I agree with an earlier reviewer that "The Different Ones" bears marked resemblances to Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder," which Serling also wrote. The crucial difference is that "Eye" reeked of quality, whereas "Ones" reeks of ineptitude. The light and shadow play that characterized much of "Eye" kept us largely in the dark until it was revealed--at the bitter end--that the protagonist was the lone (or nearly lone) beauty adrift amid a hideously ugly populace. The episode made a sort of intrinsic sense: you could almost genetically divide it into the pig-people and the people-people. "The Different Ones," however, postulates utter lunacy: a profoundly deformed man on Earth is sent to a planet where the normal population just happen to match his every feature. As if that were not bad enough, his "profoundly deformed" counterpart from the planet Vorion is--guess what--a fellow who would pass for drop-dead gorgeous on Earth. Are the odds even calculable that, among two disparate planets, the outsiders of planet A would physically match the insiders of planet B, and vice-versa? PUH-LEEZ! (It's also profoundly ridiculous that--in the 1970s--we could be entirely ignorant of Vorion, a planet that, it is claimed, lies just beyond the orbit of Mars . . . but I digress.)
I take serious umbrage with "Logoda's Heads," as well, almost from top to bottom. First, the episode was profoundly cheaply filmed: assuming that my aging TV is not to blame--which it assuredly is not--the level of background lighting and tinting ranges from a light purple sky one moment to a deep green sky the next moment; and, while we trek from one valley, over a short hillock, to the next valley, the background lighting changes from day, to night, back to day. O.K. That's bad enough. Here's where the anthropology gets so backward that my beloved Prof. Stephanie Fins would be forced to commit seppuku. We have a black (= African) sorcerer, and a black "anti-sorcerer" (the young girl), and--I think--a black old woman situated among an Amazonian people. In addition to the Amazonian shrunken head fetishes ("tsantsas"), the Logoda is fond of shaking ironwood statuettes that are--unless my memory escapes me--quite West African, whether Dahomeyan or, in fact, Malian not being terribly important. Then, the young girl refers to the "native" animals, to wit, leopards and hyenas--none of which are to be found in South America (though, I'm sure, some rake will point out, "Aha! You can find leopards and hyenas at the Sao Paulo zoo!" {There's one in every crowd.}). I mean, how ridiculous does ridiculous get? There is definitely some good material to be found on Night Gallery, but you won't find it amid this pair of corkers!
I can't comment on the third segment about "David" insofar as my chopped, sliced, diced, and regurgitated version of "Night Gallery" as shown on the MeTV cable network at 1:30AM did not condescend to sport that third piece. Pity.
