User Reviews

Professional dancer Liz Powell (a fine and credible performance by Barbara Nichols) gets sent to a hospital to recover from exhaustion. While at the hospital Liz suffers from a disturbing recurring dream about going down to the hospital morgue.

Director Jack Smight ably builds plenty of tension as well as crafts a potent atmosphere of sheer dread. Nichols makes for a strong and sympathetic protagonist; she receives sturdy support from Jonathan Harris as a skeptical doctor, Fredd Wayne as amiable agent Barney Kamener, and especially Arlene Martel as a sinister nurse ("Room for one more, honey"). Rod Serling's compelling script culminates in a startling conclusion that neatly prefigures the "Final Destination" films. The dynamic cinematography provides a certain raw crackling energy. A solid and spooky show.

This is one of the scariest, most nerve-wracking episodes in the series. It is genuinely frightening and will affect you on a visceral level. It's done so well that it's actually discomfiting to watch. It borrows its seminal idea from a segment in the 1945 English horror entry "Dead of Night", but that's where the similarity ends. The episode goes down a different path entirely and has its own unique character and identity. While paying homage to its earlier predecessor, it stands alone quite well. Some of the other reviewers have criticized the fact that it was shot on videotape, claiming that it detracts from the quality of what we see on screen. However, this reviewer feels that it does exactly the opposite. It's an asset, not a liability. Filming it on videotape actually provides a documentary -like feel to the production, enhancing the realism and the shock value.

We are introduced to the character of Liz Powell(BARBARA NICHOLS), a professional nightclub dancer who has been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion and fatigue brought on by overwork. She has been experiencing a recurring nightmare for the past six nights, which she claims is not a dream, but an actual waking occurrence. Her Doctor, played in a suitably creepy and sardonic manner by JONATHAN HARRIS, refuses to allow that it's anything more than a bad dream caused by her fatigued mind playing tricks on her.

This "dream" unfolds in an exact chronology each time. She is in a fitful, restless semi-slumber and awakens feeling very thirsty. The bedside clock is ticking loudly and as she reaches for a glass of water, the glass slips out of her hand and shatters on the floor. She then hears the sound of squeaky footsteps outside her door, such as that made by a nurse in rubber-soled shoes. She goes over to the door, opens it and sees a nurse in the elevator across the hall as its doors close. The nurse is standing motionless, her face in shadow and her hands clasped at her chest. The elevator goes to the basement and Miss Powell follows it down. She does this in fear and trepidation, knowing what she's going to see. But she appears unable to resist the compulsion that seems to be drawing her there. She exits the elevator in the basement and walks down a corridor, which branches off to the right. She stops in front of a room- Room 22- which is the hospital morgue. The doors are swinging shut as if someone had just gone inside. All of a sudden, the door swings open and a nurse appears. The inference is that it's the same nurse who was in the elevator. The nurse is beautiful but has a sinister air about her. Definitely not Florence Nightingale. Beautiful but spooky. She is played by ARLENE MARTEL, billed herein as ARLINE SAX. She looks right at Miss Powell and utters five words. Five words which cause Miss Powell to run screaming in fright. MARTEL is only seen on screen three times for a few seconds each. And each time she says the same five words. The way she says it and the look on her face will send chills down your spine. Her voice sounds like it's coming from the grave.

Now the 'red herring" in this episode occurs when the Doctor is speaking in private with one of the staff nurses. Although convinced up to that point that Miss Powell had been dreaming the whole thing, he is nonetheless puzzled over the fact that she mentioned going down to the basement to Room 22 and identifying it as the morgue. Since patients are not allowed down there and do not have access to it, how would she know what room it was and what it contained?

It is MARTEL's performance in this episode which helps to make it so memorable. Even though BARBARA NICHOLS received top billing as the lead actress, it was MARTEL who stole the episode. And she did it with style. She was absolutely perfect. In her brief time on screen, she definitely proved that less is more. I remember being badly frightened by this episode when I originally saw it. And all these years later, it still frightens me. It's not until the end, in the last scene, that we are given to realize who this nurse really is. Serling at his best. Definitely a nail-biter. 10 out of 10.

