‘The Twilight Zone’ Recap: “Replay”

“Replay” represents the best justification for a reboot of The Twilight Zone of any of the new episodes released thus far. It doesn’t exist simply to scare or thrill—like so many of the best episodes of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, it wraps up the most challenging constructs of our world in allegory, and hands them to us in a sci-fi package in hopes that the audience might more readily face reality with just a little magical remove.

Much like our consummate narrator Jordan Peele’s Get Out (though without even approaching that level of dangerous style or pulsing execution, let me be clear), “Replay” depicts fear and frustration in a visceral way that cannot help but be related to, even if Nina and Dorian’s story is not specifically your own. Because this episode dwells in the worst kind of fear: the kind of fear that is warranted, proven; the kind of fear that feels destined to become a reality no matter what you do to try to keep it at bay.

Nina (Sanaa Lathan) is a mother driving her son Dorian (Damson Idris) to his freshman year at Tennyson, a fictional HBCU. They’re eating lunch at a diner, when Nina busts out an old school camcorder she’s been using on Dorian since birth to document this monumental day. Dorian, an aspiring filmmaker teases his mother about her outdated technology, not knowing that camcorder is about to save his life. Nina and Dorian have just entered…the Twilight Zone.

And it’s the scariest kind of Twilight Zone episode: the kind that feels completely plausible save for one small tweak. That tweak is the magic camcorder, which Nina soon discovers can rewind time. Shortly before the mother and son leave the diner, a state trooper, Officer Lansky (played by the ever menacing Glenn Fleshler), eyes them disapprovingly while they joke around with each other.

As Nina and Dorian traverse the short distance left between them and the school, Dorian begs to go to his mother’s nearby hometown where her brother, his Uncle Neal, still lives. But Nina doesn’t have fond memories of home, a place she fought tooth and nail to get away from to eventually become a lawyer. Now she can proudly drive her son to college, she thinks, because she’s put so much distance between herself and that violent past. “You need to keep your head on the future,” Nina tells her son. “It took a lot for me to get out, don’t be looking back now.”

That’s when Officer Lansky pulls up behind them with his lights on. Nina reminds Dorian, who’s driving, to do what she’s always told him to in this situation: “No attitude, just be respectful.” Nina tells Officer Lansky they’re on the way to her son’s first day of college and he responds, “Oh the black school.” H’oh boy. As Lansky begins to grill Dorian, he spots the camcorder and asks if it’s recording. Nina picks it up to check and he begins yelling at them to turn it off, then dives through window to grab at the camera. In the mayhem, Nina accidentally hits the rewind button on the camcorder, literally rewinding time and taking them back to just before Lansky pulled them over.

It’s a relief to both us and Nina to have Lansky away from Dorian, but what this episode reminds over and over again is that the relief of distance is only temporary. Shifting time doesn’t take the hate from Lansky’s heart, it only gives him the opportunity to hunt Dorian down once more. Dorian pulls the car over, worried about his mother’s behavior, and as he’s telling her he thinks they need to get to a hospital, there comes Lansky’s cruiser, pulling up behind them once more. He asks if there’s been an emergency, and Dorian tells him yes, he needs to get his mother to a hospital. Lansky begins scolding him for having a centimeter of his tire still on the highway, and this time, concerned for his mother, Dorian is quicker to anger…

Lansky immediately pulls his gun on Dorian. Nina frantically hits rewind.

Now they’re all the way back in the diner, with Lansky eyeing them over his chicken fried steak once more, and Nina tells Dorian they have to leave now. This time, Nina drives, she takes as different a route as possible on these back highways, and she tells Dorian she needs to get some rest in a hotel, and they’ll get a fresh start tomorrow. They watch lottery numbers being drawn on TV and Nina says that “guessing numbers is some foolishness.” But Dorian thinks it’s not all random: “Since the Big Bang set everything in motion, everything that happens in this universe has to be the way it is … It’s all just particles unfolding the way they’re destined to.” There’s a knock on the door, and Nina is starting to get a grim understanding that her worst fear for her son might indeed be the future he’s destined for.

After Officer Lansky has slammed Dorian up against picture framing for stating his right to not show i.d., Nina slams her finger on the Rewind button, but Lansky follows them wherever they go as Nina tries to get her son to school. Back in the diner once more, Nina whispers desperately under her breath, “How do I make him go away?’ Dorian watches confused as his mother walks over to the random cop finishing his lunch at the counter and asks if she can buy him a slice of pie. “For your service,” she explains. Nina sits down with Lansky, clearly rattled, but intent on her mission: to make Lansky see Dorian as a human being.

She tells him how proud she is of her son, how important he is to her, how he’s all she has. “This is why my son is so important to me,” Nina tells him. “This is why he matters.”

