The Twilight Zone season 1 finale recap: Blurryman

“Blurryman” — Pictured (l-r): Jordan Peele as the Narrator; of the CBS All Access series THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Photo Cr: Robert Falconer/CBS © 2018 CBS Interactive. All Rights Reserved.

Who is the blurryman?

When The Twilight Zone returns to Gelson’s present, she’s back on set, everyone preparing to take the monologue again, they just need Gelson’s rewrites.

She magically has them in her hand already, so she gives the rewrites to Peele. I guess the flashback was supposed to symbolize her getting in touch with what she enjoyed about the original episodes of The Twilight Zone and she needed the blurryman to reminder her of that.

But she also doesn’t even look at what’s in her hands. Is this what she had written before the cue cards got messed up and everything that just happened was in her head? Or did the blurryman put new pages in her hands and she just knows these are going to be great without even looking? Who knows. Let’s keep going, it gets weirder.

Anyway, of course, she hands the new opening narration to Peele and he absolutely loves it.

Gelson walks away, smiling to herself. But then that voice in her head is back. It was never going to be that easy. The camera pans around Gelson as everything slowly shifts to black and white and dramatic music straight from the OG version of The Twilight Zone drops in.

(This is perhaps a good time to mention that you can now watch the entirety of this season in black and white on CBS All Access.)

Gelson is no longer on set, she’s actually in the apartment. She walks outside and it’s not the street set, it’s an actual destroyed world with cars on fire and stray dogs running around. Gelson starts to panic.

She makes her way to the library, passing a set of broken glasses (again from the iconic “Time Enough At Last”) on her way inside.

In the library, she’s again faced with the blurryman. Near tears, she asks what she did wrong, wondering what lesson she failed to learn. She says she understands that this is the end…of the episode. (We’ve gone from meta to nonsensical really quickly here.)

Let’s just cut to the point. The blurryman reveals himself to be Rod Serling (because, of course, who else would a writer feel is looming over every episode like a shadow in the background).

Gelson was expecting a cruel twist or a dire, ironic fate, but Serling simply says they have a lot of work to do before inviting her to step through the iconic door of The Twilight Zone.

This episode of The Twilight Zone then ends with Rod Serling reading (what we assume to be, at least in part) the narration Gelson gave to Peele. As Serling and Gelson walk together into the stars, Serling’s voiceover ushers in a new beginning for The Twilight Zone franchise.

What did you think of this episode and this season of The Twilight Zone? Let us know in the comments!