‘Twilight Zone’ Episode 6 Recap: “Six Degrees of Freedom”

There’s just something about The Twilight Zone taking to the skies that gives it that extra missing boost. Untethered by the confines of earth, an aircraft brings about the hope of great wide unknown, pressed up against the oppression that comes with being one tiny speck, trapped inside one tiny metal box, hurtling toward the nothingness and…everything-ness of the final frontier.

These are the dichotomies that can elevate an episode of The Twilight Zone, and the sixth installment of this reboot (“Six Degrees of Freedom”) finally turned out that breathless but varied pacing and earned tension I’ve been searching for. Some of that has to do with the built-in claustrophobic setting of a stone-cold spaceship, but it’s also a credit to the excellent performances from a slew of the youngest, most beautiful astronauts you ever did see, writing that’s devoid of much of the contrived dialogue that’s stood out in previous episodes, and perfectly maddening direction from Jakob Verbruggen.

Jerry (Jefferson White), the team member that finally goes off the deep end in one of the episode’s best twists (there are many!), tells his fellow astronauts at one point that their mission to Mars was designed “because we had no other choice than to find a way out.” The tension of this nearly hour long episode comes from the many ways in which an individual must deal with a choice that isn’t actually a choice. Will that forced exit Jerry mentioned be executed inwardly or outwardly? Will it be conducted with hope or despair? Both are valid options, and the way that this episode warps the hope and despair of each individual crewmember until the difference between the two approaches is mostly unrecognizable is a subtle kind of twist I hope this series takes into the just approved second season.

Still, there are a few things I could take or leave about this episode, like the frequent scrambled images of past space missions and the dying earth. I mean I get it, but isn’t it better that I also got it from the carefully written script, and maybe we could have shaved 10 minutes off this sucker? Either way, the episode starts with a loooong bit of exposition about how “environmental changes and political unrest” have left earth in a tenuous situation, and as a result “new horizons have grown increasingly appealing.”

Bring on the Bradbury mission—oh yes, presumably as in Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, a subtle suggestion to keep your eyes peeled for…well, other peeled eyes—the first human flight to Mars with intentions to colonize. The team is headed up by Flight Commander Alexa Brant (DeWanda Wise, playing no-nonsense opposite of her other recent character in Netflix’s highly-nonsense Someone Great), her pilot Casey Donlan (Jonathan Whitesell), flight engineer Rae Tonaka (Jessica Williams), flight surgeon Katie Langford (Lucinda Dryzek), and mission specialist Jerry Pierson (White). These introductions are important because we’re about to spend a lot of time with these young people—and they with each other.

As the fearsome crew gets ready for blastoff and what have you, the very serious Commander Brant takes them briefly offline and puts “Family” by The Interrupters over the shuttle’s speakers, and in that brief moment of singing along, you understand that these are five people who have become a family over the last four years, giving up nearly everything to take on what basically amounts to a rescue mission. That makes the shock of what comes over the speakers next all the more harrowing: North Korea has launched five nuclear missiles and one of them is headed straight for their ship.

The team immediately understands that they can either abort the ship out into a world that will likely cease to exist in a matter of minutes, or they can launch as planned and potentially become the last vestiges of the human race…

Sometimes a choice is not a choice.

As the Bradbury exits the earth’s atmosphere, they have a 10 minute window where they can silently cry listening to updates that earth is now descended into nuclear warfare, and decide whether to orbit the earth forever and eventually run out of food and starve, or continue on with their original intentions: 218 days traveling to Mars, which is now basically a suicide mission without ground support or the ability to update the ship’s internal technology system, T.I.N.A.

That’s when Jerry tells them about the scientific theory knows as The Great Filter. It posits that life in the universe is incredibly rare: “harder to start, harder to continue.” The test of life is if an advanced life form can make it to another planet before it destroys itself—that’s why we never encounter other civilizations. Because most advanced life fails. “This mission was designed because we had no other choice than to find a way out,” Jerry tells them. And in that respect, nothing about their mission has changed. So, with the exception of Rae, they agree to launch to Mars.

