The Twilight Zone Season 1, Episode 8 recap: Point of Origin explained

In the latest episode of The Twilight Zone, Ginnifer Goodwin stars as Eve Martin, the perfect housewife. Then one day, her world is turned upside down when her maid is taken into custody.

The eighth chapter of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone stars Ginnifer Goodwin in a story that highlights the ignorance a privileged life grants and addresses the harsh reality of the American immigration policy, particularly in our current climate.

Eve Martin (Goodwin) is the perfect housewife. She looks like she stepped out of a ’50s vacuum magazine ad. Her hair is an elegant coif, her home is spotless, and she is never without a mega-watt smile.

Everything about the Martin family’s way of life is baked in a warm filter. Her twin daughters look commercial-ready at all hours of the day, mostly due to the work of Anna, their housemaid.

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Eve imagines herself a close confidante to Anna, despite not even knowing the name of her children. She fancies herself a miracle-worker when Anna requests to use their address as their home address so she can get grandson into the district charter school. Within moments of making this decision, men with a similar function to ICE, arrive to take Anna away.

Point of Origin is thick with its metaphors, a common thread in this season of The Twilight Zone. Eve promises she will contact an attorney to help her but instead, she calls her friends over to discuss the travesty. They talk about how sad it all is, and her friends think of her as a heroine. It’s all posh and disconnected from reality given their bubble of affluence.

A pilgrim from another dimension

But then they come for Eve. The men return to escort her, her kids, and her husband to the same facility housing Anna. Her husband and daughters are free to leave, but Eve is forced to stay. The place they imprison her is not dissimilar to a jail cell, or, what I imagine is going on at our borders right now.

Everyone is stripped of their fundamental rights, dehumanized, forced to wear homogeneous orange jumpsuits, and no one will tell Eve why she’s there. The glowing housewife this episode began with slowly unravels.

She is taken to a super sci-fi, high-tech room and strapped to a table where Mr. Allendale (James Frain), puts a mask on her with a bunch of tubes sticking out of it. Tests are run to ascertain whether or not Eve is part of this dimension, or is she a pilgrim who crossed over from another?

The plan is to ship Eve back to her home, a world we know little about apart from a nightmare sequence spliced into the episode. Eve’s dimension is cast is black and white, a seemingly dismal landscape buried in a flurry of ashes.

A woman named Aidia is the only one who can tell Eve anything about her homeland, and she is forcefully taken away during their one conversation. Aidia shouts “it’s not theirs, it’s ours,” as she is dragged away by these men.

When Eve believes all hope is lost, as she sits in the gloom of her dank cell, a man named Musker helps her to escape. He frees Anna too, at Eve’s request.

Outside the facility, Anna hitches a ride with an ice cream truck (the very same one we saw in the opening of the episode). Anna declines and runs away, not trusting the driver.

When all seems right as rain with Eve returned her home, she finds her husband looking at her like a stranger. “You’re not who you are.” He claims, just as Allendale and his goons bursts through the front door and take her away once more.

Eve is helpless to stop them, and all her neighbors do is look on and watch, complacent with the fact they can continue with their lives once the spectacle is over.

Final thoughts

I found this episode frustrating in that all the elements of an exceptional story and performance (Ginnifer Goodwin is excellent here) were there and yet Point of Origin never reaches its full potential. We don’t learn enough about these differing dimensions or Eve’s backstory to feel the emotional weight of what her forced return would mean.

However, the apparent immigration parable is well-rendered, particularly regarding how we are guilty of shirking empathy due to our privilege. In one scene, Anna points out that Eve is only rattled now because this is happening to her. Before, she could watch the crises occur on television, then turn it off and walk away. But this has been the dire circumstance of many an immigrant for years and years.

Now Eve is the “pilgrim” she is the one judged as dangerous despite having never done anything but be a loving mother her entire life. She is sentenced based on her origin, and nothing more.

Odds & Ends

• The number 1015 shows up once again!
• Was this episode brought to us by GrubHub?

New episodes of The Twilight Zone stream Thursdays on CBS All Access.