Ranking and reviewing this season was significantly more difficult than the last one. There were two clearly terrible episodes and two clearly great episodes that were simple to write about. But the majority of the season consists of five flawed episodes. Most of those five all have aspects to them that work, but also deep issues that inhibited my enjoyment of all of them. As a result, the specific placements on this list for spots #8 through #4 are less important than in the previous list.

Let’s jump in.

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10. Ovation (ep.4, 41m)

Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. They took my least favorite episode of the previous season, The Comedian, and basically remade the same premise with slight variations. An aspiring performer, here a young singer-songwriter named Jasmine, receives a gift from an inspirational figure, here a pop star called Fiji, that grants the owner fame and success but at a terrible cost. This time around, the gift is a medallion that makes the user beloved to all audiences when they perform, but it is only a surface level admiration. When Jasmine sings, everyone quickly breaks out into thunderous applause the drowns out her performance, no matter how good or bad she sounds.

The many scenes of rapturous applause for an unfinished or mediocre performance is meant to be unnerving in the exact same way the uncontrollable laughter to mediocre jokes was in The Comedian, and it misses the mark both times. The message here seems to be that fame has a muting effect, preventing an audience from hearing an idol’s message. Like I mentioned in my Season 1 review, this sort of critique feels years removed from a reality in which people are increasingly looking to popular creatives to provide more than just flashy entertainment, by also presenting their full personality and opinions on social media. The moral of this episode is basically, being famous actually limits one’s ability to deliver a message, and that makes no sense. In the real world, fame does disconnect a creator from their audience, but that comes from an inability to listen to and relate to experiences beyond their personal bubble of wealth and privilege. The dangers of contemporary fame have much more to do with unchecked limits on the power a famous person can wield with their platform. JK Rowling can write a successful children’s series over a decade ago and leverage her massive platform to target marginalized transgender people. YouTube creators like PewDiePie can inoculate their young audiences to white supremacist ideas. Do I need to remind the creators of this show that a racist reality TV star is the president?

This episode is maybe a quarter of the way to a relevant message. Jasmine’s fans are presented as a mindless flock of admirers, who chase after her and who can’t perform even basic tasks like drive properly when in her presence. This imagery of wild crowds, along with the plot element of a singing game TV show that makes Jasmine famous, pulls more from 60s Beatlemania than anything relevant today, but yes, admiration for the famous can make people do stupid things. If this control over people presented as a terrible power Jasmine could wield upon others, we might be halfway towards making an interesting point. But all the danger of this situation is directed at Jasmine herself. Her physical and mental wellbeing is infringed upon by her adoring fans. This episode has nothing more to say than, “Wow, being famous isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, huh?”, and I find that abhorrent.

If the message of this garbage wasn’t terrible enough on it’s own, the delivery is unbearably edgy. The Comedian at least had the dignity to keep the proceedings lowkey, with the protagonist’s powers silently making people disappear from existence. In Ovation, the show revels in gruesome violence. Fiji, the previous owner of the cursed medallion, kills herself at the start of the episode by jumping in from of a bus. It feels like it’s trying way too hard to be serious and affecting. In the finale, after having relinquished the medallion, Jasmine is driven into a murderous rage upon learning that a new pop star, Mynx, has inherited the coin and is reaping the benefits of fame, and stabs her in public. For the requisite “twist,” Mynx turns out to be Jasmine’s jealous sister. Jasmine’s escalation from distressed musician to full-on psychopath comes out of nowhere. It feels like the show knows it needs some kind of exciting moment to conclude on, and it can’t think of anything other than a showy display of bloody violence. This cheap reliance of violence is, sadly, a trend that carries into several other episodes this season.

This episode was truly abysmal. I nearly canceled my CBS All-Access subscription and stopped watching the season then and there. Thankfully, my patience paid off in the some great episodes towards the end, but there are a lot of stinkers between here and there.

9. 8 (ep.6, 31m)

This episode is a disaster. It has a multitude of poorly explained and poorly explored ideas crammed into the shortest runtime of the entire show.

