Episode no. Season 5
Episode 21 Written by Richard Matheson Production code 2608 | Directed by Elliot Silverstein Featured music Rene Garriguenc Original air date February 21, 1964 | |
"Spur of the Moment" is episode 141 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
Plot
The episode opens on June 13, 1939. 18-year-old Anne Henderson leisurely rides a horse across her family's property. Upon a ridge, she views a woman in black screaming at her to stop. Anne, petrified, races back to her home. Her parents, and her fiance Robert, are waiting for her there. She tells them of her frightful experience. Her parents and Robert, a respectable investment broker, calm her down and talk of the upcoming marriage. Moments later, her former fiance David Mitchell appears at the door. Forcing his way inside, David pleads with Anne to call off her wedding to and be with him. He agrees to leave if Anne states to his face that she does not love him. Anne, caught between David and her father, can't bring herself to answer the question or even look David in the eye. Anne father tells David to consider her silence the answer, and then forces him to leave at gunpoint.
Twenty-five years later, an older Anne is a miserable alcoholic and her mother reveals that the ranch will be repossessed, although a defeated Anne doesn't care. She disparages her father, whom we learn has died, for spoiling her and never allowing her to earn anything in life. Her mother defends her deceased husband to her daughter, slapping Anne. Anne slaps her back much harder.
Anne then asks her mother if she remembered that night, many years ago, when she came home terrified after riding her horse. Anne now realizes that she was pursuing her younger self on horseback, trying to warn herself not to marry the wrong man. Indeed, her husband has bankrupted them by mismanaging the ranch.
However, it is not Robert but David who walks into the room. As it turns out, Anne changed her mind that night...running out of her house to David and telling him that he was her true love.
Back in the present, the older Anne leaves the house on horseback, fleeing the abusive David who mocks her for her decision to marry him. She approaches the ridge line and sees her younger self down below. She pursues the young Anne with her warning, but Anne rides away in terror...along with any hope of changing her future for the better.