Twilight Zone - Season 1 - Spoilers

[RJDiogenes]

Probably the ironic twist ending is the biggest hallmark of the Zone. Another common thread is that in the Zone, the universe is insane and screws with you for no reason-- and it doesn't care if things work out well for you or not. A coin lands on its side and you can suddenly read minds, Martians infiltrate society but Venusians got their first, you're beautiful but are born in a world where ugly is king, you have all the time in the world but you break your glasses. It's not a moral universe, like in Tales From The Crypt where evildoers get their comeuppance, and it's not a logical world, like in The Outer Limits where everything makes sense once you know all the facts, it's just flat-out crazy and you better hope you land on a soft spot when it spits you out.

[RJDiogenes]

Episode 3, "Replay."

Well, that was kind of like the pieces of a Twilight Zone episode that fell on the floor and didn't get put back together just right. Or maybe several episodes, because it was kind of reminiscent of "The Hitchhiker" and "A Most Unusual Camera," and maybe a couple of others. It started out great, with a lonely diner in middle America, complete with a jukebox. And then we've got an old-fashioned camera (that would have been futuristic on the original Twilight Zone) that can rewind time-- possibly stop it and speed it up, too, but nobody ever tried that. Nor do we know if it will work for anyone else but the mom.

But then we set up a premise where the state trooper, who seems to represent an inhuman force, will always get them as long as they bypass the uncle's house, because the story seems to be about the mom's disconnection from her family. Along the way, we get some talk about alternate dimensions and cosmic strings, just to have the words out there, apparently, and some self-contradictory comments from the son about the Big Bang giving rise to a deterministic universe, implying that the camera is trying to get around that and the universe is fighting back. And then we learn that the camera once belonged to the mom's dad, strengthening the idea that the camera is haunted and trying to protect them, while maybe using the state trooper to force them into a family reunion. But then when the family reunion leads to a safe path to the school using memories from childhood, the state trooper shows up anyway, this time with reinforcements, strengthening the idea that the universe didn't want the kid to make it to the school and is trying to right itself. Then the antique camera that has been the central prop of the story so far is not used to protect the kid and his family from the forces of evil-- a barricade of modern cameras connected to the cloud are instead, totally undoing both the premise of the mom's father's ghost protecting them or the universe trying to keep its timeline intact. Then we flash forward ten years in the future, where everything is okay, but the camera gets broken and we get a hint that the evil state trooper or his equivalent is immediately on the scene to get the kid now that he is no longer under the protection of the haunted or universe-bending antique camera-- except that he never was, because the previous time reversals were only there to show us that the camera could not protect him and that his fate was inevitable.

I think it would have all come together better if the mom's idea of talking to the state trooper had been the climax, and that it had worked. That would have made the story elements come together more seamlessly and have provided a more positive them to the events.

[scottydog]

I'll try to watch this episode in the next day or so. Then I'll come back and read your comments

[scottydog]

Well, that was kind of like the pieces of a Twilight Zone episode that fell on the floor and didn't get put back together just right.

I agree with you. It's almost like they tried too hard to make this a good episode. Sometimes simpler is better, less is more. They threw in a few too many ideas.

At first, I thought the entire episode was going to be about how she was going to extricate herself and her son safely from the time loop that always began and ended in that diner. So it surprised me when they made it to the town where the uncle lived.

Your analysis is spot on and they should hire you as a writer or writer consultant. Just sayin.

[RJDiogenes]

I agree with you. It's almost like they tried too hard to make this a good episode. Sometimes simpler is better, less is more. They threw in a few too many ideas.

Yeah, just like the airplane one where the ending on the beach was just one step too far.

At first, I thought the entire episode was going to be about how she was going to extricate herself and her son safely from the time loop that always began and ended in that diner. So it surprised me when they made it to the town where the uncle lived.

Right, if they had gone with her changing the cop's behavior by befriending him then breaking the time loop would have become a metaphor for breaking the cycle of racism.

Your analysis is spot on and they should hire you as a writer or writer consultant. Just sayin.

Hah, thank you. I think I could do better Twilight Zone and Star Trek both for them.

[scottydog]

I agree with you. It's almost like they tried too hard to make this a good episode. Sometimes simpler is better, less is more. They threw in a few too many ideas.

Yeah, just like the airplane one where the ending on the beach was just one step too far.

Yes, exactly right about the beach scene. I see this same problem in the movies today. There's more of everything, as if more means better. More action, more chase scenes, more explosions, more plot twists and more false (or trick) endings to the story.

Ahh well. We may be fuddy-duddies.... curmudgeons who are behind the times and impossible to please. (but I doubt it)

[RJDiogenes]

I think the elements of good storytelling are pretty timeless.

