One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 1]
The Bride Possessed
Shown 20 Jan 59
A married couple drive off on their honeymoon. However, the bride ( Virginia Leith ) completely changes her personality and claims to be someone else. Although the new personality claims to have been murdered, she also strangely refuses to accept the fact that she is dead.
Not only does John Newland introduce the show, he also directs most episodes as well.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 2]
Night of April 14th
Shown 27 Jan 59
London, 1912. A young woman has a nightmare about drowning. The next day, her fiance (Patrick Mcnee - Battlestar Galactica ) announces he has booked tickets for the maiden voyage of the Titanic.
The ending bookend sequence has the announcer explain about Futility, the real-life novella that had many similarities with real events ... but was published a dozen years earlier!
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 3]
Emergency Only
Shown 03 Feb 59
A man attends a party where a psychic woman predicts his future. It seems pretty evident that something very bad will happen to him in the next couple of days.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 4]
The Dark Room
Shown 10 Feb 59
An American lady ( Cloris Leachman ) moves into a French chateau. She is a staff photographer for a New York magazine, doing a project entitled The Face of France.
A man visits the chateau, and agrees to pose for her project. Predictably, this turns into a fem-jep scenario.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 5]
Twelve Hours to Live
Shown 17 Feb 59
A married couple has an argument. The man drives off in a rainstorm, and his car gets caught in a landslide. If he does not get rescued within twelve hours, he will not survive.
The wife has an intuition that her husband is in danger. She tries to lead the police to rescue him.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 6]
Epilogue
Shown 24 Feb 59
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 7]
The Dream
Shown 03 Mar 59
This is set in the aftermath of the British withdrawal from Dunkirk in June 1940. A group of Home Guard men, worn out by sleepless nights, protect the coast of England from the threat of German invasion. Like a more serious version of the 1970s BBC TV show Dad's Army. The twist is that a German raiding party actually makes a landing!
The old man falls asleep on duty, and dreams that his wife will die when their house is destroyed by a Luftwaffe bomb. meanwhile, the German raiding party are probably going to kill the husband. In all fairness, the Germans may have sub-machineguns against the Home Guard's handguns, but Dad's Army more than pull their weight.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 8]
Premonition
Shown 10 Mar 59
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 9]
The Dead Part of the House
Shown 17 Mar 59
A family moves into a big house. The little girl moves into the upstairs nursery room. She spends a lot of time playing with her three dolls, having conversations with them. Her father is not an easy man to live with. Luckily, the Chinese servant looks after the girl ... and learns about the house's history.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 10]
The Vision
Shown 24 Mar 59
This story is set on the front line in France in 1915. It seems based on the Angel of Mons myth. A group of French soldiers are on trial for desertion, like in Paths of Glory. Can their lawyer prove they really had a miraculous experience?
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 11]
The Devil's Laughter
Shown 31 Mar 59
In Victorian London, a condemned man is executed on the gallows. However, the execution goes wrong. It seems that the convict is impossible to kill.
This is not the case of an innocent man who has been reprieved by God. No, that story was later used in Twilight Zone (1959) . This is the tale of a guilty man who has been condemned to die in another, more ironic way - like in an episode of Twilight Zone (2002) .
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 12]
The Return of Mitchell Campion
Shown 07 Apr 59
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 13]
The Navigator
Shown 14 Apr 59
This is set aboard a wooden sailing ship in the Nineteenth Century, taking cargo across the Atlantic Ocean to Boston. The technology is so primitive that the course setting is in chalk on a black-board, and the fog-horn is manually blown. The First Officer discovers that someone altered the ship's course, sending the ship into an ice-pack far to the north. Who is responsible for this sabotage, and why?
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 14]
The Secret
Shown 21 Apr 59
A rich woman feels neglected by her husband, so she carries on an affair with an imaginary male friend.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 15]
The Aerialist
Shown 28 Apr 59
A trapeze artist, AKA a Aerialist, is wracked by guilt when a trick goes horribly wrong.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 16]
The Burning Girl
Shown 05 May 59
This episode's story is set in 1921. A blonde teenage girl named Alice has moved to a new High School, and befriended a brunette in her class. The boys in their class are mean to them and tease them, which happens off-screen but we learn about through expository dialogue. To modern eyes, the girls look they are about to hook up with each other instead ...
A fire mysteriously broke out near the girls, and looks like Alice is a pyrokinetic. This is the reason she had to move from her old school. Of course, to keep the budget low this is conveyed by dialogue, so this comes across as more of a stage play.
The real source of conflict in the story turns out to be Alice's aunt. This seems to have influenced the novel Carrie ...
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 17]
The Haunted U-Boat
Shown 12 May 59
This is set aboard the U-141, as it sets sail in early May 1945. The boat's mission is to get a Nazi party VIP to safety, so they can set up the Fourth Reich or whatever.
There is an inexplicable banging on the sub's hull. The crew are all accounted for, so nobody got trapped outside when they submerged. The banging seems to target the Nazi VIP, and his sleep deprivation leads to mental deterioration ...
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 18]
The Image of Death
Shown 19 May 59
In the 1890s, a recently-widowered Marquis marries the nurse who looked after his dying wife. The new wife insists the old wife's portrait is taken down. However, the space on the wall where the portrait once hung develops a strange water-stain. As the stain develops over the weeks, it looks more and more like a human skull ...
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 19]
The Captain's Guests
Shown 26 May 59
A married couple move to a new town, and rent a splendid-looking house. It has been lying empty for some time, and the Real Estate agent is reluctant to let it. He and the other locals seem to know something bad about it ...
After they move in, the husband starts to behave strangely. He is out of character, becoming less like himself and more like the villainous old sea-captain who used to live in the house.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 20]
Echo
Shown 02 Jun 59
Paul Marlin (Ross Martin - ) is acquited in court on the charge of murdering his wife. Like a white OJ Simpson, he is hounded by the Press so he leaves town. However, he has a vision that someone will shoot him dead.
Later, Marlin meets the man from his vision. The stranger turns out to be the brother of the dead wife. Worse, although the brother just arrived from New Zealand he somehow got a loaded Luger pistol through customs. Well, this is set forty years before 9/11 ... they did not even have metal detectors in airports until the 1960s. The brother owns the pistol because it is useful while riding the range, in case some cattle rustlers attack him or whatever. But the fact he brings it thousands of miles to a big city might indicate premeditation on his part. Combined this with the fact he has a prejudicial newspaper article in his wallet, which would imply motive ...
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 21]
Front Runner
Shown 09 Jun 59
A journalist interviews a hospital patient who is breathing his last in an oxygen tent. The patient tells of his younger days as a horse-racing jockey. He fell out with his best friend over a woman, and the former friend cursed him. A decade later, they met again and the curse came true.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 1, Episode 22]
The Riddle
Shown 16 Jun 59
An American newlywed couple hold their honeymoon in India, and take a train from Bombay to the Taj Mahal. They meet a beggar, and the husband becomes obsessed with the old man. He thinks it is a case of kill or be killed ...
The episode has a warning prologue about the use of make-up to simulate the actor being a member of a different race. Nowadays, this kind of thing would never happen. The twenty-first century version, as used in Lost , is to have a South Asian Hindu as a Middle Eastern Arabic muslim. A completely different race, of course, but because the skin-tones are similar there is no make-up involved.
One Step Beyond (1959) [Season 3
, Episode 1
]
