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Showing posts with the label Rod Serling

Explanation Unravels

  There are lots of stories in various media that follow this pattern: 1. Something spooky happens. 2. Someone (the story's rationalist) explains it, perhaps with the help of a surprising twist. The spooky thing has a natural explanation.  3. Finally, the twist is retwisted, the explanation comes unraveled. We are left with the initial spookiness.  This was a common template in the old Rod Serling Twilight Zones.  Here is a single example of which I have a memory both indelible and vague. A notorious bad-guy cowboy comes into town, and goes to a cemetery on a dare. He dies standing on a gravesite. It is the plot, we soon learn, of a man whom this newly departed hombre had murdered years before. Ah, spooky ... could the dead person have reached out from beyond the grave and killed him? Looks like it: but ...  The town rationalist has an explanation. Lots of townspeople are standing around the scene of the suspicious/spooky heart attack while the rationalist expla...