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The Twilight Zone original series Season five (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) Fall 1963 – Summer 1964 List of The Twilight Zone episodes

Episodes: In Praise of Pip Steel Nightmare at 20,000 Feet A Kind of a Stopwatch The Last Night of a Jockey Living Doll The Old Man in the Cave Uncle Simon Probe 7, Over and Out The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms A Short Drink From a Certain Fountain Ninety Years Without Slumbering Ring-a-Ding Girl You Drive The Long Morrow The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross Number 12 Looks Just Like You Black Leather Jackets Night Call From Agnes—With Love Spur of the Moment An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Queen of the Nile What's in the Box The Masks I Am the Night—Color Me Black Sounds and Silences Caesar and Me The Jeopardy Room Stopover in a Quiet Town The Encounter Mr. Garrity and the Graves The Brain Center at Whipple's Come Wander With Me The Fear The Bewitchin' Pool

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

• Episode number: 123
• Season: 5
• Production code: 2605
• Original air date: October 11, 1963
• Writer: Richard Matheson, from his story, first published in Alone by Night, 1961
• Director: Richard Donner
• Producer: Bert Granet
• Director of photography: Robert W. Pittack
• Music: Stock

• Bob Wilson: William Shatner
• Ruth Wilson: Christine White
• Stewardess: Asa Maynor
• Gremlin: Nick Cravat

Opening narration:

"Portrait of a frightened man: Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father, and salesman on sick leave. Mr. Wilson has just been discharged from a sanitarium where he spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown, the onset of which took place on an evening not dissimilar to this one, on an airliner very much like the one in which Mr. Wilson is about to be flown home - the difference being that, on that evening half a year ago, Mr. Wilson's flight was terminated by the onslaught of his mental breakdown. Tonight, he's travelling all the way to his appointed destination which, contrary to Mr. Wilson's plan, happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone."

Bob Wilson (William Shatner) is a salesman on a plane for the first time since his nervous breakdown six months ago. He spots a gremlin on the wing of the plane. Every time someone else looks out the window the gremlin moves out of view, so nobody believes him. Bob realizes his wife is starting to think he needs to go back to the sanitarium, but also, if nothing is done about the gremlin it will damage the plane and cause it to crash. Bob steals a gun and opens the window to kill the gremlin, succeeding despite the fact that he is nearly blown out of the plane himself. Although he is whisked away in a straitjacket, Bob feels confident that he will soon be vindicated—even lauded as a hero—because there is evidence of his claims: the unusual damage to the plane’s engine nacelle yet to be discovered by mechanics.

Closing narration:

"The flight of Mr. Wilson has ended now, a flight not only from point A to point B, but also from the fear of recurring mental breakdown. Mr. Wilson has that fear no longer, though, for the moment, he is, as he said, alone in this assurance. Happily, his conviction will not remain isolated too much longer, for happily, tangible manifestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even from so intangible a quarter as the Twilight Zone."

"Gremlins! Gremlins! I'm not imagining it, he's out there! Don't look, he's not out there now. He jumps away whenever anyone might see him, except me."

Richard Matheson writing in The Twilight Zone Magazine:

Of all the Twilight Zones I wrote, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” remains one of my favorites. It was well directed by Richard Donner, and I loved William Shatner’s performance. I still wish, though, that Pat Breslin had played his wife (as she did in the Twilight Zone episode “Nick of Time”), and I thought the monster on the wing was somewhat ludicrous. It looked rather like a surly teddy bear."

Rod Serling quoted in The Twilight Zone Companion:

Matheson and I were going to fly to San Francisco... It was like three or four weeks in constant daily communication with Western Airlines, preparing a given seat for him, having the stewardess close the [curtains] when he sat down, and I was going to say, “Dick, open it up.” I had this huge, blown-up poster stuck on the [outside of the window] so that when he opened it there would be a gremlin staring at him. So what happened was, we get on the plane, there was the seat, he sits down, the curtains are closed, I lean over and say, “Dick”—at which point they start the engines and it blows the thing away. It was an old prop airplane... He never saw it. And I had spent hours in the planning of it. I would lie in bed thinking how we could do this.

• This episode was spoofed in The Simpsons fourth installment of the “Treehouse of Horror” series, in the segment "Terror at 5 1/2 Feet". Instead of an airplane, the segment took place on the schoolbus where Bart had a nightmare just before he departed on the bus. The gremlin haunted Bart and nobody believed the gremlin was there but eventually the gremlin was thrown off the bus into the arms of Ned Flanders. Back at school, Bart was committed to a mental hospital for the rest of his life even though his claims were verified. Seeing a friendly face and thinking rescue had arrived, Bart received a shock when the gremlin held Ned’s head up to view.

