It’s a tradition almost as old as New Years Eve itself: The Twilight Zone Marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel. And on this the 50th anniversary of the series, the episodes seem more timely than ever.

The brainchild of Emmy Award-winner Rod Serling, who served as host and wrote over 80 episodes of the original show’s 151-episode run, The Twilight Zone is a strange mix of horror, science-fiction, drama, comedy, and superstition. Serling introduced each episode, and many of the black and white hours concluded with a surprise — sometimes a deeply ironic ending that made this viewer’s head spin in its cleverness.

Amazingly, in an old interview, Serling admitted that he was uncertain of his success and unsure of what his legacy might be, yet here we are 50 years later and The Twilight Zone is still just as popular as ever.

Now, as is the custom when one year ends and another one begins, join me as we travel through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind — a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination…there’s a signpost up ahead: it’s a list of my 5 all-time favorite Twilight Zone episodes:

1) The Hitch-hiker: The story begins with a woman, Nan Adams, who has been in a car accident on a cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles. A mechanic puts a spare tire on her car and then leads her to the nearest town to fix it properly. Just before she leaves, she notices a strange-looking man hitchhiking. Unnerved, she drives away quickly. As it turns out, this is the first of many times that she will see the same man, always hitch-hiking and wanting her to pick him up. She becomes increasingly frightened of him, and when she is stuck on a railroad crossing and nearly hit by a train, she becomes convinced that the hitch-hiker is trying to kill her. She continues to drive, becoming more and more afraid, stopping only when necessary, but every time she does, the man is there. When she ends up stranded in New Mexico, she meets a different man — a sailor on his way back from his leave and returning to his ship in San Diego. Eager for protection from the hitch-hiker she’s been seeing, she offers to drive the sailor to San Diego herself. However, she is still paranoid about the hitch-hiker, and when she sees him on the road and tries to run him over, the sailor, who can’t see him, begins to fear for her sanity and leaves her. In Arizona, Nan stops to call her mother. However, the woman who answers the phone, Mrs. Whitney, says that Mrs. Adams is in the hospital: she had a nervous breakdown after finding out that her daughter, Nan, was killed in an auto accident in Pennsylvania six days ago when the car she was driving blew a tire and overturned. At this point, Nan realizes the truth: The hitch-hiker is not a man who wants her to die, but rather the personification of death itself, just patiently and persistently waiting for her to realize that she has been dead all along.

“I believe you’re going…my way?” he inquires from the back seat, almost friendly. As Nan accepts her fate, Rod Serling narrates the final lines: “Nan Adams, age twenty-seven. She was driving to California, to Los Angeles. She didn’t make it. There was a detour…through the Twilight Zone.”

2) A Stop at Willoughby: Gart Williams is an advertising executive who has grown exasperated with the stress of the business life and, while being unable to sleep properly at home, constantly drifts off for short naps on the train during his daily commuting, and dreams of a peaceful place called “Willoughby.” Set in the year 1888, Willoughby exudes a peaceful, stress-free lifestyle long gone. After he finally snaps at his workplace, and after being rebuffed in a plea for help to his selfish, uncaring and cold-hearted wife, he exits the train while in his dream so he can live in Willoughby. In reality, however, he jumped off the train to his death. His body is eventually loaded into a hearse owned by…Willoughby & Son Funeral Home.

3) The Eye of the Beholder: Janet Tyler has undergone her eleventh treatment in an attempt to look like everybody else. The details of the treatment are not given, but Tyler is first shown with her head completely bandaged so her face cannot be seen. She is described as being “not normal” by the nurses and doctor, whose own faces are always in shadows. The outcome of the procedure cannot be known until the bandages are removed. Tyler pleads with the doctor and eventually convinces him to remove the bandages early. After a climactic buildup, the bandages are removed, revealing to the audience that she is beautiful. However, the reaction of the doctor and nurses is disappointment; the operation has failed, her face has undergone “no change — no change at all.” At this point, the doctor, nurses, and other people in the hospital, whose faces have never been seen clearly before, are now revealed to be horribly deformed with large brows, curled lips, and misshapen, pig-like noses. Distraught by the failure of the procedure, Tyler runs through the hospital as the terrible faces of everyone she runs into, apparently the norm in this society, are revealed. Large screens throughout the hospital project an image of the State’s despotic leader (sounding and making hand motions like Adolf Hitler), calling for greater conformity. Eventually, a handsome man afflicted with the same “condition” arrives to take the crying, despondent Tyler into exile to a village of her “own kind,” where her “ugliness” will not trouble the State. Before the two leave, the man comforts Tyler with the “very, very old saying” that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