I'm not sure if Serling wrote this or adapted it. It does have such a shockingly effective twist in it, that it seems like it must've been adapted from some classic story, but the twist employs modern technology, (or tech of the 20th century - an airplane). Perhaps it could derive from a classic fable about travel, but Serling was masterful at merging ancient fables with modern themes and scenarios.

Regardless, the episode weaves nightmares, premonition, madness and death all into a tight package that is superbly acted by one main female lead, and two other supporting characters. Maybe the fact that so much of it occurs in the head of one person is why it is so disturbing.

I saw this episode, like many, as a teenager, and it just creeped me out for years. Just remembering it creeps me out, and I have not felt this effect from hardly any other horror piece. The fact that this is done with no blood and guts says worlds about the quality of the writing. Suspense is also not really a factor, except that you know she will repeat her nightmare and seems powerless to correct it. That right there implies a loss of sanity.

The elements of the nightmare are creepy, the repetition of the nightmare that the patient can't control is creepy. The hospital setting is creepy. The way the patient is drawn to a basement morgue, where a nurse comes out in a shocking manner, and says the crassest awful thing possible 'Room for one more, honey' is, of course, the creepiest thing about the whole episode - you think....

Then the fact that the patient gets a tentative grip on her sanity, but immediately loses it as her nightmare morphs into her real life in a different setting. and it proves to actually be a life-saving premonition has got to be be the most shocking and unexpected twist of all time.

There simply is no way to see it coming, because it is so unrelated to the build of the entire episode. The lead actress conveys her total mental unhinging, but in this situation, who wouldn't lose their mind? In that sense, the lead character never has a chance, even though her life is saved, but what about her mental state afterwards? She has literally lost her mind by the end. We aren't witness to her recovery, or understanding and joy that her nightmares saved her life.

She is alive, but at what price? I think this episode strikes subconscious fear over madness, and the power of dreams to harm us, as much as help. It speaks to the tenuous state of the mind overall, and that's why it has such a visceral effect on the viewer.

Serling wrote some incredible episodes, and this one is in the top five for me, more horror than his other thought-provoking work, but then Twilight Zone really was about horror as much as sci-fi.

You hear stories of premonitions and wonder what could possibly explain an event that someone saw ahead of time. Then there are examples of people who missed a plane that wound up crashing and killing everyone on board. That idea is given thoughtful consideration in 'Twenty Two', placing an overworked and stressed out dancer at the center of a story where she's confined to a medical ward with her sanity in question. I have to say, when Liz Powell (Barbara Nichols) first encounters the morgue nurse (Arlene Martel) with her "Room for one more, honey", you'd be hard pressed to hear a more blood curdling scream in the history of film; it goes right through you.

This episode is like one of those time travel stories where events in the past find a way to unfold just the way they originally did despite the best attempts of someone to alter an outcome. This one however directs the viewer's attention to something about to happen in the future, even though we're not anticipating it at the time. The creepiest part of the story is the way Martel's character shows up at various points, and simply utters those five chilling words as if inviting one to their doom. That it turns out to be a warning is revealed in the finale, leaving one subliminally afraid of elevators and swinging doors.

Though it's not one of the best Twilight Zone episodes, 'Twenty Two' ranks up there as one of the most memorable ones. It has that haunting quality that stays with you because of the characters and situations. And a nagging fear that someday you might be booked on Flight 22.