The core concept overtly recalls John Carpenter’s The Thing, featuring a sizeable crew of researchers in a remote Antarctic base, coming into conflict with a dangerous organism, and the results of their conflict could decide the fate of humanity. In this case, the organism is not a shapeshifting alien, but an intelligent octopus. This could work - octopi are incredible creatures, very inhuman in their form and abilities - but the episode does not sell the horror of this creature. The 8 crew members, in Antarctic to study the sudden migrations on underwater species as a result of climate change, are violently reduced to 5 early on when the octopus attacks some members on a diving expedition. Despite not actually seeing this occur, the remaining crew members assume that the normal-looking octopus that has appeared in a nearby specimen container is responsible. The audience knows this to be true of course, but the crew makes a jarring leap from not understanding what happened to fearing an octopus they believe to be a hyper-intelligent murderer. The shots of the normal-looking octopus in it’s tank, paired with wary looks from the remaining crew and ominous music is absurd.

Over the course of the short episode, the octopus picks of 2 more crew members, hacks into the base’s computer system (really), and steals some data before escaping back to the ocean. It is revealed that two of the American researchers had a secret mission to find this very species of octopus and capture it for research (how convenient), in order to perform genetic splicing that could create a new race of octopus-people that could inhabit the ocean. The surviving Chinese researcher was also here to do the same thing for a different organization. There’s some extremely mild spycraft as they each try to contact their respective organizations with news of the discovery. However! The octopus escapes with the genetic research data and will use it in reverse to create people-octopi to wage war on the land! All of this stupidity is conveyed to the audience with heavy-handed exposition spoken within the last five minutes of the episode. I feel bad for the actors, it’s really quite embarrassing.

This episode has one of the most grandiose and outlandish premises of any episode in this season, but confines itself to the shortest runtime and suffers as a result. It’s only my speculation, but it feels like this was a longer episode that got chopped apart in editing. It’s not that a wild premise like this couldn’t work for The Twilight Zone, and it attempts to touch on somewhat interesting themes. The American and Chinese researchers have a language barrier that must be bridged with translation software, indicating a desire to reflect on how conflict results from lack of understanding. The octopi, among other underwater species, are having their habitats disrupted by human activity and climate change, and the possibility of humanity being threatened by an equally intelligent species for control of the planet is fun speculation. However, the end result is hamstrung by goofy visuals and terrible, exposition-heavy dialogue that do nothing to sell the concept.

8. Downtime (ep.2, 32m)

There is half of a decent episode here. Morena Baccarin plays Michelle, a newly promoted hotel manager, who finds herself scared and alone as everyone around her becomes unresponsive when a giant orb appears in the sky above her city. It’s a delightfully eerie setup as Michelle wanders around baffled as people calmly look up at the orb with vacant expressions. It is revealed that she is actually in a simulation, Second Life style, and she is actually a man named Phineas playing the role of a hotel manager for recreation. Her actual body had a heart attack and is in a coma, leaving her trapped in the simulation with no memory of her actual life. The orb in the sky is an indicator of scheduled maintenance on the simulation’s server, with the blank-faced people being other users who have simply logged off during that time. Her real-life wife appears, pleading for her to look up to the orb and log off, hoping it will wake her up. There’s a time limit for Michelle to make a decision - once the scheduled maintenance ends, she will be trapped in the simulation.

The setup creates a simple and compelling conflict. Does Michelle’s life have equal value as Phineas’s? She has the all of the memories and desires of a real person, but does that matter when her entire world is revealed to be a carefully crafted fantasy? The setup goes deeper, as the choice between Michelle’s life and Phineas’s reflects a conflict between work life and family life. Michelle is thrilled to receive her promotion, but it is a hollow achievement. The situation is crafted for her to succeed. Her predecessor, when handing off the title, casually remarks that he will try being a CEO or a rock star after retiring from this role. These positions are provided to anyone who pays for the simulation service, and Michelle’s belief that she has earned her position is false. Meanwhile, her, or rather Phineas’s, wife recalls the true stories of how they met and fell in love, and tries to remind Michelle that they have two kids waiting for them in the real world. It’s sappy, but it’s trying to convey a truth. Work life achievement, as is often the case in reality, reflects a privilege that is afforded by those with existing wealth. Family life is the more real reflection of what one has done with their life.

