In "The Twilight Zone," the twists always come at the end. Our protagonists -- soldiers, criminals, salesmen, astronauts, movie stars, and more -- spend the majority of the episode wondering exactly what the hell is going on, only for Rod Serling to serve up a curveball of epic, sometimes shocking proportions at episode's end. The series invented and perfected plenty of classic TV twist ending tropes, but it also featured some less guessable twists, like the circumstances surrounding "Five Strangers in Search of An Exit," or the bait-and-switch conclusion to "The Invaders."

In a few rare cases, though, the most surprising part of "The Twilight Zone" comes even later on, when Serling himself closes out the show with his signature concluding sign-off. As the show's creator, head writer, and host, Serling was our guide through the strange and uncanny place he dubbed the Twilight Zone, and he often appeared on screen to usher us back to reality, drawing a dividing line between the show's haunting, science fiction and fantasy-fueled world and our own. He did this by shoehorning the phrase "The Twilight Zone" into nearly every episode ending, closing things out by either reassuring us that the episode's horrors couldn't happen to us, or in the case of moralizing episodes, reminding us that they already have.

In exactly seven instances, though, Serling doesn't invoke the name of the series in his closing monologue at all. It's unclear why he skips over the title tie-in in these cases, though in several cases he moves the name drop to the opening monologue instead. Others take place in the first season when the show was no doubt still ironing out its kinks. Still, the title's absence is a small shock every time, and these alternate monologues almost always make the story we've just seen feel a little bit weirder without the expected closure.