Number 12 Looks Just Like You

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Twilight Zone original series Season five (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) Fall 1963 – Summer 1964 List of The Twilight Zone episodes
Episodes: 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

“Number 12 Looks Just Like You” is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.

Suzy Parker and Collin Wilcox in “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”

Details

Episode number: 137
Season: 5
Production code: 2618
Original air date: January 24, 1964
Writer: Charles Beaumont and John Tomerlin, from Beaumont’s story “The Beautiful People”, first published in the September 1952 issue of If
Director: Abner Biberman
Producer: William Froug
Music: Stock

Counter-clockwise from top left: Uncle Rick, Dr "Sigmund Friend" (Dr Sig), Dr Rex, Tom the orderly, all of whom chose number 17.

[edit] Cast

Marilyn Cuberle: Collin Wilcox
Lana Cuberle/Simmons/Doe/Grace/Jane/Patient/Number 12: Suzy Parker
Uncle Rick/Dr. Rex/Sigmund Friend/Dr. Tom/Attendant: Richard Long
Valerie/Marilyn: Pam Austin

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Opening narration:

"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 when science has developed a means of giving everyone the face and body he dreams of. It may not happen tomorrow--but it happens now in the Twilight Zone."

In a society of the future, Marilyn Cuberle chooses not to undergo "The Transformation", which happens to everybody at the age of nineteen and makes them beautiful and immune to disease.

Many years before, wise men decided to try to eliminate the reasons for inequality and injustice in the world. They saw that physical unattractiveness was one of the factors that made men hate, so they charged the finest scientific minds with the task of eliminating ugliness in mankind. As they learned to reshaped the features and remove the body, they also learned to elimate most of the causes of illness, and thus to prolong life. Before "The Transformation" a person could expect to live 70 or 80 or perhaps 90 years, but with "The Transformation" a person can live two or three times that long. "The Transformation" must be performed when the body and the tissue are at the proper state, which is at nineteen years old.

Nobody else can understand why Marilyn does not want to undergo "The Transformation", but the reason is this: by reading her deceased father's diaries and books (banned in that time), she comes to realize that when everyone is beautiful no one is because without ugliness there can be no beauty. That the leaders of society don't care whether people are beautiful or not, they just want everyone to be the same. In a fit of despair she eventually undergoes the procedure and loses her identity, as it is revealed "The Transformation" also alters a person's personality.

Closing narration:

"Portrait of a young lady in love – with herself. Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future – which after all, is the Twilight Zone."

[edit] Critical response

J. Hoberman, excerpt from “America's Twilight Zone”, published in Visions From the Twilight Zone by Arlen Schumer:

The final season’s “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”, set in a future society where everyone is surgically altered to resemble fashion models, is the most insistent of anticonformist diatribia. If the teenage heroine’s doomed rebellion against “the transformation” seems unnecessarily strident, the viewer is still brought up short by the original midprogram commercial for “new mild Thrill dish detergent”—a gently waving forest of arms accompanied by the crooning suggestion “How would you like to buy a new pair of hands?” In the context of such shameless advertising ploys, in which doing a sink full of dirty dishes becomes the occasion for entering some Brave New World, Serling begins to seem like a living-room Bertolt Brecht.