Will the Real Ending Please Stand Up?

Think of your favorite Twilight Zone episode. Can you imagine a different approach to the story? Alternate dialogue? How about a new ending? Probably not. The best TZ scripts are so perfect, it seems as if they were conceived exactly as they were filmed.

And yet, even some of our favorite episodes went through some changes along the way. Some are fairly cosmetic, but others … well, consider how Serling originally planned to end “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”

Oh, it was still the same who-is-it, everybody-perishes-but-the-two-aliens story we have now. But as I read the version of the script printed in Volume 9 of “As Timeless As Infinity: The Complete Twilight Zone Scripts of Rod Serling”, I noticed a very interesting change: Serling had planned to show us that the two aliens were actually working together.

The lead-in to that final scene is familiar: the bridge is declared safe, everyone leaves, then Ross (the impatient man late for an alleged meeting in Boston) comes back, and tells Haley, the counterman at the diner, that everyone went into the water.