[RJDiogenes]

And now I've seen episode four, "A Traveler," which starred Glenn from Walking Dead. Again, it superficially captured the feel of The Twilight Zone, but the fragments never quite came together. And for a small police station in an out-of-the-way town, that place sure had long corridors and a big dungeon. Also, it was a Christmas episode-- did they not get the memo on when the series would air?

So, in classic TZ fashion, we've got an isolated spot with spooky and inexplicable goings-on going on. In essence, it seems, an alien has disguised himself as a human in order to get the secret location of a shed that controls the power supply to a nearby Air Force monitoring station, so that it can be shut down and open a window for the invading saucers to come. Okay then. Why did the alien choose to appear mysteriously inside a locked cell underneath the police station, raising all kinds of suspicions? Why was the sergeant the only one who was actually suspicious and the captain not even interested in how the guy got into the underground holding area? If the aliens have the power to appear in human form, why did the traveler use this power in such a lame-ass fashion? If the traveler has access to the inner secrets of the townspeople, why would he need to trick the captain into revealing the location of the shed? And if he is such a know-it-all, why does he lie sometimes and sometimes tell the truth? Why does he come at the time of the Christmas party and feign interest in the festivities, only to use his secrets to incite interpersonal conflicts that never go anywhere? Why does the sergeant try to arrest the captain even though no Russians show up and there's no evidence that the traveler was telling the truth? If the shed is so important, why do neither Russians nor space aliens show up to tamper with it, yet the saucers come down anyway? And why is that particular area so important to the aliens' invasion plans?

Why do the aliens even want to invade? And, from a storytelling perspective, what was the point of all this?

The Narrator's narration talks about a "night of the most powerful myth," presumably Christmas, and that "there is no difference between myth and mistruth." How does an alien invasion connect with Christmas being based on myth? Because the alien is a pathological liar? The town drunk says to the alien that "we might be better off with you in charge," even though nobody seems especially bad off, and the sergeant kind of hates the captain, because he has a somewhat overbearing personality even though he seems like a decent enough guy, so is the theme that banal aliens are no different than banal humans? Happy Holidays or Take Us To Your Leader-- six of one, half a dozen of the other. And how does that tie into the sergeant's alleged gift for sniffing out lies, which she didn't really demonstrate in any convincing fashion? Everything about this story was just half hearted and didn't link up in any kind of cohesive narrative.

We're almost halfway through the first season of this revival, and so far the style is really nice-- but the substance has been lacking at best.

[RJDiogenes]

This week we have episode five, "The Wunderkind" (starring that guy who was on the first season of Sleepy Hollow). This one was the most baffling yet. I think at this point we can safely say that this revival is aimed squarely at the Millennial Generation, because the levels of political naivete and thematic misfires are astonishing.

There really wasn't what you would call a story here. There was a sequence of events that involved a child being elected president, followed by his campaign manager apparently being killed because of a random statement the kid had made outlawing adult doctors. There was no thematic connection to any element of the story and no relevance to the assumed target of the satire. He might as well have been set upon by that pack of dogs. Furthermore, this pseudo-twist was telegraphed from the opening scene, so it wasn't even a surprise.

The most glaring deficit, aside from a plot, was the lack of a catalyst propelling us into the Twilight Zone. The original show would set the stage for a social satire of this magnitude by placing us unambiguously in an alternate reality or a vaguely futuristic time. But here there was no such surreal setting, nor was there even a mysterious bar patron or traveler, haunted video camera or MP3 player, or even a JFK silver dollar sitting inexplicably on edge. There wasn't even a prologue in the opening narration noting how all qualifications for the presidency had been impulsively repealed without thought to the consequences. Nothing. The venue was essentially the equivalent of our world in which more impossible things happened than even Mary Poppins could handle.

Clearly, this was supposed to be a satire of President The Donald-- but at this it failed badly. While the genuine article gained traction by exploiting the base vulgarity of one ideology and the moral abdication of the other, this kid won over the country across the board with love and puppies. What the hell kind of satire is that? The Donald is only childish in the sense that he's mentally retarded-- wouldn't an escapee from an asylum or a psychotic sniper be a better surrogate? Why make the theme that power corrupts when your source material is about how corruption is power? And how are we to parse the campaign manager, who had regrets and died for them? What is the message here, folks?

Next week: An outer-space adventure. Perhaps it will be a stinging indictment of mesothelioma.

[scottydog]

I've got to get caught up with these last two episodes. I can probably watch Episode 3 tomorrow and 4 on Wednesday.

[RJDiogenes]

The good news (I guess) is that Twilight Zone has been renewed for a second season.

[scottydog]

The good news (I guess) is that Twilight Zone has been renewed for a second season.

That's excellent news. I know you think it's only been a 5 on a 1 to 10 scale, but a second season means there's hope for improvement.

