46 pages • 1 hour read
Rod SerlingThe Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
Fiction | Play | YA | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Steve Brand
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is strictly an ensemble piece. However, Steve Brand (Claude Akins) is this episode’s rough equivalent to a protagonist. Throughout the events of the story, he is vocally suspicious of what he calls the neighborhood’s “monster kick.” This attitude is framed as reasonable and ethical in that Steve is consistently calm, logical, and nonviolent throughout the crisis. He only loses his composure when Charlie kills Pete Van Horn, but even then he refrains from suggesting that Charlie is anything other than human: “Charlie, there’s a dead man on the sidewalk and you killed him! Does this look like a gag to you?” (14). His final lines and directions in the screenplay depict him begging his neighbors to calm down, for which he is punched in the face.
At the end of the episode, it is revealed that Steve is partially wrong about the aliens: They are indeed real and preying on Maple Street, but they aren’t secretly living there. Despite being wrong about the aliens’ existence, Steve’s prudent and cooperative approach to problem solving would have been an effective defense against them. The aliens’ strategy relied upon humans turning against each other in a crisis. If Steve’s neighbors had heeded his warnings, their community would be stronger in the face of an existential threat.
Steve’s attitudes and behaviors consistently characterize him as Maple Street’s voice of reason. In this, his thematic role is bifurcated: on one hand, his attitude is framed as rational, productive, and aspirational. If all his neighbors thought the way he did, Maple Street would not have dissolved into chaos. On the other hand, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” presents a decidedly bleak picture of human nature and mob psychology. Steve functions as a personification of civility and common sense in this narrative, and his attempts to make his neighbors see sense unilaterally fail. When he is attacked and overtaken by the riot, it symbolizes the complete breakdown of the social order and the futility of conscientious objection.
Charlie
Charlie (Jack Weston) is initially introduced as a functional, reasonable, and friendly member of Maple Street’s community. In the original airing of the episode, he is chubby and dressed in shorts and a Hawaiian-print button up; he appears to fill the role of the “wacky neighbor” who might appear on a contemporary sitcom. He and Steve are implied to be friends, as they initially agree to go downtown together. However, he is among the first of Maple Street’s residents to become paranoid about aliens and monsters. In this, he becomes the unofficial leader of the mob. He also escalates the situation by shooting Pete Van Horn as well as accusing Les, Steve, and Tommy of being aliens. Because of this, Charlie is arguably the episode’s core antagonist.
If Steve is Maple Street’s voice of reason, Charlie is its voice of fear. Though his actions are framed as destructive and immoral, they are also sympathetic. Though his suspicion of his neighbors is delusional, it is earnest. When he realizes he killed Pete Van Horn, he appears remorseful and frightened: “We’re all scared of the same thing. I was just tryin’ to…tryin’ to protect my home, that’s all! […] I didn’t know it was somebody we knew” (14). He describes his own actions and behaviors as proactive and defensive. Ultimately, his desire to protect his home shrinks into a wild attempt to protect himself: When suspicion lands on Charlie, he accuses Tommy, seemingly for no reason other than to direct the mob’s ire away from himself. The moral of his arc is that no one is safe from scrutiny in a community gripped by paranoia.
The Figures
Figures One and Two are twist ending antagonists. They only appear in the final moments of the episode, revealing that while Maple Street’s residents’ fear of infiltration is unfounded, they are indeed under threat by malevolent outsiders. In the original airing of the episode, the figures look exactly like humans, as Tommy predicted. However, based on their stilted manner of speaking, advanced technology, space-age costuming, and flying saucer, they are clearly alien invaders.
The Figures are symbolic and literal outsiders. They represent a hostile “other” that preys upon the familiar in-group of Maple Street. They are a militant and technologically advanced threat to the white American hegemony. The Figures are antagonists, albeit passive ones. They instigate the breakdown of Maple Street by harnessing their targets’ weaknesses, but they take little direct action to do so. As Figure One observes, humans “pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves” (17). Serling’s message is clear: In-fighting only weakens the community, leaving them vulnerable to outside attackers.
The Narrator/Rod Serling
Rod Serling appears at the beginning and end of all Twilight Zone episodes to deliver monologues. He is not a character in the narrative. Rather, he acts as a Greek chorus and a moral arbiter, breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly. These book-ending monologues serve to set the scene and pass a final judgement, respectively. As The Twilight Zone’s creator, head writer, and producer, Serling’s monologues also serve as statements of authorial intent, wherein he guides the viewer’s attention to the episodes’ key takeaways.
In the closing monologue of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling directly confronts the episode’s themes and messages: “For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children…the children yet unborn (a pause) And the pity of it is…that these things cannot be confined to…The Twilight Zone!” (18). This closing statement emphasizing the episode’s relationship to the world outside of the Twilight Zone (i.e., the real world). This all but explicitly confirms the narrative’s status as an allegory for contemporary social discord.
