The Twilight Zone season 1 finale recap: Blurryman
“Blurryman” — Pictured (l-r): Seth Rogen as the Writer of the CBS All Access series THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Photo Cr: Robert Falconer/CBS © 2018 CBS Interactive. All Rights Reserved.
The final episode of the season for The Twilight Zone brings everything full circle, connecting all of the episodes of the season under one looming presence that has been around all along.
The Twilight Zone wraps up its first season with an incredibly (and perhaps overly) meta episode starring Zazie Beetz as Sophie Gelson. Seth Rogen and Jordan Peele guest star as themselves because, well, we’ll get there.
The episode opens on Rogen playing a writer who is having trouble putting together a story he’s working on. Eventually he settles on starting his story with the destruction of the world.
As he writes that, Betty Gabriel comes in (again, character names don’t matter, we’ll get there) and the two go to the window. That’s when Rogen realizes that, *gasp*, what he wrote came true! The outside world is destroyed and Gabriel is telling them they need to get to a shelter.
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The camera pans to Peele for his opening narration. However, as he nears the end and the iconic recitation of “The Twilight Zone,” he stops, asking to stop rolling.
The opening narration is always meant to break the fourth wall and talk to us as the audience, but Peele, in this moment, breaks the wall even further. We’re suddenly on set as Peele and the episode’s writer, Gelson (played by Beetz) work through the right wording for the opening monologue.
The two walk and talk and Peele talks about the things he’s unhappy with in the monologue. Basically he doesn’t think she’s quite getting to the real message of the episode she’s written, so he as her go do some more work on it.
Of course, this is an inconvenience to the whole crew because everyone is basically standing around and waiting on Gelson to write and they’re already tight on time. In fact, they’re so tight on time that they won’t even be able to allow Peele to memorize the new speech, they’ll just have to put them on cue cards, Saturday Night Live style. Trying to at least make someone’s life easier, Gelson volunteers to write the cards herself.
Cut to the new attempt at the monologue. Peele reads from the cards, but starts to break character as the text divulges from what the story is about. The cards, rather than talk about the story they’re shooting, start talking about Gelson’s real life and a “blurryman” lurking in the background.