I'd heard this was just going to be another remake of
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, and thankfully it wasn't. If I wanted to watch that again I'd just watch one of the previous versions. As the name suggests, it is based on it though. Only it makes less sense and doesn't seem to have a point. The original is a sort of twist on the boy who cried wolf, with people not believing him because his claims seem absurd, he has no evidence, and his medical history suggests unreliability. In this case, well, none of that seems to apply.
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| Justin spends a lot of the episode wandering around the plane. |
Our protagonist, Justin, has PTSD but that doesn't really seem to be at all relevant to the plot. I don't think anyone on the plane knows about it, so they're not judging his behaviour because of it. It's just there because the protagonist of the original story had mental health issues. Anyway, he finds a weird MP3 player and decides to listen to it, discovering that it's somehow an account of the flight he's currently on, somehow sent back from the future I guess?
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| I know that when I find someone's lost MP3 player, the first thing I do is plug in my headphones and listen to their podcasts. |
Basically it says that the flight is going to disappear. So he immediately starts freaking out and trying to figure out what's going to happen to the plane so he can prevent it. He tries once to get someone else to listen to the podcast, but that fails and so he never tries again. Seriously. The person he tried first wasn't even a crew member or anything, just another passenger. Oh, and it turns out in the end that if he'd just stopped listening to the podcast and handed the player to a flight attendant then the whole issue would have been resolved, too.
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| The crew are super tolerant with him too. |
The only person who believes him is this one other passenger who says he's a pilot. And even though he comes across as untrustworthy and unreliable, Justin ends up trusting him, which is what causes the plane to crash. After figuring out the code to get into the cockpit, Justin tells it to this guy and he goes in there, overpowers the pilot and copilot, and crashes the plane. And he figures out the code because it's 1015, the same as literally every number associated with this flight. There's no reason for that either, it's just coincidence, I guess?
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| "You can trust me. Would an untrustworthy guy say he believed your completely implausible story?" |
And then the episode ends with him waking up on a beach and hearing that the passengers were all eventually found alive, except for him, and then the other passengers show up and beat him to death. So I guess the hijacker also turned up alive, and went along with the rest of the passengers in covering up Justin's murder in exchange for them not telling anyone about him hijacking the plane?
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| So they killed him but not the actual hijacker. Just because he was more annoying I suppose. |
And as with the first episode, I don't know what the point was. It wasn't about his flaws coming back to bite him, it was just some weird supernatural agency fucking with this one guy for no reason. He definitely made some mistakes, but it's not like there was any poetic justice or situation irony involved. It seems like the people who wrote these two episodes have seen this type of show or read this kind of story before, but not really understood the point of it, so they're reproducing the form but not the substance.
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| There were other characters but they weren't really relevant to anything. |
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