Two words capture the new season of “The Twilight Zone” with unfortunate clarity—overwritten and overdirected. Most anything Jordan Peele puts his name on, whether his own movies (“Get Out,” “Us”) or projects led by other talents (Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” sequel) at least deserves consideration for quality of imagination and for the strength of vision. But “The Twilight Zone,” now in its second season after being resurrected by Peele and Simon Kinberg in 2019, lacks cohesion in spite of the assembly of talent called to order for this outing, including Oz Perkins, Ana Lily Amirpour, Tayarisha Poe, and inseparable horror filmmaking duo, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.
The irony is that, over ten self-contained episodes, common themes emerge, in particular concepts of and related to the interplay between human minds, as seen in the season opener, “Meet in the Middle,” and Episode 3, “The Who of You.” In the former, Jimmi Simpson plays Phil, a sadsack therapy case on the lookout for love who discovers a psychic connection with Annie (Gillian Jacobs, mostly involved via voiceover), and in the latter, Henry (Ethan Embry), a struggling actor and useless boyfriend, suddenly develops the power to hop between human bodies, enabling him to go on a panicked crime spree. Neither episode ends well, whether for their protagonists or the hapless boobs caught in their macabre existential dilemmas. This, of course, is expected. Anthology genre shows, like “Tales From the Crypt” or a modern touchstone like Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror,” generally tend toward misery rather than happiness.
But “The Twilight Zone” isn’t weaker for the absence of sunshine. The problem is excess. Partly, the just-too-muchery reads as an issue with duration. Forty minutes and change is a healthy chunk of time for telling grim tales of people orbiting inevitable doom, but time is a double-edged sword: Emily C. Chang and Sarah Amini, writers on “Meet in the Middle,” and director Mathias Herndl make no decisions about the shape of Phil and Annie’s ultimate fate or the steps they take to arrive at said fate. Instead of setting on an idea, they go nuts with all of them, stuffing that sub-hour structure with a gallimaufry of motifs starting with isolation, pivoting to toxic masculinity, and concluding with bloody murder abetted by femme fatale scheming.
What’s especially frustrating about this scenario is that a respectable stretch of the plot actually works. Simpson and Jacobs build palpable chemistry with one another despite the screen disparity. Think of Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s “Her,” a dual performance founded on a mirror dynamic, Johansson the voice in Phoenix’s ear (literally, in fact), creating romance sans physical presence. Simpson’s work in front of the camera and Jacobs’ work behind it yields real human drama, but the drama is squandered in the final act. No lessons are learned and the bittersweet promise of Chang, Amini, and Herndl’s set-up goes instantly to seed. Whatever messages that might’ve been sent get buried beneath the swing of a candlestick and the hiss of arterial spray.
Blood and guts combined with shock and awe are all well and good—no strangers to horror or more broadly designated supernatural storytelling modes—but “Meet in the Middle” is established on notions so much more interesting jolts of violence; the episode’s heart is pure, but the resolution is muddled with crimson. Much the same is true of “The Who of You,” which apart from running smack into a brick wall of its own making also manages the baffling feat of blowing a perfectly wonderful Billy Porter performance. As Henry’s quandary deepens with each body swap, the episode removes itself further away from its driving scenario. What does an actor do when he finds that he can actually, authentically inhabit other people’s experiences? He continues to go on the lam like a putz, and Peter Atencio, operating off of Win Rosenfeld’s script, never looks back. “The Who of You” favors the easy, the obvious, and the hopelessly predictable, once again at the expense of a thoughtful logline.
And on the subject of voices in heads, there’s “You Might Also Like,” where Perkins does his take on the famous original Rod Serling classic tale, “To Serve Man,” a bizarre-o story of techno-reliance melting into technophobia. Everyone’s aflutter about the Egg, the next big buzzy device being hawked to everyone with a television set and a set of deep-rooted neuroses about their quality of living; nobody knows what the hell the Egg is, but they know they want it. They also don’t know that they’re being eyeballed by the Kanamits, those towering aliens possessed of engorged heads and fixated on Earth’s destruction. Once they just wanted to subjugate humanity. Now they want to wipe us all off the face of the planet…with gadgets.
The great puzzle of “The Twilight Zone” isn’t so much in the denouements of its various chapters but in how they dip their toes in similar waters without ever lending the season overarching harmony. The pieces don’t fit. The edges are marred and jagged. There are, in fairness, small pleasures worth discovering here, notably casting and characters, and to a lesser extent the craftsmanship: “The Twilight Zone” looks uniformly wonderful in contrast to the rushed, careless, and thoroughly unedited quality of the writing. How can so many installments in a series explore several mutations of one thesis without ever creating a satisfying, systematic whole? The work here isn’t bad, not quite. It’s overdone and underdone all at once. Derive what delights you can from “The Twilight Zone,” but if you want a firm sense of what these authors are capable of, look to their filmographies instead. [C]
“The Twilight Zone” Season 2 can be streamed on CBS All Access.