Professional stripp—dancer, Liz Powell (Barbara Nichols), is in the hospital nursing bad "dreams" (she considers something more than that) while her anxious agent (Fredd Wayne), ready for his prize client to get back to the go-go stage, and sleaze-bag doctor (Jonathan Harris of Lost in Space), always giving off that unnerving staccato giggle, try to convince her to snap out of it. But could this recurring nightmare be something similar to a premonition. What is it with the elevator, the nurse, the morgue with the number 22 at the top above the door, and that unsettling comment, "Room for one more, honey"? Video cheap production usually robbed this great show of its magical power during the six tasked with such burden, but I think in the case of this episode, "Twenty Two", it is enriched by the "soap opera" stylistics. There is just this mood that the night sequences have, the dread that domineeringly compounds Nichols and the hospital's corridors. Arlene Martel (T'Pring, Spock's would-be bride in "Amok Time") is well cast as the sinister night nurse Harris and his staff insist doesn't work at the hospital, later seen as the stewardess offering Powell the chance to board the plane for Miami, quite the harbinger of doom, forwarding a smile that seems to say she knows what lies in wait, what will happen, how Powell will respond, and yet enjoys to see her scream. The video quality is rough but interestingly it seems to give the episode something extra this go-around, not typical with most of the others enduring this cheapjack process to save some bucks. The characters in the episode aren't exactly a wholesome lot, with Powell often ogled or spoken of in objectifying terms, with subtle comments and a bit of innuendo to boot. The agent just wanting her out of the hospital to make him his 10% commission and the doctor suggesting she upset the apple cart regarding the repetitive order of her dream so it will all end do little to heal her mind of its effects. A glass breaks, the clock ticks, the hall leads to Martel, and Powell is offered "room". Echoes of "Dead of Night" (1945) are here, for sure, but "Twenty Two" is its own spookshow. Good twist even if it might seem familiar now after the use of premonitions throughout 50 years of television and movies since it premiered.

This was one of those episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE that were shown on Friday, July 4th on the Science Fiction Station. The episode dealt with a classic horror tale that keeps going around the world as urban myth, and will probably still be doing so 100 years from now, along with the alligators in our urban sewers.

Barbara Nichols is Liz Powers, a successful nightclub dancer-performer, whose agent Barney (Fredd Wayne) has just signed her up for a nice new gig in Miami. But she is suffering from overwork, and needs bed rest. While in the hospital she starts having a recurring nightmare where she is aware that it is dark as night, but the clock reads 8:10 P.M. She hears nothing. She reaches for a glass of water and it falls and breaks. No nurse comes in so she goes out to investigate. She sees a nurse all the way down the hall going into a room. She follows and finds it is the hospital morgue. The nurse (Arlene Martel) reappears and faces her with an attractive but sinister face. "Room for one more honey?", she says. Nichols feeling she is confronting great evil lets out a piercing scream, and the next thing she knows she is being held down by another nurse and the hospital doctor (Jonathan Harris) on her bed.

This happens three nights in a row. Harris tries to reassure Nichols that there is no reason for her to have this fear - he shows her the night nurse (Norma Connelly), who does not look at all like the figure in the dream. Nichols really is not convinced, and finds that her agent is not really good in helping her feel any sense of relief either. Then Harris suggests something to Nichols. In all three of her dreams the pattern remained the same - vary it: Don't reach for the glass of water.

Nichols, still dubious, goes to bed, and again, at 8:10 P.M. she wakes. She almost reaches for the glass, but remembers what Harris suggested. Instead she decides to smoke a cigarette instead. But in putting the lighter down on the table, she knocks over the glass again. She decides to see if her varying the situation has any effect. She walks down the hall, and again the entire dream plays out with the sinister nurse. She is seen screaming as Harris gives her a sedative injection. But in the course of her screaming she does say something that Harris is puzzled about. She mentions "22", and Harris knows of a Room 22 that the patients never see.

SPOILER COMING UP:

Nichols leaves the next day. She is looking forward to the Miami gig. She reaches the airport and is given her ticket, and then learns that she is booked on flight 22. This is unsettling, as is the fact she notices the time is now 8:10 P.M. She walks somewhat unsteadily and knocks into a woman carrying a vase with flowers, which she causes to fall and break. Suddenly Nichols is really getting frightened, as key events of that dream seem to be reoccurring in a different setting. An airport employee points out that her plane is getting ready to leave. Nichols stumbles down to the ramp up to the plane's entrance, and a stewardess is there - it is Martel, and smiling the same way she asks, "Room for one more honey?" Nichols screams and runs down the ramp and back to the main building of the airport.

