he venerable anthology drama returns, sans opening narration, in an hour-long format designed to showcase two half-hour stories per episode.
In the first segment, "Evergreen," troubled teen Jenna Winslow seethes as her family is relocated to the titular gated community, where rebellious adolescents have their outrageous clothing and wild music confiscated on arrival. Jenna, drugged by her parents, wakes up with her tattoos removed and her multicolored hairstyle restored to its natural brunette shade. Angered at being stifled by an environment that denies her the drugs and wild music she declares are all she cares about, she soon meets Cliff Brooks, the boy next door, who warns her that no teen has ever escaped from Evergreen. As she continues to rebel, she soon finds that the community enacts the strictest of all possible penalties for those unwilling to conform to the rules.
In "One Night at Mercy," young surgical resident Dr. Jay Fergurson saves his first life on his second day on the job. He is still flying high on this accomplishment when an ambulance brings in his next patient: an unnamed derelict found hanging from the rafters of an abandoned warehouse, in what seems to be an ordinary suicide attempt. But then the world-weary patient introduces himself as Death himself, driven to despair by the grim job he's held for so many eons. Death says he can't stand the work anymore. He's quitting. Dr. Fergurson is skeptical, but then word comes from the outside world that no deaths have been reported, anywhere, for almost a full day. And Fergurson finds himself in the unenviable position of having to decide whether Death should really be allowed to retire.
Less than impressive, but still promising
The difficulty with reviewing any single episode of an anthology-format TV show is that such things are uneven by nature. The quality can range all the way from awful to excellent from one installment to the next, and you can't tell whether the show has legs until you've watched a whole bunch and from that derive an accurate appraisal of the show's long-term quality, and whether it's going to be worth searching for diamonds amid all the dross. In the case of the original Twilight Zone, Rod Serling himself described the output as one-third crap, one-third watchable and one-third pretty damn good, with a handful of truly classic episodes strong enough to stick in the memory and leave the faithful viewer with the false impression that the show consistently reached such heights. The much later version helmed by Joe Straczynski maintained pretty much the same batting average, which meant that whenever you advised friends that the new Twilight Zone was great and persuaded them to give it a try, they ended up sampling the season nadir and later looked at you like you were crazy.
With this in mind, it would be nice to report that the newest version of Twilight Zone began with two of the show's intermittent classics. Alas, it was not to be. The first tale, with the rebellious teen forced to shape up or die, is disappointing from the start, with an unlikable protagonist, a simple-minded and unbelievable premise and a denouement so obvious from about five minutes in that the viewer is left waiting in vain for a clever twist capable of justifying it. None comes. The second, with Jason Alexander excellent as the depressed and self-pitying embodiment of Death, is considerably better, mostly because of the reaper's effective characterization as a more cosmic version of George Costanza. The ending of this one is also too obvious—the five friends who watched it with me all saw the approaching twist by the midway point—but that doesn't matter nearly as much, next to the effective tone and the confirmation that the folks behind this version of Zone understand the mix of fantasy and philosophical resonance that rendered the best installments so memorable. Even if this second tale didn't scale those heights, it still provided reason to believe that better might still be on the way.
As for Forest Whitaker, his presence is different from Serling's. Serling's opening narrations always came with a smirk. Whatever else he happened to be saying, there was always an undercurrent of "This one's gonna get ya!" Whitaker's presence is different: more earnest, almost urgent, as in "This one matters!" Both are effective hosts ... even when the accuracy of those predictions is as spotty as the show itself.
