The epiphany of this article came to me on the night I killed.

My heart pounded as I rose from my bent position over the carcass which I had destroyed, my weapon dangling from the tips of my fingers. Rivulets of sweat trailed down my face and with a shaky hand, I wiped away at the moisture.

“This is my house,” I repeated softly. “You don’t belong here.”

I let the sandal fall to the floor. Sarah stared up at me, her face filled with confusion. She couldn’t understand that I had to do it. I can’t let a known intruder continue to stay in my house. It was either him or me. I made the choice it was me and fought with everything to ensure that it was me. Wearily, I went into the bathroom and looked at my face. It was now the face of a warrior. Wrapping the tissue around my hand in a giant wad, I went back into the bedroom to dispose of the spider’s flattened body.

Did you think I killed a real person? Shame on you! What kind of monster do you think I am!

Yet, what would be the fun in just saying, “Hey, ya’ll! Parker killed a spider.” Where’s the storytelling? The imagination?

The story continues after my epic battle. When I got back to bed, I continued to write for a couple of hours until I was exhausted. Then, I stayed up to watch my latest binge: Jordan Peele’s take on The Twilight Zone.

“God could have introduced himself to us in anyway. When we meet the God of the Bible, we meet Him as Creator.”

—Allen Arnold

How Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone is unique

This take on The Twilight Zone is unique in several ways.

First, Jordan Peele actively chose to highlight minorities in these stories. Except for maybe one or two episodes out of ten, the main protagonists are women, people of color, or fall under some category of identity politics.

Secondly, unlike the original Twilight Zone, this version is interdimensional, and each chapter is part of a single story. This is seen when elements from one episode appear in another. For example, the main character, a comedian from the first episode, shows up on the magazine cover in the next one. A mission to Mars poster in the second episode foreshadows an actual mission in episode six. In episode six, one of the crew members of the Mars mission holds a toy figurine emblazed with the name of the fated plane referenced in episode two.

Not to mention, we see several occurrences of the number “1015.” It shows up as a phone number, an entry code, a license plate number, and in other ways. Speculation rages as to what the 1015 means.¹

Yet, although I would love to gab over this conspiracy of the show, it’s the very last episode that brings me to my conclusion of how this unique take on The Twilight Zone points to God and imagination.

To do that, I must give away major spoilers of this episode, including the ending.

Deeper into The Twilight Zone

This episode, called “The Blurryman,” has a great opening sequence. Jordan Peele begins to narrate:

“Witness Adam Wegman, a writer who, up until tonight, has never paid much mind to the idea of an artist’s social responsibility. He’s about to learn that there’s more to art than entertainment. He’s about to—you know what? I think we can beat this.”

We break away to see The Twilight Zone set and people who work behind it. It’s riddled with guest stars, but it focuses on the script writer, Sophie Gelson, who is tasked with rewriting the narration of the episode they are filming. She talks with Jordan Peele about reworking the opening. She makes a point saying, “But this is The Twilight Zone. If we’re not making a point about something important, then it’s just campfire stories.”

To this Peele replies, “You don’t like campfire stories?”

She responds, “I did when I was a little girl. Look, what Rod Serling did is he took the silly kid genre stuff and he elevated it. He made art with it for grownups and the reason why he’s in every episode—”

“Until now. Right?” Peele interrupts.

She goes on to say, that as a little girl watching the show, she’d wondered: What is The Twilight Zone and when do we get there? Gelson says she didn’t get the show until Rod Serling came on and told us about it.

Peele ends their chat by saying, “Take out the entertainment stuff and make it simple.”

She rewrites the script and it’s placed on cue cards.

Then, when Peele begins to read it, it becomes about Gelson entering The Twilight Zone.

The rest of the story follows in true Twilight Zone fashion as Gelson becomes part of the episode. She is chased by a character who is simply called “The Blurryman,” and he shows up in every single episode they’ve filmed. (It’s really cool to go back and watch them and see him). The Blurryman follows her and she futilely tries to escape him. Finally, in a conversation with herself, she allows the Blurryman to overtake her, and she’s taken back to her childhood when she watched the show. She has an epiphany and the new narration works. But then, it’s not over as she transported to the set world (in glorious black and white) of the original series episode “Time Enough at Last.” There, she encounters the Blurryman. See remarkis about the ironic twist on which many episodes end, and this was her end.