This setup is sadly undercut by a weak third act. Michelle rejects the wife and goes on the run from maintenance workers trying to track her down and pull her out of the simulation. After a weak chase sequence, a supervisor for the game shows up and asks Michelle to sign a waiver absolving the company of responsibility. In a final twist, he reveals that Phineas didn’t just have a heart attack, but he intentionally killed himself by taking pills before logging onto the server one last time. So, Michelle doesn’t actually have a choice to return as Phineas. She is trapped in the simulation. Phineas intentionally trying to trap himself in a virtual world is an interesting idea, but it collapses the moral complexity of the existing setup. There is no choice for Michelle to make, there never was. All that is left for her to do is live out her days in a fake world that she knows is a lie. This ending is then undercut by the arrival of the wife at the hotel for an extended stay, indicating a possibility of establishing a meaningful life even in the simulation.

The end result is a slight, confused episode that seems unsure about what it wants to communicate. Michelle initially makes a choice to stay in the virtual world, but then it’s revealed that the choice was never actually hers to make. Phineas had already made the choice to abandon his real life to live as Michelle. The loving relationship Phineas’s wife speaks so fondly of wasn’t enough for some reason that never gets explored. By the end, none of these past actions seem to matter, as Michelle gets to keep her dream job while meeting the love of her past life anew. Michelle was indecisive the whole episode, but ends up with the best of both worlds by the end. Its a wishy-washy ending that doesn’t capitalize on the initial setup.

Still, we get to see Morena Baccarin kiss another woman, so it’s not a total bust.

7. A Small Town (ep.8, 35m)

After the death of Trina Grant, the beloved mayor of the small town of Littleton, the town seems doomed to a slow death by larger forces. Unlike Mayor Grant, the new Mayor, John Conley, plans to approve a highway extension beside the town that will cut the town off from traffic, killing it’s small tourism scene and accelerating its economic decline. It’s a dour setup, particularly when viewed through the eyes of the Jason Grant, the widowed husband of the late mayor. The slow, entropic decay of small American towns is tragic and horrifying, as seen in works like Night in the Woods.

This episode’s take on the subject matter is pleasantly hopeful. Jason finds a miniature model of the town in the church attic, and discovers that any change he makes to the model manifests in the town. In a fun sequence, Jason takes all of the local complaints and concerns and uses the model to remedy them. He repairs potholes, applies new coats of paint, cleans up the streets, and puts up a new sign to attract visitors. The episode posits that if these struggling communities could just be given the resources to enact the changes they need, small towns might not be facing collapse. It’s a simplistic view of a complex problem, but it works as a fun, empowering fantasy.

After an upbeat montage of Jason fixing up the town, the episode seems at a loss for where to take the concept next. Jason gets upset when Mayor Conley gets praise for all of the changes, and so he petulantly acts out by terrorizing the mayor with the power of the model. He turns a pebble into a meteor that destroys his fancy car, and unleashes a tarantula upon the little man. Then, Jason accidently creates a blackout when he tries to upgrade the town’s sign to welcome visitors. Jason is forced to reveal that he was behind it all and apologizes. So, the moral is he tried to fix up his struggling town, but too much so? When Mayor Conley tries to take control of the model, the resulting struggle destroys the model and damages the town. The model is no longer functional, but fortunately, Jason’s wedding ring landed on the model, giving the community a huge piece of solid gold to use for repairs. It’s assumed the town can fix itself and survive with that resource, but it isn’t revealed what became of Mayor Conley, leaving a large dangling plot thread. It’s a neat concept, but the execution is messy and unfocused.

