… in the Twilight Zone.” Perhaps Serling wanted to mention the show’s name up front this time around, for any younger viewers who might be tuning in for the holidays. 

Years before writing the short story of the same name, Ray Bradbury penned the script to the season 3 episode “I Sing the Body Electric.” The story concerns a robotic grandma (Josephine Hutchinson), and it’s the type of big-brained speculative fiction Bradbury was known for. It’s also got a big heart; the story ends with the robot grandma being promised a sort of karmic path towards organic life, in which she can meet other nice grandma robots and keep working towards a promotion into real human consciousness.

Once again, the Twilight Zone name drop is likely only absent from the end of the episode because Serling included it in the opening sequence instead. This time around, it’s a corny joke about the way no one can replace your mother. “They make a convincing pitch here,” Serling says in reference to robotics company Facsimile Ltd during the first scene. “It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good — except, of course, in the Twilight Zone.” The ending monologue is just as sweet, with Serling imagining that somewhere out there, there could be “an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love.”

The third “Twilight Zone” episode to front-load its title reference is the season 4 outing “He’s Alive.” In this case, it seems likely that Serling moved the more gimmicky part of his speech to the episode’s opening so he could better drive home its dead-serious point at the end. “He’s Alive” is what might better be remembered as the show’s Hitler episode, an hour-long fable that imagines a rising neo-Nazi being influenced by the hellish spirit of the Führer himself, which grows stronger with every hateful word his companion spouts.

The episode’s young villain is played by a fresh-faced Dennis Hopper, and along with the story’s potent message, his performance makes “He’s Alive” one of the best episodes from the show’s sluggish fourth season. Its opening monologue mentions “a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone,” while its fiery closing monologue is one of the show’s best-ever. “Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare?” Serling asks. “Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town.”

Serling goes on to hammer the point home with a sense of moral conviction that seems impressive in today’s bleak, post-truth political landscape. “Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being,” Serling says. “He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.” It’s a stellar mic drop that would’ve been lessened by a shoehorned Twilight Zone mention.

One of the weirder, more mythical episodes of “The Twilight Zone” ends not with Serling’s voice at all, but with the repeated refrain of a folk song that’s central to its plot. Season 4’s “Jess-Belle,” written by “The Waltons” creator Earl Hamner Jr., tells the story of an Appalachian woman whose brokenhearted love spell comes with an unusual price. When Jess-Belle (Anne Francis) asks a witch to get her ex back from his current beau, she’s cursed to turn into a leopard each night, a transformation that makes her more animalistic and less tenderhearted each time it happens.

“Jess-Belle” isn’t great: it has a lot of interesting ideas and mythology swirling around, but the hour-long format doesn’t suit the story, and even with its considerable runtime, audiences are still left with several questions. It’s a sort of half-formed fairy tale, and it suffers more without Serling’s guiding words to end it. He once again mentions the Twilight Zone in the opening narration here, noting that it “has existed in many lands in many times,” but there’s no clear moral or theme to this supposed cautionary tale. Instead we’re left with a familiar tune, and the words: “Fair was Elly Glover/Dark was Jess-Belle/Both they loved the same man/And both they loved him well.”

The last “Twilight Zone” episode to play around with its monologue structure is the season 4 outing “On Thursday We Leave For Home.” Like the other post-season 1 episodes listed here, the Twilight Zone name isn’t actually absent from the entire episode, but is instead moved to the front of it. “This is the Twilight Zone,” Serling says plainly after setting the scene for a space-set story about former Earthlings poised to return to the planet for the first time in decades. It’s an exposition-heavy introduction to an episode Serling himself penned, and with more time to spare in the expanded episode runtimes of the fourth season, it seems likely that the writer figured he had the space to switch up the format.

The episode itself concerns a group of former residents of Earths (and a significant amount of kids born off-earth) who are given the opportunity to return to their home planet. The group’s leader, William Benteen (James Whitmore), is skeptical of the idea, especially when he finds out the close-knit community plans to split up and live in different states – outside of his jurisdiction. In a cleverly constructed ending, Benteen paints a negative picture of earth that fails to get his constituents to stay, but he ends up deciding to stay off-planet himself. His gambit doesn’t work, as everyone leaves him behind, and he realizes he made the wrong decision only after he’s left abandoned on a now-empty planet.

Serling ends the fun but not particularly weighty episode by noting that Benteen’s ability to lead “became a habit, then a pattern and finally a necessity. William Benteen,” he continues, “once a god, now a population of one.” It’s the perfect spot to add in a Twilight Zone reference, but it’s not there, leaving viewers hanging with yet another episode that ends without its most famous signature. It’s a surprise twist in structure that can only be imagined in … the Twilight Zone.