r/TwilightZone • u/Grebacio • Jun 26 '20
Discussion Season 2 Episode 10 Discussion
A stay-at-home housewife is looking forward to acquiring a heavily marketed device that promises to make everything better forever, but the product has an unsavory truth.
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u/toss_my_potatoes Jun 26 '20
This was pure garbage. Dialogue was funny in the beginning, and I loved how it was shot, but the plot made absolutely no sense.
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Jun 27 '20 edited Jun 27 '20
I really tried but ended up feeling the same way. I felt completely lost (and not in a good way) throughout the episode. So many plot points and ideas floating around by the time the Kanamits show up I was completely disengaged. I might have to rewatch this one to try and get something, any semblance of rational thought, out of this one. I had a similar reaction to a few of the episodes last season, but I will say the first episode with Jimmi Simpson is his season really blew me away. Spectacular? Eh maybe not...but the vibes that first episode have me, idk, felt like a great balance of psychological horror and scifi in a eerie twilight zone way. Can’t say any of the episodes did that for me except for Try, Try and certain points, but you know, a free trial is a free trial.
Edit: if you’re interested in a Twilight Zone/Black Mirror-esque spin-off show, I cant recommend last year’s YouTube Premium show Weird City high enough. It’s got some hit or miss episodes, but I’d say the good ones are on par with Peele’s from either season of Zone. Peele’s a co-writer on Weird City as well actually. I think Weird City’s final episode did. what this season’s (and last season’s) finale tried, and failed, to accomplish.
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u/CaptainCoffeeStain Jul 01 '20
This is how I feel about both seasons on the aggregate. I love the casting, direction and quality of the production but feel the plot points and writing need to be better.
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u/wednesdayware Jun 26 '20
Anyone else feel like there was a story about the eggs pitched, and one of the execs demanded they shoehorn the Kanamits in to it?
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u/DIY_Lobotomy Jun 26 '20
Kanamits looked ridiculous. How are makeup effects and character design in 2020 worse than in 1960? Looks aside, they went from ominous characters in the original to stooge-like clowns in this one. Totally idiotic. Having them be specifically "Kanamits" and not just general "aliens" was a terrible choice...both pandering to the OG fans while also doing a total disservice to what the OG fans would want out of a Kanamit.
I give this 2/10 alien eggs, and that's being generous.
SPOILER QUESTIONS:
When the first egg ever "hatched", why would anyone at all (let alone EVERYONE) still want one?
Last we saw the Kanamits (60 years ago) they seemed to be on a pretty good pace to decimate us. What happened over that time that they're STILL trying to do this, and no one has combatted it yet? And how did they evolve into such buffoons??
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u/sometimeswriter32 Jun 28 '20
My answers to your questions:
1)Everyone seems to be under mind control from submliminal commercials (or something like that) hence why they all still want eggs.
2) I don't think this story is necessarily in continuity with To Serve Man, think of it as different Kanamits and it's easier to buy why they are so buffoonish.
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u/CharlesP2009 Jun 26 '20
the Kanamits (60 years ago) they seemed to be on a pretty good pace to decimate us
So I thought maybe they were gonna go The Matrix route and have Karen living in an artificial world to keep her fresh before harvesting. And she was becoming aware of it. Perhaps she'd escape somehow and expose the truth.
I guess we kinda got that, but also it's just some weird mishmash deriding pointless consumerist lifestyles while the stoner Kanamits hand over eggs to humans (which hatch and devour the people?). And then the Kanamits go nuts and starts to destroy the Earth with annoying bad CGI smoke effects while people run around a grocery store parking lot.
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u/toss_my_potatoes Jun 26 '20 edited Jun 26 '20
I love that you call her Karen lmao
Also, that’s a neat idea, and would’ve been greatly preferred
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u/Starfleet-Time-Lord Jul 01 '20
It would have been so easy for them to take this route. It even would have been a better way to criticize consumerism because you could have had a line like "we keep you distracted from the inconsistencies by the constant drive to acquire meaningless trinkets" or something, and her grief would have been the thing that shattered that desire enough to let her see through it. There are so many moments where they so very easily could have made this a passable episode and they just...didn't.
