It was inevitable that Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot (Sky One) would get around to enrolling in high school at some point. As Peele’s narrator says in his introduction to this mid-season episode, “It’s a period that for most of us already feels like a waking nightmare”. Add to that the rich genre tradition of dark dormitory corridors and suspicious substitute teachers for TZ’s writers to draw on. Watching Among the Untrodden often felt like a leisurely ride on the Hogwarts Express, sandwiched between your old school bullies.
The company only accounts for so much on these journeys to another dimension. That is one of the mostly unheeded lessons of the last series, when Peele’s on-screen collaborators included the eminently likable, if not universally adored, Tracy Morgan, Chris O’Dowd and Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn. Even so, their performances sometimes felt thrown away on lacklustre plots and half-hearted conceits. Season two hasn’t given up this ploy of borrowing from the goodwill audiences feel for its guest stars – Christopher Meloni, Gretchen Mol and George Takei are still to come – but this episode, at least, featured mostly unknown actors.
That casting approach is in keeping with the Wordsworth poem from which the episode title is taken, (She dwelt among the untrodden ways … A Maid whom there were none to praise) and these young leads easily made up in winsome appeal what they lack in world renown. Sophia Macy played Irene, the eager-to-please transfer student at this posh boarding school, whose interest in “Indian food and memes and monsters – cool stuff!” is instantly dismissed as dorky by the popular girl clique. (It does, however, seem tailor-made to endear her to the typical Twilight Zone fan.)
Irene’s new best frenemy is Madison, played by Abbie Hern, a Cardiff-born actor passing perfectly here as an all-American mean girl – expect to see more of her. The most established name is probably the episode’s director, Tayarisha Poe, who impressed with her 2019 stylish debut feature film Selah and the Spades (now streaming on Amazon). Here, she returned to her themes of high-school politics and power-broking – or, in this case, “powers” broking.
After getting some intriguing result in her science project investigation into the paranormal, Irene persuades Madison to work through a series of tests for psychic abilities, ranging from astral projection to telepathy. The real challenge, though, is whether their delicate popular-girl-and-outcast-kid alliance can withstand the social pressure exerted by judgmental peers.
In its best season-one episodes, The Twilight Zone spoke to the concerns of the times we live in – racist police harassment in Replay, the inhuman treatment of immigrants in Point of Origin – though, perhaps with less timeless acuity than the many 1960s classic episodes still available on YouTube. Among The Untrodden didn’t reach even these heights, being a tale with a twist, but no real moral. Except, maybe, “beware the awesome power of an angsty and ignored teenage girl”…? But Carrie already warned us about that in 1976. See also The Craft in 1996. And Jennifer’s Body in 2009. These days, the real adolescent experience can be 10 times as horrific as those supernatural fictions. That fact is alluded to only briefly, when one of Irene’s new classmates takes in her mildly goth appearance and sniggers: “She looks like she’s planning on being the first girl-school shooter.”
So this has been an inauspicious continuation of an already mildly disappointing series and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jordan Peele’s involvement begins and ends with his narrator role. No one expects clairvoyance from The Twilight Zone team, but the ability to perceive past mistakes and then learn from them would be appreciated. Almost every critic of season one pointed to the overlong episodes, for instance, and this one still clocks in around 15 minutes longer than the Rod Serling-era average.
Ultimately, this Twilight Zone suffers by comparison, because there is just so much to compare it with – Serling’s still peerless original, Jordan Peele’s movies, other sci-fi anthology series such as Black Mirror and now TZ’s own first season. It would be fairer to judge each episode on its merits, and even embrace the anthology’s hit-and-miss nature as a part of the fun, like a bag of those assorted chocolates sold at all reputable boarding school tuck shops. The problem is we have had five orange cremes in a row now, and still no sign of a chewy toffee.
