The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume CX

Your favorite president was indicted and arraigned this week.

Wait a minute, Mike! Wasn’t Donye indicted and arraigned a couple of months ago?

Indeed he was, not just once, but twice before. In the immortal words accredited to New York Yankee legend Yogi Berra, “It's déjà vu all over again!”

Why does this keep happening? It’s like The Twilight Zone.

You said it. Like I reported in my essay I've seen this before, just as stories repeat themselves, history also has a way of delivering copies of the same old scandals in new and exciting ways. It always has.

But I’m not here to drag on about current events, I want to tell you about another iteration of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. This time it is called Black Mirror.

From the mind of Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror is not Twilight Zone, nor does it claim to be. Yet, the anthology delivers all of the suspense, drama, angst, and hope of serialized TV in a fashion reminiscent of Twilight Zone. What’s old is new again, but this time with a twist of technology, and sometimes a scarier, or even sicker premise. Brooker crafts stories that keep you watching even when you don’t want to see. You don’t really want to know what might happen, but you must find out. Many sequences are squirmingly uncomfortable. I am being deliberately vague to avoid dropping spoilers, but much of the time, episodes squarely push the question “What would you do?” into the viewers mindset.

Much of his imaginings show the misappropriation of technology to incite dastardly choices, artificial intelligence gone awry, or unforeseen outcomes of what is at first a boon to mankind, coming back to haunt us. What if you had the ability to record everything you did, and replay it at will, for everyone to see? What happens when hackers catch you in a compromised position, get it on film, and blackmail you into doing something you never would? If the world revolved around a game show, what would life really be like? What if you woke up in a nightmare that kept repeating, only to find out that it is not a dream, but a prison? What if you found out that you are an artificial intelligence who thought they were a real person? There are fantasy worlds, science fiction, alternate realities, fantastic creatures, ghosts in the machines, tragic outcomes, and happy endings.

Each episode is self-contained, so you may start with any of them. No need to keep track of a long-term narrative storyline. The variety ranges from frightful to funny. There is something for everyone. Every adult, anyway. It is not for toddlers.

I have not watched the whole series yet. Somehow, I got mixed up. I watched seasons 1 and 2, skipped seasons 3, 4, and 5, and then watched all of season 6. Now, I am going back to see what I have missed. Every show is stylishly done, sometimes as a throwback to another era, or a monster movie. The hour-long (sometimes hour-plus) shows are perfect mini-movies so break out the popcorn. One looked and felt like it was produced in the 1970’s, created as a throwback homage to horror of that era, and it was awesome. Every show is unique, well-told, and highly engrossing.

I give Black Mirror my highest recommendation. Watch it!

Black Mirror is a welcome interlude in my ongoing quest to watch every episode and film branded with the Twilight Zone label. You will be happy to know that I have scrawled a couple more notches on my cell wall when I finally tracked down the 1994 TV movie that aired as Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics. It doesn’t appear to be available anywhere on cable or internet TV, but I wrangled a DVD on eBay.

This special event, produced by CBS, presented two screenplays, one by Hollywood legend Richard Matheson, and the other written by Rod Serling. The show was hosted by James Earl Jones. Matheson’s short story “The Theater,” stars Amy Irving as a woman who sees her life being played out in a movie theater. Charlie Brooker uses the same concept for one of my favorite Black Mirror episodes, “Joan Is Awful,” starring Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek. The second installment of Lost Classics stars Jack Palance bringing his creepy tough guy style to "Where The Dead Are,” as a doctor who reanimates the dead, just like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Even though they are twisted and recycled, it is all great fun, because a good story is a good story is a good story and that’s all there is to it.

I also watched all 43 episodes of the Twilight Zone reboot from 2002/2003 which are hosted by Forest Whitaker. This is another series I bought the DVDs for. I now have an almost complete DVD collection of every Twilight Zone there is.

One of my favorite things about the 2002/2003 series was watching early work of some of my favorite actors. Some may have been relatively unknown at the time, or just gaining notoriety, but it was fun to watch Christopher Titus, Patrick Warburton, Jeremy Piven, Wood Harris, Usher, Jamie Pressley, and Jason Bateman. The series had a lot of cautionary tales, and yes, regurgitations of other stories, and even a few remakes, like “The Monsters Are On Maple Street,” and “Eye Of The Beholder.”

A few episodes do stand out. Notably, “Evergreen,” with Amber Tamblyn as a troubled youth trying to fit into a new neighborhood, and “The Path,” starring Linda Cardellini as a reporter who seeks the counsel of a coffee shop fortune teller played by Method Man. My favorite episode in this series, the one that I feel has the most Zoniness is -

Zoniness? Is that a word, Mike?

It is now. The episode that really gives you that TZ chill is “The Placebo Effect,” the story of a hypochondriac whose belief in his illness manifests and spreads to everyone in the hospital, sending staff scurrying to find a cure.

I would be remiss in not mentioning a special episode made as a sequel to the best TZ episode ever. “It’s Still A Good Life” presents a grown up Anthony Fremont with Bill Mumy and Chloris Leachman reprising their roles from the original series. Anthony has destroyed most of the world and still dictates who lives or gets cast into the cornfield and everything else about the world, for that matter, until his own daughter, who also has strong powers, develops a talent of her own. No spoilers here. But Anthony is not going to like this. She’s a bad girl!

While the series as a whole pales in comparison to the 1980’s version, and the strength of the 1960’s original, it still has great acting and fine storytelling, even for a low budget production. I guess we need a new Twilight Zone or something like it every 20 years or so, just to keep us wondering, and thinking.

I don’t know why I didn’t watch these when they first aired, or what really got me into wanting to see them all, but I am glad I have. Now I am on my way to finish up Black Mirror, and then, the most recent version of Twilight Zone, the 2019 series presented by Jordan Peele.

If you get a chance, please tune into some of these shows and check them out. Take some time in far off fantasy worlds and other dimension for a little mental break. It’s fun to watch stuff that makes you think. You will be glad you did.

But if you really want to question reality, just watch the news.

Thanks for reading.

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation.