The Twilight Zone "8" Review and Ending Explained: Season 2, Episode 6

Twilight Zone 8 review: a sea monster at the bottom of the world

The second season of the CBS All Access revival arrived on June 25, 2020, with all ten episodes released together. Jordan Peele returned as narrator, and the series was canceled in February 2021 after two seasons. The Twilight Zone "8" is the sixth episode, written by Glen Morgan, an alumnus of The X-Files, and directed by the filmmaking duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.

A little background helps. The Twilight Zone ran on CBS from 1959 to 1964 under creator and host Rod Serling, and the revival launched on CBS All Access on April 1, 2019, with Jordan Peele as the on-screen host. The new version kept the format of self-contained stories with a sting in the tail and stretched them beyond the original half hour, a change that reviewers noted from the start. "8" runs longer than a classic installment, and the extra length is part of why the middle sags.

The premise is a good one. In the Antarctic, Dr. Orson Rudd (Joel McHale, best known from Community) leads a team of scientists studying the retreat of an enormous ice shelf. He believes the work will help save lives. His second-in-command, Channing (Nadia Hilker, of The Walking Dead), has cabin fever, and the crew copes with the isolation by watching television and getting high.

The monotony breaks when something living under the ice kills two of the scientists. Frisch (Brandon Jay McLaren), stoned enough to be brave, argues for diving to look for the bodies, and Rudd forbids it. The dive happens anyway, and the station soon has a corpse with marks across the face and a slime trail leading to a shaking cooler. Inside is what looks like an ordinary octopus.

The question that follows sets up the next act. Octopuses do not hunt people, so what is this one doing? Frisch and Larry (Tim Armstrong, singer of the punk band Rancid) want to kill it immediately. Ling (Michelle Ang) wants to study it, because it may be a species no one has catalogued. Any viewer who has seen a film about corporate scientists and an alien specimen knows how that ends.

What works: the setting and the kills

The lineage is clear. Stories of research teams besieged by a shapeshifting or hostile creature in the ice go back at least to The Thing from Another World in 1951, and Carpenter's 1982 The Thing made the setting a horror classic. Alien (1979) did the same for the dark corridor. "8" picks from both, and the episode is most convincing when it trusts that inheritance.

The episode borrows its dread from John Carpenter's The Thing and Ridley Scott's Alien, and it knows what it is borrowing. An isolated station, a crew that distrusts one another and a predator in the ductwork make the first half of the hour effective. The murders are staged with care, with a patient build-up before each attack, and a few of them deliver the shock they promise.

The setting does half the work. An Antarctic outpost is about as far from help as a story can get, and the cast is small enough that each death registers. For the first stretch, the show has real tension.

What does not: the octopus that rewrites its own DNA

The trouble starts when the creature stops being a threat and becomes a plot device. The script asks the audience to believe that the octopus has stolen a handheld computer and used it to copy and alter its own DNA, becoming more intelligent in the process. It is the kind of leap that a reader forgives in a pulp paperback, and it is much harder to forgive when it is played straight.

There is also the sheer silliness of the villain. A murderous octopus that strangles people and occasionally plucks out an eye reads more like a cable-channel creature feature than a Serling-style fable. The episode is serious about a premise that cannot take that much weight, and so the gap between tone and material is where the drama leaks out.

The twist and the ending explained

After its escape, the octopus slips back into the ocean. The implication is that it has copied its new DNA to others of its kind, who will now evolve, leave the water and wipe out humans. The final image is the strongest of the hour, since it reframes the whole episode as a first chapter of something much larger and much worse.

The ice-shelf backdrop does more than set a scene. Rudd's team is studying the retreat of an enormous shelf and what it means for the rest of the world, which gives the monster story a topical frame, and the screenplay uses it to make the final threat feel like a consequence. When the creature's descendants rise, they do so in a world the humans have already changed.

The message underneath is the classic Twilight Zone warning: humans have damaged the world, and something else will inherit it. The idea of a once-lowly species rising because of human activity is a fair one, and in an earlier decade the episode would have been judged on that alone. The execution just does not support it.

The cast of "8"

Cast as listed for the episode; the octopus is the sixth lead.

Easter eggs in the episode

The revival loves a nod to the original series, and this episode packs in several.

• Rod Serling's voice. The narrator of the nature show Larry watches is meant to be Rod Serling, voiced by Mark Silverman, who has played Serling for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror attraction at Disney parks, in last season's "Blurryman" and in the 2019 film The Vast of Night.
• Whipple. The floor of the outpost says Whipple is behind the technology, a nod to the classic episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's."
• The Ramones. Ling's octopuses have names like Joey and Dee Dee, after Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone.
• Tim Armstrong. The Rancid frontman also appeared on the soundtrack of last season's "Six Degrees of Freedom."

The verdict on The Twilight Zone "8"

The episode is frustrating because it is close to good. The cast is game, and McHale gives Rudd a stubborn idealism that fits a man convinced he is on the right side of history. The opening act is tidy and the kills are effective. A better second half, with a smaller leap in logic and a creature that stayed mysterious, would have made this one of the stronger entries of the season.

Twilight Zone monsters have always worked best when they stand for something. The gremlin on the wing in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is about one man's fear that nobody believes him. The octopus in "8" is meant to stand for the planet answering back, and it does not have the room to be scary and symbolic at once. Choosing one would have made a leaner episode.

What it delivers instead is a hokey ending that is hard to take seriously. The final reveal asks viewers to gasp at a mollusk with a computer, and the tone does not give them permission to laugh. A viewer is likely to settle somewhere between enjoying the creature-feature fun and wishing the script had asked more of itself.

The debate over what to do with the creature is the most promising part of the script. Frisch and Larry want it dead and Ling wants to learn from it, which splits the crew along an old line between caution and curiosity. That tension is the classic engine of a monster story, and it works until the creature starts rewriting its own DNA and the argument is overtaken by the plot. By then the crew has stopped debating and started running, and the best idea in the script is left behind.

For anyone working through the season in order, "8" is a skippable middle chapter, and for anyone who likes monster movies it is a pleasant enough creature feature. Curious readers can compare it with the season opener, "Meet in the Middle," a much sharper piece of work, which is reviewed in the season 2 episode 1 review.

Sources

• The Twilight Zone (2019 TV series), Wikipedia — Checked against: episode list, cast and crew, and release dates.