Number Twelve Looks Just Like You (The Twilight Zone)

Number Twelve Looks Just Like You is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.

and Collin Wilcox.

Details

Episode number:137

Season: 5

Production code: 2618

Original air date: January 24, 1964

Writer: John Tomerlin (credited to Charles Beaumont), based on Beaumont's story "The Beautiful People", first published in the September 1952 issue of If

Director: Abner Biberman

Music:stock

Cast

Marilyn Cuberle:Collin Wilcox

Lana Cuberle/Simmons/Doe/Grace/Jane/Patient/Number 12:Suzy Parker

Uncle Rick/Dr. Rex/Sigmund Friend/Dr. Tom/Attendant:Richard Long

Valerie/Marilyn (post-operation):Pam Austin

Synopsis

In a society of the future, Marilyn Cuberle chooses not to undergo the mandatory procedure called the transformation that happens to everybody at the age of nineteen. Nobody else can understand why she does not want to undergo the transformation. She is eventually forced into the transformation and she loses her identity.

Themes

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". This theme and Conformacy v. Non Conformacy was explored initially in The Eye of the Beholder.

Critical response

"The final season's "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You" (1/24/64), set in a future society where everyone is surgically altered to resemble fashion models, is the most insistent of anticonformist diatribia. If the teenage heroine's doomed rebellion against "the transformation" seems unneccesarilly strident, the viewer is still brought up short by the original midprogram commercial for "new mild Thrill dish detergent"- a gently waving forest of arms accompanied by the crooning suggestion "How would you like to buy a new pair of hands?" In the context of such shameless advertising ploys, in which doing a sink full of dirty dishes becomes the occassion for entering some Brave New World, Serling begins to seem like a living-room Bertolt Brecht.

J. Hoberman, excerpt from "America's Twilight Zone", published in Visions From the Twilight Zone by Arlen Schumer
References

Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion''. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)

Back to: The Twilight Zone, Episode List, Season 5

NodeWorks boosts web surfing!

Page Returned in 0.109 seconds - HTML Compressed 67.6%

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.