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Another Twilight Zone episode, another time to sit down and watch the suspenseful and great storytelling unfold in front of me. I am loving the Twilight Zone reboot so far and the vastly different episodes that I have seen have really impressed me. On Thursday nights I watch The Orville on Fox and The Twilight Zone on CBS All Access and I always look forward to the latter one. With The Orville coming to an end for the season, I can put all my focus on The Twilight Zone, which I am looking forward to.
This week’s episode centers around a small snowy Alaska town, Iglaak, on Christmas Eve. Greg Kinnear plays police captain Lane Pendleton, who has a tradition of pardoning one prisoner from his jail on Christmas Eve. Officer Yuka has arrested her drunken brother to only try and be pardoned to teach him a lesson. As Yuka puts her brother in jail, she discovers that a well-dressed man with a nice hat is sitting in one of the jail cells. She has no idea how he got there but he introduces himself as A. Traveler and explains to both her and Pendleton that he has come from a place that admires the police captain and he wants to be pardoned himself. This only feeds into Pendleton’s ego, who is already self-absorbed. Yuka doesn’t believe anything that A. Traveler says and feels that something about him is off.
Steven Yeun plays A. Traveler beautifully, which makes me want to check out Burning since I have heard his performance was outstanding. In this episode he comes off as calm and welcoming at first, but you instantly get the feeling that something isn’t right with him. Yeun does a great job at balancing his role as being someone who is equally charming but also mysterious. He is enjoying himself on Christmas Eve and partying with local police officers. He is telling people what to they want to hear about themselves, which makes him popular amongst everyone. He starts to reveal a little too much about the officers and they start to turn on each other. This is where the show starts to get interesting because I spent a lot of the show wondering what his motives were and what is the big Twilight Zone twist going to be.
As the show progresses, A. Traveler is becoming more mysterious and people start to question who he really is, which just happens to be an alien. Towards the end of the episode, Pendleton sees A. Traveler sporting antennae coming out the top of his head. This isn’t the big twist of the episode, which I already saw coming, but A. Traveler explains to Yuka that Pendleton has been smuggling classified information into Russian for many years now … but is he being truthful? The show ends with the typical moment of Jordan Peele wrapping up the show, but I felt that the ending happened a few scenes prior to the actual ending. The reveal of the whole episode wasn’t as strong as the revel of A. Traveler being an alien as well as Yuka learning of Pendleton’s crimes.
One thing that I haven’t discussed much during my reviews of the previous three episodes is the camerawork. The camera moves around the crowed Christmas Eve party in a smooth fashion which gives the show an eerie feeling. I also love at times when the camera focuses on one setting or character and zooms in slowly, which gives the show its suspenseful vibe.
‘A Traveler’ is one of The Twilight Zone’s lengthier episodes and one that doesn’t have a strong ending compared to others, but I did love Steven Yeun’s performance as well as the alien aspects of the show and how changing one’s routines can throw off civilians and cause chaos. This message wasn’t as strong as last week’s ‘Replay’ episode, but it does feel more like a classic Twilight Zone episode more than anything.
What did you think of this episode? Tell us in the comments below!
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