The second episode of the second season of Peele’s Twilight Zone revival, “Downtime,” featured sci-fi A-lister Morena Baccarin (Firefly, Deadpool) as Michelle Weaver, a young woman who works in hotel hospitality. What starts as a relatively normal day turns into a sci-fi mystery that upends her entire existence and changes her life in the span of just a tight half-hour.
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After a strange sensation, Michelle steps outside of the hotel to find essentially the entire world in a frozen trance, staring up at a massive red orb hovering in the sky. The weirder part? No one else seems particularly perturbed by it, with passersby casually asking her if she knows how long “downtime” will last.
Cue the fear and confusion.
Though The Twilight Zone has always dabbled in morality plays, cruel twists of fate and cleverly taught lessons, this episode evoked some of the open-ended big idea swings that Serling’s original 1959-1965 series positively reveled in. This episode isn’t out to make a heavy-handed point, so to speak, but is instead simply telling an ambitious science fiction story by dropping us all into a snapshot of a moment via the anthology format. The fact that Peele, who wrote the episode, and director JD Dillard were able to pull it all off in just 30 minutes is even more impressive.
Twilight Zone’s “Downtime” Explained
Michelle runs to her husband for help, but he suddenly “breaks character,” changing his voice and asking about the maintenance, before himself falling into a trance at the sight of the orb. As Michelle terrifyingly learns after a few run-ins with random strangers calling themselves “tech support,” her entire life is actually a giant simulation, essentially a second-life style video game, where people can log in and live out the lives of different avatars. A man named Phineas had been controlling Michelle, but he suffered a massive heart attack and is on life support, leaving Michelle’s consciousness in some untested limbo state with her user unconscious and failing. ...
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/jordan-peele-created-one-of-the-best-classic-twilight-zone-episodes-with-downtime
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