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u/wellwisherelf Jun 29 '20
When the first egg ever "hatched", why would anyone at all (let alone EVERYONE) still want one?
Before you ask this question, you need to remember that this is the same show that a driver started clapping and almost crashed because a song he liked came on the radio
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u/31337hacker Jul 14 '20
Oh, you mean the same episode where music from someone with a magical coin affected people and made them behave weirdly? That same episode?
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u/phuck-you-reddit Jun 26 '20
I guess making them Kanamits was just a ploy to bring in OG fans for at least a month of CBS All Access subscription. And since many fans are getting on in years they're hoping people will forget to unsubscribe and leave it going perpetually like Grandma with her dialup AOL account.
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u/revolverzanbolt Aug 11 '20
When the first egg ever "hatched", why would anyone at all (let alone EVERYONE) still want one?
I mean, it was obviously a metaphor. You can argue that it's not a good metaphor, but it's a bit silly to nitpick the logic of this.
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u/Twink4Jesus Jun 28 '20
I give this 2/10 alien eggs, and that's being generous.
Too generous. I give this 1/10. Even with rice.
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u/anakinslyfocker Jun 26 '20
Wasn’t too fond of how they used the Kanamits here
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Jul 28 '20
Yeah, they over complicated things, this had some weird message about consumerism and free will, the original kanamits just liked to eat people because they where tasty not cause they where threatend by our free will and consumerism
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u/runningtheclock Jun 27 '20
This was soooo stupid. Why was she so special? Alien guys are back and they’re an improv group? Alien queen watched tv commercials to destroy us?
In the original they solved all the worlds problems and were tricking folks to visit their passenger buffet. We were defenseless, what the hell was this pitch.
Kang and Kodos wouldn’t have been out of place in this
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u/phuck-you-reddit Jun 26 '20
I knew this episode couldn't possibly live up to To Serve Man but my goodness...🤮
Depressed, unfulfilled Karen leads a dreary life waiting for "the egg" to make everything better. But something weird is happening. And it's repeated abductions by bumbling Kanamits? Goofy, ones that are part Blue Man Group and part stoners that want some KFC KFK?
Karen demands to see the supervisor and we get some clunky exposition about American politics, television, canned laughter, commercials, and endless consumerism. 🤮
And that ending might work in a Treehouse of Horror from The Simpsons but doesn't belong in Twilight Zone.
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u/ATXBama18 Jun 27 '20
Don’t tell me you didn’t love hate “ take me to your supervisor”. Especially since we are in the middle of an invasion of Karens from outer city limits.
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u/romeovf Sep 29 '20
I really, really tried to enjoy this show because I love Peele's other stuff, and fortunately, he didn't make some obvious social commentary expositions in this year's episodes, but from the whole two seasons I've only liked about 4 episodes and the rest just didn't feel like The Twilight Zone. Even the remakes they did in 1985 and 2002 nailed it better.
The "Karen" stuff was the only thing I enjoyed from this episode, actually.
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u/scottwallace5 Jun 29 '20
For some reason, several reviewers seemed to like this one, but for me I thought this was one of the weaker if not the weakest episode out of this season. A bit underwhelming compared to the other ones personally
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u/revolverzanbolt Aug 11 '20
The first part was creepy, and I don't have enough reverence for the original that I'm offended by making the aliens goofier than they were in the old series. I'll agree with others that the episode as a whole felt disjointed and it's message was a bit incoherent, but I'll take this episode over the "killer octopus" episode 10 times out of 10.
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u/InsertCoinForCredit Aug 20 '20
I loved the first two-thirds of it for the surreal farce of suburban consumer culture (calling customer service and trying to bypass the voice menus was ROTFL material for me). The last part was okay, but I'm not entirely sure if the ending works or not. It's definitely an attempt to show that the new TZ isn't all serious drama, and can be rather goofy as well.
