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the twilight zone tv

The Twilight Zone: Replay and The Comedian

Two more episodes of the new The Twilight Zone, which is to say that I watched the new one from this week and finally got around to watching the first episode. Neither of them are exactly subtle, which is a-okay; I think particularly with “Replay,” there’s a need to not allow the audience plausible deniability with a veneer.

Replay: Lawyer Nina Harrison is taking her son Dorian to the HBCU Tennyson, where he’s going to major in film. They keep encountering a terrifyingly racist state patrolman, and Nina uses an old camcorder to rewind time to try to find a way out of the situation, which escalates with every iteration.

The Comedian: Comedian Samir Wassan basically makes a deal with the devil in order to gain success. The deal is the twist, so I don’t want to spoil it here.

SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING below the fold.

Categories
the twilight zone tv

The Twilight Zone: Nightmare at 30,000 Feet

By total accident, I watched the second episode of the new Twilight Zone first. Which I think is fine, since it’s presumably all one-shot episodes anyway. And I think this was a good one. In Nightmare at 30,000 Feet, an investigative reporter named Justin Sanderson, who is still recovering from having seen some serious shit in Yemen, finds an mp3 player with a mysterious podcast on it in his seatback pocket after boarding a plane. The podcast purports to explore the mystery of how the very flight he’s on disappears shortly after takeoff. Justin, as you might imagine, is concerned.

It feels very classic Twilight Zone, and it’s got so many callbacks in it to the famous William Shatner episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. (Look, it was another time and the airplanes were not as cool back then.) And the episode damn well knows what expectations its setting up with that title and twists them around in really interesting ways, with about the same amount of “oh god I can’t watch this because this person is making such a spectacle of themself oh help.”

SPOILERS BELOW since I want to mull about the theme of the episode and how it differed from its predecessor.