Original Air Date: February 26, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: John Brahm
“It’s just that all sorts of queer things have been happening to me, I’ve been seeing things…”
“Mirror Image” is a wonderfully unsettling episode of The Twilight Zone. Who hasn’t ever wondered if there is an evil doppelgänger lurking somewhere out there? What person hasn’t experienced the strange sensation of deja vu? In “Mirror Image” a mischievous double counterpart plagues a young woman at a bus depot. Rod Serling came up with the idea for the episode while at the airport. He saw a man who looked just like him wearing the same suit and carrying similar luggage. Serling imagined the man with a face exactly like his own, as well. This notion of body doubles and evil twins can trace its roots to classic works of Germanic/Gothic literature, and perhaps the most famous occurrence of such a story can be found in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1839 tale “William Wilson.”
“Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes, not given to undue anxiety or fears, or, for that matter, even the most temporal flights of fancy. Like most career women, she has a generic classification as a, quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote. All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes’ shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes, who, in one minute, will wonder if she’s going mad.”
-Rod Serling
Millicent Barnes (played by Vera Miles of Psycho fame) is seated at a bus station in Ithaca, NY waiting for the next late arrival to Cortland. She asks the ticket agent about the schedule, but he curtly replies that she has already asked several times. She also notices a checked bag that is identical to her own. In complete bewilderment she asks nearby passengers and quickly ducks into the bathroom. One of the most memorable scenes in the episode takes place while she is in the bathroom. She looks in the mirror and sees herself quietly sitting on the bench. This is the first moment she begins to realize that she is not alone (this mirror sequence also alludes to the title of the episode).
“I remember reading it somewhere. Each of us has a twin in this other world. Two parallel worlds that exist side by side after the two worlds converge comes into our world, and in order to survive, it has to take over, replace us, move us out so that it can live. I can’t explain it, but i know that’s what has happened.”
When the bus finally arrives, she sees her doppelgänger already seated. Millicent flees in terror. A young man from Binghamton named Paul (played by Martin Milner) takes care of her, but he soon calls the police when he grows concerned for her mental state. After Millicent is taken away, Paul goes back into the bus depot to lie down –but he soon discovers that his own luggage is missing. He runs out the door chasing a man who turns out to be his own doppelgänger. His double calmly smiles at Paul and runs away. The “mirror image” curse has now fallen on Paul.
“Obscure and metaphysical explanation to cover a phenomenon. Reasons dredged out of the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained. Call it ‘parallel planes’ or just ‘insanity’. Whatever it is, you’ll find it in the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling
My Thoughts on “Mirror Image”
Wha an incredibly disturbing episode. The notion that we all have a counterpart –a doppelgänger– haunting our lives is a horrifying prospect, precisely because it is inexplicable. Is Millicent’s double evil? Or malicious? Answers are never really given. In “Mirror Image,” Rod Serling inserts an ancient folktale into the context of our soulless mechanical modern world –for example, contrast the scene of Millicent waiting in line at an ordinary bus depot, against the advent of a strange supernatural phenomena. This is the true essence of The Twilight Zone, making the ordinary seem extraordinary.
Credits:
- Director: John Brahm
- Written by: Rod Serling
- Music: Stock music from composers Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, Fred Steiner, Van Cleave
- Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
- Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
- Art Directors: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
- Film Editor: Bill Mosher
- Assistant Director: Edward Denault
- Set Decorations: Henry Grace and Budd S. Friend
- Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino
- Casting Director: Mildred Gusse
- Starring:
- Vera Miles…..Millicent Barnes
- Vera Miles (1930-present) also appeared in the first episode of Hitchcock Presents “Revenge” in 1955 as well as later in two Hitchcock Hour episodes. She remained a favorite of Hitchcock’s and was set to star in his seminal film Vertigo but she got pregnant, much to Hitchcock’s chagrin, and so she was replaced with Kim Novak. However, Miles starred in Hitchcock’s terror classic Psycho (and later Richard Franklin’s sequel Psycho II) and she also appeared alongside Henry Fonda in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, as well as in a couple John Ford movies alongside James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and John Wayne in The Searchers. She was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Kansas (later winning the 1948 Miss Kansas Competition). When she first came out to Hollywood, she was signed to Howard Hughes’s RKO Pictures and given a personal driver, Bob Miles. They quickly fell in love and got married, but Hughes was irate. He dropped Vera Miles as an RKO star and ordered that all his future drivers be homosexual from there on out. She was sold to 20th Century Fox but was dropped six months later. After divorcing her stuntman first husband, she married her Tarzan co-star Gordon Scott from Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle (1955) and they adopted a Korean War orphan together, but they divorced shortly thereafter. She then married actor Keith Larson (they had one son together) but after eleven years, Miles filed for divorce citing “extreme cruelty.” She married one more time and retired from acting, preferring a quiet life, though she was eventually divorced from her fourth and final husband. In addition to her film appearances, Miles was featured in many popular television shows such as Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Laramie, The Fugitive, The Outer Limits, Burke’s Law, The Eleventh Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Ironside among others. Amazingly she is still alive as of the time I write this review.