As she laments this, the Blurryman reveals himself to be none other than: Rod Serling.² Rod Serling begins to talk to her: “I take it I have your attention. Good.”

She questions, “What is this place?”

He tells her: “I think you know.”

The episode ends with them walking into the Twilight Zone and Rod Serling’s ending thoughts:

“What do we do when our world is turned upside down? When everything we thought to be true is ripped away and we’re forced to face a new reality? Sophie Gelson has just awoken to the fact that when we put away childish things, we may be closing our eyes instead of opening them. And that perhaps our only hope is to face all reality. A multitude of truths, not shrinking from that vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X beyond imagination but to embrace it. To open ourselves to the unknown. Not the end of the story but a new beginning for the Twilight Zone.”

A meta-commentary on the art’s creator

I sat back from the computer in awe at the brilliance of the story, a strange goosebump-like sensation riddling over my body. Peele had taken the us back to the genesis of The Twilight Zone itself, to the man who had created it.

In a book I recently read called The Land of the Purple Ring, Deborah J. Natelson, she writes via the book’s hero:

Imaginarium is the land of imagining happy fluffy clouds, rainbow unicorns, and princesses in towers—but it is also the land of imagining yourself a fluffy cloud who eats rainbow unicorns and locks princesses in towers, for lunatics are no more imaginative than sanetics; no, nor any less.

So as a sanetic, or possibly a lunatic (the jury’s still out on that one), let me use my imagination to bring it all together by using the elements of the iconic show.

When God created us, we were born to continue his work as creators. The very nature of creation brings community.  In the Garden, the Lord placed Adam and Eve there to work and keep working in it. Who knows what things they created in those wistful days we’ll never see?

Then, a calamitous event happened, the oddity that wasn’t supposed to be there. Not the snake, but the idea that we could be like God. Thus, the downfall of our imagination was birthed. It was God who had to rescue us by throwing us out of the Garden and into … the Twilight Zone.

This is a millennia-long episode riddled with horrible things happening to sinful people. But imagination is the genius of humanity. Without imagination, we wouldn’t strive. For though we have killed millions, we have given birth to billions. Though we have experienced the dredges of poverty, we’ve experienced the heights of decadent wealth. Bridges of communication are broken, but they are also rebuilt by the gripping of one hand to another.

This place is “the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”

Yet, we seek the narrator to understand the episode, the message behind it. Like Peele’s endeavor to create a single story among the episodes, God left us his word so we could understand his purpose for us. Like the Blurryman, he is an integral part, understanding the elements of the story far better than we ever could.

For God can see the overarching story, and without his intervention, we are doomed to never leave the Twilight Zone.

Jesus himself steps into the ‘episode’

Unlike Rod Serling’s narrator, who postulates the problem and then gives the conclusion of the narrative, God chose to step into the Twilight Zone with us, to become like us and subject himself to the same machinations without being affected by them. Unlike the audience, he never just watched and commented on the show. He got involved by getting past the surface message and into the hearts of the viewer—showing us that we are sinners who need to be saved and rescued. He did that by dying for our sins and rising again to give us access to leave the Twilight Zone.

One thing Rod Serling said is that Twilight Zone was the place of our imagination. But our imagination is limited by sin. We can only go so far.

Yet, rescued by the limitations of sinful nature, the place of light and shadow, we can go to the X beyond that boundary of our imagination.

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

—1 Corinthians 2:9

People think of Heaven as if it’s “just” a place. Yet Heaven so much more than that. It’s a relationship with the Creator of all who became like us to save us. God’s imagination is far more advanced than any of us could understand. In Judgement, he will destroy this place of light and shadow and close the door and open our eyes, ears, mind, and hearts to a place outside of the Twilight Zone.