The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling
Episode directed by Allison L Brown
Welcome back everyone to the long-overdue return of my Twilight Zone recaps! It’s been almost two years since we last covered this series, and while I can give you a laundry list of excuses as to why this fell so far down the priority list, the truth is that I probably shouldn’t have let it go the way that I did given how far into the series I got. Well, that’s all gonna change as I am determined to finish this series once and for all, and what better episode to start with than what is arguably one of the best episodes of the entire series? It’s the kind of high concept and dismal portrayal of a future gone wrong that has led to some of the best speculative fiction like Brave New World and The Obsolete Man, but can it hope to compare to those classic stories, or is it straining to hold all of its big ideas together? Let’s find out!!
The episode begins with the idyllic middle-class life of Donna and Ted (Bonnie Somerville and Steve Bacic), though things have been less idyllic lately as Ted’s been out of work for some time and the bills are piling up. It’s far too early for the housing market crash, but maybe he was a victim of the Dot Com Bubble. Either way, he’s going for an interview this morning that will turn it all around and get their lives back on track. Donna is cautiously optimistic as she sends her son Wylie to school and enjoys some personal time at an affordable spa, but then things come crashing down in an instant when she gets one of the worst phone calls a parent could get; her son didn’t show up for school and is missing! Without missing a beat, she rushes to the police station to report her son’s disappearance only to be accosted by some dude named Nick Dart (Wayne Knight); the host of a reality show called How Much Do You Love Your Kid, and it looks like Donna is an unwitting participant in this game of theirs. Seems legit given how clearly we’ve demonstrated how little we care about the safety of children in the last few years.
The Reviewers Unite 