You Are Entering A Dimension, Not Of Sight And… Buffering…: The Twilight Zone #1 Review

I am not the world’s biggest fan of The Twilight Zone. I recognize that that is a hell of a thing to say for a self-avowed sci-fi fan on the day after SyFy’s (God, remember when it was called The SciFi Channel? And they showed science fiction programming as opposed to wrestling specials and movies about animals mixed with monsters and / or weather events?) two-day marathon of the show, but that’s just the way it is.

I understand the show’s contribution to televised science fiction and horror, but the shows tended to follow a formula: there’s someone with some kind of internal flaw, be it venial (wants more time to read) or mortal (the vanity to get surgery to be as attractive as everyone else). Something happens that seems to give them what they want, and then there’s a twist at the end that makes them pay for their sins. Except for when there are cookbooks and gremlins on the wing, but for a large part, that description covers the show’s formula. It’s a morality play in one act, and it’s a formula that’s never really hooked me in.

And writer J. Michael Straczynski also understands the formula… for the most part. In his first issue of The Twilight Zone series from Dynamite Comics, Straczynski gives us a deeply flawed “protagonist,” who has a powerful wish that is seemingly answered with a mild twist. But Straczynski forgets one part of the formula. And it might not seem like the most important part, but by ignoring it, it really took the experience down a notch for me.

Allow me to introduce Trevor Richmond: an executive for a company who is skimming profits from his employer to line his own pockets while cooking the books to hide the truth from his boss, who is distracted from day-to-day business by his failing health and the unsolved murder of his son. After years of using his ill-gotten profits to finance a life of adultery and betrayal, Richmond is days away from an SEC investigation that will end in his indictment, when he meets with one Mr. Wylde: a problem solver who assures Richmond that he can change Richmond’s identity with a simple pill… for a price. Richmond takes the pill and awakes as a completely different person, with a new name and face, and walks away from the indictment scot free. But the path away from his troubles isn’t clear, and Richmond is soon to find that he has taken a wrong turn… into… The Outer Limits! Wait, that isn’t quite right…

Okay, so the key to any of the Twilight Zone comeuppance episodes is a protagonist who you want to see a karmic beating, and Straczynski gives us a doozy in Trevor Richmond. Straczynski takes pains to show layers to Richmond’s sliminess, showing that not only is his embezzlement taking his own company down, but his skimming methods add to the general misery of the human condition by employing sweatshops, creating sub-code buildings in impoverished areas, and ruining every investor who had ever heard of his employer. Straczynski shows us that Richmond lies with every word, not only to his employer and wife, but even to Wylde himself, who is the only person who can get Richmond out from under his troubles. The final nail JMS drives into the character for us if when, after Richmond’s appearance has been changed, he walks past his girlfriend on the street, as she is in the process of being thrown out of their mutual apartment, and all Richmond cares about is that she didn’t even recognize him. So when it comes to someone to root against, Straczynski makes a slam dunk with Richmond.

Also inherent to the formula is the nearly supernatural granting of the protagonist’s wish, and the identity switch meets the needs nicely. Now, back in the day, Rod Serling or his writers would probably have been happy to attribute the wish-granting to magic, but Straczynski clearly recognizes that he’s writing for a more modern audience, and wraps the identity change in enough pseudo-science to make it somewhat believable. Sure, he attributes the change in fingerprints and Richmond’s writing to “organic nanoparticles” in the pill, and he gives us surgeons “realistically” trying to add an inch to Richmond’s height, but it still amounts to a magic wish. However, it’s a magic wish with enough big words to ground it, so it worked for me.

And then there’s the twist at the end… and that’s where the main problem with the story lies. Because it’s just a little twist, and it’s one that was somewhat telegraphed earlier in the issue… and it doesn’t conclude the story. It’s a cliffhanger twist to bring readers back for the next issue to see the real conclusion of the story. Which is okay, and which technically meets the formula, but it does not meet the part of the formula where the morality play spins out in a single act. Again: I am not the biggest fan of The Twilight Zone television series, but I have seen most of them probably one time or another, and I cannot remember a single story that ran more than one episode. And I believe there is a good reason for that: Twilight Zone stories are, by nature, not all that deep.

That formula of Person-Wants-Something / Magic-Happens / Twist-Showing-Person’s-Folly doesn’t require a lot of real estate to accomplish, and is, in my opinion, better served by economy. After all, there was one season of The Twilight Zone where the episodes were an hour long rather than the standard half-hour, and I can’t remember a single one of them other than the one where Robert Duvall played a new-Nazi who took public speaking classes from Hitler. And I remember that one not because it was particularly good, but because it had Tom Hagen from The Godfather as a fucking neo-Nazi. Otherwise, those hour-long episodes tended to drag, because these stories didn’t need all that time.

So to get to the end of this issue was really a big letdown for me. Because it was strong enough leading up to the ending that I wanted to see what happened to this prick, and yet now I have to wait a month to see him get his comeuppance. Straczynski did a good enough job painting an irredeemable douchebag that I don’t need to get to know him any better to want to see him take a fall. I’m ready now. And further, the sudden stop and the wait for conclusion gives me a chance to go back through the story in my head and try to figure out where it’s going. And there are enough elements – Richmond’s boss and his murdered son, that boss’s mysterious meeting that is clearly shown yet obscured by Straczynski to downplay it – to give me an idea where this might be going, and that is death to this kind of story. I’ve written before about the first time I watched The Sixth Sense, and how once I thought I knew the twist, I stopped caring about the story and just wanted to get to the ending to see if I was right? Well, the break has led me to think I know the twist in this story.

And it’s a damn shame because, as I said, Straczynski did a hell of a job setting this thing up. Even as a person who isn’t a fan of the show, the issue hooked me into this character and made me completely ready to see him take a fall… but not enough to be excited to see how it plays out in a month. Based on its pedigree and formula, The Twilight Zone is a prime candidate to be a series of tightly-plotted one-and dones. I would love to pick up a book like that, with writing like this, every month. But breaking things up like this could mean the kiss of death.

Straczynski is a good and conscientious enough writer to plant the clues necessary for a twist story to be fair – any twist story that doesn’t plant enough clues to make the twist guessable, so that a repeat reading shows that the answer was there all along for the observant, is, in my opinion, by nature a bad story. But giving us a month to ruminate makes it that much easier to guess the ending, which deflates the whole thing.

So if JMS can give us some one-and-dones written as well as this issue, he’ll have a monthly copy on my pull list. But I can’t whole-heartedly recommend it, because right now, all I want to to get to the end to see if my guess about the twist is right.