Zone-ing Out

2008-08-28
3:25:34 am

Okay, so there's a channel we get called My 9 that shows basically all syndicated shows. It's not usually a channel I watch, but I happened upon a King of Queens rerun which had both comic convention staple Lou Ferrigno and comedian Patton Oswald (plus, remember when Leah Remini played Alyssa Milano's friend on Who's the Boss?). Anyway, during KoQ I saw a commercial for an upcoming episode of Twilight Zone which I SWORE had Heroes' Adrian Pasdar and super hottie Shannon Elizabeth. So was I right?

Yup. I stuck around for the next hour as Forrest Whitaker introduced me two different episodes from the 2002 TZ relaunch. I'm a big fan of these kinds of shows (the original TZ of course, both the old and new Outer Limits and, my favorite, Tales from the Crypt) so I would have watched anyway (it also helped that Em was out running errands and visiting a friend).

So anyway, yeah the first episode of TZ I saw was called "Dream Lover." In it, Adrian Pasdar plays a graphic novelist (that's a comic book writer AND artist for the less pretentious). He was super successful with his first graphic novel and is trying to work on his second so he starts drawing this sexy woman in a towel who comes to life. He assumes she's his muse and only he can see her, but it turns out to be a big twist (duh) and that SPOILER SHE actually created HIM! Oh snap!

I'll be honest, I didn't see that twist coming so it was a pretty welcome treat. Overall the episode was great. I couldn't place the artist who drew all the comic book drawings (and IMDB wasn't much help), but it looked like pretty solid art. Shannon Elizabeth's character even drops (or tries to) a comic book in-joke with the line "Alan Moore couldn't do better." Now, this is funny for two reasons. The first is that Alan Moore's name got said on TV (it's still weird for me to see comic creators mentioned in the "real" media). But the REAL reason it's funny is because Adrian Pasdar is DRAWING at the moment.

It's a great episode to check out for comic fans, it even reminded me of a Tales from the Crypt episode where Harry Anderson plays a comic book artists whose creations keep coming to life (though I think they kill him or something, it's been awhile).

Oh, one last thing, when Shannon Elizabeth first appears and Adrian Pasdar disappears at the end of the episode the effect is straight out of A-Ha's video for take on me.

The second episode was a standard bad-guy-getting-haunted-by-kids-he-accidentally-had-killed story. The only thing that really elevated it was that Jason Bateman played the guy. Also, they made him agoraphobic, so he's actually too scared to leave his house and once he really tries to the kids have locked him in with creepy kid magic. And by that I mean these kids are super creepy. Not, twins-from-The-Shining creepy, but close.

One day I hope to get the Tales from the Crypt DVDs or even the original Twilight Zone DVDs and do disc-by-disc or season-by-season reviews. Any PR people out there listening?