Breaking Barriers In Rod Serling's 'Twilight Zone'

Holly Bender

5/2/2023

Prof. Quattlebaum

Science Fiction

Breaking Barriers in Twilight Zone “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension—a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone,”. This is a quote that has echoed in thousands of television screens for the past sixty years. Originally broadcast for the entertainment of viewers that tuned in to these echoing televisions, Rod Serling’s magnum opus had a much deeper purpose than to entertain.

Instead, Serling intended to break barriers in television; to discuss topics considered taboo in the mass media. It

After being displaced by the myriad of returning men from world war two, a large margin of women returned quietly to domestic life. This, however, was not the case for some independent-minded women (Getchell). Serling caters towards these masses with his employment of many actresses in his show, however some activists did not believe this to be enough. Addressing his criticism, he approaches his viewers on the tail-end of one of his first episodes,

The morals in this episode are very clear, especially when describing the main character, “He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time, he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis... he walked the Earth without a heart.” (Serling, “Death’s-Head, Revisited”). In this description, Serling makes it known that there should be absolutely no sympathy for this man, or for any other man that may share his ideals, and consequently gives the character an ending fitting to his crimes; torture until death. Through the influence of his personal religion, The Twilight Zone broke barriers by discussing