I wasn’t a fan of last year’s reboot of The Twilight Zone, but somebody convinced me to check out some of the second season’s episodes. Although they’re a mixed bag and still highly derivative, there is definitely some improvement.
The boarding school-set ‘Among the Downtrodden’ threatened to be a rip-off of Brian De Palma’s Carrie but it soon found its own twisted path, one quite cleverly plotted by Heather Anne Campbell (yet saddled with a typically heavy-handed direction). Following a group of scientists dealing with a monstrous creature in Antarctica, ‘8’ benefits from the work of two genuinely great sci-fi/horror directors (Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead), who pull off an entertainingly schlocky chiller that rises above its origins as a riff on Christian Nyby’s and John Carpenter’s versions of The Thing. Even the intertextual winks (it’s set at NyBy Science Station; characters watch a TV show narrated by Rod Serling…) and the odd casting choice of having Tim Armstrong play a scientist (who is obviously into ska) somehow work as more than mere distractions. (The fact that this one has a shorter running time helps as well!) In turn, ‘You Might Also Like’ was a letdown. I guess it could’ve worked as a passable satire of consumerism – even if not a particularly deep or original one – but the result is too confusing and poorly paced (probably a failed attempt at sophistication…). It doesn’t do itself any favors by referencing one of the original show’s most beloved episodes, ‘To Serve Man,’ which was everything this one is not: charmingly goofy, exciting, memorable, funny, and surprising.
And then there is Jennifer McGowan’s ‘Try, Try,’ about an increasingly weird meet cute at a museum. Like Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, it revisits a classic story from the perspective of the female character, thus shedding light on how predatory and manipulative the behavior of the former male lead would feel if faced from a different vantage point. To be fair, works about gaslighting are not a new thing – hell, the term comes from the title of a couple of gothic movies from the early 1940s! There is a whole subgenre of psychological thrillers about women being mind-fucked, usually culminating in them trying to denounce a truth nobody believes (just off the top of my head, The Lady Vanishes, Coma, Rosemary’s Baby, My Name Is Julia Ross, and Bunny Lake Is Missing come to mind). This trope can be read as feminist: not only are the female protagonists actually revealed as sane in the end (contrary to what those around them think), but society’s predisposition to wrongly see women as hysterical is both acknowledged and presented as an obstacle for the forces of good (i.e. as something the villains take advantage of). What ‘Try, Try’ brings to the table, though, is a metafictional reversal: a device that was commonly accepted as amusing in Groundhog Day is now presented as disturbing. The episode makes its point effectively, even for people who haven’t seen the original, but you might as well watch the actual movie – after all, anyone watching 2020’s Twilight Zone will probably be woke enough to recognize that comedy’s creepy gender dynamics (which the film doesn’t fully condone, even if it makes light of them) without having Jordan Peele spell things out in the end.
Anyway, speaking of surreal science fiction anthologies, here is your reminder that comics can be awesome, My Greatest Adventure edition:
