This past Monday, streaming service CBS All Access kicked off their revival of “The Twilight Zone” with two episodes from the new series, executive produced and hosted by Jordan Peele. As it turns out, Peele makes for a perfect host for the modern day take on the classic series, and both “The Comedian” and “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” felt quite true to the iconic lineage.
In “The Comedian” (which can also be streamed for free through Amazon Prime and YouTube!), Kumail Nanjiani stars as a stand-up comedian whose approach to the artform isn’t garnering many laughs. That is until he enters the Twilight Zone, where he learns that selling his life and loved ones for laughs has both short term advantages and long term repercussions.
And then in “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” Adam Scott stars in a vastly different take on one of the most classic “Twilight Zone” episodes. His character discovers a mysterious MP3 player on a flight to Tel Aviv that has on it a podcast episode about the disappearance of the very flight he’s on, sending him on a paranoid journey to crack the mystery and save the doomed flight.
Both episodes are loaded with political and social commentary to chew on, and they’re also packed with fun little Easter egg nods to the past – and to a potential shared universe.
Here are five of the best Easter eggs we spotted in the first two episodes.
“The Comedian” – Distorted Faces
The opening image in the very first episode of the new “Twilight Zone” shows us the back wall of Eddie’s Comedy Club, which is adorned with a very Shining-esque image from the past. The mural is again seen at the very end of the episode for a direct nod to Kubrick’s The Shining and its final image, but the photograph also gives nods to the classic “Twilight Zone” episodes ‘Eye of the Beholder’ and ‘The Masks.’ Both episodes memorably featured distorted human faces, and several of the faces in the Eddie’s mural are distorted in nearly identical ways.
“The Comedian” – Willie the Dummy
Backstage at Eddie’s Comedy Club in “The Comedian,” a creepy doll is briefly seen in the background of a shot, and fans of the original series surely recognized that it looked like an exact replica of the “Willie” doll from Season 3 episode ‘The Dummy.’ Actually, it wasn’t a replica but rather the actual screen-used doll from 1962, loaned to the production by magician David Copperfield! Kumail Nanjiani confirmed to Vanity Fair that it was the real deal, relaying that Copperfield agreed to let the dummy appear on screen if his own name was referenced.
Sure enough, Nanjiani’s character remarks in the episode (after realizing that his comedy is quite literally making people disappear) that he’s become “an evil David Copperfield.”
“The Comedian” – Kanamit Beer
Diarra Kilpatrick co-stars in “The Comedian” as a standup comic named DiDi Scott, and at one point she’s drinking a beer at the bar of Eddie’s alongside Nanjiani’s Samir Wassan. If you look very closely at the label on the beer bottle she’s drinking, it reads “Kanamit Lager,” a reference to the humanoid alien race from the iconic ‘To Serve Man’ episode of the original series.
The twist of ‘To Serve Man’ is that the Kanamit have actually come to Earth to consume human beings, so it’s a clever little wink-and-nod to see DiDi sipping from a bottle labeled Kanamit!
“Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” – Gremlin Doll
The revival’s “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” is a new take on the William Shatner-starring ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,’ exploiting more modern in-flight fears than big hairy gremlins. But the classic gremlin from the original version of the episode does make a cameo appearance in “30,000 Feet” when a replica doll of the gremlin that terrorized Shatner washes upon on shore after the plane Adam Scott’s character is on crashes. As another little nod to the past, a character named Dr. Cravat is mentioned, a reference to gremlin suit performer Nick Cravat!
“Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” – Shared Universe?
This last Easter egg we want to highlight isn’t a tribute to the past, but an interesting suggestion for the future. Before boarding his flight in “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” Adam Scott’s character checks out the magazine rack in the airport gift shop, and two of the magazines prominently displayed are adorned with photographs of other characters from this new batch of revival episodes: Kumail Nanjiani’s Samir Wassan from ‘The Comedian’ and Jacob Tremblay’s Oliver Foley from an upcoming episode titled ‘The Wunderkind.’
The suggestion here is that all of these new “Twilight Zone” stores are taking place in an inter-connected “shared universe,” and we can’t help but wonder if we’ll be seeing more of that connective tissue going forward. The original “Twilight Zone” episodes were standalone tales, but it seems the new series has designs on, in one way or another, bridging its stories together.
Have you spotted any other Easter eggs so far? Comment and let us know!