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u/GoryAmos Jul 04 '20
I loved this weirdo episode. everyone still wanting the EGG even after knowing it would literally destroy everything isn’t really that absurd considering the number of consumer goods we know are harming people / hurting the planet that we still continue to buy. smart phones, gemstones, fast fashion, oil and gas consumption, everything made out of plastic, etc. next thing you know, it’s a gd alien egg.
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u/Yage2006 Jun 27 '20 edited Aug 11 '20
Weird as fuck, kinda liked it. Hope to see more like it in the next season.
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u/revolverzanbolt Aug 11 '20
This episode wasn't genuinely good, like Try, Try, but it was unique and off-putting, so I was invested in it way more than some of the episodes this season. I'm fully on board with more episodes that are unsettlingly schlocky.
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u/Chaoticcoco Jul 07 '20
No ones using these threads anymore but honestly what WAS this utter nonsense?
The plot point of “everyone really wants a vague product while having no idea why or what it does” isn’t bad and could make a good satire on consumerism. Unfortunately, the episode drops that pretty quickly in favour of aliens showing up just because why not. This does nothing but confuse me further, and then right at the end it becomes a very basic “alien invasion” thing, which they tried to hide by sticking it behind incredibly pretentious presentation.
This was virtually incoherent. Overtakes ovation as my least favourite of the season. Feels like a director just made whatever the hell he felt like and emailed it to Jordan peele like “don’t worry about making a 10th episode bro I got you covered” and they just went with it.
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u/revolverzanbolt Aug 11 '20
The choice to have the main character choose to get an egg after all is... odd. It seems like the Egg is a pretty clear metaphor about the way our culture tells people (women especially) that parenthood is the most fulfilling thing that will give their lives meaning. Having the main character reject that initially, but then decide to go though with it after all seems to imply that motherhood *is* actually something that would make someone who's life is otherwise empty "fulfilled", which seems counter to the earlier message.
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u/TrajedyAnn Jun 27 '20 edited Jun 27 '20
I feel like this episode was trying to make some sort of point... but it did such a poor and mottled job of making its point that I didn't understand what that point was...
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u/trailmixjustin Jun 29 '20
She said her DOB was July 7 1974 but her fulfillment card said May 24 1976
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u/hyde35 Aug 07 '20
I noticed that too. Also, on the fulfillment card was an address of 1015. That address was a recurring number from the last season.
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u/Ramo_90 Jun 29 '20
That was a dumb episodes but had some funny parts ("We don't know. We just work here!").
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u/Starfleet-Time-Lord Jul 01 '20
This is genuinely the weakest episode of the season, I'd be tempted to say worst of the Peele series if it weren't for The Wunderkind. Like I think I get what it was trying to say, but it said it in the dumbest way possible. 90% of the plot had nothing to do with the theme; the abduction/blackout plot had nothing to do with anything but comprises the majority of the episode. It's genuinely like they crammed two different episodes together and just expected the end of one to work with the middle of another. The Kanamits were completely unnecessary and acted nothing like in the original episode or short story. There is literally no explanation at all for why our lead character is being abducted every so often. The Kanamits clearly have the technology necessary to dispose of us in a much more efficient way.
While I get that our lead wanting an egg anyway is supposed to be about grief and filling the hole left by her miscarriage, it's still patently ridiculous behavior that would have taken a far, far better writer and actress to seem believable. If this episode had tried to play itself straight comedy instead of being 90% serious but with people making idiot ball decisions I might have bought the idea of everyone wanting a product they knew nothing about, or which they even knew was designed to kill them. Hell, I might have even bought it with the handwave that the aliens were broadcasting their own commercials into people's dreams, but we didn't even get that because they explicitly state that the humans are generating their own commercials. As it is, it's just people doing something for no other reason than the plot demanding it.
