Thoughts from the Twilight Zone IV

I continue to push through season 1 of the Twilight Zone, searching for novel ideas and inspirations. Here are some interesting new ones: Sin Eater sightings in the Hitch-Hiker, time travel trouble in the Last Flight, and a larger horror story forming in Mirror Image.

Season 1: Episodes 16-20

I’m skipping a few more stories here either because there is nothing truly supernatural about them (The Fever) or because they don’t do anything interesting with the premise (The Purple Testament).

The Hitch-Hiker

A woman notices a strange hitchhiker following her as she drives across the United States.

After a long stretch of uninteresting episodes (including most of this episode), I finally encountered a new idea. The twist is hinted heavily at the beginning of the episode. She’s dead. She died before the story began when her tire blew out and she crashed her car at the start of her trip.

But what I find interesting are the implications of the hitch-hiker and the nature of her journey. The man doesn’t quite come across as Death himself, just another traveller, one that has been journeying longer than her. Is he looking to mentor a fellow ghost (for a Wraith setup)? Or is he going to help bring her back to life for a price (for a Geist game)?

The journey is also interesting. Is it a dream? Or are the sailor, the gas station attendants, and the mechanics all “real”? The mechanic might have “fixed” her car days after her accident (with the skid marks still fresh). Is she moving in and out of our world (and the Twilight Zone)? Perhaps she has become a phantom driver crisscrossing the country. Or perhaps she is now a Sin Eater with the thin gray scarecrow of a man as her Geist?

The Last Flight

A cowardly WWI pilot from 1917 lands in 1959 and learns to face his fears.

At first glance I thought this story was too tidy but then I started to think of how the protagonist travelled through time. The strange silent cloud sucked up at least two pilots according to his tale. Who knows how many more got time lost? In a TimeWatch (or other time travel) game, the PCs might need to scramble to track the cloud down through time, fixing the damage it caused as they go. Where did it come from? What or who created it? Can it be stopped?

Elegy

Lost astronauts land on a cemetery planet running since before World War III. They find its inhabitants frozen at the moment they would most like to spend eternity in. Unfortunately for them, they wanted most to be on their rocket about to go home.

This plot and its murderous caretaker interests me. I could see adapting it for lost time travelers (who must escape being frozen at their happiest moment in a far future ‘heaven’) or as a weird Dead Dominion in the Underworld (where all the ghosts enjoy eternity and the living are made to join them by a kindly Kerberos).

Mirror Image

A woman looking to catch a bus instead finds a doppelganger out to steal her identity.

This episode leaves many interesting questions unanswered. Is the bus station a way station for these doppelgangers? The caretaker asks how the woman got to the station which raises the question “where is here?”

With multiple doppelgangers appearing in the story and at least some of the originals being taken away by the police, is there an asylum of doubles out there?

The Doppelgangers seem better informed about what they are. How did they get here? Are things better here? What are they escaping?

As for gaming, World of Darkness: Urban Legends includes this very plot, minus the creepy mirror realm that these being seem to come from. Another option for the Chronicles of Darkness would be for the doubles to be spirits or other intruders slowly replacing humanity like some sort of pod people. In TimeWatch, the doppelgangers might be survivors of a disaster in an alternate timeline, stealing across to our reality.