‘The Twilight Zone’ (2019) Recap: ‘Point of Origin’

Written by John Edward Betancourt 

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Well, once again I have to tip my cap in Jordan Peele’s general direction. Because his iteration of The Twilight Zone continues to surprise its audience by way of some beautiful misdirection. For when I finished up the harrowing ‘Not All Men’, the trailer present for this week’s episode, ‘Point of Origin’, seemingly advertised another traditional Zone episode. For everything in that preview screamed sci-fi and one trippy journey and at first glance, this episode seemed to live up to that particular billing. Because everything about this tale seemed a little off from the get-go, especially one considers how perfect and pristine Eve Martin’s life turned out to be.
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But it didn’t take long for this tale to stun us in impressive fashion by becoming a chilling parable involving immigration in modern American when Eve’s housekeeper was pulled from the Martin household at gunpoint and even then, it seemed as though this story was headed in a different direction. Because without their darling Anna working around the house, Eve was forced to handle the daily duties, with mixed results and it truly seemed as though the story was going to become a discussion on how integral immigrants are to modern society but that…would have been far too easy a discussion for this series to have. Especially when one considers the topics the show has handled this season. But once the black SUV’s arrived and Eve and her family were taken in, the story’s real commentary was revealed, and we quickly learned that this was going to be an episode that focused on the utter disdain for immigrants’, certain people in America, including the Trump Administration, have exhibited in the past few years.

Granted, that was handled with a sci-fi twist after all since we eventually came to learn that Eve actually comes from an alternate dimension where her world was seemingly laid to waste by nuclear war, and she and others like her came here to escape the horrors of said world, but the parallel to our everyday world was unmistakable when it comes to Eve’s story. After all, so many immigrants come to America to find a better life and some come to escape the awfulness of their homeland, but the story made it clear that in the here and the now, their voyage now ends in fear since they end up in detention centers just like Anna and Eve did and while the images present here spoke volumes to what’s happening at the border right now, and how it’s wrong through and through, the story also posed an important question to all of us in that…where does the hunt for ‘American Purity’ go from here? Does it end with just sending people that risked life and limb to come here, back to their homeland or will we eventually begin to turn on one another for the slightest deviation when it comes to a bloodline?

Yet, what was equally impressive, is that the series had something to say about the root cause of the seemingly newfound public disdain for immigration and much of that was explored by way of the world that Eve inhabits before she finds herself under fire for her alternate origins. Because her home, her friends, her life and her destinations all reek of that Normal Rockwell Americana that so many hold near and dear to their hearts in this nation, and that concept really is what drives this vitriol toward immigrants. For there are so many out there who believe that the United States was at its most perfect when we relied upon American ingenuity, something that was driven by its proud citizens. And the key word there is ‘citizens’, because somehow, in the minds of the wistful, immigrants simply didn’t exist in that day and age, and if they were to leave our country and let us return to that old way, we would, and it pains me to type this, ‘make America great again’. But what matters more when it comes to this particular thread of commentary is that it serves to remind us of the fact that Americana is dead and long gone and that there is no going back to it, and the sooner that the wistful come to realize this, the better.

Yet while the series has been quick to offer up some simple solutions as a starting point to address some of the issues it has examined, there was none of that to be found here, and understandably so. Because in reality the fix to this problem has been around for ages in that, the United States of America is a nation of immigrants, one founded on the principle that this land will offer a better life to anyone who comes here, and there’s no way that we can simply turn our backs on immigrants or a principle that created a nation. Granted, there are plenty who will disagree with that, and spout their rhetoric about the ‘problems’ that immigrants pose and that’s really what this story hoped to expose I would imagine, the fact that the real problem with immigration is the American people since we’ve done little to find common ground when it comes to this red-hot topic. Either way this was another impressive episode, and I love the fact that it layered in so many themes and concepts and once again I’m quite curious to see what part of our world and our lives The Twilight Zone is going to tackle in the weeks to come. Until next time. 

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