The Twilight Zone episode 6 review: Where reality and sci-fi meet

The Twilight Zone’s sixth episode, “Six Degrees of Freedom,” transforms climate change into suspense, while teetering on our very real apprehensions.

As a note for any Twilight Zone fans who are still indecisive about embarking on the journey through the rebooted parallel dimension: “Six Degrees of Freedom” features some rapidly flashing lights, especially within the first seven minutes of the episode.

Finding yourself trapped in an alternate dimension probably wouldn’t be fun. However, the fun of watching The Twilight Zone is that you don’t know what to expect. You know the general genre to expect and that each episode will be infused with socio-political commentary. Beyond that, it’s as ambiguous as the otherworldly forces in the series. This week, “Six Degrees of Freedom” uses our real-life fears to reinforce its creepy science fiction.

Twilight Zone episode 6 thrives on our environmental decay, and it sustains itself on the sheer edge of suspense. The commentary in this episode:  How manmade technological achievements impact the entirety of humankind, the world, and the future. “Six Degrees of Freedom” is commenting on our ongoing climate change crisis that’s only getting worse.

Environmental chaos is at the heart of this episode. Science fiction often teeters on the edge of reality. It hides behind the illusion of fiction, but it’s based on the nonfiction in our real world. The Twilight Zone recognizes our grim reality and modern affairs, and it manifests it into fiction.

The introductory moments of the episode set up a sort of calm before the chaos. Discomfort is just settling in as the crew recognizes they’ll have to make a decision between two equally unsavory options. The decision itself strains the crew to build on suspense. Overall, suspense plays on the scoring in the background throughout the episode to make viewers look forward to the main conflict once the characters officially venture into space. After all, the initial conflict on Earth kept us waiting for the intergalactic conflict to kick in.

During a birthday party, a delusional crew member who comes up with the hypothesis that the mission and destruction of the Earth aren’t real. He claims none of it is real. This is the turning point that brings the episode back to the central commentary on climate change. It mimics the real-life claims of those who deny climate change and humans’ impact on climate change.

Simultaneously, the turning point vaguely notes how claims about the world being a simulation can disconnect us from the problems at hand. But like the crew member who’s convinced none of this is real, it’s our disillusioned way of coping with the very real danger around us.

Shortly after the lift off into space, the crew’s table discussion of aliens in pop culture and films makes the extraterrestrial twist could seem too obvious. However, space and science fiction together seem like a missed opportunity without aliens. We aren’t mad about the heavy-handed foreshadowing. Considering that the aliens don’t appear until the final moments of the episode, it makes their awaited debut a bit too similar to the ending of episode 4. However, the plot unveils a lot of twists to make the aliens a part of the journey all along.

When the alien says, “But it took the near-destruction of their planet for them to finally do so,” this statement slightly nods to the gravity and timeliness of climate change. While it refers to the trek to Mars, it implies that it takes the near-destruction of our planet for us to attempt to do anything to assure our future. (Because we can’t really have a future if our planet dies.)

Apparently, in the aliens’ all-seeing eyes, we’re worthy of salvation. Well, at least, in this sci-fi lens, because we can’t necessarily trust ourselves to reverse our impact on the environment. Beyond the handling of aliens as a mode to discuss our environmental peril, this episode is successful in other avenues.

Building pathos with the commander’s desperate call to contact her loved ones on Earth, we develop a connection with her especially.

Beyond the acting the chemistry between the crew, some of the strides this episode makes rest in the scoring and the cinematography. With a deeply unsettling, for all the right science fiction reasons, POV-framed scene at about the 30-minute-mark, the episode starts to raise our fears. The bathroom scene intentionally cuts between what we can and cannot see from the crew member’s line of vision, and adding the mirror in the mix only makes us more nervous. “Six Degrees of Freedom” understands what we know about the sci-fi genre, and the episode exploits it for a prolonged fright.

The rhymic pulsing in the background, which mirrors a heartbeat, only increases our horror-related disquiet. The Twilight Zone knows how to make us tense and how to startle us even when we’re anticipating a scare.

Though the episode is about humans and their impact on one another on the small and large scale, the dialogue might bog down the episode just a bit too much in the middle segment. The alien encounter seems too tame because it doesn’t seem we’re on the brink of “salvation” as far as our environment is concerned. However, “Six Degrees of Freedom” is plays on classic sci-fi themes while delivering necessary commentary on a modern-day issue.

Sci-fi and dystopian settings have long since been a dynamic duo, and The Twilight Zone is recognizing that the most horrifying dystopian scenario is the one we’re currently fringing on. In an episode about the maddening effects of our human-made catastrophes, “Six Degrees of Freedom” makes us look more critically at the current start of Earth’s environment. Because where sci-fi and reality meet, necessary discourse rises.