Neither of the two lead actresses in “Among The Untrodden” have done much before this Twilight Zone; and both are very good. And yet the real star of this episode may be its director, Tayarisha Poe, whose first feature Selah And The Spades was a sensation at Sundance when it debuted there in 2019. The movie landed on Amazon earlier this year, where it didn’t draw nearly enough attention… because, y’know, we’ve all been kind of distracted. But if you’ve seen Selah, you’ll understand why Poe was an inspired choice to direct “Among The Untrodden.” Both that film and this Twilight Zone are about a clique of boarding school bad seeds, and about a potentially destructive mentorship between peers.
Poe didn’t write “Among The Untrodden.” That credit goes to Heather Anne Campbell, whose previous Twilight Zone credits include co-writing the pretty good “Six Degrees Of Freedom” and writing the under-baked “Not All Men.” This new episode exhibits a lot of the strengths of those two earlier installments: namely a strong sense of the ever-shifting dynamics within a social circle.
The social circle in this case is a familiar one from TV and movies—and no doubt from real life. Abbie Hern plays Madison, an alpha in her circle of mean-spirited private school girls. Sophia Macy plays Irene, the new girl in class, an oddball who announces on the first day that her big science project for the semester is going to be about psychic powers, and will involve testing her classmates to see who might have any enhanced mental abilities.
Irene is, of course, almost immediately targeted by Madison and her posse of bullies. (On day one, they pass her a note that asks if she was forced to transfer from her old school because she’s: A slut; or: A loser.) But Irene seems unconcerned about the harassment. She presses on with her tests, and soon identifies Madison as obviously gifted. The reason? Madison scored a 0 on Irene’s basic ESP test—the one about guessing the simple shapes printed on the other side of a card. This would be almost impossible to for Madison to do unless she’d “seen” all the shapes in her mind and had deliberately answered wrong each time.
“Among The Untrodden” proceeds along two tracks, one of which is more fruitful than the other. About half of the episode is an entertaining but predictable riff on the likes of Mean Girls and Heathers, with a dollop of Carrie stirred in. As Madison tentatively allows Irene into her life, the other girls keep duping the newbie into saying and doing embarrassing things—like asking her whether she’s ever “orgasmed.” Yet again, Irene is unruffled. She cheerily plays along. (“She’s not even embarrassed about how embarrassing she’s being,” the bullies marvel.)
The relationship appears to shift after Irene falls off a rooftop balcony while hanging out with the clique. Curiously, she comes away uninjured. (“It doesn’t hurt if you don’t give a fuck all the way down,” she laughs.) Suddenly, the other girls seem to admire Irene, with her earnest “I’m okay you’re okay” speeches and her fashion tips from Girls Beat magazine.
But alas, the sudden kindness is all a ruse. The gals are just setting Irene up for their biggest prank on her yet: the reveal of their science project, which is a video display of her most awkward moments, titled, “Anatomy Of A Loser.” This inevitably leads to a full psychic beat-down of Irene’s tormentors, who get totally The Fury-ed as soon after they unveil their project.
But who’s doing the Fury-ing? Irene or Madison?
What I liked best about “Among The Untrodden” is the other track it proceeds along: the one involving the wary friendship that develops between the eccentric girl who loves psychics and the hard-edged girl who may be one. These parts are more surprising, with a potentially larger meaning.
First off, there’s a double-twist in this central relationship. As Irene runs through a list of potential psychic powers and tests whether or not Madison has any of them, Campbell and Poe subtly suggest that maybe Madison has no powers at all. Instead maybe it’s Irene who has ESP and telekinesis. (Hence her not being hurt when she falls off a roof, and hence her persecutors getting psychically flattened at the science fair.) Maybe she also has the power to enter people’s minds and bend their wills. Maybe she’s been manipulating Madison into believing she’s special, just so they could become friends.
But here’s the twist on the twist: After Madison angrily accuses Irene of just this thing, Irene persuades her otherwise and they reconcile… just in time for Irene to crumble into ash and blow away. Early in the episode, we saw Madison’s pencil do the same thing after she dropped it on the floor. And in the testing sessions between the two girls, on the list of potential powers Irene puts on the big board, one of the ones she never gets to is “conjuring.” It turns out that not only is Madison actually psychic, but also powerful enough to be able to create, unconsciously, something as simple as a writing implement and as complex as a teenage girl.
For me at least, this bait-and-switch was completely unexpected. It also cast the previous conversations between Madison and Irene in a new light. All this time, Madison was really talking to herself: admitting to herself that she hates her friends, and encouraging herself to embrace being “different.”
If you want to, you can read this as a metaphor for all kinds of angsty adolescent rites of passage: from making the choice to break away from “the crowd” to coming to grips with sexual orientation. But this episode smartly keeps that vague, and thus more universal. In the end, this is a story about the popular kid who’s secretly lonely, yearning for something she may not find until she allows herself to grow up.
Stray observations
- This episode’s press kit easter egg: “He can twitch a muscle, move a jaw, concentrate on the cast of his eyes, and he can change his face.” That’s a line from intro to “The Four Of Us Are Dying,” a Twilight Zone about a shape-shifter. Make of that what you will.
- The elaborate technology and design of the “Anatomy Of A Loser” science project bugged me, I have to admit. I’m always annoyed by how in TV shows and movies people somehow have the time, resources and skill to make, like, elaborate Halloween costumes or museum-quality school projects. (Plus, how did they assemble that big display without a teacher seeing what the project was going to be about and stopping them?)
