Number 12 Looks Just Like You
(Season 5, Episode 17)
“Given the chance, what young girl wouldn’t happily exchange a plain face for a lovely one? What girl could refuse the opportunity to be beautiful? For want of a better estimate, let’s call it the year 2000. At any rate, imagine a time in the future where science has developed the means of giving everyone the face and body he dreams of. It may not happen tomorrow, but it happens now, in The Twilight Zone.”
Eighteen-year-old Marilyn Cuberle doesn’t want to be like everyone else. She just wants to stay exactly the way she is, and not change a single thing. The problem is, however, that her future society “heavily encourages” everyone to undergo an operation to look exactly the same as everyone else. When Marilyn tries to explain to her family why she refuses the operation, nobody understands why. Their society proudly states it helps make everyone happier by eliminating beauty standards, but Marilyn argues it also takes away your identity.
By far one of the most spine chilling conclusions to occur on a Twilight Zone chapter, despite Marilyn’s pleas to her friends and family that she doesn’t want the operation, she’s forced to undergo one anyway. Tricked into entering an operating room, and subsequently detained by the hospital personnel, Marilyn’s fate is sealed. When she emerges post surgery, not only are her defining facial features completely gone, but her personality that vehemently revolted against the practice has magically vanished. She not only looks like everyone else around her, but now she also thinks like everyone else too.
In psychology, this is essentially the “2+2=5” principle. To explain, if you were magically dropped into a reality where everyone believed 2 and 2 was 5, despite the fact that you knew without a doubt 2 and 2 was 4, you would eventually break down and start believing it was 5 just to be a part of society again. The twist here, however, is that while Marilyn didn’t choose to accept 5, or in her story “the surgery,” society chose for her. -Donald Strohman
Do you have a favorite episode of The Twilight Zone we missed? Be sure to comment with your own picks of the best that The Twilight Zone had to offer! If you haven’t seen a single episode yet, 1: What’s the matter with you? and 2: Go binge watch it on Netflix immediately!
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