When the writer of The Twilight Zone has her opening intro challenged by presenter Jordan Peele, she shares her fears and then has to confront them.

There’s something very meta about this season finale episode of The Twilight Zone which gains its biggest plaudits for daring to be different. Of course it’s not the first episode to be set as a show within a show (Richard Matheson’s A World of Difference being the most obvious) but this is the first time that The Twilight Zone has been directly addressed as the show.

Jordan Peele plays an omnipotent version of himself, lording it up on the set, though he’s more pompous than mean, and ultimately gets the best out of writer Sophie Gelson (Zazie Beetz – Deadpool 2). She used to watch The Twilight Zone as a child and wondered when the actual Twilight Zone itself would appear. She argues that it was never just ‘monsters on a plane wing’ and that the real point of it wasn’t to trade ‘genre bullshit’ but an actual message. And that’s what she’s struggling with in writing this episode.

Director Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Dark Phoenix) then throws Sophie straight in to the hunter/prey story she had been railing against – pursued by the Blurryman (read this as any apocryphal urban legend like slender man) before dropping her into a black and white episode with black bars down each side of the screen. And then the Blurryman snaps into focus.

Verdict: It’s been a variable first year for this new version of The Twilight Zone and it goes out on an absolute high. Its technical achievements don’t quite achieve its ambitions but if the stories can be this imaginative and stretching in year two then we’ll be very well served. 9/10

Nick Joy