Try, Try Twilight Zone Review: Season 2 Episode 9 and Ending

Try, Try Twilight Zone recap: the day that repeats

Anyone who wants to describe the Try, Try Twilight Zone episode quickly can say it is Groundhog Day if it were hosted like a cable-news interview and confined to one location. The setting is a museum with a new exhibit on masks. The story is almost entirely two people talking, debating the human mind and the reasons people do what they do each day.

Claudia, played by Kylie Bunbury, is at the museum to study the exhibit and records notes into her phone. She steps into the street and is nearly hit by a passing truck, but Marc, played by Topher Grace, pulls her out of the way in time. He is a kind stranger who happens to be there for the same exhibit, and he pays her admission. They run into each other again inside.

From there, Marc behaves oddly. He finishes sentences before Claudia can, and he describes his tastes in art, history and philosophy in a way that matches hers almost exactly. When he catches a thrown water bottle like a shortstop fielding a line drive, Claudia begins to suspect that something is off.

What Marc is hiding

Marc starts to act like an out-of-control child. He lifts artifacts off their stands, plays a boat oar like a guitar and swings a thorned weapon around while wearing a tribal mask. Then he tells her the truth: he has repeated this day for at least a few years, maybe more, and every morning wipes the slate clean. He can do anything he likes and wake up to a fresh start. In all that time he has wanted one thing, and it is Claudia. Today is the closest he has come to getting her.

Claudia is not flattered. Having finally accepted his story, she turns it on him. He has done the work, but she has not been there for any of it. He has used trial and error to clear a path to her, which is cheating, and her reaction is discomfort, then anger, especially when he turns menacing the moment she refuses him.

The twist and the final scene

In the last stretch Marc decides that today he will be as cruel as he likes, since tomorrow he will start over and be nicer. He lunges at Claudia with a sword out of anger that she will not love him in return. Claudia, who has spent the episode promising to kick his butt if he lies to her, fights back in self-defense and wins, because Marc never learned who she really was. The police take him away.

The story skips to the next day. Marc watches Claudia from a distance, and the truck that was supposed to hit her passes without touching her. That raises the question of whether the truck ever hit her at all, or whether Marc invented the accident to get close. His parting line to her is chilling: she can move on to the next day without him, but in his reality he gets to chase her every day, and she can do nothing about it.

Who is in the cast

Kylie Bunbury is known for the series Pitch and Under the Dome, and Topher Grace for That ’70s Show. Casting the clean-cut Grace as the obsessive is the episode’s best decision, because Marc has to seem harmless for the first twenty minutes and frightening for the rest. Bunbury is given the harder emotional work. Claudia has to move from curiosity to suspicion to fear in a single location, without any change of scenery to help her.

The details

The only easter egg in the episode is the truck, which belongs to Dingle Moving, the umpteenth nod to the classic episode “Mr. Dingle, the Strong.” The museum itself is a mild plot hole, because artifacts in open display would normally be alarmed, and Marc gets away with swinging them around.

Try, Try Twilight Zone review: what works

On a first viewing the episode can feel like a rerun of an idea the show has already used. A second viewing helps. The episode does not repeat the same day over and over for the audience. It shows a single day and trusts the actors to explain the rest, and the performances are what make that choice work.

Topher Grace plays a rational man while still being properly chilling, and he turns into a believable monster when the story calls for it. Marc has lost his mind, but there is a case that he was a misogynist before the loop and that years of repetition only magnified it. Bunbury plays the fear convincingly and also plays a strong woman who tells Marc that he is not owed anything, no matter how much of a gentleman he thinks he is. The episode never lets that line become a speech.

The pacing is steady, and the ending satisfies both characters, though it does get talky. Marc and Claudia pontificate and debate for long stretches before the intense, off-beat climax. Anyone who dislikes dialogue-driven hours may tire of it.

The idea at the center of the Try, Try Twilight Zone script is that effort does not create a right. Marc has put in what he considers years of work, and he treats the result as a debt. Claudia’s answer is that she was never part of the transaction. Every version of her that he met and learned from was a version he could discard when it went wrong, and she was never asked. That is a sharper point than most time-loop stories make, and it is the reason the talk, which could have felt like padding, feels necessary.

The comparison to Groundhog Day holds if the 1990s romantic-comedy setting disappears, the loop is limited to one day, and the male lead becomes a creep. As a Twilight Zone, it works: one man, one idea, one cruel irony. It is also among the more intelligent outings of the second season, and it is worth a watch before the finale.

Sources

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