The Twilight Zone (2019) Season 2: Meet In The Middle

I'm a fan of the Twilight Zone. The original series by Rod Serling is one of the greatest television series ever made. The unique stories and amazing writing have helped the series stand the test of time and some of the stories are still relevant all these decades later. And like most popular series it has received it's fair share of reboots with the most recent being the 2019 series helmed by comedian turned director Jordan Peele. I've already talked about this series before, once in a general review of the first season on an old abandoned blog and again when I discussed the underlining politics and how badly they were handled. I didn't like the first season. It had a lot of issues but it also had moments of brilliance and potential that kept m coming back in the vein hope it would improve, which it did thankfully.

But that was then and this is now. Season 2 has finally been released and rather than do a general review on the whole season, instead I'm going to look through each episode individually to see if things have actually improved. Not everyone sticks the landing on their first go after all. So I'm going to try to be optimistic and am watching this with an open mind. I'm going to try to be positive. Unfortunately, if this episode is any indication, that is going to be incredibly difficult. Just a heads up, there will be spoilers so if you just want the TL:DR version, skip to the last paragraph.

Our first episode is “Meet In The Middle”. The story follows bachelor Phil Hayes who, despite an admitted feeling of crippling loneliness, has ridiculously high standards for the women he dates. During one such date he begins to hear a voice in his head. That voice is a woman named Annie Mitchell who lives on the otherside of the country. Somehow the two have become psychically linked and through their mental telepathy they form a close bond. But things get complicated when Phil discovers Annie is a married woman who lives in an unhappy marriage, feeling the shame kind of loneliness that he feels bringing the two closer.

On the surface, I like this story. Two people, both struggling with a crippling sense of loneliness, become linked by a psychic connection and slowly become closer as a coping mechanism sounds like a good idea on paper. There's a lot you can do with that and the premise fits perfectly in with the Twilight Zone. The acting is also great with our two leads, Jimmi Simpson and Gillian Jacobs, having excellent chemistry. Jimmi Simpson has to carry a lot of the episode with his facial expressions and while it can be a little awkard at times he still does a fantastic job. I like that the characters do share a connection to the point that they can open up to each other on a deeper level. The best scene in the episode is when Phil admits his sense of crippling loneliness and the lack of purpose he feels in his life. It's a good scene where the two comfort one another, the kind of scene you want to nail in a love story like this. Except there's a problem, this isn't a love story.

As I was watching the episode I was curious as to where it was going. At one point Annie stops contacting Phil out of fear of her husband and Phil spirals into depression. This scene was so over the top with it's editing that it became hilarious but little did I know that it was going to get worse. Annie re-establishes contact and agrees to meet Phil at a halfway point from where they live. At first I thought they were going to do a thing where the two meet and she isn't what Phil thought she was, given the opening set up his incredibly high standards. “Maybe the message was going to be about how you only achieve true love through compromise” I thought to myself. Instead, I got a whole load of bullshit.

Instead, while on the train to their meeting place, Annie gets kidnapped by a strange man. Phil goes after her and tracks her to a house in the woods. He confronts the man in the house and kills him to save Annie. Only to then discover the man had a daughter and that Annie was his wife and that she doesn't recognise him. Then the police arrive and take Phil away only for the show to pull a double twist and reveal that this was Annie's plan the whole time. She manipulated Phil's loneliness so he would free her from her marriage, only telling him what he wanted to hear. When I saw this I was pissed, at first. But the more I thought about it the more I began to laugh at it.

An ending, by it's very definition, is the logical conclusion to the story. If you write a story about revenge it should logically conclude with the main character getting revenge. So by that token, a twist ending should be a logical conclusion that the audience is not expecting. The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” is a perfect example of this. The twist that the aliens were planning on eating humanity makes sense because everything was leading up to it. It surprises you but it doesn't come out of nowhere. “Meet In The Middle” fails in this respect. The episode leading up to the ending is so different in terms of tone that, by the time the ending hits, your left more confused than anything else. The tone is the big problem here because it's wildly inconsistent. The tonal shift the third act takes is so sudden that it's almost comical.

This ending effectively undoes almost the entirety of the preceding episode. The connection between the two main characters is rendered moot because of the revelation that it was based on a lie. The entire story changes in the last 15 minutes but instead of feeling like a clever ending that makes you question what came before it, instead you just feel like the episode has wasted your time. It feels more like they were setting up for a “Gotcha!” moment rather than bringing the story to it's logical conclusion.

I know that the Twilight Zone is known for it's twist endings but they all made sense within the story. This doesn't. It sets itself up as a love story only to pull the rug out from under you in the last 10 minutes. In short, it's trying to “subvert your expectations”. And if I may rant for a second, can I just say that this trend of “subverting expectations” needs to die. I hate to be the bearer of bad news people but “subverting expectations” is not clever or interesting, it's hackneyed and irritating. Anyone can do it. All you have to do is set the audience up to expect something and then do the opposite. Any hack can do it and until critics disengage from their own pretentious wanking and start calling it out for what it truly is the more hack writers and directors will continue to do it. It isn't clever so knock it off.

“Meet In The Middle” has more issues than just the ending. It is my unfortunate “privilege” to inform you that many of the issues that plagued season 1 are still present and accounted for. The pacing is horrendous. There were several times when I was watching the clock and went, “wait, how long have we got left?” The show meanders with a lot of scenes that add little to the story. You could cut a good 10 to 15 minutes, at least, and the episode would be much better. Then there's the dour nature of the story itself. The first season suffered from a lack of tonal variety so when I was watching the episode play out I was honestly enjoying it at first. The more optimistic tone of the first 30 minutes felt like a breath of fresh air, so to see the episode devolve into the same cynical bullshit was a huge let down. Even Black Mirror, the show that it is clearly trying to imitate, has episodes that are more uplifting. Maybe we'll get one further down the line but I'm not holding my breath.

“Meet In The Middle” could have been a good episode. It starts as an enjoyable, if perhaps a little hokey, love story of two lonely people but spirals out of control in the third act for no real reason. What makes it worse, I don't know what this episode is supposed to be about. What's the message here? That woman are duplicitous bitch queens? Wow that is good advice. “Meet In The Middle” is too bloated and unfocused that whatever message it's trying to say is ultimately lost in translation. I've criticised this show in the past for beasting you over the head with it's messages but at least I knew what the messages were in those cases. I have no clue what it is here. It doesn't even really use it's core premise in any interesting or unique ways. The 1985 Twilight Zone “A Message From Charity” did the whole two characters being psychically linked idea a lot better. This episode doesn't do anything interesting with it until the very end, by which point the episode has gone off the rails and it's too little too late.

I wanted to like this episode guys. Honest and truly I did. I even like parts of it. I like the two main characters and I like that the episode attempts to tackle the theme of loneliness. I too feel a sense of loneliness and was interested in where the episode was going only to recoil in disgust and then laughter at the ending. I don't think I can properly convey how laughable this ending is. It goes so dark, so quickly and is so over the top that the only reaction you can have is just to laugh at how absurd it is. I'm not even mad, truth be told I'm kind of impressed. Well that's one episode down ladies and gentlemen. One down, nine to go. We can only pray that it gets better from here. Until next time, remember to stay safe and have fun.