6. Meet In the Middle (ep.1, 43m)

Another clever concept ruined by a weak ending. While on a lackluster date, Phil suddenly links minds with a stranger named Annie. They strike up a telepathic friendship that quickly turns romantic, despite their physical distance and Annie already being married. The perspective of the story stays fixed on Phil. He is introduced as a serial app dater who is never satisfied with the women he meets. On the date we open on, he is strangely hung up on the fact that his date’s hair is slightly different than how it appeared in her profile. Even before he crosses minds with Annie, he has an ideal woman in his head and no woman in his real life can compare. Once he is in a telepathic relationship, that personal deficiency is only magnified. The episode goes to great lengths to show how Phil is obliviously missing opportunities with people around him while he focuses on his internal dialogue with Annie, from a cute barista eyeing him at a café to a beautiful woman who wants to sit across from him on a train. It is funny watching Phil communicate with Annie on virtual dates, unaware of how strange he appears to those around him, as he emotionally reacts to their silent conversations while people look at him with confusion.

There’s an enticing ambiguity to their relationship - is Annie opening up Phil to experiencing more of the world while in a genuinely happy relationship, or is she pushing him to disconnect with his own reality? Does the mental connection allow Phil to experience an unprecedented level of intimacy with another person, or does the inherent distance between them enable Phil to live out a delusional fantasy with a woman he doesn’t really know?

These questions ultimately don’t really matter. After deciding it’s gone too far, Annie breaks off communication with Phil for two weeks, leaving him distraught, before suddenly showing up in his mind again, begging him for them to meet to make a relationship work. Phil enthusiastically agrees and gets on a train to meet her, but on the way the episode transforms into a thriller. A few hours before Phil arrives, Annie tells him she is being stalked by a stranger and suddenly goes quiet. Phil uses hints from their last conversation to track down the house he believes Annie has been abducted to. At Annie’s urging, he breaks into the house and brutally murders a man. For the twist, Annie is in the house but seems not to recognize him, clutching her child while police arrive to take Phil away. In a final telepathic goodbye, Annie thanks Phil for killing her abusive husband, allowing her and her child to live in peace.

The interesting ambiguity of the setup is flattened to a boring and obvious moral statement - do not murder random people. Maybe, slightly more generously, it’s saying do not get too invested in someone that you do not know well, to the point that you get catfished. But that’s the problem with an explosively violent ending like this; all the nuance of what came before is made insignificant when compared to the final violent act. Considering whether Phil’s strange relationship with Annie is a net positive or net negative influence on his life is engaging; watching Phil murder a man he doesn’t know in a blind rage is not.

5. The Who of You (ep.3, 46m)

Here we have another promising episode that ends a weak note that sours the whole experience. Harry, a broke and struggling actor, decides to rob a bank after a fight with his more successful actress girlfriend, Morena. When demanding money from the teller, her and Harry’s eyes meet and they swap consciousness. Harry’s body is arrested, but in the body of the teller, he escapes with the money. Thus begins a wild goose chase of Harry bouncing between the bodies of New Yorkers, trying to secure his ill-gotten money, while the sharp police detective on the case, Peter, tries to figure what is happening as different minds pop into the captive body of Harry. It’s a high energy premise, and the actual acting and directing challenge of conveying one person across nearly a dozen actors, and conveying nearly a dozen people as a single actor, is skillfully done.

Throughout the episode it becomes clear that Harry is an unrepentant asshole. He considers himself entitled to everything, from acting roles, to his girlfriend’s trust and affection, to control over the bodies he magically takes over. After miserably failing an audition for a popular TV show, he dismisses the show itself, saying he shouldn’t have to “debase” himself for that work. He decides to rob the bank because he believes his girlfriend is just upset that he doesn’t have enough money, even as she clearly tells him she mainly just needs better communication from him. Fake wooden gun in hand, Harry amps himself up outside the bank muttering “I can do this! I went to Juilliard!” It’s a great setup for a deeply unlikeable protagonist. Once he acquires his power, he doesn’t think twice about bouncing around between bodies, even as all the people he inhabits wind up in dangerous situations.