4) Twenty Two: While in a hospital recuperating from stress, Liz Powell has a strange nightmare. Every night, she awakens at midnight, turns, and breaks a drinking glass full of water, and then hears strange footsteps outside her door. It is always the same person: a nurse who beckons Liz to follow her. When Liz does, she goes down into an elevator and nervously approaches room 22. The strange nurse then emerges from the dark shadows of the room and, smiling wickedly, gives a message: “Room for one more, honey.” Liz screams and runs back to her room, where she falls back to sleep. Her doctor claims that the dream is impossible, as there is no nurse who resembles the woman in the dream working in the hospital. The doctor then suggests that Liz change her actions in the dream, such as not to reach for the glass of water. Liz does this that night, and is happy to hear no footsteps, but when she turns to sleep, her blanket shatters the glass. The dream goes on in the same way, but this time Liz realizes that the room is a morgue.

The next morning, the doctor is shocked: Liz has never been downstairs to the morgue, and yet she described it with remarkable accuracy. Discharged from the hospital, Liz is at the airport, preparing to go home. While nervously twitching in the terminal, she bumps into a woman carrying a vase. It falls, making the same noise as the drinking glass in the dream. Liz’s flight is then announced as “Flight 22,” leaving immediately. In a long, slow shot, Liz walks up the runway, climbs the stairs, and approaches the plane…and a stewardess who looks just like the dream-nurse appears, intoning her same terrifying message, “Room for one more, honey.” Screaming, Liz runs back down the stairs and into the airport, falling to the ground. A moment later, as the concerned airport staff rush towards the hysterical Liz, the plane explodes immediately after takeoff, killing everyone aboard. Liz’s dream has warned her of her impending death, thus saving her life.

5) Time Enough At Last: Bank teller Henry Bemis loves reading books yet is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them. Both his boss and his wife are shown to think his reading is a terrible waste of time. One day, when Henry takes his lunch break in the bank’s vault and opens his newspaper, we see the foretelling headline: “H Bomb Capable of Total Destruction.” Moments later, loud explosions can be heard from outside, violently shaking the vault and knocking Bemis unconscious. In the aftermath of the apparent war, he regains consciousness and emerges to find he is the last person alive on Earth. As he searches desperately for his wife, Bemis soon finds himself in a world of both abundance and emptiness, with food to last him a lifetime and sheer loneliness taking its toll on his sanity. As he loses hope and is about to commit suicide with a gun, he discovers the ruins of the public library with its books still intact and readable. All the books he could ever hope for are his for the taking, and he finally has all the time in the world to read with no one to stop him. Bemis contently sorts the books he intends to read for the next several months. Yet just as he reaches to pick up his first book, he stumbles and his reading glasses fall off and break. In tears, he picks up the remains of his glasses and sobs, “That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed! It’s not fair!”

Sheeesh. Well, no one ever said life as a Twilight Zone character is ever easy, yet that’s just more entertainment for us.

While these 5 episodes are just a tiny smattering of the other 130 or so other episodes that I love, you don’t have to wait until next New Years Eve to catch them. You can experience the whole series for yourself in The Twilight Zone: The Complete Definitive Collection available now on DVD. Features include all 156 complete episodes, Serling’s bio-documentary “Submitted for Your Approval,” compelling interviews with the show’s writers, the series’s unaired pilot, audio commentaries with Martin Landau, Leonard Nimoy, Cliff Robertson, and much, much more!