- Martin Milner…..Paul Grinstead
- Martin Milner (1931-2015) went on to costar as Todd Stiles in Route 66 before beginning his best remembered role as Officer Pete Malloy in in the police drama Adam-12. He and his wife had four children, she passed away of leukemia in 2004 and Martin died of heart failure in Carlsbad in 2015.
- Joe Hamilton…..ticket agent
- Joe Hamilton (1899-1965) appeared in a variety of shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Gunsmoke, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour among others.
- Naomi Stevens…..woman attendant
- Naomi Stevens (1925-2018) was an American character actress who began her career in vaudeville and radio before turning to television and film. She appeared in films like The Valley of the Dolls and The Apartment, as well as television shows like Have Gun-Will Travel, Perry Mason, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
- Bob McCord…..bus passenger
- Robert “Bob” McCord III (1915-1980) appeared in a variety of Westerns in addition to The Twilight Zone. He set a record for appearing on The Twilight Zone 75 times (mostly uncredited). He was known as “Bud McCord.”
- Terese Lyon…..old woman
- Ferris Taylor…..husband
- Edwin Rand…..bus driver
- Max Cutler…..bus passenger
- Tony Renando…..bus passenger
- Grace Rickey…..bus passenger
- Luke Saucier…..bus passenger
- Vera Miles…..Millicent Barnes
The Twilight Zone Trivia:
- In an interview for TV Guide, Rod Serling said he got the idea for “Mirror Image” from a publicity tour the previous fall in which he was sitting in a Cleveland, Ohio airport and noticed a person walking by carrying a bag similar to his own. From the back, the man carrying the bag also looked eerily similar to Rod, as well. His story apparently changed a bit over time but this was the general gist of it.
- Jordan Peele, a huge fan of Rod Serling, credited this Twilight Zone episode as the inspiration for his 2019 film entitled Us.
- “Mirror Image” was the final first season episode filmed before a brief respite in order to secure additional sponsors for the show.
- John Brahm was the most prolific director in The Twilight Zone series. The last episode he directed priot to “Mirror Image” was “The Four Of Us Are Dying.”
- Rod Serling explored the idea of ‘different parallel planes of existence’ again in the Twilight Zone episode “The Parallel.”
- Keen observers will notice that in the opening scene the LADIES room sign is deliberately blocked. “LA” is covered behind Millicent so that it reads “DIES.”
- Paul Grinstead mentions he is from Binghamton in this episode, another nod to Rod Serling’s hometown.
- The exact location of the bus station in this episode in not revealed, though it is likely somewhere in the Cortland, Binghamton, Syracuse region (perhaps Marathon or Ithaca). The cities mentioned in this episode (Cortland, Syracuse, Tully, and Binghamton) all lie along Hwy. 11 in central upstate New York (the region where Rod Serling was raised).
- This entire episode was filmed on Stage 25, the same stage that was used for Beechcroft’s office in “The Mind and the Matter.”
- William Self initially worked with Vera Miles for a 1953 episode of Schlitz Playhouse of Stars entitled “The Soil.” Instead of doing an open casting call, he simply offered her a few hundred dollars for the part, and he was surprised to learn that her studio (RKO Pictures and the briefly 20th Century Fox) had just dropped her after only four films in Hollywood since came to Los Angeles after being crowned Miss Kansas. William Self later referred Vera Miles to Rod Serling.
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Top 5 episode.
Especially thanks to a very good performance by Vera Miles.