Having just watched this classic episode in preparation for showing it to my ESL students on Halloween, I was struck by how amazingly timely it is at our moment in history. If we think of the two alien figures as Bush and Cheney, and we equate the manipulation of electrical power in the show with the control of the flow of petroleum in 2008, this episode becomes a flawless allegory for our current world situation. Of course, some political parties -- which shall remain nameless-- seem to have learned better than others the utility of turning people against each other in order to gain or maintain power. It's tempting to say that "Monsters" has held up well over time, but the truth is that its themes held validity thousands of years before it was written. As Mr. Serling -- undoubtedly one of the true geniuses in the history of TV -- so aptly reminds us at the end, "the pity of it is...that these things cannot be confined to...The Twilight Zone!"
