“What is The Twilight Zone? When do we get there?”
The sky high expectations surely didn’t help matters but this year’s Jordan Peele-hosted reboot of “The Twilight Zone,” in the eyes of most, was pretty underwhelming in its debut season. Aside from a couple standouts like “Replay” and “Point of Origin,” I’ve personally found the series to be just that thus far, with many episodes failing to land with the proper punch and others just plain being way too on-the-nose to really even work at all. But with last week’s season finale, the series delivered its boldest, most must-watch episode to date.
Titled “Blurryman” and starring Seth Rogen and Zazie Beetz, along with Jordan Peele as Jordan Peele, the season finale took a meta trip into “The Twilight Zone,” with Beetz quite literally playing a writer of the reboot we’ve been watching on CBS All Access these last several weeks. Beetz’s Sophie Gelson is being haunted by a mysterious, Slenderman-esque figure on the set of “The Twilight Zone,” and her attempt to outrun what she fears most takes her back onto the sets of recent episodes like “The Comedian.” But who, or what, is this entity?
If you haven’t yet seen the episode, go watch it now. Spoilers incoming.
So as it turns out, the titular “Blurryman” is actually Rod Serling himself, brought back to the screen for the reboot’s season finale by a combination of actors and CGI. The final moments of Sophie’s nightmare fittingly culminate in black & white, with Serling finally revealing himself and escorting the writer – a lifelong fan of the series Serling created, who spent much of her childhood glued to the TV in a land of “make believe” – quite literally into “The Twilight Zone.” Before delivering a monologue, he tells a mystified Sophie: “We’ve got a lot of work to do”…
“What do we do when our world is turned upside down? When everything we thought to be true is ripped away and we’re forced to face a new reality? Sophie Gelson has just awoken to the fact that when we put away childish things, we may be closing our eyes instead of opening them. And that perhaps our only hope is to face all reality. A multitude of truths. Not shrinking from that vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant “X” beyond imagination, but to embrace it. To open ourselves to the unknown. Not the end of the story, but a new beginning… for The Twilight Zone.”
In many ways, “Blurryman” feels like a sort of catharsis for the actual writers of the new “Twilight Zone,” the episode acknowledging that Rod Serling has figuratively been present on set and that the biggest fear for the creative team has been doing his legacy justice; the main thrust of the episode is that Beetz’s Sophie has been stressing about nailing the narration for the latest episode, which has no doubt been a huge point of stress for the real team. It’s revealed to us during the episode that the shadowy “Blurryman” has quite literally found himself in each of the reboot’s episodes thus far, not-so-subtly pointing out the fact that the new series has been living in Serling’s shadow. And indeed it has, not just because it’s a new version of the classic series but also because many of the episodes in Season One – Nightmare at 30,000 Feet, for example – have outright updated classic Serling stories and ideas.
But with “Blurryman,” it’s almost as if the writers are giving themselves permission to blaze their own new path with “The Twilight Zone.” To leave behind the homages to past episodes and to make Serling proud with entirely new stories that do proper justice to his legacy. Why? Because now more than ever, the episode also stresses, the world needs “The Twilight Zone.”
More than anything else, “Blurryman” is a love letter to Rod Serling, “The Twilight Zone” and the overall importance of using “silly genre shit” to tackle serious, real world topics and issues; Jordan Peele, the new show’s host/executive producer, sure knows a thing or two about that. The “fake open” for the episode, before the meta twist reveals that we’ve actually been watching the filming of a faux episode of “The Twilight Zone,” sees Seth Rogen playing a writer whose words quite literally have the power to change the world, and that’s important because that’s really what “Blurryman” is all about: there’s more to art than entertainment. “The Twilight Zone” has never merely been escapism but rather a mirror held up to society, and at times like these, we need entertainment that allows us to open our eyes; we need stories that force us to face reality head on. Only on the surface were Serling’s stories “make believe.”
Whether or not “Blurryman” manages to hit a home run is entirely up to the individual viewer – some may even feel that its uncanny resurrection of Rod Serling is something akin to sacrilege – but no one can deny that it swings for the fences and manages to deliver the reboot’s most powerful, unexpected twist thus far. Mind you, the creative team’s bold admission that they perhaps haven’t been firing on all cylinders with the previous nine episodes of their “Twilight Zone” doesn’t absolve them of the fact that the series had been quite underwhelming up to this point – “Blurryman” would’ve been more powerful as the start of a great season rather than the end of a lackluster one – but the implications for Season 2 are nothing if not exciting.
No, the new series hasn’t been great, but they’re out here trying and I’m glad that they are. Because right about now, maybe it’s true that “our only hope is to face all reality.”
And where better to do that than within the safe confines of “The Twilight Zone”?