A moment later the plane bursts into flames before a horrified Nichols and the others in the building.

TWENTY TWO was one of six TWILIGHT ZONE episodes that were shot on video tape, and it certainly adds an "odd dimension" to the viewing pleasure of it. Because of the fuzzy quality of the episode's appearance it makes the turmoil of Nichols' apparent mental breakdown more effective. But it also reminds us of the live television that was so much a part of the 1950s, and of which so much is now lost or missing. In particular watching Nichols deepening fears get realized, and the growing uncertainty of the intelligent skeptical Harris, we are lucky to see them almost as if they were freshly performing in front of us. Wayne too is good as a nice fellow who really can't make out what is going on with his client and friend, but blunderingly keeps trying to move on. And Martel does the most with her limited appearances in the episode.

The episode was based on an anecdote that Bennett Cerf put into one of his anthologies. But it may seem familiar to viewers of the film DEAD OF NIGHT, when in the first episode of the film a racing car driver is recovering in a hospital and has a recurring nightmare where he awakes at a given time, looks out the window and sees a hearse driven by Miles Mander dressed as an undertaker, who looks up at the patient and says, "Only room for one more, Sir!" In the end the racer, after he leaves the hospital, almost boards a double decker bus and sees the conductor is Mander, repeating, "Only room for one more, Sir!". Wisely he does not board, and watches in horror as the bus (in avoiding a collision) falls off a bridge. I have seen the anecdote appear in collections of "odd but true" books frequently. I don't care if it is really a false story - it is a damned good one.

I agree with everyone who says that this episode gave them nightmares. It is one of the few Twilight Zone episodes I'm actually afraid to watch. There's something inexplicably real and convincing about it, that makes the audience identify with the terrified patient.

Partly, sound is used to really eerie effect. The bit that gets me the most is when Barbara Nichols leaves the room, sees the shadowy figure of a nurse standing in the elevator with the door closing, and then follows to the room she dreads. There is something incredibly frightening about that, and it works every time, no matter how many times you might have watched this episode.

The part that everyone always talks about is the strange nurse, whose startling beauty and welcoming smile are in utter contrast to whatever ghoulish, ghastly creature one might imagine would come out from behind the door to beckon "Room for one more, Honey". Arline Sax aka Arlene Martel, appears in a number of late Fifties to mid-Sixties television shows, including Perry Mason, The Outer Limits, and even The Monkees. Her exotic looks usually saw her cast as a sinister temptress of some kind, but one of her best roles is a sweet, blonde seamstress working in a decrepit building, where she ends up with Robert Culp hiding from pursuing aliens. ( "Demon with a Glass Hand"), Outer Limits.

She lacks the imperious, coldly seductive manner of Barbara Steele, but I find a certain kinship between them, in that both were stunningly beautiful women almost always cast as evil sirens.

Barbara Nichols (not Arlene Martel, as another reviewer wrote) is really good as the burned-out, stressed-out stripper (sorry; dancer!), Liz Powell, who is in the hospital to recuperate. Jonathan Harris is her doctor, and Fredd Wayne is her agent, Barney. There is also an appearance by Norma Connolly as the night nurse. I remember her best as Ruby Anderson on General Hospital, where she appeared from 1980 - 1997. Nichols insists that a recurring nightmare she is having is real, and she won't listen to the men that it's just a dream/nightmare.

The nightmare goes like this: At 8:10 p. M., the clock ticking loudly (which really adds to the spookiness level!), Miss Powell wakes up and reaches for a glass of water, knocks the glass off of the tray and it breaks. Then she hears someone by her door. It is a nurse, and she follows the nurse down the elevator to Room 22, which happens to be the morgue. She is very scared all the way from her room to the morgue and when the nurse opens up the doors to Room 22 and tells her 'Room for one more, honey!' she runs away screaming (and she does very well at that!), heading back to the elevator. Harris suggests she try to change the chronology of what happens in the dream (to try to change the outcome of the dream), but it doesn't work out, the glass breaks anyway.

