"The Mirror" was the sixth episode of the third season of The Twilight Zone, and was first broadcast in October of 1961. The episode starred Peter Falk, in one of his earliest television roles, as Ramos Clemente, a revolutionary dictator with some resemblance to Fidel Castro.

Clemente has just come to power at the end of a revolution, and he and his fellow revolutionaries are reveling in their new found power. They call out the recently-deposed president to mock him, but he tells Clemente that his victory is temporary, because things will revert to form. He then tells Clemente that he has a mirror that can tell who is the closest threat to him. When Clemente looks into the mirror, he sees, one by one, his fellow revolutionaries plotting to kill him. Very quickly, the revolutionaries, once close comrades, fall into a mess of paranoia and revenge.

As mentioned in my reviews for "Two", "The Shelter", and "The Passersby", military conflict seems to be a theme in Season Three. All of these episodes also focus on how war can destroy human relationships, and the quickness with which the revolutionaries turn on each other in this episode greatly resembles the hysteria in "The Shelter". This episode is also noticeably graphic in its violence, at least by the standards of 1961. Although this episode does have a supernatural element, with the magic mirror, that element is not accentuated. This episode is more a drama with a slight supernatural element added to speed along the plot.

I did notice the use of a mirror as a plot device. As I mentioned in "The Arrival" and "The Odyssey of Flight 33", airplanes make the perfect situations for Twilight Zone episodes. The same could also be true of mirrors, one reason they were used in "Mirror Image" and "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room". Much as airplane travel seems outside of the normal world, even if we scientifically understand it, a part of our minds will always believe that looking into a mirror is looking into another world. Like many Twilight Zone episodes, this episode takes a simple, even juvenile plot gimmick, and manages to produces real suspense out of it.