The Twilight Zone #11 Review

With time travel at his disposal, Detective Chambers has the power to pick a sacrificial lamb who can die in the place of the war vet he’s been hired to protect. The only problem? Chambers actually has a conscious.

the official description from Dynamite:

At the end of his career and at the bottom of a bottle, Ben Chambers took on one last case: investigate the unsolved murder of an Iraq War veteran and son to corporate CEO Jason Black. What he got was a trip through the past unlike any other.. Having broken the timestream, will Detective Chambers be able to save the young man’s life, and if so, what kind of consequences might it have on the present? The answers to these questions and more lay waiting for you in The Twilight Zone.

Yup, it sounds familiar: Just like Slaughterhouse Five, Detective Chambers has become “unstuck in time.” Hired to find the killer of a war vet, Chambers can bounce backwards and relive the crime over and over, looking for clues and trying to alter the terrible event. Unfortunately no matter what Chambers does, he can’t escape this fact: clearly, someone has to die. In hopes to save his client, he spends most of issue #11 trying to find a person who can die instead. Unfortunately, he’s got this thing called  a conscious which keeps messing with him — and writer J. Michael Straczynski spends much of issue #11 not only deepening the mystery of this current arc, but allowing Chambers to vent and wrestle with the choice he has to make. Luckily, just when Chamber’s emoting is about to get annoying, Straczynski  introduces another element that keeps readers invested: the resurfacing of previous characters, from previous arcs. For those of you used to the Twilight Zone being a series of simple one-shots, it’s clear Straczynski has other things in mind — a meta arc, of sorts, which (I hope) will lead to some bigger plot shift down the road. And although this particular run has not exactly been my favorite (emoting characters can get tiresome) you have to hand it to Straczynski because I want to read what happens next.

Guiu Vilanova’s art (which initially drove me a little nuts with its overly posed panels) has really loosened up. Vilanova seems at his best when the script calls for something strange, or non-traditional — check out Chamers as he floats through the timestream. Also, his facial work is a joy — yes, Chambers is supposed to be a stressed out dude and Straczynski does his best to demonstrate this through the dialogue, but in looking over the issue I really feel that Vilanova should have been trusted just to draw those feelings. The expressions he depicts are priceless.

Overall, a solid continuation of what’s been a solid run.