**Spoiler Alert**

Arlene Martel (billed as Arline Sax in this episode) is the scariest nurse/flight attendant ever, even though she only has 5 words that she repeats for her lines. When Nichols is released from the hospital, she goes to board a plane (Flight 22! At 8:10 p. M.!) for Miami to start a new gig, but when she gets to the plane, Martel/Sax is there; this time, she is the flight attendant (back then known as a stewardess) and not the nurse. When Martel/Sax gives her line, Nichols goes running and screaming back into the airport, falling as she runs away from the plane. As the people around her are wondering why she is freaking out and some try to comfort her, you can see out the window that the plane is exploding in the air! Martel/Sax was in Nichols' dreams to warn her what was about to happen to her! As for the videotape/film discussion, I believe that the videotape format adds to the atmosphere.

***SPOILERS*** Suffering from a severe case of psychical exhaustion and anxiety belly dancer Liz Powell, Barbara Nichols, has been admitted to a local hospital for a period of R&R and mental observation. It's during her stay there that she has a series of dreams every nights that she's there about her being awakened at midnight and following this creepy looking nurse, Arlene Martel, down to the basement to room #22; The hospital's morgue! With a malicious grin on her face the nurse turns to Liz as she opens the morgue's swinging doors and tells her, as if with uncontrollable glee, "Room for one more honey"!

With her doctor, Johathan Harris, and later her agent Barney Kennener, Fredd Wayne, trying to convince Liz that it's only a dream she refuses to listen to them. Liz feels that this nurse is somehow telling or warning her that the end is soon to come and that the #22 is a clue to what that end will be!

***MAJOR SPOILERS*** Finally released from the hospital Liz is slated to take a flight to Miami to, in the warm Florida sunshine, chill out before she's ready to continue her career as a dancer that the dream, or really nightmare, comes to life! This time not in her sleep but in her being fully awake! In exact chronological order the nightmare that haunted Liz all that time in the hospital come back to her as she goes through the same motions, like a mindless zombie, of walking straight to her impending and not unexpected death! That's until that creepy nurse from the hospital, or from her deep subconscious, reappears to welcome Liz on the flight! With that same greeting that she greeted Liz at the hospital morgue!: "Room for one more honey"! By the way the flight that Liz was to take that faithful evening to Miame was flight #22!

P.S "Twenty Two" was one of six Twilight Zone episodes that were shot on video tape compared to all the other that was shot on film. Which gave it that live soap opera look.

***SPOILERS*** The key to this episode is acting. Arlene Martel is the nurse/stewardess who will welcome Barbara Nichols to her fate. I love both of these actresses; mostly, I guess Arlene because she was the coolest beatnik ever in an episode of Perry Mason (The Case of the Absent Artist). Barbara was just naturally sexy and showy in most of her roles. In this one, I wonder if she did her own stunt, when she fell down running from the aircraft to save her own life. I was glad when she lived. I remember watching it when I was a kid, and I liked her then, probably more for playing an "exotic dancer - stripper". One can only use the common denominator of common sense to see that she'd have been sensational in that capacity as well.

If you get a chance, see this episode. You'll like it, as well. I say this is a strong 9.

I don't honestly think this is one of the better Twilight Zone episodes, but it has one fascinating element. The knowing look of the stewardess at the end, and the immediate explosion of the plane upon take-off, suggests that what we are seeing is an instance of domestic terrorism/suicide bombing, a good many years before such notions gained currency. Does anyone else see the ending this way, or am I reading too much backward into it? Certainly the stewardess/morgue nurse has been depicted as an agent of death throughout the episode. Her creepiness gives the episode a memorability that it otherwise might not have had, and to read her as a bomber is not difficult at all.

If you look under potions for bad dreams..... such drivel. There isn't anything worse than dream sequences and then to repeat them. Twenty Two is dull and annoying and there really is no point. It's also predictable, it's obvious before she's about to board a plane, that the stewardess will be the same girl and say "room for one more." Why others can't see these things coming, I don't get.