Episode 2: Nightmare at 30,000 Feet
The second trip into The Twilight Zone, Nightmare at 30,000 Feet, takes viewers up in the air for some in-flight entertainment that’s excellently tense and filled with paranoia.
Inspired by another famous story from the original Twilight Zone series, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, the episode follows Justin (Adam Scott), an investigative reporter who has troubles accepting his past and trying to keep his thoughts in the present. Just as he gets on a flight, he finds an MP3 player in his seat that holds a podcast talking about the plane he’s on disappearing. Once he begins to notice some of the clues he is hearing to be real things on the plane, Justin must piece everything together before the plane crashes.
Putting this story up in the condensed area of an airplane is incredibly effective as the camera close-ups and movement were great in creating claustrophobia. There’s plenty of close-ups on faces and small details that make each scene feel up-close and personal. Movement is also played to great effect as seeing Scott’s Justin move between cabin to cabin and seat to seat makes the plane feel incredibly small. I couldn’t help but feel tense with each of these movements because of how trapped the small space makes you feel.
I knew I wasn’t alone in this either as Scott literally embodies Justin’s paranoia and unflinching need to investigate his surroundings. Seeing sweat stream down his face throughout the episode and his face light up in anxiousness as well as horror every time he heard a new clue from the podcast, translated to me, as a viewer, perfectly. Every time he became a little more paranoid, so did I and even while the conclusion to his searching is a little predictable, it’s tough not to relate to his struggles.
The updates made to this classic Twilight Zone story are great as the themes are very relatable to plane travel today. People experience paranoia and mental breakdowns on planes for numerous reasons: fear of flying, bad experiences, and even racial bias. This episode plays with these ideas really well and I could tell that it was indirectly bringing light to some social aspects. While it never directly references the racial aspects of its messages, there’s definitely some themes of profiling that the episode touches on as Justin makes mistakes from him thinking people are something that they are not.
I actually found the themes of profiling and paranoia to be incredibly fitting for the air travel setting as it’s something that people deal with every day. Not to mention, it’s a fitting story arc for Justin as his paranoia gets the best of him, causing him to meet an unexpectedly terrible fate that was surprisingly satisfying.
There are also some great Easter eggs that harken back to the original episode as well as, possibly, the previous episode. There are similar sequences and even a particular doll that long-time fans will instantly recognize and shows how the new series is respecting its old roots. There also might have been a reference to the previous episode as I thought a magazine cover featured a familiar face.
As with the previous episode, the episode’s score is just too powerful at times and it’s so loud that some of the dialogue gets completely cut out. Especially in moments where characters are whispering or pilots are talking over the radio, the score, while still great to hear, is just too much.
Either way, this update to a classic Twilight Zone tale is great and captures the social relevant themes, unnerving tension, and a great leading performance that fans expect to see. Nightmare at 30,000 Feet is a great step up for the new series that further showcases the series going in a great direction.
Review Score: 9 out of 10
Twilight Zone Episode 1 is available on YouTube & Amazon Prime. The rest of the series will air on CBS All Access.
