An alien invader toys with a grieving couple’s emotions in an overly corny Twilight Zone
TV Reviews Recap
If it wasn’t for the cast of “A Human Face”—and the director—this Twilight Zone would be kind of a waste. Whatever goodwill the episode builds up in its effective first half is largely squandered by a second half that just keeps restating its primary point over and over, bluntly.
As with our previous episode, “8,” the premise suggests a fairly classic horror story scenario. Jenna Elfman and Christopher Meloni play Barbara and Robert, a married couple in the process of packing up their house to move out, not long after losing their teenage daughter Mags (Tavi Gevinson). When a cosmic flare flashes outside, the husband and wife soon find a grotesque, toothy, wormlike alien gnawing on the old furniture in their basement.
They flee upstairs and the alien follows; but along the way it shape-shifts into something that looks and sounds like Mags. Holed up in their bedroom, they face a choice. Robert is absolutely certain the alien is still as dangerous as it looked downstairs. But Barbara thinks maybe some miracle occurred with the flare. Maybe Mags is back? And even if not… “It’s really nice to hear that voice.”
It’s hard to overstate just how good Elfman and Meloni are in “A Human Face,” especially in the scenes where their characters aren’t in fear for their life. The opening pre-flare/pre-alien sequence is a fragile little gem, with Barbara plastering on a smile while she talks about the phone being out. Robert is busy taking the pictures off Mags’ wall and boxing them up, hoping his wife won’t linger around the room’s many potential triggers for melancholy; but he takes a moment to carefully explain that the phone is bundled with the internet, which has already been cancelled. “A Human Face” is credited to Alex Rubens, who wrote one of season one’s worst episodes (“The Comedian”) and also one of its better ones (“Blurryman”). In the early going at least, he pens some quietly poignant moments.
Gevinson is quite good also, in a tricky role. The former Rookie editor and millennial superstar has been doing more acting lately, often landing in parts that take advantage of her unusual screen presence, playing off her striking looks and monotone voice. She’s a convincing alien impostor, initially repeating phrases like “Can we get pizza?” and “Can you pick me up after practice?” that she seems to know will break Barbara’s heart.
“A Human Face” was directed by Christina Choe, who did a good job with season one’s otherwise fairly blah “Not All Men” and a great job with her 2018 debut feature, the haunting identity-stealing drama Nancy. Here, working with the limited location of one dimly lit suburban house, Choe plays around a lot with the few light sources, sometimes framing the characters so that they become indistinct silhouettes, set against the sun streaming through a window. She also gives Elfman and Meloni the space to develop their dynamic.
But where this episode goes after all that thoughtful, sensitive setup? Well, that’s a letdown. Ostensibly, the arrival of “Mags” pushes Barbara and Robert to reopen old wounds. She was too inattentive with their child; he was too cold. (“You want a do-over,” he snaps dismissively.) The makeshift Mags fuels their fire, telling her “dad” that he was never a real father, “just a guy who had a kid,” and telling them both that, “Neither of you cared about who I really was.”
This is all a bit generic, as far as family squabbles go; and the dialogue hits its points too hard. Granted, there’s not enough time in this compact episode (another one that’s about a half-hour!) to recap the nitpicky details from a decade-plus of mediocre parenting. But even reduced to the bullet points, the big three-way argument that dominates the second half of this story feels like it goes on forever, without saying much of anything. Again, if not for the fierce commitment of the actors and the artful touches of the director, much of the second half of “A Human Face” would be a hard grind with minimal reward.
The episode does end fairly well though, with “Mags” finally admitting that she’s a “biological pacification drone” and “a machine for conquest” and “an aspect of an invading force.” This would seem to vindicate Robert’s skepticism. (“It used the word ‘conquer,’ Barbara!”) But Barbara says it doesn’t matter. She coaxes her husband to walk out of the house with her and their “daughter”… into a street where they find all sorts of blissfully happy families, walking along with their own biological pacification drones.