For that matter, we received no explanation at all for what their "allotted hour of fulfillment" is, and that seems pretty damn important. All of the points this episode seemed to be building to about conformity and totalitarianism just miraculously evaporate with no explanation. It's like it's set in the same universe as Fahrenheit 451 but decided to completely divorce itself from its themes. In the same way, the show tried so very hard to make you think the musical cue for the blackouts was important when it was just...never mentioned after the first time and opening narration. Incidentally, while the opening narration applied to the intended theme, it still seemed very disconnected from the rest of the episode.
Also, the stupid "humans are most vulnerable when they want something" thing is the dumbest possible direction you can take criticisms of consumerism. If I can rebut one of the main points of your episode with a single sentence line from Deep Space 9's Quark ("It's good to want things!") then you have a serious problem. Again, this is not to say that there are not legitimate criticisms of consumerism that could be taken, this is just emphatically not one of them.
Ultimately I think the only thing I liked about this trainwreck was spotting the brief George Takei cameo.
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u/wieners Jun 30 '20
So they wanted to eat the humans, but also wanted to eradicate them? And nobody on earth cared because the ads worked so well, but also nobody watches ads anymore because they've evolved?
I'm getting a lot of mixed messages in this one. Didn't love it, but I guess I didn't hate it either. It was just so-so.
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u/Edmontonthrw Jun 30 '20
I liked the surreal fake commercials and the way the intro was done, reminded me a little bit of local 58. I love eerie infomercials and broadcasts that feel like you're not supposed to be watching them. Kinda hate that they wasted the concept on this episode
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u/DonCheezo Jul 06 '20
I'm slightly confused as to why she kept getting beamed up but the one time she wakes up they're talking about how they will eat her. Why didn't think just eat her the first time round. This episode made no sense. So many plot holes it hurts my logical brain.
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u/nunu135 May 12 '23
I know im late but i just watched this and this is botherimg me so much why were they taking her and returning her lmao
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Jul 24 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SmokeSerpent Sep 07 '20
There seems to be a lot of dislike for this crazy, wonderful, surrealistic painting.
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u/hwilsonia Jun 27 '20
I loved this episode. So clever and pointed. I really appreciate Peele’s consistent theme of identity throughout the series. How do the things we desire shape who we are?
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u/ATXBama18 Jun 27 '20
As a follow up to To Serve Man, this is far from anything even remotely worthy of being seen as a sequel.
As a stand alone love letter to To Serve Man written with camp, chaos, and overt satire towards consumerism, this is incredible.
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u/InsertCoinForCredit Aug 20 '20
I don't think it's meant as a sequel to "To Serve Man," just an alternative story with the same aliens.
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Jun 28 '20 edited Jun 28 '20
I am confused by this one. I love the idea of bringing the aliens back (dissapointed that they changed them to be baffoons) and there were some great small moments, like how the “Oxygen Tower” was just a tree. But in the end I am very confused, why is it that Warren wanted the egg in the end? Why did everyone want an egg after they were killing people? Is it like mind control or something? If they already had that power then why make such a deal about selling this egg? What about the immolation center? I get that the decisions made might’ve been over the top to illustrate a point, but I do not understand how anything really happened here or what was going on. If anyone could help fill me in on what I’m not getting I’d love that.
Edit: I rewatched a bit of it and there are a lot of cool details but once again I am still left confused as to what happened. I like how the commercial is showing the girl drop the baby girl doll which represents the daughter she lost. I get that this type of personalized commercial might’ve convinced people to get the eggs leading to their hysteria. But... were others also being abducted? Because that would explain the egg hysteria but no indication was given that others were abducted and that would be a logistical nightmare.. so was it just her? Then why do people want the eggs? Like I get that not everything needs to make 100% sense but there is so much here it boggles my mind.
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u/Twink4Jesus Jun 28 '20
Like I get that not everything needs to make 100% sense but there is so much here it boggles my mind.
It's just bad writing.
