Without a child to play with the dolls, they remain sedentary lumps of cloth and paint. The twist ending is encapsulated by the meta-narrative of the child, who embodies the spirit of this creative potential. While Serling's tale centers on the unknown horrors of existential dread, it also demonstrates the way in which the creative process itself becomes manifest in the final product. The major is returned to the group, all depicted as dolls now, while the ballerina’s eyes fill with tears as her plastic hand reaches towards his. (Spoiler!) The camera smash-cuts to a child picking up an army doll from the snow and placing it back in a bin used to collect Christmas toys for orphans. As he tumbles over the edge, the twist is revealed. Eventually, the major plots an escape and manages to clear the wall. Racking their collective brains, they posit whether they have been abducted by aliens, have gone insane, have died and been sent to Hell, or exist only as figments of someone's imagination-as characters in another person's dream. They have no memory or knowledge of who they are, where they came from, or how they wound up in the silo. There are no doors or windows-only an open ceiling much too high for any of them to reach. Back in 1961, the prolific Rod Serling adapted a short story for an episode of his Twilight Zone series titled "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." In this episode, a clown, a hobo, a ballerina, a bagpiper, and an Army major find themselves confined within a large, metal, silo-type enclosure.
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