At long last I’m ready to finish my series of posts on season 1 of this Twilight Zone revival. I finally finished that data sciences class to which I’ve been referring so maybe I’ll soon have a lucrative source of income until this blog takes off!
First things first – let’s keep churning out the content.
Episode 8: “Point of Origin” – Easily the best episode that isn’t “Replay” from the whole season, yet still not flawless. Ginnifer Goodwin plays a bourgeois wife and mother whose nanny suddenly gets apprehended for being an undocumented immigrant and who wants to help the nanny, only to discover that she herself is an “alien” in a more literal sense of the word. I’m impressed the episode avoided being TOO heavy-handed trying to liken the heroine’s struggle to those of Hispanic immigrants. It was a tense thriller about someone whose world has been upended and is trying to figure out how to reclaim her life, even if you leave aside the political commentary
<SPOILERS/> That said, it was somewhat heavy-handed. I liked how the two detained characters maintained their separate views, instead of the extraterrestrial simply getting taken under the Hispanic’s wing because she now identifies with her former nanny. However, sometimes it laid on the white guilt rather thickly, to the detriment of the story. The nanny at one point chastises the main character, WHO’S TRYING TO HELP HER, by basically saying “I clean up your kids’ shit and puke but you don’t even know my kids’ names” and I wanted to scream “That’s your job! Thanks for the false equivalence idiot.”
Also, the ending got on my nerves. The husband basically tells his wife she’s not wanted anymore now that he knows the truth about her, and their (admittedly small) children back him up. If the husband is such a bigot he doesn’t want any immigrant near him, why would he be okay with that nanny raising his kids? And if he believes that “some of them, I assume, are good” as Trump put it, why would he not be accommodating to his own wife and the mother of his children? The ending really came across like it was trying to make white viewers think “Wow that could be me. I need to change!” and seemed inauthentic. </SPOILERS>
In spite of that, the episode’s merits (including Goodwin’s performance, the direction, and the score) make it a strong entry.
Episode 9: “The Blue Scorpion”– Chris O’Dowd stars in a really gripping tale about a gun that seems to have supernatural powers and won’t leave the life of the man to whom it was gifted.
<SPOILERS/> For the most part it seems like no more and no less than a nice escapist piece about an inanimate object providing divine intervention to a person who really need it. This episode is the latest one that fails to stick the landing though. Why throw in that bit at the end with the child finding the gun? Were the writers seriously trying to throw in an anti-gun message after telling that whole story where it worked wonders for this guy? If they felt it was irresponsible to have any sort of gun worshiping in our society where people are always in danger of a mass shooting I understand, but then why write this episode about a magical gun at all? </SPOILERS>
Episode 10: “Blurryman”– Well the beginning was awesome!
<SPOILERS/> Seemed like an episode starring Seth Rogen as a famous author but suddenly broke a fourth wall, kind of, and turned into an episode ABOUT a writer of this season of The Twilight Zone </SPOILERS>
I remember liking it when I watched it, but after two months I’ve already forgotten what happened. It was basically just a bunch of references to the original show. Fun enough for fans of the classic series, but might as well have been a clip show where people on this new series talked about the original’s legacy.
Point of Origin – 78, The Blue Scorpion – 63, Blurryman – 54
At this point, now that I’m done with the whole season, I’ll give my overall thoughts. There was one great episode, one very good episode, a bunch of episodes that were frustratingly mediocre, and too many outright clunkers.
I hate to say this, given how much I love The Twilight Zone, but I feel like it might be a concept whose time has come and gone. Watching the 60th anniversary celebration Fathom Events put on for the original show last month (featuring six classic episodes plus a short documentary on Rod Serling) got me thinking that The Twilight Zone was really revolutionary in its time. Not only were sci-fi and horror less than a century old as genres in any medium, but morality plays with a sci-fi twist were especially something the likes of which nobody had seen. At this point, though, society might be ready for an anthology that lets the powerful, serious sci-fi stand on its own and doesn’t need gimmicks like twist endings, addictive theme music, and a guy in a suit using fancy phrases to describe the lesson we’re learning.
To put it another way, Entertainment Weekly commented before this new show debuted earlier this year that the real shadow looming over the current Twilight Zone didn’t come from the original Twilight Zone but rather from Black Mirror. I feel like this is Black Mirror’s era to be the riveting trendy show, while The Twilight Zone’s place is during New Year’s marathons with old black-and-white episodes.
I’ve love to be proven wrong though! This new Twilight Zone has already been renewed for a second season, and if the quality of that new season next year is much better than that of this one, I’ll gladly eat my words.
Come on Jordan Peele and company. Make me eat crow! Do it for Rod Serling’s legacy!
Bottom Line: Unfortunately, just meh. This block and the whole season.
Up Next: Another of those trilogies I promised.
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