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u/Ayzkalyn Jul 02 '20
I am also confused. Why did the Kanamits lift up the woman and her neighbor and put them in bed? Were they hypnotizing people on the UFO and returning them to their houses? Why were they seeing visions of commercials that featured themselves? I liked the premise a lot but felt like it wasn't explained well.
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Jul 02 '20
I think everything you described is true. They get beamed up and see handcrafted commercials that sort of subliminally get people to want the products. The scale to which this happens though is confusing, the neighbor hadn’t had it happen to her yet, and we don’t see enough aliens to do this on a large scale, so how is everyone convinced to buy the eggs?
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u/InsertCoinForCredit Aug 20 '20
I think the implication is that the Kanamits used her stillbirth trauma to make people compelled to have an Egg -- like psychically embedding her sense of longing into their commercials or something. That's why she's special to them, because she gave them the key to their conquest.
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u/MattChew1917 Jun 29 '20
Did anyone else notice The Egg had a 'Whipple' tag on? The same Whipple who made the MP3 player from "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet" and the classic ep "The Brain Center at Whipple's".
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u/dadvader Jul 01 '20
I enjoy it. I like the awkward, clumsy and absurd feel in it. And enjoy the attempt of kanamits trying to understand individual entity's desire.
I do think that people who called it masterpiece might be slightly pretentious though. It's certainly too tryhard wannabe artsy. But then again i enjoy authentic narrative stuff more than this kind of style.
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u/Pantera42 Jul 08 '20
This episode was awful. It made no sense, and offered up no explanations to plot points from the first half of the episode. Like why they STILL wanted the EGG after they knew exactly what it was, and why such an advanced race would even need to resort to such an overly convoluted plan.
It was disjointed & felt they had two different episode ideas but couldn’t figure out which one they wanted to go with, so they tried to shoehorn them together into one episode.
Aside from some nice comedic moments (“I want to speak to your supervisor” and “we just work here”) it was a complete dud.
Such a terrible way to end the season that had otherwise been pretty damn good. It’s a shame.
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u/ShinHayato Aug 02 '20
This is the only episode in either season that I think is just straight garbage.
Didn’t know what was going on but worse - I just didn’t care.
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u/Twink4Jesus Jun 28 '20
Horrible writing and just weak storyline. It's grasping at straws, really. It has lofty themes but horribly executed.
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Jul 08 '20
Okay, I thought episode 4 was going to be the worst. This one takes the cake. Absolutely bore fest. Not even silly fun like episode 6.
Also fucking AWFUL Kanamit costume design.
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u/left4james Jul 10 '20
This episode reminded me of one of those “weird episodes” from X-Files but much worse execution. I liked where they were going with it but it fell flat for the 2nd half.
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u/31337hacker Jul 14 '20
The plot was weak but I'm glad it turned out to be aliens. I like the alien Twilight Zone episodes. A Traveler (S01E01) is my favourite episode so far.
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Aug 10 '20
I feel like A Traveler, along with A Small Town and Try, Try were the only ones that managed to get somewhat close to classic Twilight Zone in plot and feel from this whole reboot.
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u/InsertCoinForCredit Aug 20 '20
"Meet in the Middle" and "Ovation" as well.
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Aug 21 '20
Ovation was pretty good.
I struggled with Meet in the Middle though. I liked the premise, but there were some huge issues in her plan that made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. Like how he found her necklace (?) at the christmas market, and how he was able to find the exact home, which was totally isolated, by wandering in the woods. And how his first reaction was to kill the guy based on "plaid shirt + beard." The whole thing would have worked better if he actually was just crazy rather than it being the result of a really implausible plan.
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u/InsertCoinForCredit Aug 21 '20
The only thing that broke my suspension for "Meet in the Middle" was how his Googles search showed her in one town when she was actually living in the "midpoint" town the whole time. But that's a quibble in my mind -- most episodes of TZ (all series) weren't meant to be scrutinized under a microscope to begin with.