Nina asks Lansky about his family, and though he wears a wedding ring, he mentions no wife. She tells him she’s sorry for his loss, and he tells her thank you for the pie. They seem to have made a connection. He seems to understand that Nina and Dorian, they’re good people…

And then Lansky turns around just before he gets to the door and asks Nina if the Volvo outside is hers. “That’s a nice car,” he says dangerously. “How’d you get that car?” Outside, he asks for proof of ownership of the car, and finally, Nina gets mad. Why would she have the pink slip to her car, she begins yelling at Lansky. Dorian remembers that he has a photo of the pink slip on his phone, and dives into the car to get it. And when he comes hurrying back out with his phone in front of him, Lansky doesn’t hesitate. He shoots Dorian straight in the heart, like he’s gone on as long as he possibly could not killing him.

Nina weeps at the hospital as she’s asked to identify her son’s body, and she begs the doctor to locate the camcorder from the scene of the shooting…from the scene of the murder. In front of Dorian’s lifeless body says “Oh please, oh please, oh please,” and hits rewind.

But this time, even though Dorian is returned to her, she knows that rewinding time won’t change Officer Lansky. It won’t make him think that Dorian “matters” or that his life is important, or that he’s not dangerous, just a good kid trying to get to his first day of college. Nina can’t protect her child from the world around him, and there is nothing more terrifying than that. Lathan plays this desperation coming from a woman who usually has it all figured out perfectly, and it’s such a relief to hear her finally confide in her son what’s going on. She cannot face this alone. And Dorian knows there’s only one place they can go…

He puts his Uncle Neal’s address into the GPS.

When they arrive in Nina’s old neighborhood, Dorian asks her why she never went back. She tells him that this is where two of her brothers lost their lives. “To me there were only two ways out of here: walking out and never looking back.” But rewriting the future for Nina and Dorian is going to mean taking a long, hard look at the past. Thought it’s not a warm reception from Neal to Nina at first, he doesn’t hesitate to believe her experience. Nina tells him about the camcorder and Lansky: “No matter what route we take, no matter how nice or mean we are, there’s nothing I can do!”

“I get it, I believe you,” Neal reassures her right away, for what feels like the first time in Twilight Zone history. “They always come,” Neal says. “Question is, what are we going to do? At least this time, there’s a ‘we’ and not just you and your boy.” The message here is not a subtle one: Cameras can document, yes, and magic cameras can turn back time, but only the collective “we” stands any chance of changing the future. Officer Lansky is a monster in this episode of science fiction television, but he’s also just a person without any special powers except a government issued gun.

And Neal, and Nina, and Dorian: their power is relying on each other. Neal has been doing a remembrance project as their neighborhood has continued to be gentrified, and he knows every secret nook and cranny in between his house and Tennyson that Lansky couldn’t possibly know. He leads Nina and Dorian on foot through alleys and tunnels, until they’re emerging from an old drainage system just a few yards from the front gate of Tennyson University.

Yes—they straight up Underground-Railroaded this hateful nutjob.

And yet: there Lansky is, waiting outside the gate, yelling for them to stop before going inside the gate, and immediately pulling out his gun on Dorian when they don’t. Neal stands right in front of the gun as more white cops show up behind Lansky. Dorian pleads with his mom to hit Rewind, they have to try again. Nina picks up the camera, and tells him, “Not this time, Dorian.”

“You’ve been profiling us, targeting us, following us, shooting us, killing us,” Nina yells at Lansky. “But not anymore! Now, we cross the line—my son will cross that gate right now, right here. My son will go to college. So BACK THE FUCK UP!”

Lansky puts his finger on the trigger, but the other cops looks around at all the students and parents who have gathered behind Nina’s family with their own cameras bearing witness, and tell him it’s time to go. “I see it now, Officer Lansky,” Nina says. “You’re the one who’s really afraid.”

It’s not the most refined allegory, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s real, and this episode of The Twilight Zone puts that reality in front of a large audience and asks us to face the truth of police brutality against black people. Dorian and Nina shouldn’t have to bear this burden alone. How could anyone know about something that terrifying and not try to ward it off?

A flash forward reveals the future that Nina had hoped for her son came true: a happy life and an adorable daughter named Trinity. Dorian tells his mom that it’s been 10 years, so she can probably put the camcorder down now. The moment she does, it ends up getting broken, but Dorian tells her to let it go—he loves her, everything is fine. He walks out the front door to go get them ice cream, and Nina hears it: the telltale siren.

“Nina Harrison found that only be embracing her past could she protect her son’s future,” Jordan Peele tells us. “And it was love, not magic that kept evil at bay. But for some evils there are no magical permanent solutions, and the future remains uncertain. Even here…in the Twilight Zone.”

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream Twilight Zone "Replay" on CBS All Access