- Another one from “The Twilight Zone is a shared universe!” department: In one scene, the girls are listening to Mynx!
- Next up: “8.”
24 Comments
The act of conjuring was brought up with the key to the balcony; Madison was able to conjure the key and complained that she would have to re-conjure the key each time she needed it, as the item conjured will disappear once it’s fulfilled it’s purpose.
Yeah, this was a key piece of the plot to leave out, especially once you see what happens to Irene once Madison admits that they’re friends and that she needed a friend.
I really enjoyed this one – it leans on very familiar types and then does the work to make the characters realistically juvenile in ways that complicate those types. And the ambiguity of who is responsible for the magic was capably handled.I had to make peace with the OTT aesthetics – when Peele shows up at the beginning and says “high school sucks for everyone” I was like “motherfucker that is clearly Hogwarts”. That was the most decadent women’s restroom ever (over)designed. It fits with the slightly overwrought tone that the episode has to shift into to get where it needs to get to within the runtime.
“That was the most decadent women’s restroom ever (over)designed”In the episode’s defense, Madison explains that the bathroom is no longer used by the school so the students go there for a place to hang out, so they would decorate it as a place they would want to hang out at.
Actually, the explicit reveal of the conjuring happened with the key to the balcony. After they use it, it disintegrates, and it is explained that it dusted away because it had fulfilled its purpose. The pencil from the cold open appears inside the desk after the camera pans up then back down. Madison conjured it for the purpose of throwing it at Irene, which is why it disintegrated when it fell to the floor. I also just noticed that the graffiti behind Irene in the screenshot says, “fake bitch”, another telegraph.Overall, this was my favorite episode of the entire Peele reboot. The leads were fantastic, and the ping ponging between the two twists made way for a third twist I did not see coming. I’m a little shocked this isn’t as universally loved.
The pencil disintegrating in the cold open had no context, so it can’t be the mechanism for the audience to appreciate the twist ending. The key to the twist was the key for the balcony.
Yeah, I thought Irene had disintegrated that pencil out of controlled rage, so I kept waiting for her to actually have powers
Honestly, I thought Irene had conjured the pencil for her (I totally thought this was going to be a short version of Carrie in the beginning.)
Yes. Thank you. This reviewer misses things a lot and the things he misses are getting obviouser and obviouser. It was an entire scene with the word “conjure” used more than once and an entire shot of the key disintegrating and then the explanation, but then he’s all, “We never learned if she could conjure or not.” Ugh. This is one of my favorite episodes, too. I was truly surprised both when she “came back” after falling (I knew she was going to fall, but did not expect her to survive at all) and when she disintegrated.
I also wanted to say that I noticed the “Fake Bitch” during the episode, but never guessed it was a hint. I just thought it was interesting since Irene was kind of being fake with the popular girls to get them to like her.
The good news is that this doesn’t sound like an “Outer Limits” ending.The bad news is that this sounds like a freaking “Scary Door” ending on Futurama.
Why should we believe you? You’re Hitler.
This gets a “fresh” rating from me. I liked the constant uncertainty of who had the psychic powers. The highly stylized production design reminded me of some of the 80’s Twilight Zone episodes (when that passed for special effects). And since we are viewing through the eyes of a teenager, the world is slightly over the top. The premise did not feel over stretched to meet the time, which tends to happen in some Twilight Zone episodes. Also, i think this did not insult any one, politically.
Liked the episode. Hated the idiotic “Anatomy of a Loser” science fair exhibit. Those three vapid nitwits would have met with the same withering assessment that Irene got from the teacher, irrespective of its cruelty: it’s low-effort, and doesn’t show a hypothesis, laboratory trial evidence, or any discovered result.
They truly failed to show a proper implementation of scientific method.
I figured that maybe Irene was going to have died in the fall and the one walking around was a conjuring by Madison that was eventually going to disintegrate, but never considered that Irene had actually never been real in the first place.
The elaborate technology and design of the “Anatomy Of A Loser” science project bugged me…I liked this one quite a bit, but the science project also really jumped out a me.The production design of the impossible-bathroom was unrealistic, but nicely stylish. But that science project was so overdone that it had me wondering if the Mean Girls were actually 1950s space aliens.
The bathroom wasn’t one that was used. Irene went through a whole lot of unused rooms with strewn furniture before she got to it. It was in a part of the school that was no longer used, which is why they could paint it up that way.
Madison said that the bathroom was no longer in use by the school but that the girls were able to sneak in and use it as a place to hang out. So it would make sense that the girls would decorate it over time to what we saw.
It’s so weird how the press kit uses “The Four of Us Are Dying” to promote this and not “The Who of You”.
The more I think about it the more it seems like the press kit clues got jumbled with the viewing order
lucky kids get to cut their teeth on this ep
I agree with the majority of this review, but the grade feels low. The double twist was one so well executed it easily makes this my favorite episode of this new twilight zone iteration.
I’m in the process of watching them all and this is one of the better ones, which is not saying much. The episode falls flat because Madison is such an unlikeable character that I didn’t, nor should anyone, feel any sympathy for her at the end. In fact, the “twist” actually shows us exactly the type of person she is. Someone who uses someone for their own selfish needs and then discards them when they are no longer of use.