Morena Baccarin stars in this tale of a hotel manager who is confused and frightened when she looks up and sees a large orb floating in the sky and everyone around her frozen in place, staring up at it in adoration. She appears to be the only one confused by these events that everyone else sees as commonplace and soon finds herself confronted by people following her who say that they are there to help.
Sounds like an amazing premise, doesn’t it? This is the kind of episode that can practically coast on the mystery and intrigue of what is going on and seems destined to be a modern day classic.
It’s just too bad that, after about fifteen minutes, the entire situation is explained, the twist is revealed, and the episode… well, it pretty much has nowhere else to go.
“Downtime” isn’t bad, but it could have been such a taut and tense thriller, but all of the goodwill of the premise is needlessly squandered for a reason I cannot even begin to fathom. Why the twist of what was going on was revealed so early in the episode is the only remaining mystery left in the episode.
Morena Baccarin, to her credit, does an amazing job with the script that she is given, but the episode devolved from a story crammed with promise, only to have an elephant leap onto it and squeeze all of that promise out in a big gushy and tragic tidal wave. I can only assume that the writers of this episode were also going for some kind of customer service analogy as well, but it was barely a part of a the story and largely overlooked and underdeveloped.
“Downtime” isn’t horrible, at least not as horrible as some of the first season episodes of this Twilight Zone reboot, but it’s certainly nothing I would be bragging about if I were in charge of this show.
Jason Gaston 