You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind,

a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.

That's the signpost up ahead. Your next stop, the Twilight Zone.

The...

...theircone. Throughout the history of fiction, there are examples of most unusual objects, objects that the protagonists find or are given or in the case of the episode that we'll be

discussing tonight steel these objects are sometimes hunted down other times they just

arrive in the hands of the character by chance. Often though it seems that the object finds itself

just where it needs to be to have some impact on the life

of the person who finds it, for good or for bad,

depending on who they are and how they use it.

In the horror film Hellraiser, the character of Frank, a man who has experienced all of the pleasures and perversions

that Earth has to offer looks for a puzzle box that can take him beyond those pleasures

and the pain that we know on earth.

The William Wymark Jacob's story, The Monkees Poor, is maybe one of the most famous unusual object stories.

It's the story of a couple who make three wishes on a mystical monkey's paw,

and the wishes are granted but the consequences

of those wishes are quite horrific now the interesting thing about these most unusual objects is

that if the character finds them in an antique shop or a junk shop or is given them by a shaman or buys it from a mysterious stranger

then we as the audience will usually accept that this object has some unusual power and we accept

that unconditionally we don't need to know where that power comes from we

accept that somewhere down the line it was created for some reason that we don't

know so this is probably why it's a very common storytelling trope it

...