I would replace the mediocre “Night Call” and “The Dummy” with “I Shot An Arrow Into The Air” and “Third From The Sun”
“I Shot An Arrow…” I think is the only Zone in which the ending is telegraphed by the title of the episode. Or as Mark Scott Zicree put it
“Any astronaut who crash lands on a body within our solar system that has the same atmosphere and gravity as Earth and doesn’t immediately realize he’s on Earth, had better go back to astronaut school.”
Night Call was written by the great Richard Matheson. I would hardly call it mediocre (although I prefer the short story’s original ending to the television version).
Somehow I never read the story (although now I want to find it), and mediocre might be a bit strong, but I still don’t think it deserves a place in the 10 best surprise endings.
It’s actually one of the first episodes I remember when thinking back on The Twilight Zone. It scared the living crap out of me as a kid. When I discovered Matheson’s immense body of work later in life, I devoured as many of his horror tinged stories as I could at first. He writes some creepy freaking stuff.
Now that I think about it, I think I do remember reading it unless I’m thinking of a different story. Is it the one that ends with the caller saying “I’m on my way over”, or something like that?