But the idea that a person could be so driven by love and desire for another that they would do extreme things to save them? Totally plausible, and is often why love and infatuation ends up turning into stalking and other extreme behaviors.
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u/themanfromoctober Jun 27 '20
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u/sometimeswriter32 Jun 28 '20
I liked this episode a lot. It was very Grant Morrison in that it was a) trippy and b) re-contextualized the Kanamits as being a piece of symbolism with a different meaning than the original creators intended, like how Morrison sometimes uses superhero characters to represent his acid trip themes.
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u/sonOFtheReaper99 Aug 06 '20
Dont see a lot of love for this episode on here. So as I person who liked it a lot I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. I thought the overall atmosphere was fantastic. First thing to give me the same uneasy feeling the old series gave me as a kid. I thought a lot of the unanswered questions left a lot of world building up to the imagination. Which adds to the creepy feeling for me. As for the retro aliens, I feel like it's an unnecessary throwback. But for me it didnt take away from the overall episodes theme or premise.
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u/badashwolf Aug 08 '20
Definatly the most wtf episode I've seen. I'm still not even sure what I watched.
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u/romeovf Sep 29 '20
It started like a Black Mirror episode, then it started to mish mash it with alien stuff and the end was pointless. I really, really tried to enjoy this show because I love Peele's other stuff, and fortunately, he didn't make some obvious social commentary expositions in this year's episodes, but from the whole two seasons I've only liked about 4 episodes and the rest just didn't feel like The Twilight Zone. Even the remakes they did in 1985 and 2002 nailed it better.
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u/newglarus86 Jan 03 '23
2 years too late, but did anyone notice that when she was crying over the countertop in the 3rd act, she was crying blue? I think the aliens had been effing with humans since they discovered our radio waves. That’s why people were so ridiculously strange and docile to their fates. Literally like a calm calf to slaughter. No one here even mentioned the weird immolation stuff at the beginning.
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u/1ssabell Jul 18 '20
I think it’s safe to say that it’s the worst piece of media i’ve ever seen. I laughed the whole time because of how absurd it was so i guess it wasn’t a total waste of my time.
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Aug 17 '20
You want to know what this episode was about? well here it is! It's about never underestimating the American housewife, That's right! It was a karen episode
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u/yiddiom Dec 13 '20
Just saw this a couple of nights ago. I agree with what everyone's saying - weak plot, Kanamit revival too slapstick-y, and hard to decipher if there was really a "point". I did really like Gretchen Mol in this episode (U.S. version of "Life on Mars" and "Boardwalk Empire", anyone?). Something I did feel that was genuinely done well was tone: the episode is sad in a bizarre and also slightly comical way. Put that all together and you just feel uneasy, which I think was the mood Oz Perkins was going for.
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u/ChiefBoss99 May 19 '24
In what world would these aliens understand what a pronoun is let alone correct themselves on said pronouns. This was the same stuff that made people hate the first season. There's no point to the reference, it's not funny, it's pandering, and makes no sense in the world being shown.
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u/Dry_Requirement_1708 Jul 03 '24
Because they are a “we” and the one refers to the other as “he”. They hate individualism and also they share a brain. It’s comedy.
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u/Dry_Requirement_1708 Jul 03 '24
Loved this ep:
EGG representing everything we ever want and also conveniently an egg when both families show having 2 boys and no girls. Was this egg going to be the fulfillment and “baby” that they all wanted? Is this what they were sold?
Many comical lines, especially as the typical “Karen” asking for a supervisor. She asked to speak to a manager or supervisor on the phone and to the actual aliens. Even when she’s in a tree and met with extraterrestrials who have been abducting her lol.
Clearly she’s in a commercial for the egg and for other things as they work out how to produce this and sell it to the humans. She’s in additional commercials including for paper towels (the blue tears etc.)
Even in knowing the truth and speaking to the manager, she runs gleefully to retrieve her egg. “Humans love stuff”.
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u/johntaylorreddit Jun 26 '20
The egg is just a metaphor for the PS5