Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone is one of television’s evergreens, as pertinent today as it was when it premiered in 1959. Pop culture has changed a great deal since then, and the show cannot help but remain a product of its time as well as a classic that never gets old. Among its numerous fascinating qualities, The Twilight Zone provides a look at what people were watching in the early 1960s, which many of its episodes reflected as part of their commentary.

That includes a thick helping of Westerns, which were staggeringly popular at the time, and which dominated network television when The Twilight Zone originally aired. Accordingly, a number of episodes from the anthology series use Westerns as part of their storytelling. Most of them take on the aspects of a campfire ghost story, which lends itself well to tales of the Old West. A list of the 10 best Western episodes follows, with all of them taking the genre in new and surprisingly different directions.

10

“The 7th Is Made Up Phantoms” Chases Down History

A 5th Season Entry Is All Mood, No Purpose

“The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms” can be best described as an exercise in mood, which is about the only thing it gets right. It concerns a trio of National Guardsmen on maneuvers near the site of the Battle of Little Big Horn, where George Custer led troops of the 7th Cavalry into a massacre. The Guardsmen find their paths overlapping with the 7th’s, and become convinced that they can prevent its outcome.

The episode arrived during The Twilight Zone’s final season, when Serling himself admitted to creative exhaustion and many of the scripts reflected a dearth of ideas. “The 7th” suffers from a lack of direction, and having established its premise, it doesn’t know where to go with it. It also treats the Little Big Horn like a tragedy instead of a blunder, which hasn’t dated well at all.

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9

“Showdown with Rance McGrew” Is Serling’s Anti-Western

The Episode Parodies TV Westerns of the Time

Serling himself didn’t think much of the Westerns of his era, concerned mainly with their sloppy assembly and general lack of quality. The airwaves were clogged with them at the time, and while a few still stand out, the bulk ranged from mediocre to terrible. In fact, after The Twilight Zone was canceled, Serling created a highly acclaimed Western, The Loner, which was itself canceled after only one season.

“Showdown with Rance McGrew” is his measured attack on the genre’s worst clichés. It concerns the self-important star of a hit TV Western who irritates the real legends of the Old West with his self-aggrandizing script changes. They send Jesse James down to straighten him out, leading to some rather extreme course corrections that will presumably doom the show. The episode itself is fair-to-middling at best, with a limp sense of humor and some badly dated digs at 1960s TV Westerns. It does give a good impression of the kind of C-list television The Twilight Zone was created to rise above.

8

“Execution” Brings Time Travel to the Old West

Fate Won’t Be Cheated, Not Even by Science

The Twilight Zone was still perfecting its formula during the first season, and “Execution” reflects that rawness. Its ironies are subtler than the most famous episodes in the series, and its script contains a few noticeable plot holes. A scientist uses his freshly invented time machine to pull an Old West outlaw out of the noose and into the 20th Century, without necessarily considering the consequences. The episode serves largely as a meditation on human nature, whether we’re ever truly capable of becoming civilized, and the quiet way that fate will not be denied no matter what the century.

It also involves two reasonably familiar faces. The more recognizable one is Russell Johnson, who is best known as The Professor on Gilligan’s Island, and who starred in another memorable Twilight Zone episode, “Back There.” The other is Albert Salmi, a veteran character actor who has a ball playing the time-displaced outlaw overwhelmed by the then-modern 1960s. He appeared in two other episodes of The Twilight Zone, opposite future luminaries Leonard Nimoy and Julie Newmar.

7

“Mr. Denton on Doomsday” Gives the Town Drunk His Moment

Redemption Is the Theme in an Early Entry in the Series

The Twilight Zone benefited from an abundance of onscreen talent, and many notable actors on their way up delivered memorable performances on the show. With “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” it’s Martin Landau, playing a bullying cowboy who loves picking on the town drunk. The titular Mr. Denton is a former gunfighter who has fallen on hard times, and gets a boost from a mysterious peddler, who sells him a magic potion that he claims makes him unable to miss.

The episode serves largely as a character study, with Denton meditating on the cost of taking a life, and the finale more of a fitting redemption arc than an ironic comeuppance. Like a number of The Twilight Zone’s Western episodes, it depends on its tall-tale tone to succeed, which works admirably enough in his case. If Denton’s speech about why he started drinking sounds familiar, there’s good reason: Gene Wilder’s Waco Kid deliberately parodies it during a similar speech in Mel Brooks’ classic genre send-up Blazing Saddles.

6

“Dust” Tackles Questions of Justice and Racism

The Fable Qualities Are the Point

The Twilight Zone always engaged in social issues with the very best intentions, but with sometimes problematic results. It touches on the issue in “Dust,” though it indulges in undue stereotyping in the process. The episode is intended as a parable about humanity’s ability to find its better angels. A young Latino man is convicted of running over a little girl with his wagon while drunk, and is sentenced to be hanged. An unscrupulous hustler sells the man’s father a bag of “magic sand,” which he claims will turn the mob’s hate into love.

At the moment of the hanging, the rope breaks sparing the young man, and the girl’s parents decide that God has intervened. Feeling baffled at how it could have happened, the hustler decides that the dust must have been magic after all and gives the money he made on the dust to the poor children of the town. The episode never answers whether it was truly some supernatural incursion, and as Serling would say, it doesn’t matter. Its hopeful ending is rather naive, but the Western setting provides enough fairy-tale qualities to sell the message.

5

“Still Valley” Brings the Devil to the Civil War

The Confederacy Gains an Infernal Partner

The Twilight Zone’s Civil War episodes struggle with outdated concepts, with the war framed as a blameless tragedy rather than a fight to end slavery. This isn’t the case with “Still Valley,” which makes the war’s moral compass abundantly clear. A Confederate scout arrives in an occupied town to find the Union soldiers frozen in place. An old man claims that he did it with a book of witchcraft, and that — by revoking the name of God — the scout can do the same thing with the whole Union army.

The dilemma carries the episode, as an ostensibly good man has to confront the true cost of the cause he’s supporting. The finale is a trifle inelegant, but the build-up works quite well. More importantly, the message is direct: the Confederacy needed to die and stay dead, and it’s delivered with a clarity that was sadly more uncommon than it should have been.

4

“A Hundred Yards Over the Rim” Brings Hope to a Pioneer

The Time-Travel Story Is an Optimistic Outing

Westerns often made a good fit for time-travel stories in The Twilight Zone, since costumes and other trappings could be easily obtained. In the case of “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim,” it sends the leader of a small band of 19th century pioneers into the 20th century. Low on provisions and with a desperately sick son, he comes across a then-modern diner along a stretch of highway in the desert he’s been struggling to cross. Everything he needs — from water to penicillin for his son’s fever — is there at his fingertips, with the locals uncertain why it’s such a big deal.

The episode saves its big visual twist for the opener, rather than the close, as the protagonist steps over the titular ridge to see a row of power lines. The remainder elegantly sets up the cause-effect paradox, which is gentle, but carries a nice sense of satisfaction with it. Cliff Robertson shines in the lead, with both an Oscar win and comic book immortality as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben still awaiting him.

3

“Mr. Garrity and the Graves” Is a Late-Inning Sleeper

An Underrated Gem Marks The Show’s Final Weeks

“Mr. Garrity and the Graves” tends to slide under the radar when it comes to discussing The Twilight Zone’s best episodes. It arrived toward the very end of the series’ run, when creative fatigue was setting in and strong episodes were becoming far less common. It has a few plot holes to dodge around, though they suggest a much larger scenario rather than deflating the one presented. It’s supposedly based on a real incident, though Serling adds the twist that it’s clearly begging for.

The titular con artist arrives in an Old West town, whose residents are much happier with the outlaws, bullies, abusive spouses, and other undesirables all safely tucked away in the local cemetery. Naturally, they profess otherwise, until Mr. Garrity promises to restore their “loved ones” to life, and delivers a decent bit of smoke and mirrors to convince them he can. The stinger is that he really can, despite the fact that he himself thinks it’s all a hoax. Though there are some questions raised, the episode ends on a genuinely chilling note, and nails the ironic sting that the series sometimes struggled with in its final season.

2

“The Grave” Makes a Perfect Ghost Story

The Story Plays Like a Campfire Tale

In his promotional lead-up the week before its premiere, Serling described “The Grave” as “one for rainy nights and power failures,” and he couldn’t be more accurate. The story minimizes the moralizing and meditations on human nature in favor of a pure ghost story, designed to build a creepy atmosphere that pays off with a memorable whiplash of an ending. As Serling notes, the story takes place after the typical ending of a Western, with a notorious outlaw gunned down in the street and a frustrated bounty hunter arriving a few days too late. Amid accusations of cowardice, he takes a bet to plant a knife on the outlaw’s grave at midnight, despite a threat that his quarry will rise from the dead and claim him if he does.

It’s essentially a giant game of chicken, but writer-director Montgomery Pittman baits his hooks with exquisite skill. It doesn’t hurt to have Lee Marvin (one of the genre’s most famous tough guys) in the lead, and Pittman readily sells the idea that even someone like him might think twice before disturbing certain men’s graves. It doesn’t look far past the whiplash ending, but it really doesn’t need to. “The Grave” is a small masterpiece of technical storytelling and one of The Twilight Zone’s very best episodes.

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1

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Adapts a Classic

It Was the Only Twilight Zone Episode Produced by Someone Else

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is unusual in that it wasn’t produced by The Twilight Zone. It’s a 1961 French short film, written and produced by Robert Enrico and based on the story by Ambrose Bierce. The film was awarded Best Short Subject at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 1963. Serling provides his opening without entering the drama itself, as he usually does.

Enrico presents a haunting and surprisingly accurate rendition of Bierce’s dreamlike text, seen from the point of view of a Confederate saboteur as he is about to be executed by Union troops. He appears to escape, seemingly by the hand of Fate, and wanders a dreamlike landscape in an effort to return home to his wife and children. The film earns every one of its accolades, and Serling is canny enough to simply get out of its way and let it do its work. The series has simply never been better.

The Twilight Zone is currently streaming on Paramount+.