YMMV / The Twilight Zone (2019)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Joe Beaumont from "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet": Real person or just a creation of Justin's fractured psyche? The episode ostensibly presents it as the former, but there's some evidence to support the latter.
  • Oliver Foley's decision to fire all doctors over the age of 18 at the end of the episode? Just some random stupid idea that he thought up of, or a way to finally do away with Raff?
• Anvilicious: According to this Gizmodo article, it voiced that many morals and aesops are too concerned with teaching the audience a lesson (one that proceeds to bang the viewer over the head with at that) rather than the characters and by extension the audience.
  • We get it. Jordan Peele doesn't like Donald Trump.
• Awesome Moments: The Host Announcement trailer featuring the classic Twilight Zone theme alongside a HD remake of elements from the original intro, combined with a mix of both Rod Serling and Jordan Peele's narration of the opening monologue. What's not to love?
• Awesome Music:
  • During the Super Bowl promo for the series, a soft and enticing ambient song plays in the background...and then morphs into a chillingly-warped variation of the iconic Twilight Zone theme. A second listen will reveal that the entire score is based on the Twilight Zone theme, starting out soft, them becoming practically reverent... but while it has become familiar, the Twilight Zone can never stay familiar...
  • The track that plays during Samir's Heroic Suicide in "The Comedian".
  • "Fly Me To The Moon" by Frank Sinatra from "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet".
• Franchise Original Sin: This is not the first Twilight Zone series to feature hour-long episodes. The fourth season of the original series, as well the 1985 series, also had episodes of similar length. However, Rod Serling preferred the half-hour format and was forced by the studio to make longer episodes due to the show being moved to a different time slot, and they went back to half-hour episodes with the fifth season. The 1985 series avoided the problem by telling multiple separate stories each episode, rather than stretching a single story to an hour-length.
• Jerkass Woobie: Raff Hanks from "The Wunderkind". He may be an opportunist and a manipulator but he's also the only one to end up realizing that Oliver is grossly unfit to be President when no one else wants to listen and what does he get? He gets shot, has his name destroyed by the media after being falsely accused of trying to assassinate Oliver and most likely dies after he's stabbed repeatedly in the chest by a kid doctor while screaming in pure agony.
• Magnificent Bastard: "A Traveler": "A. Traveler" himself is a mysterious, charming man who shows up in a small Alaskan town as a charismatic "extreme traveler." Manipulating the townspeople into conflict to deflect suspicion from himself, he plants misinformation about himself and his goals while laying the groundwork for an alien colonization of earth. After having Sheriff Pendleton sent out to check the power grid, he manipulates Sergeant Yuka with a promise of Pendleton's job to send her after him, ending the episode victorious and sharing a slice of pumpkin pie with a cellmate as his forces come to take over earth.
• Padding: While the episodes of the original series were around 25 minutes long, the episodes of the 2019 series are 45-50 minutes long and many episodes feel overly long and padded to reach that length and would have left more of an impact if the episodes were briefer and more direct.
• Tainted by the Preview: A good number of prospective viewers voiced their apprehension towards the series after the Feb. 21 trailer dropped, thanks to the editing of said trailer implying that the series would be serialized and follow a distinct continuity rather than follow the anthology format of previous iterations. That said, a fair number of other prospective viewers were willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt and assume the perceived implication was just the result of faulty editing. Jossed as the anthology aspect is retained but there appears to be small details to connect the episodes.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: One of the criticisms most have with this iteration is that they feel the writers went way too far into horror and had too many stories that went into bad endings. Stating that while yes, the series did have it fair share of horror, it leaned more into the surreal for the most part and wasn't afraid to go into other genres like comedy or romance just with an otherworldly bent which this version rarely does. Likewise feeling the tone is more akin to The Outer Limits (1995) than Twilight Zone.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The survivors of Flight 1015 in "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet" can be seen as this considering they all survived the crash sans Joe. Considering Justin had been already trying to prevent the plane crash, they should have instead been grateful they survived. Instead they kill him and considering what the podcast implies, they flat out lie and just say Justin didn't survive. Granted, Justin ended up becoming the reason why the plane crashed, so they didn't really need to be grateful to someone who's left them stranded, but their method of killing him at least still seems pretty brutal.
• The Woobie:
  • Samir Wassan from "The Comedian". All he really wanted was to make people laugh but thanks to a close encounter with a fellow forgotten comedian leads to him making many people disappear in a huge desperate desire to be famous. He really hits it as seen in Tear Jerker and his own reward is being erased from history.
  • Justin Sanderson in "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet", trying to prevent a plane crash only to unintentionally cause it and gets killed by the survivors of the plane as a result.
  • Poor Nina from "Replay" is forced to see her son (himself an example of this trope) be brutalized or even killed by a racist cop. And even after going through the lengths to save him the ending implies it was all for nothing.
  • Eve, Anna and all the other immigrants from "Point of Origin".

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