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.

Your next stop, the Twilight Zone.

And one of the things they do sometimes is to categorize the Twilight Zone episodes into

the types of experience that they give you. Previously I think I've spoken about what they call

Tales of Dread, which they define as a narrative fantasy about an event in which a character is

punished in a manner that is appropriate. The punishment fits the crime and is mortently humorous,

for example. And the writer says that they call them tales of dread, because they mandate that the audiences entertain paranoid or anxious imaginings,

specifically, that the universe is governed by an all-knowing and controlling intelligence

that meets out justice with diabolical wit.

I think we can all easily think of some of those episodes that would fit into that category.

The recent Death's Head Revisited is one such story.

But although this is a recurring type of Twilight Zone,

our journey has shown us that not all episodes are like

that. The episode that we'll be discussing tonight isn't really like this at all, but it

might fall into the category of what the writers of that book call frame shifters. And they don't quite define frame shifters in a nice, bite-sized paragraph.

They actually break them down into various subsections.

But an element of all of these subsections is a surprise ending.

Now some frame shifters like the breaking of Henry Beamer's glasses at the end of time enough at last

don't necessarily cause you to look back at what's happened previously in the episode in a different way.

But then you take something like I of the beholder where once you know the

surprise what leads up to it will forever be a different experience on repeat

...