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A young woman is forced to undergo experimental treatments in an attempt to make her appear “normal.”

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This episode opens with a shot of a lady laying in a hospital bed with comically large bandages covering her entire head. She talks with the nurse about what the day was like, as she is obviously unable to see anything, and when can the doctors take her bandages off.

The nurse tells her that the doctors are still trying to work out how to “fix her face”. The lady says that her face must look pretty bad and that she never really wanted to be beautiful¹.

When she speaks she sounds like she’s got a bucket of saliva swilling round her mouth giving that god-awful “wet” sound when people are talking. This is something that bothers me massively but I will persevere for this episode, but god DAMN.

The nurse says that considering how long the patient has had the bandages on, whether it takes two days or two weeks won’t matter.

We get a lot of shots of people without showing their face. The bandages patient, obviously, but the nurse is shown from the waist, and when her face is in shot it is hidden in shadow.

Here, the other nurse has her back to us and we get a nice flash of cigarettes².

The first nurse askes the second whether she has seen the face of the patient and she says that she has. She is apparently so hideous that if it were her she would have buried herself in a grave someplace. Harsh.

I mean … the obvious twist here is that the patient’s face looks totally normal, if not beautiful. We shall have to wait another 20 minutes for this to be revealed though.

Again there is another shot emphasising how you do not see anybody’s face.

After Rod Serling reminds us that we are watching The Twilight Zone and that the lady’s name is Janet Tyler, we return to the patient’s room where the doctor is talking to her about how warm it is. Ms Tyler says that she thought it was but, as she has a giant bandage on her head, she couldn’t be sure³.

The doctor makes some reference to the fact that she’s been here 9 times before, to which she responds that it’s actually the 11th⁴. He apologises for how difficult it is to fix her face, again only showing his back:

The doctors are only allowed to perform 11 experiments on ugly people, apparently, so this is Ms Tyler’s last chance. She pleads with the doctor to let her sit out in the garden and feel like a normal person.

If the treament this time doesn’t work, she can always go live in the ugly pit with all the other monsters.

“Stop being all emotional Ms Tyler, you ugly fuck, the state is doing all it can for you, you ungrateful bitch. You’re acting like I just told you I’m going to segregate you for the rest of your life or something.”

Ms Tyler flips her shit and tells the doctor that the STATE IS NOT GOD it cannot make ugliness a crime⁵.

The doctor agrees and starts unwrapping them from her face.

Ms Tyler would rather be dead than ugly⁶. The doctor says probably not, be he’s happy to throw her into a prison with other disabled people.

The last of the bandages fall away.

Ms Tyler holds her head in despair!

Ms Tyler is so disturbed that she has full make-up on and her hair done despite wearing a bandage on her head for almost her entire life that she tries to escape!

The medical staff are stunned at her ugliness.

While running hysterically through the hospital Ms Tyler runs into a representative from her ugly commune. The doctor tell her not to be afraid, and comments on how odd it was that she ran right into him⁷

~Fin~

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So actually this is one of the highest rated Twilight Zone episodes ever. I guess I started reviewing these at a high point in this series life.

I thought this episode was pretty good, even if the twist was entirely predictable. I am not sold on the premise that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Ms Tyler was obviously not an ugly person, and neither was that guy she met at the end.

It would have been more relevant if the guy she met at the end was your average 3/10 balding loser⁸, trying to get her to understand the rules of a heavy euro board game, or sit down to a Magic: The Gathering duel. Absolutely terrifying for an attractive woman.

There are other themes of authoritarianism, societal conformity, and the emphasis we place on the shallow superficial beauty that are running through this episode.

The Hitler-esque Leader on the TV screens is spewing out the facist rhetoric:

"...that there must be a single purpose, a single norm, a single approach, a single entity of peoples, a single virtue, a single morality, a single frame of reference, a single philosophy of government! We must cut out all that is different, like a cancerous growth! It is essential that in this society, that we not only HAVE a norm, but that we CONFORM to that norm! Differences weaken us! Variations destroy us!"

Sounds an awful lot like a eugenics-backed ethno-state.

This episode remains relevant a good 65 years after it was broadcast.

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19th September 2024