The Twilight Zone (TV Series) Developing (2003) User Reviews

The house by the Lake

[kapelusznik18 · 5/10 · 20 August 2016]

***SPOILERS*** Discussing their future plans soon to be married Edie Durant & Alec Lehane's, Robin Tunney & Martin Christopher, car is hit full blast by a runaway truck killing Alec and putting Edie in the hospital with a fractured skull. It's a year later and Edie now back to work as a photographer is advised by her rabbi or priest the kind & understanding Shawn, Malik Yoba,to get back to work and forget the past by taking photos and enter an upcoming photo exhibit in town.

Snapping random shots around town Edie after developing them notices that one of the negatives has not only come out in full color, she's using black and white film, but has a house on it that she didn't photograph! Asking Shawn if this is some kind of sign from above Edie is told by him, who's supposed to be an expert on the subject, that she might be just a bit-due to her head injury-forgetful in what photos she took. Completely overlooking the very fact that it's impossible to develop color negatives from black & white film!

Still snapping photos around town Edie in developing them finds one of them has the dead Alec on it standing in front of the house! Checking out the real estate pages in the local newspaper Edie sees the very house that she photographed on sale and goes to see it to take photos on the inside. It's them after developing them she finds all the rooms that are empty in real life full of furniture including a baby's room for the persons who live or are going to live in it!

****SPOILERS*** Edie now sure that Alec is calling her to join him, in the world of the dead, so that they can be together is about to jump off a cliff into the lake and is stopped by Kavan Smith, Matthew Forsenth, who just seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. It's then that Edie gets the massage that Alec is history and it's Kavan who's the one whom fate has planned all along for Edie to marry and live with for now and ever after: Just like the house by the lake that fate guided her to in the photos. That she took of them in color with black & white film!

Overly Sentimental Schlock

[Hitchcoc · 4/10 · 13 July 2017]

This plot is out of some cheap romance novel. The young bride loses the handsome guy. She can't get over it but at some point he makes contact from the grave. She is utterly obsessed. This is understandable, but for some reason this has been done hundreds of times, over and over. Of course, she has a friend who is a minister advising her to get on with her life. His pleas go unheard. She is a photographer and when she develops rolls of film, there are strange things in the pictures. They lead her to a really dramatic conclusion. Anyway, not worth the time.

"You're asking me to believe something that is impossible."

[classicsoncall · 8/10 · 30 March 2023]

Presumably, this story must have happened in The Twilight Zone, as I can't believe how someone like Edie Durant (Robin Tunney) could possibly believe that her former fiancé, Alec Lehane (Martin Christopher), would come back to life after dying in a car accident a year earlier. I realize there are delusional people that might be obsessed by the idea, and Edie's fixation with it could have led to her own undoing by attempting to join Alec via suicide. Arriving at that level of belief is something I just can't contemplate. Fortunately, the vision of Alec's intrusion into her photographs was an attempt beyond the grave to get Edie back into the mainstream of life and allow her to find love and fulfillment by moving beyond his death. In that respect, the story's conclusion had some merit in helping Edie find her way, rather than remain in a state of melancholia and depression that would have surely ruined her future.

Younger folks might not understand the technology used in this episode!

[planktonrules · 9/10 · 15 February 2022]

Edie and Alec are planning on getting married and moving to a lovely home near the ocean. However, there's an accident and Alec is killed.

A year later, Edie is still grieving for Alec and she's not gotten on with her life. Her minister advises her to pick up her old hobby of photography to give her something to do and disrupt this unhealthy lifestyle. So, she does...and when she later develops the film, one of the shots is a color picture of the house Alec wanted them to move to long ago. And, oddly, the rest of the roll is in black & white. Is Alec somehow trying to communicate with her?

I have a strong feeling this episode will confuse many viewers now because practically no one uses film to take photographs. In other words, with digital photography becoming the norm, many younger viewers won't understand about how to use film, why you need to develop the pictures to see them, and, more importantly, how a color picture CANNOT appear on black & white film stock. It's NOT like a digital camera where you can turn on and off black & white and color modes. It really is wild how things have changed so much in only two decades.

So is this episode any good? After all, you can't blame or lower the rating for the TV show for using a technology that was the norm at the time. I enjoyed the show quite a bit, but felt it was less like a "Twilight Zone" episode and more a romance novel you'd see brought to life on the Hallmark Channel. This is NOT a complaint...more that although there is a paranormal aspect, it also is pretty romantic at the end. Well worth seeing...and with a very sweet twist...though apparently some other reviewers felt it was a bit saccharine.