![]() ![]() The camera, and its ability to rewind time and re-start the episode’s loop, is simply the device for telling its story about racial discrimination. That episode was, in and of itself, already cannibalizing many of the themes of the earlier “Time Enough at Last,” but “Replay” isn’t terribly concerned about its deus ex machina. It’s a classic Twilight Zone premise, quite similar in structure to the uninspired 1963 episode “A Kind of Stopwatch,” about a watch that can literally stop time. But can even this device save her son, when fate seems dead set against them? Stopping at a roadside diner along the way, the pair run into a cartoonishly racist highway patrolman (Glenn Fleshler, doughy and tyrannical), who follows them and begins to hassle/actively threaten Dorian until Nina discovers a helpful trick: The antique camera she’s possessed all her life suddenly seems to be imbued with the ability to rewind time. This episode is the story of single mother Nina, played with effective confusion and mounting desperation by Sanaa Lathan, as she attempts to shepherd her would-be filmmaker son Dorian (Damson Idris) to his university orientation. Instead, “Replay” is like a neon sign, the size of a building, reading “WE ARE MAKING A STATEMENT.” Surely our storytelling should have grown in complexity by now, rather than regressed. Is it asking too much that a show airing in 2019 present its stories with a bit more sophistication than a series that first aired in 1959? It’s 60 years later, people. It’s well acted, well produced, well shot, and entirely on the nose-less “fantastical” and more “ripped from the headlines.” You can’t argue against its social relevance, but it’s simultaneously tough to make a case for it as entertainment, given that the latter feels like an afterthought to its timely (but clumsily direct) message. ![]() “Replay,” the third episode in the Jordan Peele-produced reboot, hits CBS All Access today with a story that pretty much eschews subtlety altogether. You can say this for the original series, though: At least it typically made an attempt to wrap its themes in allegory to begin with. We fondly remember the series’ best and most timeless episodes today, but a cursory glance at our ranking of all 156 original episodes includes just as many that now radiate naiveté, or badly mishandle their attempts at allegory. ![]() The Twilight Zone was “political” from the start, but it would be fallacious to act as if the show’s political statements always aged well, or were executed effectively. There’s no sense in debating whether a series like The Twilight Zone “should” have episodes that are derisively labeled as “political.” From its inception, Rod Serling’s masterwork anthology series always shined a light on socioeconomic inequality, racism, irrational prejudice and the futility of abject hatred or blind faith. And the thing that pretty much all of these arguments have in common is that they entirely miss the point. Many of those inches have revolved around heated, knee-jerk audience reactions to the overtly “political” nature of its stories, bickering back and forth about whether The Twilight Zone ought to be an outlet for this kind of discourse. The CBS All Access reboot of The Twilight Zone has already received countless column inches in praise or condemnation of its attempts to adapt the iconic TV show for a modern audience. ![]()
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