The Twilight Zone, S1E21, "Mirror Image"

Opening: Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes: not given to undue anxiety, or fears, or for that matter even the most temporal flights of fantasy. Like most young career women, she has a generic classification as a, quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote. All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes’s shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes, who, in one minute, will wonder if she’s going mad.

This is one of the show’s finest, most exquisitely nerve-wracking horror episodes. It crafts exactly the kind of terror that can expertly insinuate itself into your nightmares, and its portrayal of an ordinary life suddenly and without warning straying into the strange is pitch-perfect Twilight Zone.¹

Before I get into anything else, I want to compliment the setting. Both the cavernous bus depot and the bleak, wet darkness of the small hours of the morning are tremendously evocative, and they both come across as in-between places not quite grounded in reality. Right from the start, it sets up a foreboding atmosphere that augurs nothing good.

Millicent Barnes is played by the great Vera Miles, who achieved film immortality in a variety of major roles (and starred in the first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, relevantly to us). She’s always good, and she’s at her best here. I also love whatever wardrobe person decided to put her in that velvet cloche. It’s beautiful, and it enhances how visually distinctive she is—which makes her doppelganger all the more noticeable and unsettling.

It’s always effective when the banal turns brazenly illogical but somehow still stays banal, and this episode is the perfect example of that. Reality is fracturing and doubling, but Millicent is still in a bus station, dealing with a touchy ticket agent and all-too-conscious that she’s raising her voice. You can easily imagine yourself in the same situation, and what would you do? What would anyone do, if they kept being told that they had just done things they had no memory of doing? If they looked in a mirror and saw two reflections? I can quibble with some of Millicent’s exact actions—after the suitcase’s first vanishing act, I would be sitting with it on my lap and my arms wrapped around it—but not with her emotional response.

She starts off with confidence and justified defensiveness, sure of her own perceptions and experience—why is the ticket agent (Joe Hamilton) saying she’s already asked about the bus? She’s done no such thing! Surely he’s just being difficult and unfair. In fact, he seems like exactly the kind of crotchety type who would be snappish with a young lady asking questions. So it’s one unreasonable ticket agent … but then she sees her suitcase, or what looks exactly like her suitcase, parked behind his desk.

That changes things. It doesn’t matter that at this point she can still see her own suitcase beside the bench, too—a fixed point of reality that won’t last for long—because a note of doubt has made its way into her mind. In horror stories like this, it’s hard not to feel that to some degree her sensitivity to the world around her makes her more vulnerable, as if a less curious, less attuned person would simply refuse to register the plot happening around her. In this case, it might be true. Stealing Millicent’s life isn’t just a matter of beating her to the bus to Cortland, it’s also about psychologically terrorizing her until she breaks down, until the “girl with a head on her shoulders” ends the episode inaudibly protesting as she’s shoved into a car and driven away. She’s out of the episode, out of the picture—and she may soon be out of reality entirely.

It’s as if bus depot ordeal has tenderized her, making it easier for the double to eat her life up. There’s a real “And When the Sky Was Opened” vibe here: whatever hospital the police take her to, I don’t think she’ll be there—or anywhere—for long.

All this terror and disorientation is incredibly effective. It’s aided by the supporting cast, especially Joe Hamilton and Naomi Stevens², who plays the washroom attendant; they’re both such ordinary, familiar figures that they perfectly counterpoint the encroaching strangeness. The two real gut-punches come from her standing in the washroom and seeing her doubled reflection, with another Millicent sitting on the bench outside, and her seeing herself already sitting on the bus. Both are pulled off perfectly—and are better technically constructed than the double-shot of Paul at the end—and they’re earned by all the more subtle, teasing build-up beforehand.

There’s nothing wrong with Martin Milner’s Paul—and Milner himself had an impressive TV career³—but he does herald the less impressive part of the episode. (“Mirror Image” was one of the inspirations for Jordan Peele’s Us, and it passed on its unfortunately talky third act along with its superb uncanniness.) We don’t need Millicent recapping the plot to Paul, and we don’t need her delivering a monologue about parallel universes (or at least not such a long one). I feel like the possibility of different planes of reality colliding is clear without a lengthy explanation, but to be fair, I have several more decades of science fiction to draw from than the show’s original viewers. I’ll grant that this may have seemed less clumsy and more necessary at the time. And this speech is, at the very least, nicely complicated by Serling’s outro, which more or less says that the science fiction here is just a futile attempt to make sense of the horror. There’s something beautifully uncanny about the episode trotting out an explanation only to undo at the end, bringing us back to the mystery.

Paul’s scenes do have some gems.⁴ I love that he’s the nice, earnest guy who asks a pretty young woman what’s wrong and, when he gets a Twilight Zone plot related to him as an answer, he has the expression of someone who’s realizing he’s in way over his head: “This one’s tough to figure out.”⁵ I also like the ticket agent asking suspiciously if Paul has “a thing about sick people”—a laugh-line that’s very welcome in the relative grimness of the episode’s back-half. (In that same exchange, the ticket agent also gets a recurring Serlingism: “Unasked, I’ll tell you what I think.”)

Paul’s main job in the episode is to be kind and wrong. He really does try to help Millicent, and he doesn’t back away from her even when he realizes that she could be suffering from delusions. He voluntarily misses his bus to look after her after she faints. He gently tries to get her to consider more realistic, less “metaphysical” options.

He’s a good guy … and he’s completely wrong, does horrific damage, and ends the episode almost as fundamentally destabilized and overtaken as Millicent. He’s been part of an almost dystopian scene of a woman being shoved into a police car with no discussion or verification—he’s orchestrated a well-intentioned kidnapping, more or less—and then he’s seen himself flee into the night, smiling and wild-eyed, carrying his stolen suitcase. All he can do now is eventually stop running and look around, searching for an answer that isn’t going to come.

Closing: Obscure and metaphysical explanation to cover a phenomenon. Reasons dredged out of the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained. Call it ‘parallel planes’ or just ‘insanity’. Whatever it is, you’ll find it in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: John Brahm

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”

1. Which makes it funnier that it’s actually quite like “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. ↩︎
2. Stevens was an incredibly prolific character actress who often filled a story’s “busybody mother” or “Old World landlady” niche: you can catch her in The Apartment and many, many other movies and shows. ↩︎
3. Adam-12 and Route 66, in particular. But for me personally, he’s best-known for this and Sweet Smell of Success. ↩︎
4. For one thing, he gives a little shout-out to Binghamton, Serling’s chosen hometown! ↩︎
5. It’s the inverse of my favorite line in “Little Girl Lost,” which we’ll get to in time. ↩︎