The Twilight Zone Reboot: 10 Classic Episodes It Should Remake
Between the pit of man's fears and the summit of knowledge is an area which we call the remake zone.
Get ready once again to unlock a door with the key of your imagination, because The Twilight Zone is back.
The new series, the fourth reboot of the beloved original show, has debuted on streaming service CBS All Access, with one of its opening episodes being Nightmare At 30,000 Feet, a higher altitude reimagining of the classic series episode Nightmare At 20,000 Feet (it's the one with William Shatner on a plane with a gremlin dismantling the wing).
On one level you can see why the new showrunners would want to draw viewers in with their own take on a familiar Twilight Zone staple, but this story feels a little played out. It's already been redone by Mad Max's George Miller in the 1983 Twilight Zone movie and has been endlessly referenced and parodied, most obviously in one of the earliest Simpsons Halloween specials.
If the new Twilight Zone is to continue (like its 1980s predecessors) occasionally dipping its toes into reworking some of the original stories, it would do better to avoid the much-referenced likes To Serve Man and Time Enough At Last, stories whose every twist is well known even to audiences who have never seen the original episodes.
Instead, they should look for inspiration to some less familiar classic stories or some that were great concepts which were not perfectly executed. In short, Jordan Peele and his team should think about remaking these.
10. The Time Element
The Story:
In the 1950s a man visits his psychiatrist to tell him about a recurring dream where he is stationed at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and tries unsuccessfully to warn people of the coming attack. He is convinced that he is really time travelling in his sleep, which the psychiatrist doesn't accept, right up until the man dreams that he is shot and killed by the Japanese.
Why Remake It?
This didn't actually air as an episode of The Twilight Zone itself, but rather was a sort of pre-pilot shown on another anthology series. Its instant popularity and strong critical notices finally provided the go-ahead from network CBS for creator Rod Serling to produce an actual Twilight Zone pilot in 1959.
Redoing it today would show that the new series respects the origins of the show, and would finally make The Time Element an official Twilight Zone story.
More than that, though, it is simply a good story with perennial themes that could easily be updated. The questions of what would you do if thrown back in time to a moment of catastrophe, and would that catastrophe even be preventable if time travel were possible, are the sort of thing that I'd expect to see addressed in some respect in the new series.
Meanwhile, we are today the same amount of time after 9/11 as the original Twilight Zone was after Pearl Harbor, so that makes it pretty easy to update some of the plot specifics for an equivalent catastrophic attack relatable to today's audience.