How I Found a Martian in a Diner in the Twilight Zone

I don't know how many times I've seen this episode of the Twilight Zone.  It's not important anymore.  I see it now on Hulu once a week, at the very least.  I haven't learned the dialogue yet, but I'm close.

It was my favorite episode when I was a child in the 1980s.  Our relationship with TV was very different back then because we couldn't demand anything.  We watched what was on, and what was on was chosen by hidden people, and no requests could be made.  Watching anything in reruns was a crap shoot; we never knew which episode of the Twilight Zone would come up.  It was frustrating, but thrilling all at once.  When a favorite episode came up, we would be thrilled and the day became special.

Twilight Zone was one of the very few shows that received a marathon.  Usually at Thanksgiving or New Years, channel five in LA would run twenty-four hours of Twilight Zone.  It was that popular.  I think only Gilligan's Island or I Love Lucy could claim such a distinction as a marathon.

As I said, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up" was a favorite.  It wasn't the best of the episodes, and it certainly wasn't the deepest.  Two state troopers need to figure out which person of eight people might be a Martian.  The ending is silly fun, and the moral somewhat bleak: events are inevitable, including very terrible ones.  

So why my obsession?  Tight, smart writing.

• This could be put in the catalog of Locked Room Mystery.  The action is restricted to one room, a set number of people, and there are no alternatives that can come from outside.  This is a very difficult form of writing and when it's good, it's really really good.
• It has story elements for which I have an affection when it comes to mysteries: snow, a diner in the middle of nowhere, a group of strangers, aliens, stranded travelers, even a tiny romance between strangers in a terrifying situation.  All of these things add mystery and questions.  Nothing can be trusted and there is danger in the natural world as well as the psychological world.  No one really knows what is going on.
• The characters are smart, including the women.  One in particular, a professional dancer named Ethel, comes up with an intelligent, logical tactic in discovering the Martian.  Twilight Zone made women, smart women, the center of many episodes  and this was one of the ways I discovered as a child that women could be interesting and the focus of a story.
• The ending has a stunning twist.  Seriously, even if you can figure out who the Martian is, and it can be evident if you really look hard at the characters, the ending still is a mind fuck.
• The ending is bleak as fuck.  Seriously, Rod Serling didn't give a fuck about making everything happy and rosy and tied up cleanly.  His philosophy is that people are fucked, either from internal problems or outside forces.  God bless him.   In the 1980s on television, especially with the heavily sugar coated Cosby Show leading the television pack, we needed something dark.  As a kid learning how to write, I needed exposure to a varied world.  How else was I to understand life, or even the dark things happening to me?