I see a lot of Twilight Zone fans commenting on this Night Gallery entry, which makes my review somewhat redundant but I'll mention it anyway. 'The Different Ones' is a reworking of one of Rod Serling's most celebrated stories, one that's always offered on those cable channel marathons around Thanksgiving or selected holidays. That one was called 'Eye of the Beholder', and included a deeper, underlying warning about mass conformity and falling victim to a herd mentality. The one thing about this episode though, which was novel for the era, was it's mention of euthanasia as a potential 'solution' for the problem posed by the disfigured son of Paul Koch (Dana Andrews). That seemed rather daring for the early Seventies. And as 'The Twilight Zone' often did, this story took the time frame into the near future with a mention of the Federal Conformity Act of 1993. I always found it interesting that Serling would place some of his TZ stories in the very foreseeable future instead of thousands of years, which is what the second feature also did.
'Tell David' is kind of remarkable from the standpoint of it's 1971 air date in that it offers futuristic designs for various gadgets like the telephone with programmed redial, and a simplistic GPS tracking system that David Blessington (Jared Martin) shared with his 'Mom' when she showed up lost, trying to find her way home. Though David's warning from 'the future' is more than transparent to Ann Bolt (Sandra Dee), her explanation to husband Tony goes unheeded when she gets back home, setting up the dire consequences of her own fate that she couldn't help avoid.
'Logoda's Heads' is a story of powerful magic and shrunken heads that could have gone any number of ways depending on who was writing the story. As it is, the mysterious Logoda (Brock Peters) falls victim to his own brand of black magic at the hands of an even more powerful witch, though the way the story plays out, the idea that Kyro (Denise Nicholas) would displace the village chief is somewhat dubious. If she had the potential to defeat Logoda once the white adventurers showed up, why wouldn't she have done so long ago?
'Tell David' is kind of remarkable from the standpoint of it's 1971 air date in that it offers futuristic designs for various gadgets like the telephone with programmed redial, and a simplistic GPS tracking system that David Blessington (Jared Martin) shared with his 'Mom' when she showed up lost, trying to find her way home. Though David's warning from 'the future' is more than transparent to Ann Bolt (Sandra Dee), her explanation to husband Tony goes unheeded when she gets back home, setting up the dire consequences of her own fate that she couldn't help avoid.
'Logoda's Heads' is a story of powerful magic and shrunken heads that could have gone any number of ways depending on who was writing the story. As it is, the mysterious Logoda (Brock Peters) falls victim to his own brand of black magic at the hands of an even more powerful witch, though the way the story plays out, the idea that Kyro (Denise Nicholas) would displace the village chief is somewhat dubious. If she had the potential to defeat Logoda once the white adventurers showed up, why wouldn't she have done so long ago?