New version of The Twilight Zone to be on CBS All Access

Now this was an improvement.

It wasn't perfect and it is a little confusing at the end. I assume that the mission was real and the aliens were monitoring them. That's how I'd like to look at it.

I thought the opening scene was great and it had two TZ staples. The threat (or in this case the reality) of nuclear war and a mission to outer space. Good performances and production values all around.

I'm curious as to why they didn't have some form of recreation on the ship considering this was going to be a long mission. It felt like there wasn't so much as a book on the ship.

I'll be honest, while this show continues to struggle with the length of the episodes and some scenes could have been tightened, this episode didn't feel like 53 minutes to me. It felt like it ended early when I saw it.

The Great Filter was a cool thing to bring into this and did they also make a reference to the Fermi Paradox? I've read about the latter recently and it's a fascinating theory.

We'll see how next week's episode goes...it does have Rhea Seehorn in it from Better Call Saul and that is definitely a good thing.

 

I'm in a similar position only I'm not sure if I'll have enough interest in returning to see the episodes I missed.

 

Yes they did reference the Fermi Paradox. Those two concepts really elevated the episode for me because they are just such cool concepts to think about, at least for me.

 

Great episode. I really liked the twist. I was almost a spiritual sequel to The Monsters are Due on Maple Street. It was all an alien test, but instead of preparing for invasion they're wanting to see if we're worthy of saving.

Next week's looks like an adaptation of The Screwfly Solution.

Spoiler: Plot

It's about men suddenly turning violent against women and trying to kill them. Scientists at first think it's a form of insanity, but the men insist that it is natural and try to justify it. They later form a religion to justify it. Scientists eventually figure out that sexual impulses have been replaced by violent impulses. Eventually the men are bent on completely wiping out all women on the planet. In the end it turns out that aliens have infected humanity in order to just let us kill each other so they can take over the planet without an effort. The title comes from how we try to wipe out certain insect species by releasing sterile males to compete with the fertile ones to reduce future populations.

Masters of Horror adapted it a few years back.

 

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.

 

I still feel like the eps should be shorter. "Six Degrees of Freedom" could have been a TZ classic if they had shortened it to around 30 minutes, and focused just on the tension of the astronauts coping with isolation and the knowledge of leaving an Earth devastated by nuclear war, with a wacky astronaut claiming it is all fake. The ending would have had a bigger impact.

 

All the episodes shown so far would have been better if they were around 30 minutes.

 

I think the mission was real, and the aliens were simply observing from a distance. The alien said something about how humans managed to break through the 'great filter' but "it took the near destruction of their species for them to do so". I assume the alien was talking about the war when it said that.

And I don't think the one astronaut was an alien spy or anything like that. The alien said "This one discovered we were watching". So it would seem that he's human, just that the aliens saved his life.

 

I got the impression that it was all fake. The aliens mentioned the one astronaut figured that out which impressed them.

 

^ The astronaut got it half right. He thought the mission and the war were fake (incorrect) but he also thought there were others watching (correct). He just had no idea it was aliens watching them.

I might be more inclined to agree that the whole thing was a simulation if not for the alien's line about "the near destruction of their species". I thought that was a clear reference to the war.

 

Anyone still watching?

Just watched "Not All Men". on the plus side, the horror/slasher aspects of the ep were pretty well executed. But, I think the episode was too long. There was too much set up and too many drawn out scenes that slowed things down. The ending was probably a bit expected.

 

I think a lot of us dropped CBS AA when Discovery season ended. We will back for Picard.

 

The latest episode was great, really tense.

 

All episodes of The Twilight Zone reboot will soon be available in black and white.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/jordan-peel...Shk1BKn1XeacNVWS5-3Ohle43dbwPK6pZxgNo7C9iC6ag

 

It looks so much better in black and white. Just looks more authentic.

 

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 here 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.

 

This show is as subtle as a lead pipe.

And to think I actually thought it could get good (with the Mars episode)....and then they go and do this. What was I thinking?

"Not All Men" would have been a LOT better if it really was the meteorites. And you know what? Perhaps it was, after all. True, that one guy 'Cole' wasn't affected, and surely there are a lot of men who weren't, but maybe the space rocks simply don't work on all of the men. And the suggestion that it wasn't the meteorites, that they were a placebo, was just a theory put forth by one of the characters. Doesn't mean it's true.

Besides, if it wasn't the space rocks, then why did the craziness only start after the meteor shower? And what the HELL happened to that one guy's voice which dropped three octaves in an instant? And why did the infected have those bulging veins and bloodshot eyes?

Oh well. It is what it is. If they want to get in my face, I'll just have to get out of the way! And I can't say I'm encouraged by the preview for "Point of Origin", either. I suspect it will be as "subtle" as this one was.

 

That was pretty bad. One good episode out of seven for me. I'm not sure why I'm continuing to torture myself.

 

People are dumber now, it has to be that way. This is a world where people refuse to give their kids vaccines and the current political power in charge is gleefully locking up children in cages and at the same time calling themselves pro-life by giving an embryo the same legal rights as a living human. So pregnant women can use carpool lanes and get arrested for murder if they miscarry. We're lucky the meaning isn't flashing in big letters at the end.