Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone was so influential that it not only inspired filmmakers to craft their own similar narratives, but it also inspired people to remake the series and some of its best episodes, as well. In fact, there have been three separate reboots of The Twilight Zone. Two years after Twilight Zone: The Movie elicited shrugs in 1983, there was the first reimagining. That series ran (primarily on CBS, like the original) from 1985 to 1989 for a total of 65 episodes. The second reboot aired from 2002 to 2003 on UPN, which amounted to a massive 43-episode single season. The most recent reboot, which was hosted and co-developed by Jordan Peele, ran for two 10-episode seasons on CBS All Access. That show, like Twilight Zone: The Movie, had a reimagining of the classic episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”
But that episode wasn’t the only one to see itself redone over the years. The 2000s reboot, which was hosted by Forest Whitaker, actually not only remade a pair of the original series’ most well-regarded episodes, it produced a sequel to one, too (specifically, a sequel to “It’s a Good Life” titled “It’s Still a Good Life”).
What Is the Original “Eye of the Beholder” About?
If “Eye of the Beholder” isn’t the most iconic episode of The Twilight Zone, it still ranks mighty close. It’s fully in line with “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” As just the 39th episode of the series (still within its first season), “Eye of the Beholder” was also an early sign that the show was quite capable of being as thoughtful as it was frightening.
We follow Janet Tyler, a woman lying back in a hospital bed with bandages fully surrounding her head. In time, we are told that this surgery is her eleventh attempt to acclimate to the society that surrounds her, one that deems her physically repulsive. But this is the society of a different time and a different place, one that is highly implied to be totalitarian in nature. She is only allowed eleven procedures and should this one prove to be a failure like the other ten, she’ll be sequestered to an area that is filled with people as hideous as she is.
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For the most part throughout the first two-thirds of the episode, we don’t leave Janet’s side. We feel her growing anxiety. And, all the while, we’re wondering just how bad she can look to warrant such trepidation, almost outright fear, from the staff. The doctor has a different outlook, he questions why physical appearance is such a big deal, at which point he is warned by a nurse that his words are treasonous.
Janet is eager to have the bandages removed, and finally, the sympathetic doctor complies. Slowly, they’re unwrapped from her head until we see what the doctor and nurses see. But, while they recoil in, respectively, disappointment and horror, we’re taken aback by her beauty. We don’t recoil until light is shown on the medical staff’s face.
The beautiful Janet rushes out of her room and tries to evade any number of gruesome-looking hospital staff until she stumbles into the break room. There she finds a handsome man named Mr. Smith, who escorts her to the area where she will be kept away from the more traditional-looking (in this society, at least, certainly not in ours) pig-snout people.
Whereas those behind the early aughts Twilight Zone shook things up a bit with their take on “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” they kept things pretty much verbatim with “Eye of the Beholder.” Even Whitaker’s bookending narrations are almost exactly what Serling had said.
The only real difference was that the impact of something like this is considerably lessened when done a second time without anything new to say. Specifically, the 2003 version has a 6.5 on IMDb, whereas the original series episode has a 9.1. Not to mention, even though the original version had aired over 40 years prior, the quality of makeup seemingly hadn’t improved much by the time the early aughts edition rolled around.
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