The Twilight Zone - Point of Origin

This show's writers seem to have a pathological fear of subtlety. Another episode that was a perfectly fine concept but slowed way down and explained in excruciating detail to try to make sure that absolutely nobody missed the point. Even before anything happened it was really obvious what the message as going to be and the entire rest of the episode was basically pointless. Even the twist was telegraphed a mile off.

This scene, about a minute and a half in, basically gives away the entire plot.

Eve is a rich American woman. Anna is her maid/housekeeper/au pair/whatever you want to call it. She's the servant who raises the kids and does the housework. Anna gets taken away by armed men, presumed to be immigration enforcement agents. Eve and her husband try to help her but their lawyer can't find any information about her or where she's been taken.

Anna, before she was arrested.

Then Eve gets arrested as well, along with the rest of her family. Her husband and kids are released fairly quickly, but they keep her. She finds that Anna is there, as well as a guy she saw outside the supermarket that morning. There's no real reason for that coincidence as far as I can tell, other than to make things seem a bit weirder. Anna tells her that they're both from the same place and takes her to meet this other woman. This woman (supposedly speaking some other language but it sounds like English to Eve) tells Eve that she's lost/suppressed her memories of where she came from.

The homeless guy or whatever he really is is played by Michael Eklund, and I always like to see him.

Then the guy who seems to be in charge (played by James Frain) puts her in some kind of Aurora Chair to test whether she's an alien from another dimension or not, and of course she is. Do you get it yet? It's about deporting "illegal immigrants". There's some kind of hallucination/simulation thing where she starts to remember the world she came from and the chair registers that she's an alien so they're going to send her back there.

James Frain is fantastic. He should be in more stuff.

Some guy helps her break out and she goes back to her family, but they no longer want anything to do with her because she's a filthy alien. She wasn't actually a "fuck off, we're full" type, just privileged enough to not have to think about it, so it's not a case of poetic justice or anything. She didn't actively persecute anyone, but she was aware it was happening and didn't do anything about it.

Anna also escaped with her but ran off somewhere, so I guess maybe she got away?

It's a simple message that didn't need to take 45 minutes to get across, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe this series isn't intended for adults. It occurs to me that some of these episodes would be ideally suited to showing in highschools. They're well-made and the messages and themes are clear enough that most of the kids would pick up on them without difficulty. Maybe Jordan Peele just pulled off a clever con to get CBS to fund his edutainment project.

Also Eve doesn't know how shops work.

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