Hilariously, Harry is such a terrible actor that even with this extraordinary power, everyone around him is always suspicious. The police are continuously able to track him down because his performances are weak. His inability to empathize with others and his poor acting ability are directly linked.

Up until the ending, that is. In a final confrontation, Detective Peter and Harry are swapped, and Peter dies in Harry’s body, leaving Harry in Peter’s body permanently. This whole final confrontation is messy, as Peter should have a good understanding of Harry’s powers by this point, but he walks into the confrontation entirely unprepared. Even ignoring that, when Harry goes to met up with Morena again, he realizes that she knows Peter and they have been in a relationship behind his back. It’s an odd twist that needlessly complicates Harry’s and Morena’s relationship. Morena is barely in the episode after the start, and she works fine as a character just asking Harry to be a better and more empathetic person. Making her also a duplicitous cheater at the last moment undercuts the episode’s moral statement. Furthermore, for the final scene, Harry (in Peter’s body of course) is shown after having a well-received audition. Acting ability and empathy were thematically tied the whole episode, but somehow, despite clearly learning nothing throughout this affair, he is rewarded with success. This ending is baffling. It’s a superficially “dark” ending, since Harry comes out on top, but it’s thematically incoherent.

4. Among the Untrodden (ep.5, 39m)

How many times can I say the same thing? This episode has a good setup and some well executed scenes, but struggles to find a satisfying conclusion.

Here, the series tries its hand at a high school drama set in an all-girls boarding school. A popular girl, Madison, and a socially awkward new girl, Irene, strike up an unexpected friendship as Irene helps Madison to discover and train her latent psychic powers, which include telepathy and conjuration. By the end of the episode, it is revealed that Irene was herself a manifestation of Madison’s powers, a physically realized imaginary friend that provided Madison a safe environment to experiment with her interests in psychic abilities, something that Madison’s pre-existing clique of haughty mean girls would never have done. Irene also illuminates the cruelty of Madison’s friend group, as Irene’s desire to fit in with the popular girls leaves her vulnerable to their bullying and manipulation.

It’s a decent enough story with an effective series of reveals and escalations. However, Madison’s starting friend group of the three mean girls make for ineffective villains. Madison’s character arc is about breaking away from her toxic friends in order to self-realize as a more honest and kind person, but that’s undercut by how cartoonishly the mean girls are portrayed. They make fun of Irene for “liking Indian food and memes” (???) and for not being experienced with drugs or sex. They feel like thin caricatures of bullies. There is no indication that they have any interests beyond bullying Irene. It weakens Madison’s personal journey as a result.

Also, again, the series turns to violence for its finale. After publicly embarrassing Irene, a psychic outburst knocks out the three mean girls. They appear dead when the ambulances cart them away, though it’s not clear exactly what happened to them. Again, this flattens the morality of the situation. Madison doesn’t have to actively deal with these bad friends while trying to better herself; they are just violently disposed of, no questions are ever asked about what happened, and Madison is allowed to move on and be a better person in their absence. The episode, perhaps inadvertently, advocates for violent intervention against people you dislike in your social environment, which is an uncomfortable message to end on.

3. A Human Face (ep.7, 33m)

I appreciated how small in scope and intimate this episode is. A simple setup, small cast of characters, and tight plotting give it the feeling of a bottle episode. It’s very reminiscent of older Twilight Zone episodes in it’s “tell, don’t show” approach. That is an approach that is generally frowned upon in visual storytelling, but for an old show with time and budget constraints, that was often the only viable approach. An original series episode like Nightmare as a Child, which A Human Face somewhat reminds me of, had the contemporary events of the story in a normal setting, probably a prebuilt available set from another show, with much the dialogue simply recalling past events. In certain conditions, it can be more effective than a more elaborate storytelling technique. With good actors, a discussion about past events can stimulate the audience’s imagination more so than actually showing what happened.

