June 5, 2023

Spoilers

“The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”

I loved this episode.

“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” was excellent from beginning to almost end. There was no much in this episode, clearly taking shots at the McCarthy hearing and how people were seeing Communists all over the place.

“Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 P.M. on Maple Street.“

“This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment –before the monsters came“

Something flew over Maple Street. The people who lived on this street thought it might have been a meteor. However, everything stopped working. No lights. No cars. No machinery of any kind. Nothing would start or turn on.

Why? No one was sure and they were nervous. When an imaginative child brought up an idea of the ‘meteor’ was in actuality a space ship and that the child had read a story about how monsters from outer space would infiltrate a community to set up for the landing.

The people dismissed the idea at first, but it got inside their minds and the paranoia of the situation started to rot their attitudes. They began blaming individuals on being guilty, with no evidence and even less reality.

It devolves into violence as one of the people is shot because they thought it was a monster coming out of the darkness.

The accidental death did not calm the tensions. In fact, it only triggered the people into chaos. I loved how this episode showed how human beings can react to rumors and innuendo, becoming mob-like.

Now, I am not sure I loved the very end of the episode where we see that this whole situation was being manipulated by aliens from a space ship, what had actually flown over the street. I would have preferred to have left that reveal a mystery. I don’t think that was necessary.

However, that did not take away from how much I loved this episode. It may be my current favorite episode of the series.

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices… to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill… and suspicion can destroy… and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone“