Then, somehow, a mysterious man who says he’s had his named legally changed to “A Traveler” (short for Aggro Traveler, the name of his YouTube channel) shows up in jail. This year, the ceremonial stranger is set to be Yuka’s hard-drinking brother, Jack. In other words, it’s at its best the closer the story stays to Iglaak’s police station, a domain ruled over by Captain Lane Pendleton (Kinnear), a police chief who enjoys his power, enjoys holding court (and making casually racist comments about the Inuit residents), and usually ignores his far more competent deputy Yuka (Sila), who can barely stand her boss but tolerates him in the name of duty.Ĭaptain Lane Pendleton is a man of tradition, and those traditions include pardoning a stranger on Christmas Eve. But the atmosphere surrounding that plot, the tense direction of Ana Lily Amirpour ( A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), and the performances of Greg Kinnear, Steven Yeun, and newcomer Marika Sila make this an enjoyable, bleakly funny installment - even if it loses a little momentum in the home stretch. The basic plot is pretty easy to sum up, and echoes several classic episodes in which it’s unclear who is and isn’t an alien visitor (most clearly “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”). But the time it takes only enriches the episode. That’s the question driving the fourth episode of the revived Twilight Zone, even if “A Traveler” takes some time getting around to revealing it. And the same settlers brought their own traditions, like Christmas, to Iglaak, and they did so with the sense that the change would be permanent, that this land was theirs forever.īut what if settlers from elsewhere, maybe not even from this planet, had other ideas?

It took settlers from elsewhere to the place with those names, names borrowed from the Inuits, who were there before. But Iglaak wasn’t always Iglaak and Alaska wasn’t always Alaska. It boasts a nearby Air Force base - which it mostly exists to serve and with which it shares an unreliable power grid - and little else.

The small town of Iglaak, Alaska, population 936, is located almost 1,500 miles from the North Pole and seemingly just as far from anything resembling civilization.

The smooze zone