And then it’s just 230 days of grappling with the uncertain extinction of everyone they’ve ever known; finding comfort in each other; being told they can’t find that kind of comfort in each other because their supply regimen cannot accommodate a pregnancy; happy family dinners; family dinners where Jerry won’t shut up about “War of the Worlds,” the radio play where Martians invade New Jersey that many thought was a broadcast of an actual Martian invasion; clinging to one another; rejecting one another; and so on.

It could be monotonous, watching these people go through the motions of life in captivity, but each check-in tells a new story of five people fighting through despair to find hope, and clinging to despair to avoid the pain of losing hope. That’s what makes what happens on Day 76 such a dynamic twist. Rae has finally come to terms with the decision Commander Brant made, and organizes a birthday part to lift her spirits. Once again, in a brief moment of joy where everyone comes together to sing “California Dreamin'” by The Mama’s and the Papa’s, Katie, who has been the morale lifter for the entire trip, suddenly caves into the sadness she’s been avoiding.

Jerry, who has been looking increasingly deranged, roaming around sticking his hands in toilets and then logging numbers in a little book, says he has just the news to cheer her up. He tells the crew that he’s been collecting data since the launch to test a hypothesis, which he has not proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Uh, what’s that? Now, I admit that in the beginning when they couldn’t take the shield off to look at earth because they needed it to protect them from radiation once they got to Mars, I wondered if this could all be a trick of some kind. But once these babes got in the air and started dealing with familial drama, I was not expecting one of them to pull the ol’ “no, this is the Bad Place!” card. Jerry, though his wispy beard makes him look like a mad man, lays out solid evidence that they’ve been fine all along—that this is all an endurance simulation experiment meant to test crew morale and mental durability on a trip to Mars. He says that the probability of a North Korean missile launch just 20 minutes prior to the Bradbury taking off was 735.6 billion to one and what’s much more likely is that they never launched at all. That they entered a replica Bradbury ship and the brief period of weightlessness they felt while they thought they were orbiting earth was actually due to the ship being housed in the Six Degrees of Freedom motion simulator, and also the name of the episode.

And that’s when TINA announces that they’re about to crash into a very convenient solar flare, and everyone needs to rush to the cockpit to avoid it. But Jerry refuses—he knows this is all a test, that they’re being watched. And he’ll prove it.

As everyone else straps in and closes off the cockpit, Jerry marches back to the airlock door screaming, “There is nothing!” and opening the door determined he’ll find a very much not decimated earth on the other side.

From what we see, it looks like Jerry comes face-to-face with the solar flare TINA warned them about, and that the rest of the team just narrowly escapes. And though they try their best to forget about it, frequent mentions of the possibility of Jerry still being alive persist as the now team of four gets back to daily life. Casey jokes that Jerry should knock twice if he’s just on the other side of the ship’s wall; Katie runs her own hand around the toilet to see if the crystallization that Jerry claimed wasn’t there really wasn’t there…

But she walks back out with a hand full of toilet crystals—proof that this is all real, not just some NASA experiment to test their mental and physical endurance. And what better proof that it’s all been real than…actually landing on Mars? Despite Brant’s claim at her lowest point that she was “commander of nothing but a slow suicide mission, they make it to their destination, and commence the landing sequence. “Welcome to Mars,” Commander Brant says.

But there’s still some uncertainty—there’s still some hope—that none of this has been real. And there’s some hope that it is. But there’s only one way to find out: ditch the shield and take a look.

And when they look out the ship’s large front window…it certainly looks like Mars. “We made it. We made it through the Great Filter,” Brant says with a mix of triumph and fear. As the camera zooms out to show their ship sitting in the red dusty mountains, you think that soon it might reveal a sound stage, or that Six Degrees of Freedom room Jerry went looking for. But that’s not what happens.

The camera goes wonky, and we see some of those blurry images I don’t so much care for, and what looks to be a naked body covered in goo in a mysterious sort of void. A subtitled alien voice is heard overhead: They have exceeded our expectations and passed through the Great Filter. Most life never does. But it took the near destruction of their planet to finally do so … This one discovered we were watching.” The camera reveals the naked goo man to be Jerry, a look of amazement dawning on his face.

Impressive indeed, and worthy of salvation. Prepare to make contact.

In Twilight Zone terms, I believe that’s what we’d call an almost happy ending…depending on how you look at it, of course.

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream The Twilight Zone "Six Degrees of Freedom" on CBS All Access