My earliest memories of The Twilight Zone oscillate between waking up late at night and seeing reruns playing on the TV in the living room and the billboards for the Tower of Terror at Hollywood Studios. The series has been on in the background for much of my life and between the imagery and soundtrack, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic whenever I encounter either. But between relaunches and reboots, there’s been precious few that have captured that original feeling. Luckily enough, though, we have the first issue of The Twilight Zone by Dan Watters, Morgan Beem, and Sandy Tanaka. 

Edward Kane is a multi-billionaire with stomach cancer. He’s spent a sizable portion of his fortune looking not only for a cure for the cancer, but for a cure for everything. Sickness and aging are the two things keeping him from living forever, so why can’t a few billion in research funds help him along the way? Enter the benevolent virus developed in a remote resort that, when infected, will cause the body to simply forget how to age and decay, much in the same way immune amnesia resets our immune system. Kane, much to the chagrin of the researchers who developed the virus, makes himself patient zero. But after recovering from the virus being injected into his system, he enters a world in which all of the people on that remote resort have become blank figures wobbling in the breeze. While the virus can erase disease in the body, when jumping from Kane to anyone else, it’s mutated to erase their very sense of self as well.

There’s a specific mood that comes from some of the best Twilight Zone episodes that’s hard to quantify. Eerie, but not quite outright scary. We can feel a sense of dread because we know what kind of genre we’re stepping into, but it plays with the expectations of where we think that dread will lead us. And that’s what we’re feeling throughout this first issue of The Twilight Zone. The inevitability of something going horribly wrong, the hubris of Kane, the pursuit of science that may not be completely understood—staged and recorded, it could slot into any of the reruns that would wake me up in the middle of the night thirty years ago. And while adherence to the original’s vibes helps, it’s the story with a plot so grounded in our currently that it feels like the opening of any Wired article over the past decade.

While this issue is the first in an anthology, it does provide some hope that the rest of the stories will be just as strong. Because capturing that feeling for one story from one team of creators may be difficult, it’s maintaining that same feeling between other writers and artists that will really make it feel like we’ve come across some old scripts in an abandoned storage locker in Culver City. 

Get excited. Get the twist.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.