Robert and Barbara are a married couple preparing to move out of their home sometime after the suicide of their teenage daughter, but the mysterious arrival of a shape-shifting, extradimensional creature disrupts their plans. The entire story takes place in the couple’s house. As the creature takes the form of their daughter, and even seems to take on her memories, Robert and Barbara are forced to grapple with their failures as parents for their late daughter. Robert and Barbara are very well-acted, each confronting their own inability to understand their daughter in her life. Barbara smothered her daughter with attention while never actually taking the time to understand her, while Robert kept his distance. When the creature arrives, they find themselves returning to their old habits, with Barbara wanting to care for the strange creature however possible, while Robert treats it with fear and distrust. It’s a melancholic little story that works as an effective character study with unsettling implications. Even though it becomes abundantly clear that the creature is inhuman and an agent of an invading force, a convincing replica of their daughter and promise of a second chance ultimately sways both Barbara and Robert to accept it into their family.

2. Try, Try (ep.9, 42m)

It took until the final two episodes of the season, but we’ve finally found greatness. This episode is fantastic. Mark, played to perfection be Topher Grace, has a meet-cute at a museum with Claudia, played by the equally stellar Kylie Bunbury, after saving her from being hit by a passing truck, leading to an impromptu date. It is gradually revealed that Mark’s ability to be Mr. Right to Claudia is enabled by him being trapped in a time-loop. He’s been working on getting this date right after countless attempts.

This story is effectively a response to Pop Culture Detective’s video on Stalking for Love. That video-essay starts by noting the creepy stalker behavior of Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. Despite repeated rejections across countless time resets, he continuously tries to win the affection of his coworker, using his increasing knowledge of everything about her to coerce her into returning his affection. Pop Culture Detective notes the extreme power imbalance of this sort of dynamic, and expands from Groundhog Day to discuss the concerning endorsement of stalker behavior in a litany of other Hollywood films, from other time loop setups like 50 First Dates, to non-fantastical stalking scenarios like American Beauty.

Try, Try has the same concern regarding Groundhog Day-style setups and stalking. Mark seems to play everything right, from dropping resonant literature quotes, to cracking perfect jokes, to skillfully protecting Claudia from harm. He comes across as genuinely charming at first, skillfully playing the role of a goofy, nerdy, slightly awkward, but confident intellectual. As the nature of his behavior is unveiled, it becomes clear the Mark views Claudia not as an autonomous person, but as a puzzle that he can crack with the right combination of words and actions. Mark views himself as “a nice guy” - his words - who has put in the time and effort to figure Claudia out and is thus deserving of her affection. Indeed, he’s already won it. As this particular date begins to sour, he boasts about he’s already successfully courted her a couple times in the past. They have hooked up, and she’s even said that she loves him before. In a clever metaphor for consent, he seems to believe that because she’s accepted him before, he is owed her love from that point on.

Of course, when Claudia pushes back against him and denies him what he wants, Mark’s friendly façade dissipates. His experience in the time loop has left him not with more empathy for those around him, but significantly less. He can hardly view the people around him as people, just predictable machines for him to memorize and play with. He assumes, given all of his experience, there is little else he can learn. “Do you think there is anything I haven’t thought about,” he says dismissively as Claudia pleads with him to see how this situation is creepy from her perspective. When he decides this day is a bust for him, he decides to play with Claudia in a new way, by getting violent.

Although the focus is clearly on the representation of stalking in fiction, this story also uses its premise to sneak in some subtext on race. I don’t think it’s an accident that Mark is white and Claudia is black. Claudia is at the museum studying indigenous masks for her dissertation. Mark treats the museum as his playground, first in a cute way, like hiding in a giant canoe, but increasingly in a reckless and disrespectful way, by playing with the ceremonial objects for fun. Even if Mark can no longer help but see the people around like objects, he also doesn’t treat objects with proper care. When Mark decides to try getting violent, he puts on an indigenous mask and picks up an ancient sword out of its display.

In a supremely satisfying closer, Mark gets his ass handed to him when he turns on Claudia. Five solid punches to the face and he’s down for the count, embarrassed and humbled. On his next try, he doesn’t intervene when a truck nearly hits her like he usually does. She sees it at the last second and avoids it. She never needed him. Everything he did was for his own selfish reasons.

