The second episode of the second season of Peele’s Twilight Zone revival, “Downtime,” featured sci-fi A-lister Morena Baccarin (Firefly, Deadpool) as Michelle Weaver, a young woman who works in hotel hospitality. What starts as a relatively normal day turns into a sci-fi mystery that upends her entire existence and changes her life in the span of just a tight half-hour.

RELATED: Stream Episodes of Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone on SYFY

After a strange sensation, Michelle steps outside of the hotel to find essentially the entire world in a frozen trance, staring up at a massive red orb hovering in the sky. The weirder part? No one else seems particularly perturbed by it, with passersby casually asking her if she knows how long “downtime” will last.

Cue the fear and confusion.

Though The Twilight Zone has always dabbled in morality plays, cruel twists of fate and cleverly taught lessons, this episode evoked some of the open-ended big idea swings that Serling’s original 1959-1965 series positively reveled in. This episode isn’t out to make a heavy-handed point, so to speak, but is instead simply telling an ambitious science fiction story by dropping us all into a snapshot of a moment via the anthology format. The fact that Peele, who wrote the episode, and director JD Dillard were able to pull it all off in just 30 minutes is even more impressive.

Twilight Zone’s “Downtime” Explained



Michelle runs to her husband for help, but he suddenly “breaks character,” changing his voice and asking about the maintenance, before himself falling into a trance at the sight of the orb. As Michelle terrifyingly learns after a few run-ins with random strangers calling themselves “tech support,” her entire life is actually a giant simulation, essentially a second-life style video game, where people can log in and live out the lives of different avatars. A man named Phineas had been controlling Michelle, but he suffered a massive heart attack and is on life support, leaving Michelle’s consciousness in some untested limbo state with her user unconscious and failing. ...

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/jordan-peele-created-one-of-the-best-classic-twilight-zone-episodes-with-downtime

For decades, whispers have circulated among game show aficionados about a mysterious Jeopardy! contestant from 1986. She went by Barbara Lowe and won five games in a row, which at the time—in just the second season of the reboot hosted by Alex Trebek—was the upper limit for returning champions. Later that year, when the show aired its Tournament of Champions contest with the best recent players, for which five-day champs automatically qualified, Lowe was nowhere to be found. Then, bizarrely, her episodes seemed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

In the 1990s, Game Show Network re-aired Season 2 of Jeopardy!; eagle-eyed fans noticed that the five episodes featuring Lowe were unceremoniously skipped. When the show launched a 24-hour streaming radio program and a Pluto TV channel that broadcast old episodes, Lowe’s episodes still failed to appear. In markets where affiliate stations play reruns on the weekends, Lowe’s episodes are omitted, again and again.

But the why of that matter, and what exactly happened during those games to incur the enduring wrath of the nation’s foremost quiz show, has long proved elusive. This is particularly bedeviling to Jeopardy! superfans, for whom detailed knowledge of operas, world capitals, and even television ephemera looms large. There are few corners of pop culture where facts and certainty are as celebrated as they are on Jeopardy! Yet one day in 1986, something happened—and nearly 40 years later, no one could say what. For the show’s most devoted fans, hunting for clues about Lowe—Jeopardy!’s biggest mystery and, some claimed, its greatest villain—became a calling unto itself.

Now, for the first time, Lowe is ready to open up about what happened, having caught wind of her place in Jeopardy! lore when one of those superfans tracked her down to see whether maybe, just maybe, she might have recordings of her games. She says she didn’t have the heart to tell him that when she’d moved a couple of years earlier, she’d thrown out a stack of VHS tapes that included her Jeopardy! appearances.

“He said that my episode is regarded as the holy grail of episodes,” Lowe tells The Ringer. “I was absolutely hysterical about it. I thought, ‘That’s insane.’”

And yet Lowe’s episodes were finally found late last year. The discovery of the lost tapes and Lowe’s first interview addressing her experience answer some questions and raise a host of new ones for the people who spent decades looking for the footage. Why were her games shrouded in secrecy for almost four decades? Was there really bad blood between the show and the five-time champ? What transpired during her time on set? And how did this saga come to take on a life of its own? ...

https://www.theringer.com/tv/2023/5/2/23705821/jeopardy-lost-tapes-barbara-lowe-mystery-champion