The Twilight Zone: The Hitch-Hiker (1960)
Season 1, Episode 16
7/10
Road to nowhere
27 October 2019
It's only natural I suppose with a show like this to attempt to second guess the twist at the end and just occasionally I guess it right. So it was with this episode starring the sadly ill-fated Inger Stevens as a young woman on a road trip across America, who after a roadside recovery man repairs a tyre blow-out for her, telling her in passing just how lucky she was, then keeps seeing a shabbily dressed old man beckoning her to give him a ride. The funny thing is no one else can see him and no matter how far she gets in her journey, he's always there, thumb-raised, waiting for her at the next stop.

I doubt I was the only one to predict the outcome here but even if the rest of it did seem a little padded at times, especially her encounter with a young sailor whom she unnecessarily attempts to proposition just to keep her company, it was still spookily entertaining most of the way through.

Miss Stevens makes for a credible damsel in distress in what was pretty much a one-hander in an episode which made me think of later films like Spielberg's "Duel" or "The Vanishing" which inhabit similar territory. A well up-to-standard episode.
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