When a mysterious traveller appears in a jail cell on Christmas Eve, the sheriff in a small Alaskan town (1,500 miles from the North Pole) has to tackle a force even weirder than Santa Claus.

On paper, the combination of X-Files writer Glen Morgan and director Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Castle Rock) is very tasty indeed, but this episode just can’t escape from its generic set-up and ho-hum resolution.

Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead) is very good as the besuited mysterious Traveller, an extreme tourist or ‘agro traveller’ who finds the world’s hotspots as uses them as vacation choices. Greg Kinnear is also fine as the arrogant Captain Pendleton, a little too pleased with himself around how he forgives a prisoner every Christmas Eve.

As the story develops we move into territory memorably mined in classic episodes Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up, and the paranoia of The Monsters are Due on Maple Street as the Traveller stirs up trouble like Leland Gaunt in King’s Needful Things. Only Sargeant Mongoyak (Marika Sila) seems to have clocked what’s really going on, and even she isn’t impervious to the machinations of the man in black.

In addition to the aforementioned similarities with other Twilight Zone episodes, character Dotty Matheson is clearly named after series writer Richard Matheson, and character Ida Lupino was the actress in episode The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine. As to the ongoing reference to 1015, this time it’s the keypad entry code to the cellblock.

Verdict: Following a structure that’s loyal enough to the original show, the twists in this modern Twilight Zone episode feel like a given, robbing them of any real impact and ultimately providing a feeling of ‘so what?’ Modern issues of fake news and the power of social media are touched upon, but ultimately it’s a case of ‘the red under the bed’ and we’ve seen that done many times before… and more successfully. 6/10

Nick Joy