WARNING: Spoilers. You might be glad I did spoil it for you.

I used to do TV and movie reviews in my Blogger blog, but gave it up. They take some effort to do and there are literally thousands of other sites and blogs who do reviews and most of 'em did it better than me. This isn't a review, but a gripe.

Anyone watched the new Twilight Zone? I just finished up the fifth episode of this season, all of which have already aired. I barely made it through the first one "The Comedian", a boring treatment about an totally unfunny comic who wants to preach to his audience instead of telling jokes. Most of his routine was about the horrors of guns and how they should be confiscated. OK, I thought...if any more are like this, I'm done.

The second one was a remake of a remake of the original "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet"; the original one had William Shatner as the man who freaks out and thinks he sees gremlins on the wing, remember? The remake in the TZ movie had John Lithgow as the man, but a great performance. I zipped through that one or fell asleep b/c seeing it twice before was plenty and after the first episode in this new reboot, figured there wouldn't be any twists or surprise ending the original was famous for.

It was the third one that pissed me off - "Replay" about a black woman taking her son off to college. They get stopped, the kid is shot by a trigger happy racist white cop and thanks to an old magical videotape camera, she's able to rewind time. Of course, that premise has been done to death many times before - although without the social diatribe - and the rest of the episode was like the movie "Groundhog Day", with her rewinding time and trying multiple ways to keep her son from dying at the hands of the white cop. She finally gets him to college and it's one like Grambling, black kids everywhere and they have a stand off against a multitude of white cops and after they back down, time can move forward. Progress, of course.... And, of course, it was almost like a commercial for "Black Lives Matter" but putting aside the stilted plot, the message was clear; white people bad.

I thought I'd give it another chance; after all, I already had d/l the shows. The fourth was the best so far, a story about an alien visiting a small Alaskan town police station on Christmas. It dawned on me just now it was a riff on the original TZ episode about the diner in the middle of nowhere w/ the stranded passengers and the fry cook happens to be an alien. Still, they just HAD to put in some more "white people are racists" with an Inuit side plot, the opressed "real Americans"...and a deception that the Russians were behind the upcoming invasion...only it was going to be the aliens. (they didn't CALL it collusion, but....)

This last one though, took the cake; it was about a young boy, a YouTube star probably ten or so who decides to run for President. He wins and just as I was wondering how they got past the 35 yr. old min. requirement to be President, they "explained" it away as having his parents on the ticket. Huh? I can suspend my disbelief in many things, the laws of physics or a time paradox, but NOT the Constitution! The kid is a brat, promises all kinds of things (free video games!) and then does nothing but eat pizza and ride his big trike through the White House, plus he was having trouble on the putting green and throws a tantrum and dumps the bucket of balls out and one rolls in the hole "It's a hole in one!" Oh, and I should mention the kid has long, "comb over" type haircut, blonde. Of COURSE it was a dig at Trump.

What's "funny" is that even the websites who adore the leftist messages in the episodes, esp. that one, hate the show. Most of the written user reviews in IMDb were pretty much the same "I'm a liberal and this program sucks." said one. "I'm a liberal but don't like these messages being shoved in my face." said another. There were a handful or two of "10" ratings, but they spent more time whining about the "Trumptards" down-voting the program than actually criticizing it. I believe the show has a "5.9" rating; I gave it a "1" star review, not just to balance out the totally unreasonable "10-star" ratings, but because I couldn't rate it any lower.

I don't give two S-words about obscenities these days, you gotta get used to them if you wanna watch much of anything, but I remember watching the original TZ with my pop, sometimes mom too and the show's social commentary was apt for the time, a statement which was hard to argue with, but it was usually subtle, disguised in shows like how we treated visitors from outer space (Like the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" did). This new TZ has a bunch of cursing in it, and even that young President (Trump) was dropping F bombs. Good grief. It's certainly not family fare, no matter what the social message intended is.

I may give it one more chance; according to Wiki, the next one sounds interesting, about a crew headed towards Mars when they find out there's been a nuclear war back on Earth . The captain of the mission is a woman and I'm sure the show will be about how she's ignored and disrespected by the men on the crew and there will finally be a twist that the original was famous for but this one has been lacking...namely that the female commander makes less than her male second-in-charge. That, or one of the crew is an alien. No, not a space monster, but a real alien, the illegal kind.

Sorry, I meant "Undocumented Astronaut".