• In 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, John Lithgow—star of the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun—plays the same character. References to the Twilight Zone are abound in the 3rd Rock from the Sun series. One episode of the series had Lithgow's character flying on a plane, but screamed in horror when he thought the plane engine was a monster since he had never flown on a plane. A later episode featured William Shatner as “The Big Giant Head”. Lithgow picks up Shatner at the airport and when Shatner mentions he saw something on the wing of the plane, Lithgow exclaims, “The same thing happened to me!”

• This episode was spoofed in a segment of "Balinese Slapping Fish", only the fish are atop the wing, who then begin slapping each other.

• On a brief parody, a Jhonen Vasquez comic entitled True Tales of Human Drama! about a man's paranoia of flying, shows one panel of him screaming "There's something on the wing!!"

• This episode was spoofed in the episode "Tryptophan-tasy" in the The Bernie Mac Show, where Bernie has hallucinations after eating his own personal undercooked turkey and enters a dream where Vanessa plays the gremlin on the wing of the plane and Bernie has to stop her.

• The episode is spoofed in the film Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls when Ventura (Jim Carrey) looks out the window of a plane and — speaking in William Shatner’s voice — claims he sees something on the wing.

• In Futurama, Fry and Bender are watching The Scary Door (a spoof of The Twilight Zone). The episode they see is a reference to "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and several others. A gambler is run over by a car and finds himself with a slot machine in front of him. He uses it twice then finds out that he is neither in Heaven nor Hell but on an airplane. “There’s a gremlin on the wing! You gotta believe me!” “Why should I believe you? You’re Hitler!” the flight attendant says as he shows the gambler a mirror where his reflection is Hitler. He begs Eva Braun for help, she doffs her head to reveal that she's a giant insect. Bender then states that he "saw it coming."

• A Johnny Bravo episode spoofs this episode. Instead of a gremlin, the antagonist is a clown. An animated spoof of William Shatner (wearing Star Trek gear) appears in the episode sitting before Johnny and catapulting out of the plane. At the end, after Johnny knocks the clown off, it is revealed that there was a clown on both wings, used to stabilize the plane. Johnny is given the task of stand-in stabilizing clown for the remaining flight.

• There is a song by Pop Will Eat Itself of the same name on the 1990 album Cure for Sanity featuring sound clips taken from the episode.

• A sketch on Muppets Tonight spoofed this episode. Miss Piggy spots a creature devouring the wing of the airplane she's flying on. She starts screaming until the camera pans out to show William Shatner sitting next to her as he tells her, "It's no use. I've been telling them that for years." He then offers her a copy of his autobiography.

• The metal band Anthrax has a video spoofing this episode. Instead of a gremlin, however, the William Shatner character looks outside to see the band playing the song Inside Out on the wing.

• This episode was also spoofed in a segment of the Tiny Toons Night Ghoulery special, in which Plucky sees a gremlin (whose appearance is based on the one Bugs Bunny fought in the Looney Tunes short Falling Hare) through the window as it straps a bomb to the wing. When he sees the gremlin struggling with a lighter to light the bomb's fuse, he opens the emergency exit and jumps out with a fire hose. The gremlin kindly asks Plucky for a lighter, and Plucky gives it to him, but then tries to spray the hose at the fuse. The scene cuts to the plane on the ground with a huge hole in its wing, and Plucky being taken away in a straitjacket as the segment ends. In reference to the original character being played by Shatner, Plucky plays the role as a parody of James T. Kirk, with the flight attendent clearly modelled on Uhura.

• In an episode of Angry Beavers, Barry Bear is thrown in the air and a voice is heard yelling: there's a bear on the wing! before an airplane is seen crashing down.

• The videoclip for the song "Something Beautiful" by the band Cauterize features a girl who boards a plane and in mid-air realizes that there is someone on the wing: in this case, the lead singer. Just as in the original, she becomes more and more agitated as no one believes her. In the end the evidence left is a hanging microphone.

• In the pilot episode of Dead Like Me, when the main character is on her first assignment as a reaper, a graveling is scratching at a train window. A terrible train accident follows soon afterwards.

• The Twilight Zone
• Episode List
• Season 5
• Flightplan

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

• TV.com episode page