I have absolutely no idea what the point of this one was. You keep waiting for there to be a reason and there just isn't. It's kind of like
The Comedian and
Nightmare at 30,000 Feet - a supernatural force decides to fuck with people's lives and there's nothing they can do about it. The end.
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| This week's victim is Jeff, a university lecturer who has an Irish accent despite spending most of his life up in America. |
Jeff is having a really bad time. His wife is leaving him and his father's just killed himself. And then, well, either he finds a magic gun or he finds a regular gun and begins suffering from some kind of mental illness. You could read it either way, and it honestly makes no difference. I'm going to assume it's actual magic since this is The Twilight Zone, but there's no reason favour one explanation over the other.
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| His dad leaves this weird, ambiguous suicide note. |
The gun seems to want to kill a Jeff - any Jeff - and Jeff immediately starts meeting an unlikely number of people named Jeff. There's a weird aside where one of his students wants to change classes because she thinks her shoes are lonely, which I think was there to give the writers an excuse to explain animism - the belief that objects have spirits - but I'm not sure why. It seems like it would fit if the episode was making a point about perception and reality, but it isn't.
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| The gun is also extremely valuable but that doesn't seem to be important. |
Jeff ends up throwing the gun away and passing the curse on to someone else - but only after killing another Jeff, who happens to be a burglar, and for which he is universally praised. Are they trying to make a statement about gun violence, or about crime, or self-defence? No. The episode ends with Peele saying that valuing objects over people leads to tragedy - but no one did that! In this entire episode there was no one who did bad things because they valued objects over people.
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| The person who picks up the gun and its curse is a child. Does that mean anything? Not that I can tell. |
The only tension in the episode comes from wondering if he'll kill himself or someone else, but it's never really played up enough to be genuinely worrying. The only conflict is between him and his wife, because she wants a divorce and he doesn't. But that has nothing to do with the gun, or with valuing objects over people. It's like half a dozen people were writing a script together but none of them could agree on what they wanted it to be about. And yet it still wasn't as bad as
The Wunderkind.
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| The only explicitly inexplicable thing we see in the episode are the names appearing and disappearing on the bullets. |
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