Anyone looking for a larger theme to this whole Twilight Zone season might note that a few of this year’s episodes (like “Downtime,” and especially “You Might Also Like”) end with the characters happily accepting what could be a pretty bleak fate. It’s also worth noting that one of the major ideas of this episode is that people can be led to embrace their own destruction, if in the process they get to air some old grievances and bury some old regrets.
But all of that goes hand-in-hand with the second half of this story, which for me is less indelible. When I think of “A Human Face” in the future, I’ll probably try to focus on the fine first half… and in particular on how Jenna Elfman looks both stricken and hopeful when she hears her daughter’s voice again. Now there’s a human face.
Stray observations
- Your easter egg quote for this episode: “Clown, hobo, ballet dancer, bagpiper, and an army major—a collection of question marks.” Even casual Twilight Zone fans should be able to peg that one to another of the original series’ best-known episodes, “Five Characters In Search Of An Exit,” about toy dolls who think they’re real (and who are just looking for love).
- I had some hiccups with my regular set-top box while streaming this episode, and had to switch to a different device. For some reason my CBS app on that device defaulted automatically to the Descriptive Video Service option, with a voice on the soundtrack explaining the images on the screen. It took me a second to realize this wasn’t part of the episode—because it sounded a little like the translation app in “8,” which I’d just watched—but as soon as I figured out what was going on, I switched it off. Still, it was an interesting experience, because the DVS sometimes directed my attention to the elements within the frame that were most important to the story. Give it a try sometime!
- Next: “A Small Town.”
20 Comments
I somehow enabled the Descriptive Video Service when watching “Rocketman” on Amazon Prime the other day and it took me a couple of minutes to figure out why the action in the Paramount logo was being narrated: “Star fly over a mountain!”
There was an issue with one of the episodes of search party on HBO Max that only uploaded the descriptive video version. I thought I had accidentally sat on my remote and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to turn it off. It’s a shame that judging by these reviews this new season just seems to be very bad. I think this episode’s B- is the highest rating any of the episodes have received so far.
I might watch these for free but I’m certainly not paying CBS for the privilege.
This happens all the time to me on both Amazon Prime and now CBS. I had the exact same experience as the reviewer when I watched the first Twilight Zone episode this season. I was thinking it was the narrator, and why wasn’t it Jordan Peele LOL.
This is the first one of the season that I actually hated.I had thought the exposition in “8″ was bad, but it has nothing on the endless talking in this episode. It just goes on and on and on, and it’s all in service of nothing. What is this trying to be a story about? Teen suicide? Coping with loss? Absentee fathers? Children are all just alien parasites? Or a “what is this thing you call love?” which even James T. Kirk would call hacky? It is a grabbag of bad, bad hottakes.And it’s a shame because the direction and performances are nicely done, but the script is trash.
…and while I’m thinking about it, “I know that it’s not a perfect copy of so-and-so, but it’s what I need right now” is a good basis for a story, but you need to actually do something with it.Black Mirror did a great job in “Be right back” (back when that show had actual stories to tell), and Electric Dreams’ Bryan Cranston episode did too.
I think there are also object easter eggs in each episode that have not been mentioned in these recaps. In this one, there was the little alien robot in Mags bedroom holding her jewelry. I don’t know the names of OG episodes, but I recognized that little guy. There’s also a very obvious easter egg object in the next episode in the diner.
They hit on the moving boxes’ logo pretty hard in this one, so it’s not surprising to see it on a truck a couple episodes later.
The robots from the Classic episode The Invaders.
Great acting, ‘meh’ story. Not as bad a waste as Ovation and I think it is a bit better than 8 but definitely near the bottom.
Did they force Dharma to wear ugly mom pants to show her age?
