Stopover in a Quiet Town

"**Stopover in a Quiet Town**"
"Stopover in a Quiet Town"
The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 5; Episode 30
Directed by
Written by	Earl Hamner, Jr.
Featured music	Uncredited
Production code	2611
Original air date	April 24, 1964
Guest appearances
	Barry Nelson: Bob Frazier ; Nancy Malone: Millie Frazier ; : Little Alien Girl ; : Alien Mother
Episode chronology
← Previous; "The Jeopardy Room"	Next →; "The Encounter"
	The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (season 5)
	List of episodes

"Stopover in a Quiet Town" is episode 150 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone starring Barry Nelson and Nancy Malone. It originally aired on April 24, 1964.

Opening narration[]

Bob and Millie Frazier, average young New Yorkers who attended a party in the country last night and on the way home took a detour. Most of us on waking in the morning know exactly where we are; the rooster or the alarm clock brings us out of sleep into the familiar sights, sounds, aromas of home and the comfort of a routine day ahead. Not so with our young friends. This will be a day like none they've ever spent – and they'll spend it in the Twilight Zone.

Plot[]

A married couple, Bob and Millie Frazier, wake up in an unfamiliar house. Millie remembers only that Bob drank too much at a party the night before, and that while driving him home, a large shadow appeared over their car.

They discover that the house is mostly props. The telephone has no connection, the cabinetry is merely glued-on facing, and the refrigerator is filled with plastic food. They hear a girl's laughter and go outside to find the child. However, once outside, they discover that the town is deserted. They find a stuffed squirrel, search for help in a vacant church, and ring the bell in the church's bell tower to attract attention. When no one comes, the increasingly desperate couple discovers even the trees are fake and the grass is papier-mâché. They hear a train whistle and, eager to leave the town, rush to the train station and board the empty train. As the train leaves the station (revealed to be in "Centerville"), they begin a lighthearted conversation, vastly relieved. However, when the train soon comes to a stop again in Centerville, they realize it has only gone in a circle, and they are back where they started.

They leave the train and begin walking out of town, once again hearing a little girl's laughter. A shadow falls over them, and they flee, only to be scooped up by the hand of a gigantic child. The little girl's mother says, "Be careful with your pets, dear--daddy brought them all the way from Earth." At her mother's bidding, the little girl drops the couple back into the town, which is now revealed to be a model village with a miniature railway running around it.

Closing narration[]

The moral of what you've just seen is clear. If you drink, don't drive. And if your wife has had a couple, she shouldn't drive either. You might both just wake up with a whale of a headache in a deserted village in the Twilight Zone.

Uses in other media[]

The episode is referenced in the second verse of the Rush song "The Twilight Zone", recorded in 1976: "You wake up lost in an empty town/Wondering why no one else is around/Look up to see a giant boy/You've just become his brand new toy."

This Twilight Zone episode is referenced in the sixth episode of the fourth season of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Inmate counselor Healy mentions the episode to the paranoid prisoner Lolly to convey that he understands that she confuses fantasy with reality in much the same way as Healy's mother did.

The episode plot is also loosely seen in season one, episode 22 of Pokémon. In the episode titled "Abra and the Psychic Showdown!", Ash loses to a mysterious and dangerous psychic gym leader named Sabrina. Upon his loss, Ash, Misty, and Brock are shrunken to doll size and find themselves in Sabrina's toy model home, where Sabrina proceeds to antagonize them. Ash and his friends are only saved when Sabrina's disguised father uses his psychic abilities to teleport them back to the real world.

Lorcan Finnegan and Garret Shanley's Vivarium (2019), in which a couple played by Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg becomes trapped in a deserted housing development, contains multiple references to this episode; in both, a couple is trapped in an artificial environment, ending up right back where they started when they try to get out.^[1]

References[]

^ Dawn Keetley, "Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone, Horror Homeroom, April 5, 2020, http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/vivarium-rewrites-the-twilight-zone/

DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0
Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0

External links[]

"Stopover in a Quiet Town" at IMDb

[1] Dawn Keetley, "Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone, Horror Homeroom, April 5, 2020, http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/vivarium-rewrites-the-twilight-zone/

[1]

v t The Twilight Zone (1959) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgment Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"
Season 5	"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"