[RJDiogenes]

This week they released Episode 6, "Six Degrees of Freedom."

And that was actually a big improvement. The episode was mostly very well done and pretty much resembled a Twilight Zone story. It certainly helped that they made use of several tried-and-true TZ tropes, such as nuclear Armageddon and an isolated spaceship crew being driven slowly mad, but it also had a really decent TZ twist at the end.

Like pretty much all of the episodes in this first season, it was overly long. In another context, like an independent film festival, it would have been fine, but Twilight Zone should have been pithier and punchier. The opening sequence of the crew deciding whether to evacuate or continue on was very nicely done, but could have been handled as exposition in dialogue after the fact. The attempts to contact Earth would have established the situation. And several scenes, such as the birthday party and baby talk, were superfluous. But the cast, none of whom I think I knew, were all decent and the solar flare sequence, with crazy guy preaching as everything threatened to go toes up, was very tense. All in all, the only real error that jumped out at me was their reception of an old TV show-- electromagnetic waves don't go backwards and a TV transmission isn't likely to be reflected back so conveniently. They wouldn't be able to pick up an old TV broadcast that clearly near Mars even if the timing was right-- we needed a roof antenna in Dorchester just to pick up Boston stations.

But that twist ending was actually pretty good. It was nicely ambiguous, so we don't really know if the aliens saved the astronaut, if the astronaut was actually an alien agent, or if the astronaut had been correct and the whole mission was just a simulation, albeit orchestrated by the alien agency. But the real kicker was that the aliens determined the human race to be worthy of salvation! How the hell did a positive message sneak in there? I suspect that this episode will be very unpopular.

On the other hand, the previews for next week made me cringe, so this one is probably just a fluke.

[RJDiogenes]

Episode 7, "Not All Men."

And Millennial Twilight Zone is back, with an episode about toxic masculinity from beyond the stars. Like the L'il Donald episode, I'm not sure if this was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but the climactic exchange of the soldier's "Smile and you'll look pretty" and the woman's triumphant "No!" was a laugh-out-loud moment. The whole thing was like an awkward fanfic.

The TZ trigger in this one was a storm of little red meteorites that inexplicably impact in the midst of the Perseid meteor shower, even though nothing like that has ever happened before. Suddenly, men, and only men, go all "Return of the Archons," and the world is in flames. The characters quickly decide that the red meteorites are to blame, and then just as quickly decide that the red meteorites are placebos, and that all men everywhere just suddenly decided to revert to their true bestial nature.

Aside from an opening sequence that is a possibly unintentional homage to It Came From Outer Space, there's not much to say about the story. Like several other episodes in this revival, it's more of a sequence of events than a plot. The main character came so quickly to the conclusion that the red meteorites were involved that I was speculating that the story may be a dream episode, like "The Midnight Sun," or that she might be an alien agent, either hostile or friendly, like in "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street," but the episode had nothing that clever to offer. It was just the boys versus the girls, in typical 21st century style. I think the actual twist her is that the real world has entered the Twilight Zone and society has regressed back to the 1950s. This episode will certainly give the Right-Wingnuts a lot of ammunition, if nothing else.

[RJDiogenes]

Episode 8, "Point of Origin."

This one had a couple of familiar faces: Snow White from Once Upon A Time and Sarek from Discovery.

It certainly did an excellent job of capturing the feeling of classic Twilight Zone, recalling episodes such as Eye of the Beholder and The Obsolete Man and Third From The Sun and others, with an individual or small group under threat from an oppressive police state. The tension and paranoia were palpable. In this case, it was all in the service of a metaphor for immigration-- specifically the issue of immigrants who came here illegally at an age when it can't be considered their fault-- and a little amnesia was thrown in to add a little mystery.

It was actually pretty well done this time, although it's not exactly the most difficult aspect of the immigration problem to tackle. The agents of, presumably, the government were as stone faced and unforthcoming as one would expect in a TZ police state, as well as closed off to any extenuating circumstances. The mother was surprisingly presented in a sympathetic manner, willing to help her housekeeper's grandchildren without hesitation and trying to save her from the immigration officials-- although there was a strangely hostile confrontation in the detention center that was kind of forced. Aside from that, the script was well written with only a handful of cringe moments (the use of the word "caravan," the detention center orderly's "I don't look like you," and the closing narration are the only ones I can think of). The family's abandonment of the mother didn't really serve the metaphor, but it certainly served The Twilight Zone.

All in all, one of the two best of the series, along with the Mars Expedition episode. It conjured up the Twilight Zone very well, dealt with a prominent social issue in an engaging manner, even if they played softball with it, and made it personal with sympathetic characters and good actors. If this was the worst episode of the series instead of a standout, we'd have a really good show on our hands.