The Twilight Zone is leaning into the weird for season 2. CBS All Access’ reinterpretation of the iconic sci-fi franchise from executive producer Jordan Peele returns for another round of strange new realities, unexpected twists and unexplainable events, and only ET has the exclusive first look at the episode Peele wrote.
In the Peele-penned hour, titled “Downtime,” Morena Baccarin plays Michelle, who feels like she’s on top of the world after getting a promotion to hotel manager. But any cause for celebration is short-lived when the nature of her reality is called into question once she notices strange shifts in people’s demeanors, personalities and attitudes, including her husband Carl (Colman Domingo).
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“Carl! Carl!” a frantic Michelle rushes home, desperately searching for her husband in ET’s exclusive clip. When Carl emerges, she lets out a sigh of relief, wrapping him in a hug as he consoles her.
Apparently a mysterious “red thing” is “doing weird things to people and putting them in a trance or something,” Michelle speculates, exasperated at the possible idea that an otherworldly presence is taking over people’s minds and bodies.
“Trance?” Carl begins to question. But a few seconds later, Carl morphs into someone else right before Michelle’s very eyes, a thick accent and a completely different persona consuming his soul.
Suddenly, her outrageous theory doesn’t seem so outrageous after all.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it’s the bloody downtime signal,” he brushes Michelle off, telling her that his name isn’t Carl but Danny. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Must be losin’ my mind!”
When Carl/Danny runs down the staircase like a man on a mission, Michelle is even more confused by what’s going on. (And so are we, frankly!)
“I’m going to wake up!” he exclaims when she asks where he’s going, laughing at the absurdity of her question. “You can drop the character, mate. You don’t remember who you really are, do you?”
“I am Michelle!” she replies, frazzled.
“No, I mean before Michelle,” Carl/Danny says ominously. She rolls off a list of things only someone close to him would know about him, but he only stares back. “You might want to wake yourself up.” What is going on?
In addition to Baccarin and Domingo, the season 2 ensemble includes Kylie Bunbury, Jenna Elfman, Ethan Embry, Sky Ferreira, Tavi Gevinson, Topher Grace, Tony Hale, Gillian Jacobs, David Krumholtz, Thomas Lennon, Sophia Macy, Natalie Martinez, Joel McHale, Chris Meloni, Gretchen Mol, Paula Newsome, Billy Porter, Jimmi Simpson, Jurnee Smollett, Daniel Sunjata and Damon Wayans Jr.
Ahead of the series’ launch last year, 360aproko spoke with executive producer Simon Kinberg about teaming with Peele to bring a modern-day reimagining of Rod Serling’s classic TV series.
“Four or five years ago, I’m not sure it was the right moment for The Twilight Zone. As much as I wanted it to be, we were living in a time of perceived stability. So I don’t know that the world needed The Twilight Zone in quite the same way. And I also think we were living in a time, because of that stability, where social activism was not as prominent and noisy, in a good way, as it is now,” Kinberg told 360aproko. “I don’t know that we would have been able to be as provocative and daring with our episodes four or five years ago.”
“In today’s world, we live in a completely different culture than the one we lived in. We live in a world where all of the social, moral and political issues are being talked about in a much more lively, more diverse, more everyday context,” he added. “But it took the world changing a little bit and it took finding the right partner, who really knew how to combine those two things — great genre storytelling with social messaging. There’s nobody in the world better at that than Jordan.”