1. You Might Also Like (ep.10, 41m)

After watching Season 1, my big hope for Season 2 was that they would get brave enough to actually take on some truly bizarre concepts like in the original Twilight Zone. It took them nearly the entirety of two seasons to get here, but You Might Also Like is strange, funny, terrifying, and in many ways a spiritual successor to the classic episode To Serve Man.

Surely aided by being written and directed by accomplished horror filmmaker Osgood Perkins, this episode, in tone and style, feels entirely different than any other episode in this series. Most episodes in this rebooted series feel desperate to impart a sense of serious weight to their proceedings, by keeping their premises somewhat grounded, their visual palette subdued, their actors serious. This approach has yielded a handful of genuinely good episodes, but it frequently has resulted in dry, stodgy stories with messy narratives that don’t justify their own self-seriousness. Previous efforts to take things in slightly more wild direction, like with Blurryman or 8, felt self-conscious in their efforts to push at the boundaries. Blurryman had to lampshade its efforts to call back to the original series and restricted itself from committing to a more old-school episode style, while 8 was just a graceless mess that packed its runtime full of nonsense exposition to justify its dumb ideas.

You Might Also Like confidently draws direct inspiration from old Twilight Zone. Aliens are here! Not appearing as a tastefully shot blur in the background or an ultra-closeup of a grey, like in last season’s A Traveler, or the off-screen voices at the end of Six Degrees of Freedom. No, we have honest-to-god big-headed grey Kanamits, just like in To Serve Man, that are clearly just actors in makeup and prosthetics, and they look fantastic.

The Kanamits are here to give to humanity Eggs, a mysterious new product that, in commercials, they ominously promise “will make everything okay again, and this time it will be okay forever.” On the day that all families are set to receive their Egg from designated fulfillment centers, we follow the suburban housewife Mrs. Warren who is at regular intervals having strange blackouts in which she experiences odd commercial-like visions before waking up in her bed. We follow her around her perfectly manicured, sterile house as she tries to deduce what is happening to her, while wondering what the Egg actually is.

Mrs. Warren and her neighbors, Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Stevens, are pitch perfect sendups of wealthy American suburbia. All dressed in neat, expensive athleisure, they are singly focused on maintaining appearances. Even as Mrs. Warren tries to explain the strange occurrences in her life to Mrs. Jones, she is more concerned with passive-aggressively questioning Mrs. Warren’s interior decorating choices than helping. The attention to detail in lambasting this lifestyle is incredible. Nearly every part of Mrs. Warren’s house is spotless and symmetrical, yet she still wishes she could burn it down and start over. In her cabinet, she has a forest of pill bottles for things like Happiness, Hunger, and Libido. Even as she becomes more confused and distressed, Mrs. Warren still takes care not to trample her neighbor’s carefully maintained lawn. The story and all of it’s lovely little touches convey the absurdity and vapidity of this modern lifestyle.

The actual plot is kept somewhat vague, but as I understand it, the Kanamits have been abducting Mrs. Warren in order to observe her mind. They have been watching humanity for decades and learning about their desires through their commercials. Now, they use their technology to watch the commercials that people generate in their minds subconsciously, revealing their deepest desires. They have honed in on Mrs. Warren because her grief is especially potent. Two years ago, she had a stillbirth, a girl, and she hasn’t recovered, as indicated by the still pristinely maintained baby’s room in her house. The idea for the Egg, a product that everyone would want, developed from observing Mrs. Warren. The Egg produces an alien spawn that will eradicate the human race and yet after learning this, Mrs. Warren decides that she still wants one.

