TONIGHT on ME-TV @ 12:35am EST, one of the GREAT episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE: “THE MASKS” (written by Rod Serling, directed by Ida Lupino, originally broadcast March 20, 1964) “Mirror Image” would be an apt title for Serling’s last great episode of The Twilight Zone, the 5th-season’s “The Masks,” because to the duplicitous characters wearing them, the macabre masks mirrored not their carefully coifed external appearances, but their shallow, insensitive, grotesque inner selves. The only Twilight Zone episode directed by a woman, the esteemed Ida Lupino (star of Serling’s first season “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine”), “The Masks” takes us to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, where family members in from Boston gather around their dying, wheelchaired patriarch with feigned concern, barely masking their greedy lust for their imminent, and immense, inheritance (of course, “Be careful what you wish for” was one of The Twilight Zone’s most reliable rubrics). In keeping with the carnival atmosphere, he forces them to wear the monstrous masks he’s selected for them until midnight—if they want his estimable estate. He assuages their initial revulsion by assuring them that the masks’ vulgar visages are the “opposite” of the vainglorious way they see themselves. Come midnight, and the old man gasps at his miserable masked offspring with his last breath, “You’re caricatures, all of you! Without your masks, you’re caricatures!” As they doff their masks, they gape, to their (and our) utter horror, that he was right—their faces have been permanently misshapen into the same masks they were wearing: their true faces. Serling’s script, though excessively wordy—the result of years of dictating his scripts into a tape recorder—is deliciously incisive, dissecting and disparaging each relation to their corrupted cores like a skilled surgeon. The magnificent, memorable masks were designed by Twilight Zone's master of makeup William Tuttle, creator of the equally-immortal pig-faces of the Twilight Zone classic, "Eye of the Beholder.” arlenschumer.com/twilight-zone #rodserling #arlenschumer #twilightzone #thetwilightzone #themasks #tv #television #tvhistory @dgareps https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn14ki6rbXO/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=