This was probably the best of the season, frankly. The second half is rather bald, but in so being it gets as close to an actual Serling-era sci fi story as this iteration of the show has ever gotten – discussion of metaphysics is never exactly fun. Despite the cumbersome dialogue it never loses its off-center eerieness. It cleaves to a rail just to the left of, say, Les Revenants, which also mined the what-if scenario of grieved-for loved ones returning from the dead, but in this case the choice to be absolutely unambiguous that the daughter is in fact not really the daughter is really interesting, and creates a dilemma that’s interesting despite the outcome not really being in doubt. It’s really reminiscent of a Nathan Ballingrud short story called “Monsters of Heaven”, now that I think about it. The collection that story’s from is being adapted into a Hulu show called Monsterland, so we might actually see a redux around Halloween. It will probably be accused of being similar to this episode.The first half is still the best, though. The creature effects were actually rather good, the jerkiness of the shapechanging sequences suitably alien. The scene where they’re trapped in the bathroom and the alien is trying to lure them out while still in the process of learning the daughter identity, such that it starts off repeating itself over and over before narrowing in on more effective calls, was the most tense the series has gotten so far.
Earthlings lured into a sense of complacency by the appearance of their dearly departed. Mars is heaven
When I think of “A Human Face” in the future, I’ll probably try to focus
on the fine first half… and in particular on how Jenna Elfman looks
I didn’t recognize her until I saw her name on the credits. What has she done to her face? I thought she was Christina Applegate.
I recognized her right away. Of course, I also watch her on Fear the Walking Dead, but I don’t think she looks a lot different than she did in Dharma and Greg. A little older and clearly a bit of plastic surgery, but not unrecognizable. Not like Renee Zellweger was (she looks more like herself these days, so she must have had it fixed.)
I enjoyed this one. It seems to be getting a bad rap.It probably works better if you see it as something of a heavy-handed political allegory for the divisive times we find ourselves in.
The last image in the article – and everyone’s facial expressions therein – just about sums it up (for me, anyway).
Both
Barbara and Robert know, on a factual level, that ‘Mags’ isn’t their
daughter. Barbara knows this, despite everything ‘Mags’ tells them, but
such was the pain of their loss that she would rather switch off that
part of her brain that reminds her of it and throw herself into this
new, fantasy-like state of affairs. She’s happy to do so. ‘Mags’ has won
her over absolutely.
Robert isn’t capable of doing
that. He cannot bring himself to fully accept this new ‘reality’, as it
is. It breaks his heart, of course, and he seems to only begrudgingly go
along with the charade and follow them both outside. It doesn’t take
much to imagine his tolerance for the illusion will crumble before long (imbuing an already-bleak final shot with further tragedy).
In short, it seems to be trying to be a cautionary tale about the perils of demagogues and being willing to ignore
the truth that’s staring you in the face in favour of a fiction that
tells you what you want to hear. Which, in 2020, isn’t really going out
on a limb.
I agree that the writing isn’t exactly daring and wouldn’t have the impact it does without Jenna Elfman and Chris Meloni. But I liked it all the same, mainly because of the performances. You can only do so much in a half-hour and there isn’t much room for nuance. I enjoyed the ending but it could’ve been more ambiguous; the not-very-subtle
implication of there being other ‘Magses’ and the idea that they have
not, despite her/its protestations, switched off their directive to
infiltrate and conquer could have been muddied a bit more.
Sorry if I’ve repeated anything someone else has said but I thought I’d throw my two-penn’orth in. Otherwise, thanks for the recap.
Did anybody notice how often they said each other names? It’s like they really wanted us to know it’s Robert and Barbara… Jeez. I know actors in general have a habit of adding names to lines themselves, so it’s kind of a basic rule to avoid writing them down… Wonder if the writer just kinda forgot.
So a shape shifting alien “or biological pacification drone” can phase through a wooden floor but can’t get past a locked bathroom door? And I have no clue what the underlying message or moral is supposed to be in this one.
So,hang on – every household on that one road had lost a child?
I eagerly await Tavi Gevinson starring in the inevitable biopic of Scarlet Johannsen. At multiple points in this episode I thought they had dubbed her voice in and had CGI’ed her younger face onto the actress.