The Twilight Zone “A Human Face” Review: Season 2 Episode 7

Twilight Zone “A Human Face” recap and review

Last year’s season had an alien called A. Traveler, a social-media celebrity who invaded Earth while getting a small Alaskan town to trust him. This season it is a gelatinous blob that does the work, and it does it by copying the long-dead relatives people loved most. That is the concept of “A Human Face,” and it keeps alive a pattern in the revival: the showrunners still have no clear idea how aliens might actually defeat humanity, and they seem unbothered by the gap.

Twilight Zone “A Human Face” opens on Robert and Barbara, played by Christopher Meloni and Jenna Elfman, a married couple whose daughter has died. They have sold their house and are about to move, and the day of the move is also the day a solar flare is due. The radio assures them most flares are harmless, but this is The Twilight Zone, so the audience knows something strange is on the way. Robert takes his late daughter’s bed apart while Barbara talks about how scattered she feels. He contradicts her at once, in the same condescending tone he uses to explain that their phone runs off the internet.

As he works, a pulse passes through the room. The walls and ceiling warp for a moment and a high-pitched sound rings out. Something has landed in the basement, and when the couple creeps down they find an undulating, slug-like creature eating a wooden table. It screams at them. They run upstairs, argue, then go back down. The creature is huddled in a corner like a wounded animal, and when it lashes out it takes the shape of Maggie, their daughter, played by Tavi Gevinson.

The alien Turing test

At first “Maggie” behaves like a test for a machine, repeating arbitrary lines the real girl used to say to her friends and parents. Barbara tears up, because to her this is her daughter. Robert, for all his bullying, argues rationally that the thing is only repeating phrases. The balance shifts when Maggie starts to move past requests for pizza and begins to appeal to her mother for help.

It is the best stretch of the episode, because the question of whether a copy built from memory counts as the person is old science fiction and still gives the actors something to play.

Where the logic collapses

After the first half spent persuading the couple that she is their daughter, Maggie reverses and delivers a long speech that amounts to admitting she is not. She then says she knows everything Maggie did, and she promises not to invade the planet if the couple agrees to treat her as their child. That is blackmail with a loving face, and the script wants the audience to read it as comfort. Robert’s turn is just as confusing. He spends the episode berating his wife for going along with the alien, calls the whole thing a con, and then holds the creature’s hand. A character who is wrong for forty minutes can change his mind, but the change needs a reason on screen, and this one has none.

Barbara is written as passive and gullible, which makes the imbalance worse. The episode asks the audience to do Olympic-level mental gymnastics to explain why everyone behaves the way they do.

The cast

Christopher Meloni is best known for Law & Order: SVU and Harley Quinn, and Jenna Elfman for Dharma & Greg and Fear the Walking Dead. Tavi Gevinson came to the part from Neo Yokio. All three do what they can. Meloni plays Robert as a man who handles grief by treating it as a logistics problem, and the early scenes with the moving boxes and the disconnected phone show how little patience he has left. Elfman gets the more sympathetic role and the less interesting one, since Barbara spends most of the story agreeing with whoever spoke last. Gevinson has the hardest job. She has to play an echo, then a plea, then a threat, and her calm manner helps the creature stay unsettling when the script has stopped helping.

The look of a 1980s Zone

The episode borrows heavily from the 1985 revival of The Twilight Zone, the version that later went into syndication for a third season. The effects feel cheap in the same way. The slimy alien that leaps at Robert and Barbara is genuinely frightening and fairly convincing, but when Maggie turns into a humanoid figure of pure light and energy, the image is straight out of that older show’s playbook.

A Human Face easter eggs

This episode carries more nods to the original series than most of the season.

• The real estate company selling the couple’s house is Davis Morton Real Estate, a reference to the firm where Arthur Curtis works in the classic episode “A World of Difference.”
• Maggie’s box of private things holds a doll of the Clown from the classic episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.”
• The moving boxes come from Dingle Moving, another wink at the classic episode “Mr. Dingle, the Strong.”
• One of the little Invaders from the classic episode “The Invaders” sits among Maggie’s dresser items.

Twilight Zone “A Human Face”: the verdict

The cast deserves better. It is a pleasure to see Jenna Elfman after a long gap, and Meloni is always watchable. Gevinson is excellent as the alien, with a stare that suits a creature wearing a borrowed face. None of them can carry a final act in which the twist is not a twist. The alien is obviously an alien, and the parents end the episode walking hand in hand out the door with their new, dead, daughter-shaped friend. The neighbors, it seems, are all living with alien copies of their own dead relatives, which leaves the audience to wonder how a whole street ended up in harmony.

Every incarnation of The Twilight Zone has produced a few standout episodes, which makes a miss like this one easier to accept, but it is hard to defend. The aliens are written as dumb as a bag of rocks. They land in front of the people they want to trick, turn into the dead daughter, spend half an hour trying to convince them, and then announce that none of it was necessary. The title is clever. The episode behind it is the one to skip in season 2.

There was a better episode inside this premise. A story about grief that asks whether comfort from a counterfeit is better than no comfort at all would have given Meloni and Elfman something to build toward, and the first half hints at it. The invasion threat flattens it. Once the alien says that peace depends on being loved, the emotional question becomes a negotiation, and the audience stops caring who is telling the truth.

The sensible way to watch the run is to leave this one out and go from the sixth episode straight to the eighth. Nothing in the season depends on it.

That is the fair summary of Twilight Zone “A Human Face”: a competent horror opening, a strong lead trio and a script that forgets its own rules. Fans of the 1980s revival may find the cheap glow of the final transformation charming. Everyone else will notice that the same season holds stories with real ideas in them, such as the school-hallway tragedy of the fifth episode, and that this one is the outlier.

Sources

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