After arriving at the alien spacecraft, Mrs. Warren introduces herself. She defines herself in terms of simple facts, her past desires, and her present dissatisfactions. As a fact, she is 5’6”, 137 lbs., fears spiders and horses, is married, and has two sons, though she has no comments, positive nor negative, to say about her family. For her past, she recalls a formative memory from when she was a little girl and intentionally got lost in an amusement park. In junior high, she wanted to be an Olympic ice skater, or a country western singer. Of course, she is neither of those things now. In her present, she thinks about the stillborn baby girl she never had. She hates the paint colors and drapes she chose for her house, and she hates her cars, and she wishes she had different things though she cannot say exactly what. This is a portrait of Mrs. Warren, and I believe, a portrait of a section of American society. A vast population of people surrounded by meaningless abundance, and yet infinitely distant from anything that gives their lives meaning. A population that once had real dreams and desires but is now trapped in a mindset in which they can only hope that their happiness will come with next remodel, or set of purchases. So perhaps it is little wonder that Mrs. Warren and others flock to the distribution centers, even when they know full well that death awaits them. They have access to anything they could possibly want, and so far, none of it has made them happy. Might as well try the Egg. The final shot of Mrs. Warren gleefully running into a horde of people around the distribution center to claim her Egg, while flying saucers hover above in plain sight, is funny and chilling.

We see an alternative lifestyle, though just briefly. While still trying to figure out what is happening to her, Mrs. Warren calls her astrologist for spiritual guidance. On the other end, an eccentric looking woman in a small rundown house selects the ringing phone, marked “Stars,” out of a pile of other phones with labels like “Celeb Gossip,” “Companionship,” and “Medical Advice.” She has quite a hustle going here. “Chantelle speaking,” she answers, “How can I better align you with your cosmic purpose?” A pair of friends hustle by her, giving her a brief hug. The warmness and intimacy of this home feels like a different world from Mrs. Warren’s quiet mansion at the end of a desolate cul-de-sac. The Egg and its advertising is targeted towards the wealthy, so what will happen to Chantelle and her friends as the Kanamits unleash their people-eating swarm? Will the whims of the rich bring doom to the poor, or will this be a localized invasion? My only reservation with this episode is that the limited perspective a wealthy white housewife leaves enticing questions at the margins of our view into this strange world.

Still, there is so much to love here. The episode is broken into four Parts, each with a punchy title card that gives the episode a unique pace. The commercials Mrs. Warren sees in her trances are hilarious, including iWide Shut (a VR device to help men in the bedroom) and Immolation Station (a Chuck E. Cheese style hangout for kids to safely explore their more arsonist-like tendencies). The abduction sequences are artfully depicted as the entire world going dark, with a projected blue light magically pulling an unconscious Mrs. Warren forward. When Mrs. Warren goes to pick up her Egg, it’s at UServe Department store, a cute callback to the original series episode that inspired it. This story is overflowing with great ideas.

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This season is overall better than the first, but I am left feeling disappointed nonetheless. On the positive side, they fixed a big gripe I had with the overly long episodes of Season 1 that stretched many of their stories to breaking points. On average, the second batch is less than 40 minutes per episode. Though it does leave some episodes feeling like their premise wasn’t properly explored, Downtime and A Small Town most notably, this is a net positive change. And the concepts are, on the whole, stronger. They still rarely get as strange as I would like, but the ideas motivating each episode feel more ambitious than Season 1. Even if I do not think many of these episodes really come together, I appreciate that most of them have a decent core concept, usually with at least a few well executed scenes.

And yet I’m disappointed. The presence of two unmitigated disasters of episodes was unfortunate, but the middle ranked episodes hurt my enthusiasm more. That half of the season, five episodes of ten, had the exact same issue of failing to produce a satisfying conclusion really hurt my enjoyment of this show. And the over-reliance on violent spectacle to close out many episodes was really tiring. The excellence of the top two episodes on my list only add to that feeling. Those were everything I could’ve wanted out of a rebooted Twilight Zone series, and while they justified my time investment in the show, they also spoiled me. Even the pretty solid #3 ranked A Human Face felt a bit insubstantial in the light of those final two.

Still, my undying love of The Twilight Zone means I’ll probably pay for a month of CBS All-Access if this series gets approved for a third season. Mulling over heady sci-fi concepts is fun for me, even if the material is only average. And it gives me an excuse to revisit old favorites from the original series. Rewatching a handful of original series episodes that I was reminded of by the new series was almost more fun than watching the new show.